Bridge of Triangles (7 page)

The Sydney days warmed and the two smaller ones learned various ramp routes to the school. Joe and Mary had to catch the electric train along a few stops to their high schools and they quickly learned the way and the names of the stations. Sissy learned that finding a job was not as easy as she thought. No matter how she pleaded and insisted that she would work hard the answer always seemed to be the same: washy smiles which said there was nothing at the moment. No, they had just stopped taking on any more until some time next year. So the woman walked around the industrial suburbs or took buses to not too distant factories in her search for work. Although she collected the child endowment and had Welfare assistance with the rent money she knew she must get a job. The Sydney dream was not coming true.

Meanwhile the family lived largely on devon and bread and jam.

The older kids had train tickets provided weekly, but the shame of going to school with a lunch of jam sandwhiches wrapped up in scraps of paper or sometimes without lunch at all kept them home more often than not. Chris felt deep shame at going to school in old torn clothes and would pretend to be sick rather than feel the stares and taunts of the other kids. Of course if Chris stayed home then Keith did too. And then it was an easy matter for Sissy to let Joe and Mary stay home to look after the smaller ones.

After a few months of frequent absences the authorities came round to investigate. The authorities came in the person of a short little lady with a rosy face and a handbag which contained a blue-backed notebook. On the day she arrived the kids were all playing in the bullring. The bullring was a circular area about the size of two tennis courts. It was between the puddly road under Joe's window and the scrubby wasteland at the end of the settlement. Its surface was uneven with clumps of cutty grass and be patches of
earth. Kids had been calling it the bullring forever it seemed and although its original purpose could only be guessed at it was now perfect for scrappy soccer, bike races and gang wars. The wars could be plotted and waged from the safety of forts partly buried in the deep red clay trench which circled the bullring. The short little lady must have followed the noise all the way round the flats until she found its source. The sight awaiting her made her grope for her notebook. With shrieks and warlike menace Joe was in the act of jumping from his window. The others were riotously celebrating the razing of a rival fort. The sheets of thick lino which had once been the roof over their enemy were now well alight with viciously hot orange and yellow flames.

The lady shouted, “Are you a Leeton boy? Stay there, I want to talk to you.”

Joe was instantly suspicious and took, off up the ramps. At his cue the others ran too. The roof of the fort flared up and acrid black smoke belched into the air. Drips of flaming liquid lino plummetted into the gully floor. It was the best part of the fire but the other three kids didn't wait around to see it. They took off after Joe. Up the ramps and away through the maze of huts. The lady would have no hope of following. But she would have plenty of time to write her report and make her recommendations. Her face grew rosier as she scribbled into her blue-backed notebook. That very day Sissy had found work in a frypan factory. It was just as well.

Before many more days had passed the rosy faced lady arrived again. This time it was evening and Sissy was at home. The kids saw her as Sissy opened the door. They bolted into the long room and Joe climbed up the frame-work and peered over the partition, all the while making silencing signals with his fingers over his mouth. The lady spoke long and quietly to Sissy on the doorstep. She handed
Sissy some papers. She wrote in her blue-backed notebook. She seemed to be peering in behind Sissy's back to the front room with its meagre bits of furniture.

Sissy Leeton received notice of the court case a few weeks later. She ensured the kids were in their tidiest clothes and they got the train the few stops to the self-important suburb which held the district courthouse.

A stern brick building with a flag pole leaning out over the footpath, the court house had rounded arches supporting verandas on three sides. The children sat on slatted brown seats while a policewoman hovered nearby. Sissy had gone into the building. After some time another lady came out and Joe was led through the double doors with their frosted glass crowns into the gloomy interior. Silent minutes passed. Mary was then led away. Chris feared that his turn would come soon. He edged closer to Keith. Keith edged closer to Chris. The lady kept watch over them, smiling occasionally. But his turn never came. After a little while Sissy and the older two came out.

“Now let's get back 'ome. And none of ya bloody muckin' round from youse lot. Ya lucky you didn't get sent back to ya father. Or a 'ome.”

“What happened?” Chris asked. But what had gone on behind those frosted crowns he never was told—not even by Joe or Mary.

So home the family trod and trained. And the vast city swallowed them up in its disregard for the reality of people. Radios shouted of lawn-mowers that could be had if only you brought your money with you. Newspapers screamed of rapes and murders round the railway stations and scared everyone, including Sissy, with their wire-enclosed warnings of a maniac they called the Kingsgrove Slasher.

