The Idea of Perfection (23 page)

With a lurch like a vomit he remembered where he was. There was a lost pulsing ache in the soles of his feet, and a hot weakness around his ankles and knees. There was a dangerous lightness in his head now, as if it was floating away, weightless. The tower appeared to be swaying.

The thing was, he could not be sure if it was the tower swaying, or himself.

Now he was sweaty and dizzy, and hot and cold at once. He must not move. Whatever happened, he must not move. He must go on hanging on to this piece of gritty pipe. He must keep his feet just exactly where they were. If he kept them locked on to this plank, he would not spin away into space.

He heard someone moan. It could have been himself.

Later he had read up on the vertigo business. There was a purely physiological basis for it. It was not a moral failure.

He had tried to explain it to Marjorie.
A kind of spirit level in our heads,
he had tried, but she did not seem interested in the idea of a spirit level in the head.
The eyes have to get a vectoring fix on something,
he said, but she had glazed over by then.

It was a pleasure, understanding it, and up to a point it helped. He knew now to keep something in sight in the foreground, and to hang on to something. There was no shame in hanging on, if it helped.

But the word had gone round about the day he had had to be sedated and carried down on a stretcher from the South Tower of the Port Gordon Bridge.

He was a good engineer, but it had gone against him, professionally. That was why he was a small-job man. He was a small-job man, and his new boots were pinching like buggery.

Stan, or Len, or someone, was coming round now with the billy, filling everyone’s mug. His big cracked hand grasped the wire handle and poured, the tea split by the wire.

You right like that mate? he asked. You right?

Douglas did not know what was being asked.

Yes, mate, that’s fine, he said.

No, you right like that? Stan or Len asked again.

They both stared at the tea, locked into some problem of communication. The tea was so dark it was almost purple.

Chook was sitting on another log opposite him. He was solid, his whiskery ears had authority. His feet were big, solid on the ground in their steel-toed boots. All those Lens and Stans were solid too, with their jerked-out remarks, drinking the mouth-curdling tea.

He felt like the only flimsy one.

We got sugar, Chook translated, and pointed to a grubby paper packet of sugar near the fire, puckered around the top from being grasped in big dirty hands.

No milk, but.

That’s fine, Douglas said again.

To prove how
fine
it was he took a sip, but flinched back from a burnt lip. The tea was so strong it made his mouth shrivel. He wondered if it was too late to ask for the sugar, being passed around now from hand to hand with a tin spoon.

He felt Chook watching him, summing him up. It was tricky, being the engineer. You had the authority. You had to take responsibility. If anything went wrong, you were the one all the faces turned towards.

His first job, years ago, there’d been a bloke like this Chook Henderson. Douglas had been young and green, and had been only too happy to let someone else take charge. Before he knew what was happening, there’d been some kind of Union thing happening about tea-breaks, some other complicated thing about a bloke with a bad back.

In the end he’d had to trail into the town and phone Morton Street.
Sorry sir, the men have downed tools. What do I do now?
Young, and green, all right: but not too bright, either. He’d heard that loud and clear in the voice that came back down the wire.

He took another sip. He felt his upper lip was a strange tensed shape, but he had got some of it down, and Chook was looking away at last.

If he were German or Venezuelan, it would be all right to be sitting here stiff and foreign. But if you were Australian, you were supposed to feel at home in the country. The
bush,
rather. They seemed to call it that, even when it was just plain old paddocks.

The message had come through loud and clear at school.
An Australian
was a man on the back of a horse, rounding up sheep or cracking a whip at a lot of cows. So the kids at Kogarah Public School, who had never seen a sheep or a cow except at the Show, had had to learn how to be
Australian
off the blackboard.

Australia Rides on the Sheep’s Back.
He could remember the way Mrs Linney had written it up on the blackboard in her curly writing. He had copied it down neatly in his exercise book while Mrs Linney explained about it being a
figure of speech.
Then she had written up
eleven and a half sheep for every man, woman and child.

An earnest and conscientious child, he had felt a particular wordless anxiety about it. He had taken that child personally, and worried about the eleven and a half sheep that must be his, toiling over some parched hillside.

They had sung
Click Go the Shears,
and written down the words
ringer
and
blue-bellied joe
in their books, and next to them what they meant. He had forgotten now, but he had once known. They had recited
I Love a Sunburnt Country
and tried to believe they did. Douglas Cheeseman’s pale freckled skin did not love a sunburnt country, and for a long time he had thought a
sweeping plain was
something to do with woodwork, but he had sung as sincerely as the rest.

He had thought you could simply apply yourself to it, and learn to be the sort of
Australian
you were supposed to be. He could see now that it would never be that simple.

 

 

When he put the tea down and got to his feet, everyone looked up at him. It was as if they thought he might be going to make a speech.
Welcome, men, to the Bent Bridge Project.

He had not planned any speech. As he spoke to Chook, he felt his face going red, the way it did when too many people looked at him.

Just having a quick check of that alignment, he said.

He was not asking permission, but when Chook turned the hand holding his salad roll so that he could see his watch, it looked a bit that way. A piece of beetroot fell out and landed on the dusty toe of Chook’s boot.

Fair enough mate.

