The Idea of Perfection (38 page)

Instead, here he was, unhappily going through the motions of defending Head Office.

And so they rot.

Can’t you just put new ones in?

The timber is scarce these days, you see. Plus, there’s not the skilled labour to work it.

He found he was ticking things off on his fingers. He hated people who did that. He did not think he had ever done it before. He put his hands away in his armpits.

For the corbels alone, you’re looking at a helluva lot of old-growth hardwood.

Some other dreadfully jovial man had taken over his mouth. He stopped in despair.

He could see a small pale scar on her chin that he had never noticed before.

It’s an environmental concern, he said at last.

Now he sounded like a Forestry Commission pamphlet.

Look, he said. This bridge took fifty-odd mature old-growth eucalypts to build. Fifty-odd, minimum.

She was watching him now and the frown had gone. Her face was blank with thought as she visibly pictured fifty-odd trees.

He followed up his advantage.

That’s fifty families of possums, give or take a few.

He started the sum in his head, say conservatively four possums per family, fifty times four was. Next he could talk about the birds, and then he could move on to the snakes. People tended to forget reptiles, in the scheme of things.

She was looking away again, past his shoulder, away over to the bush. He could see how her bottom jaw stuck out in a way that gave her an obstinate look.

It’s just a matter of facts, he said, loudly, convincing himself. You can’t just wait till a bridge falls down. Can you?

It was a mistake, asking a question, even a rhetorical one. She did not respond, and his words winged away windily into the quiet afternoon.

In the long silence he could hear the men murmuring together behind him. Someone coughed that thin cough again.

He saw a frown start between her eyebrows, and he went on quickly.

Whereas, you whack a concrete beam in, see you right for a century.

He stopped, wishing he had not used the word whack.

Yes, she said. I know you’re keen on concrete.

She allowed a pointed silence to fall.

What are those tapes? she said finally. Round the trees.

She pointed so the sleeve of the African thing fell back and showed her arm, the muscles under the tanned skin.

He turned to look, although he knew exactly what she meant.

That’s where the road’s going to go, he said.

He swept his arm up and down along the line.

Cutting in round the side of the hill.

There was a silence. He glanced at her. She was staring up at the hillside.

The trees? All those big trees are going?

He was like a man holding the gun to his own head and pulling the trigger.

Yes.

He gave the word an upward inflection, as if it was not just
yes,
it was
yes, but.
Something would come along so that he could somehow make a
yes
into a
no,
and stop her looking at him this way.

Nothing rescued him. She went on looking at him, waiting.

So they’re going, she said flatly. All those trees.

In a kind of panic he started to count them to himself.
Four,
and three more in a bunch, that made
seven. Eight. Nine
and
ten.
And more further up.

He would be perfectly happy to go on counting all day.
Eleven, twelve.

He could imagine the noise of the chainsaws. There would be no
buggerising around
with axes. He could imagine the drama of the trees crashing down one by one. Chook would love it.
Fourteen, fifteen.
They would lie there dead, and the dozer would push them in a pile to one side. They would stay there until the bracken and the blackberries finally hid them.
Seventeen, eighteen.

She was staring coldly at him, waiting.

Yes, he said.

It came out in a whisper. Yes, he made himself repeat, louder. They’re going.

His voice sounded very puny to his own ears, as if travelling a long way through empty air.

The dog suddenly jumped up as if someone had called it, and a moment later a small truck appeared along the road in clouds of yellow dust. They moved to opposite sides of the bridge to let it pass between them and it crossed the bridge in a long rumble and clatter that ripped the silence. He could feel the bridge tremble, could hear the bolts tinkling and straining at each other. He even thought he could see a sort of ripple in the roadway as the truck went over, and feel a buckling under his feet.

When it had ground away up the badly cambered corner, the man and the woman were left standing in hanging dust.

He could not think of anything to say that would not sound like I
told you
so. He scraped at the roadway with the toe of one of his boots. They were scuffing up quite nicely now.

Yes, she said, as if he had been lecturing her. Well, I’d best be getting along.

She did not meet his eyes, but turned and was off, away down the road to the brown Datsun. She opened the door and the dog sprang in. They looked as if they had been doing that particular bit of teamwork all their lives. He stood watching until the car disappeared around the corner.

He was the wrong man for this situation. He knew that. He wished there was someone he could go up to and tell.
Look,
he would like to say,
I’m the wrong man for this. Ask anyone.

Anyone,
in the form of Harley Savage, tall and powerful, would willingly agree. But there was no one to tell. There was only he himself, a flimsy man alone with his shadow, scuffing at the roadway with his boot.

Taking the long view, the whole business of the Bent Bridge was unimportant. Taking a long enough view, the whole idea of bridges was meaningless. The sun would decay and explode at some point in the future, and no one would ever again have to worry about anything.

The long view was usually a comfort to Douglas, but it did not comfort him today.

When something fell with a clang over by the ute, he looked around. The men were all gathered there, staring at him. Chook met his eye but looked away quickly and busied himself with a big thorough cough that involved taking the cigarette out, clearing his throat, and spitting into a bush. A startled bird shot out.

Hey Chook, Douglas tried, going over to him. What was that all about, mate?

Chook was busy bending down now, doing something with a jemmy.