The Leeton mob saw little of Aunty Rose those days. Sissy left for the frypan factory each week day before the kitchen
window turned from black to grey to reveal the night-damened ramps that connected the flat to all those hundreds of others. The kids were left sleeping. Later they would eat their Weet Bix with lumpy mixed-up milk and dawdle off to school with the packages of newspaper-wrapped sandwiches Mary threw together—or if it was the day after pay day, Sissy might have left a few coins to buy pies.

Joe and Mary set off to the station and Chris and Keith joined the throng that grew in number and noise as the network of ramps converged into the main one that ran like a backbone through the settlement. The Leetons lived at the end of one of the last ribs and on their way to school Chris and Keith passed a number of huts before they saw any other kids.

One of the first kids Chris met was Barry. It was Barry who soon told them to meet him on the main ramp up near the shop at night and he would show them where they could watch TV.

Just as in the mornings dozens of kids wound Pied Piper like to school, so too at night they filed to three of four of the flats where there were television sets and where the owners seemed not to mind too much if fifteen of eighteen kids squeezed into the smoky front room to stare at the flickering grey and white images. Some of them would let the kids stay till “God Save the Queen” was played. Afterwards they might go and throw stones onto the roofs of the huts where the funny people lived. Funny people were those unfortunates who lived by themselves and wore sallow looking cardigans even in the heat, or those whose doors were never opened but TV's could be clearly heard inside.

One hut that got pelted fairly regularly housed a grey looking woman with her teenage son. The boy was gangling and dim looking. He wore heavy boots and khaki overalls. He could be seen sitting on the step of their flat staring—just staring right ahead. His mother was sometimes seen
shuffling along the ramp on her way to the shop. She carried a cane shopping basket and looked only at the floorboards as she went. The boy seemed never to leave the step—he sat and stared all day every day.

It was Barry too who first showed them the quarry that gaped into the earth behind a stand of wasteland trees and tall reedy grass. Barry seemed to know everything about that settlement.

Life for the Leetons found its own routine. Sissy never missed a day at the frypan factory. For the first time in her life she bought some new clothes and covered her face in make-up. On Friday and Saturday nights she would go to the pub. To prepare for this ritual Sissy would sit at the kitchen table in the low hut and apply powder and lipstick before a small round shaving mirror. The kids watched, fascinated. Rose started coming around. She might arrive mid-afternoon and by six o'clock the two sisters would be dressed up, made up and excited as two kids. Rose would advise Sissy on which shiny gold necklace or which tinkling bangle looked best with her outfit. Sissy would try many and the kids would offer their own advice. The background was filled with the strident calling of horse races on the shiny new radio Sissy had bought after working a few months.

And so as the two sisters set off in their bright clothes to the bus stop on the busy main road in front of the settlement, the kids would marvel that their mum had given Joe paper money to buy their tea and Aunty Rose might have given Mary some silver coins, “So's youse kids can go and buy yourselves some lollies later.”

Sometimes on Saturday afternoon the kids would go to the pictures. It was Mary who'd come home from school full of talk about the pictures. So with no discrimination they would run and walk to the next suburb and watch whatever was on. After they would traipse back home vaguely disillusioned. Often on their return Sissy would have already left for her night out.

Saturday nights marked the start of the saddest intervals for the smaller kids. Joe was old beyond his years and had already discovered bowling alleys, cigarettes and girls. Mary spent many hours away with friends in other parts of the settlement. Chris and Keith roamed the ramps looking for someone who would allow them to sit on their floor and watch television. They nearly always found a place and
settled down between the bodies of other kids the owners had also taken pity on. Sometimes, when the two boys would knock sheepishly the answer would be, “Yeh, alright, but I can only take one.” Then Chris would push Keith through the door and go along the night ramps to where he knew someone else owned a TV. The worst parts of these Saturday nights was when the owners prepared their own suppers. Cups of steaming Milo and a plate of cake or biscuits. Very rarely would the visiting kids get a biscuit, unless someone arrived drunk late in the night clutching a bag of chips or a chocolate.

Sundays were usually hungry days. Sunday was often the day when Weet Bix were eaten. There was food in the house but the kids just ate what was quickest and easiest.

It was Barry who knew all the places to go. A boy who was never one to sit around, he introduced Chris to everything going on in the settlement. He knew where men were putting in a new light pole; where a dog had been splattered on the road; where some people had only just moved out of their hut because a Commission Home had come up for them, and they might have left something good behind. Barry could always get through the windows. There was something light-headed and unreal about creeping through a deserted house which still held smells and signs of the recent occupants.