In Chook’s voice was only the politest minimum of surprise that someone would not take their full tea-break.

The men were still looking at him, standing waiting while Chook checked his watch. The young one was watching with a hand up under his singlet, artlessly scratching a soft round stomach and showing a big innocent belly-button like a baby’s.

He wished he had just gone on sitting. At least he was inconspicuous, just sitting minding his own business, getting on with his lamington. Although he was
not quite right
doing that, he was not definitely
wrong.
Wanting to go back to work before you had to was definitely
wrong.

He walked over on to the bridge and stood safely back from the edge, looking upstream, where the little river threaded its way between slopes of rounded rocks and stretches of sand.

From over at the fire behind him he heard the chink of an enamel mug against the billy and someone laughed. His back was stiff, his shoulders tense. He felt hunched like the bridge.

It was easy to feel small under the big harsh sky. The sun fell on to his hat, his shoulders. He could feel it burning through the shirt. You could underestimate these country suns. They could seem kindly, but there was something metallic and unforgiving about them.

He had his slide rule with him, the old Pocket Log Duplex Decitrig in its tan leather case that he had bought as a student, still cocked to multiply 1.285 by something in the middle of the scale. It was many years since he had used it, and it showed his age, even owning one. The young blokes exclaimed over it as if it was a papyrus scroll. But it was a comfort. At moments like this, he liked to have it in his hand. He got it out now, although he had no need to calculate anything.
The Engineer at Work.

If it had been up to him he would not knock down this little bridge. He could see clearly what could be done. You would take up the timbers of the roadway, labelling them so you could put them back together the same way. Then you would replace the rotten corbels. Then, before you laid the roadway back, you would cap the whole thing with concrete, the same way Dr Liu had put the gold inlay on his back molars. Then the roadway could be bolted down on top of that. It would be good for another hundred years, but it would still look more or less the way it did now.

He spread out the plans on the planks of the roadway and squatted over them. His own shadow fell black over the lines and figures. He was glad to be able to get a pen out of his shirt pocket and make a note.
Bearers and piers essentially sound,
he wrote.
Corbels failed.
He took his time, making sure every letter was nicely shaped, bent studiously over the plans.

But as he wrote, he went on thinking, and he saw that it would not be enough simply to make formwork on top of the bridge and pour the layer of concrete. If you did it like that, the bridge and the concrete would never be married together properly, and with all the movement in the old bridge, the concrete would crack, no matter how much steel you incorporated. It would let the water in, and you would be back where you started. Worse off, in fact, because you would not be able to lift off the concrete slab for future repairs. It was the kind of thing that made the job interesting: the way an answer created another question. It was why, in spite of never knowing things like why Wests had a
ton
of
guts,
he would prefer to be out here, in the thick of the problem, rather than back at Morton Street behind a desk.

Cap with concrete,
he wrote, and then a big question mark. As he was shaping the question mark, with one part of his mind thinking that the shape of the question mark was the same shape as the bridge, another part of his mind showed him, like a snapshot, what the answer was.

Instead of pouring the concrete in situ, you would make formwork on the ground and precast the cap in sections. You’d cast the girders right into the concrete, which would shrink tight around them as it set. You’d cast it upside-down, of course, which would mean that the part that would be uppermost when in use — that is, the bottom when it was cast — would be stronger, because of the tendency of the blue metal to sink through the mix. The sections could be pinned together, and the roadway put back on top of them.

It was a beautiful solution, elegant and simple, and economical too.

Modules,
he wrote.
Precast with girders incorporated. Pinned to slab.

It was a lovely solution to the problem, but he would not mention it to anyone. Mr Denning had been a good solid engineer in his day, but he was not a man to grasp a new idea quickly, let alone welcome it. Head Office liked things nice and simple. He could imagine the shape Mr Denning’s face would go if he tried to explain about the module idea. He could hear the way he would stumble and fall over his words, and how silly Mr Denning’s silence would make them sound. Another, braver, man might be prepared to do it, but he was not that man.

As he was carefully capping the pen and clipping it back on to his pocket, he got a whiff of Chook’s cigarette. Without really looking, he could see him out of the corner of his eye, standing by the fire with his hands on his hips, smoke billowing from his face, watching
the engineer at work.

A fly landed on Douglas’s chin and crawled up towards his lip. He was afraid that if he waved it away Chook would think he was waving at him. He tried to snort it off without moving, but it was one of the sticky little fearless bush flies and it stayed put, until, with the smallest movement possible, he brushed it off. He heard someone cough loudly but resisted the impulse to turn and look. Several flies were now crowding on his hand, where he had brushed the first one away. It seemed to be true, what they said:
Kill a fly, ten more come to its funeral.

Up on the road the bulldozer started with a grind and a roar. A small cloud of black smoke floated down from it and melted away over the water. The engine coughed and died and he heard a scornful shout from Chook.

He rolled the plans up tightly and wedged them under his arm. No one but himself need ever see the note he had made on them. It was all too easy to imagine Chook’s face.
You some kind of a greenie, mate?

He could see the cows, still in the paddock where they had chased him. From here, the fence looked insignificant, the cows innocent, merely a picturesque addition to the landscape, calmly moving from tuft to tuft of grass, eating away like cows on a calendar.