Don’t know the first thing about it, mate.

Crouched down into himself, his voice was muffled.

Haven’t got a clue, mate.

Chook had become the smallest and most compressed of men, kneeling over his jemmy. Suddenly, he took up almost no space at all.

Be saving the bloody dunnies next.
That had been a good laugh. But where was he now, when things had stopped being funny?

Douglas stood looking down at a bald spot on Chook’s head he had never known was there.
You’re just all talk, Chook,
he realised. It was a kind of dizziness, the surprise of it.
You’re all hot air,
he thought in something like wonder. It was what he had heard men say of each other, and had never understood until now.
Just a big bag of wind.

THERE WAS A particular place he was going tonight but he was not prepared to admit to himself where it was. If he ended up there again, it was not on purpose. It was just that this was a small town, there were not many streets, it was only natural.

Behind the bottlebrush the grass was flattened now from his feet standing there so often.

He was not really
hiding.
He was not really even
looking in.
He was just
out for a walk,
the way anyone might be. One foot was actually up in the air, in the very act of
walking.

 

 

 

A few days after the petition, he had been in the paper again. The woman at the Caledonian had made him look at it, standing over him at breakfast that morning. He had stared at the little dots that made up his own face on the newsprint of the
Livingstone & Shire Weekly Clarion,
stooping threateningly over the small figure of the woman with his mouth hanging open. In the photo his ears were sticking out at a remarkable angle.
LAST BID TO SAVE BRIDGE.
They had got his name wrong: they had called him
Chessman,
but at least he had not made the front page this time.

Not
that good a one of Coralie,
the woman in the pub had said.
Not like her at all, really.
He had hoped that it was
not like him at all really,
either, but that was probably too much to hope.

He did not want to be any more famous in Karakarook than he was already. He did not want to make the headlines again:
PEEPING TOM CAUGHT.

But there was no one out at night in the streets of Karakarook to be convinced about the
walking,
and after a while he came out from behind the bush and forgot to keep one foot ready in the walking position.

She was there again tonight, brilliantly lit in the yellow rectangle of the window. On the sideboard he could see the fruit bowl and a jumble of ornaments. On the wall a blue striped bathroom towel was draped over something square. Perhaps it was a picture she did not like, some gaudy print that had got on her nerves.

It was something he did himself in motels, where the pictures were screwed to the wall for the other kind of people, the ones who liked the pictures so much they wanted to take them home.

She sat, frowning down at an old-fashioned black sewing machine on the table in front of her, a strip of red flannel round its middle stuck with pins, painted with elaborate gilt scrollwork around the upper curves. The electric cord coming out of its back was thick, rubbery and twisted like an umbilical cord. The sewing machine sat very black in the rain of brilliant yellow light from the bulb above the table, shedding its own small extra pool of even yellower, even brighter light from its own small lamp, the circle of warmth falling on the needle winking bright.

He could see a curved metal lever coming out of its base. You must work the machine by pressing against the curve of the lever with your knee. A clever bit of design. Left your hands free.

He could not see what she was bending over at the machine, and took the few steps to the fence, but even craning over it he still could not see. After a moment he opened the gate, lifting it up so it would not scrape on the path, and tiptoed over the dry grass. Now he was right outside the window, looking straight in through the gap in the curtains.

There could be no story about being
out for a walk
now. He felt unsteady on his feet, taking shallow inefficient breaths, as if he had suddenly come to the edge of a great height. He made himself take a deep lungful. Absurd. A man his age.

He could see that the little pieces of fabric had been sewn together into larger units, and now she was stitching those units together, holding them up, putting them against each other, putting pins in and taking them out. The thing was growing quickly as she pinned and stitched, was already big enough to cover the top of a bed.

Marjorie had embroidered things. She had done a tablecloth once that she told everyone
nearly killed her.
She had a pretty puffy box, all frills and satin padding, for her embroidery things. You could not open the lid unless the handle was pushed fully back. Very poor design. But the poor design of it had not worried her, only the risk of his hands, dirty from a day on the site, coming near her tablecloth.

The way this woman was frowning down at the fabric made him think of how she looked when she smiled. He remembered panting on the dusty road, clutching his stick, the cows bellowing down behind the fence. There’d been a certain way she’d looked into his face. He went through it again in his mind. They had turned together to look at the cattle and then she had looked at him and smiled.

Brightly lit up like someone on a stage, she frowned into the pool of yellow light, squinting at the eye of the needle, threading it. Then he could see her give a long sigh and pick up two of the little pieces of fabric. She stared down as they moved smoothly through the machine, all her attention focused on the fabric, the needle, the circle of light.

He could see her profile, absorbed, stern, as she guided the fabric under the needle, then reached through to pull down the threads against the cutter at the back.

It was silly, torturing himself with watching her, but he could not seem to stop. He watched as if to memorise it all, as if his memory of her smile would have to last him a long time.

He could hear the thrumming of the motor, and see how large and strong her fingers were, pushing the fabric through the maw of the sewing-machine. She was like a mechanism herself, he thought, a well-designed and well-fuelled piece of machinery. Or a beam of reinforced concrete.
Oh Douglas,
he could hear Marjorie, exasperated,
everything’s got to be your everlasting concrete!