“This was the room where the mother and father slept,” said Barry when he and Chris had shinned up the wall and through a window which was conveniently broken.

“This is where their bed was,” Barry grinned at Chris. “This is where they made babies. Do you know how you get babies?”

Chris had asked his mum when he'd been very small but he'd been told that he had been brought home from the hospital. Since the lady in the hut next door had been the
subject of Sissy's and Rose's speculations as to when her baby would be born, Chris had pondered hard and often on the matter of babies' origins. Now Barry was about to tell him. At last he would know just how the hospital was able to give a lady a new baby. A baby which had once floated beyond the great dreaming sky-hill where the magic and light of orange peel scalloped clouds promised hints of other worlds—where all things began and to which all things belonged eternally.

There was nothing anatomically wrong with Barry's explanation. The basics were absolutely correct. In that empty room, standing on those stained floorboards, listening to this grinning eleven-year-old Sydney boy whom Chris had no doubt knew everything in the world, a turmoil and a grey floating unreality gripped the atmosphere. The last stage of Chris's arrival in the world had been reached. Was there really no magic? Did he not begin beyond the great looming sky-hill which dipped down to touch the rim of the world? No, everything screamed that Barry was wrong—and yet perhaps he was right for Sydney. Yes, that was it—in Sydney everything was changed. But back home—his real home where the Old Granny's kewpie dolls had hung around the walls and the great laughing Paula had stooped over the mint-perfumed washing tub and where the rocking sky was huge and clean in its infiniteness—why back there things were as they really were. Sydney was all wrong. His soul tried to resist it.

When Jack started sending maintenance Sissy allowed Joe first and then Mary to take the train to the court house and pick up the money. But Joe returned with practically none of it and Mary with about half. So it was established that Chris would go. The money was due for collection every second Wednesday and Sissy could not be away from the frypan factory so regularly. The boy missed half a day's
school to take the dull red train across the sprawling suburbs. He would make his way to the courthouse. At the end of the veranda was a glassed-in office. Here Chris learned to sign his name in a large book in exchange for the precious brown envelope. Sissy had told him to fold it up and carry it in his pocket. Chris knew the money was from his father.

Who was his father? Chris sensed that he was a man more acted upon than acting. That his father resented being organised showed in the man's quiet determination never to find merit in the actions of others. After all to recognise any inherent goodness in others might allow them to come too close to him—to discover that his bullying strength was a flimsy front. That they might not find he was all good in a world he sharply divided into good and evil. Jack Leeton was a man who could not live with his own faults, the awareness of which drained him of his life energy. His children were there—constant accusers of his culpability and weakness. He attempted to deal with his perceived inner emptiness by instigating a simple formula for what he called honesty. And this worked when dealing with horse flesh or the man who sold chicken mash, or the general store which permitted him to put things on tick because “Jack is so reliable”. The subtlety of his dishonesty in relationships naturally eluded him because of his fear of human closeness. He never discovered that he could work out his own rules for living. He lived by the rules of others while all the time telling them to get fucked. Yet where Sissy was concerned things were different: she could stick around if she wanted to. But she must question nothing. She must never attack the fabric of his flimsy fortifications. And for a while it seemed to do. He was a strong man not afraid of hard work. He was the father for her kids. He might really love her. In the beginning she did not realise
the price she was being asked to pay—how far she would move from her country and people.

When Jack was a boy he'd been led off to where the Good Shepherd lived. He early perceived that this invisible man was white. And the Good Shepherd's Father had the face of Jack's father and probably spent his time too sinking wells in heaven. No time for talk or sitting. No need for Grandma Leeton to sit in the cane chair and search the hair of her children. God was made of soap. Oh yes, the Good Shepherd taught her all about right and wrong. Her lot got three good plain meals a day and a bed with cold white sheets to sleep in. And learned their prayers.

So Jack grew up secure in the values of those who were right. And then the jungle floor soaked up the bright frothing blood of other honest men. Was there enough soap in the universe now? Unquestioned obedience to duty. God, King and Country.

And so when Chris signed the book, and the court official handed over the brown envelope with a bewildered expression, the most fragile link between man and boy was maintained. Every second Wednesday was a feast day in that small hut all those years and years ago. Bags with juicy peaches, a big bottle of drink, the extravagance of a whole pineapple and the largest block of chocolate were carried triumphantly by Chris into that low mean hut. And if Jack Leeton ever knew then it is certain he approved of the joy with which those kids attacked the stuff his labour had bought.

It was Barry who told Chris about the cordial and the biscuits every Sunday morning. It only cost a penny he said. And so it was that the boy went to his first church service. And so it was too that the first awakening notion of the real cost of sustenance and nourishment was formed.

Across the main road was another sprawl of huts. Over
on that side there were no ramps connecting the huts. There was a barbershop with a red and white pole where it cost two shillings to get a hair cut. Here too was a doctor's surgery and post office. One end of the block had wide double doors. These opened into a long room across the width of the hut. Above the doors a wooden cross was bolted to the wall. A faded sign announced that a meeting would be held every Sunday at “9.30AM GOD WILLING”. Chris wondered about that. He was beginning to wonder more and more about all things.

His relationship with Barry had subtly changed since the talk about babies. It would be years before the ineffability and utter mystery of the physical world worked its way into his conscious mind: until he accommodated the inexorable truth that he was to walk the earth for a time and that the innocence which Barry's words had cut into like a jagged bread knife was no real innocence. So much pain in accepting that there would never, could never be the return his child soul yearned for. It would be years and years before he dimly began to see that notions of forward and return were ultimately without meaning. That all is a constant now. Fragments of a memory of a memory, felt at first as a consuming pain, filtered through the voices of birds and lizards, the moving air and leaves and even the rocks themselves. Something of what he'd learned to call the past informed him. And in the centre of all this confusion was a tiny light which no matter how much it flickered and threatened to go out, danced back with fitful flames. It seemed to say that somewhere a meaning to the swirling events which were the sum total of his walk on the world was waiting to be found. He reached out for any rock which that light happened to flicker on and illuminate.

So he tagged along with Barry because now there were empty days that yawned into what he'd learned to call the future. His memories of the past became ghostly and
insubstantial. It was a strange liaison because Barry showed a certain contempt for everything, especially school. Chris had grown to like school, most of all the reading and art. Maths was a mystery, but later, after Barry's parents got their Commission Home and Chris became friends with a boy who was good at maths, he got a little better.

The interior of the place where you could get cordial and biscuits for a penny smelled a bit like the flat when the Welfare lady had first taken them there; musty and unused and yet slightly of other people. The place echoed if you even thought and every sound bounced back from the small windows and the high roof. Black steel rods tied the upper portion of the room together and the bare board floor had wooden forms arranged so they focussed on a cloth-draped table at the front. A large book stood on the table along with a wooden bowl. There was a tall wooden cupboard labelled “Sunday School Press” over in one corner.

The man's eyes were set close together and his ginger hair grew sticking up and thick above a high earnest forehead sprinkled with freckles. The twenty or so kids had wonderfully raised the dust in the room and now they seemed determined to drive the floor into the earth as they confirmed that, yes, they were happy and glad by stamping their feet. They'd already clapped their hands, nodded their heads and as Barry had whispered to Chris in the back row, shown their joy by “waving your dick”. Barry was daring. Chris eyed him like some sort of city hero.

Canon Wilson seemed not to notice any of the present tom-foolery, pinching and plait pulling. Instead he spoke of the utter wickedness of all people and how they were going to be cast into the everlasting pit. Yes, even little children unless they knocked at the door and heard the shepherd and became as little children and turned the other cheek as they passed through the eye of a needle.

“What's he talking about Barry?” Chris's knowledge of the other had always been there—unformed but certain and sure. Barry's seemingly simple bonding to the earth had first awakened the thought that people attempted to give shape to the unformed knowledge. Chris was beginning to see that these other people—these whites—were grasping to grasp some notion with which he had been born. The certainty that there was more than this sad sad world where people hated and killed one another, where little children were left hungry and lonely and reaching out to be loved, where everyone died and that was that. And now Canon Wilson seemed to say yes—there is more than this but it can never be now. Perhaps he was right. It never could be now—now that the old families were all but gone. The big faces wise and accepting—the big hands breaking the bread and sharing—the small hands clutching secure thick black curls as babes were carried strong and safe across the earth's surface. Yes this was all gone. And the only hope was in a place called heaven.

“Bullshit,” whispered Barry, “got your penny? Ya gotta pay now.”

Canon Wilson passed the wooden bowl to a child and led the crowd in a song about pennies dropping one by one. As Chris's penny fell down amongst the others with a bright clink, a mixture of relief and anticipation swept over him. Had he bought a little time away from the bottomless pit? And had the time come at last for the drink and biscuits?