The Idea of Perfection (31 page)

No, he said. No, the mountain was what I meant. A basalt remnant.

He glanced around at the deadened landscape below as if it had called out to him, then went back to studying the arrangement of the bottles.

Are you a geologist? Harley asked. Knowing about basalt remnants?

That was good.
Making conversation,
it was called.

Oh no, he said and laughed. I’m an engineer.

He looked at her sheepishly.

Dead boring.

She started to say something, but he cut across her.

Great conversation-stopper at a party, he said. Telling people you’re an engineer. Clears the room.

She did not have a chance to find the words to tell him she was not such a
people,
because the woman was between them again to set out the tea things. Some of the tea slopped out of the silly little elaborate china tea-pots on to the tablecloth and some of it went on a scone. They were very small scones on a rather large plate with a scalloped edge and embossed roses. There were two tiny china pots in a tortured tulip-shape full of jam and cream.

He poured his tea quickly, even before the woman had finished setting everything out, but it was already so strong the roses inside the cup were almost invisible. When he tried to lift the cup to his mouth she saw that he could not get his finger inside the handle and had to grasp it in an awkward sideways way.

When she lifted her own cup she had the same problem, and the cup burnt her knuckle, as it must have burned his.

The table was now crowded with objects but there was not actually very much to eat. They each took one of the tiny scones and spread the cream and jam. The tulip-shape disguised the fact that the pots did not actually contain very much of anything at all. With the scones gone, the plate looked very large and empty.

Harley had decided not to comment on any of this, to save his feelings. But her mouth seemed to have made a different decision.

I wasn’t hungry, actually, she found it had said.

Horrified, she listened to the words continue to come out of her mouth.

I had a heart attack, it went on. Not that long ago.

He was listening hard. He had eaten his entire scone in one go.

She was suddenly feeling overheated. The African thing she was wearing was actually rather thick, although you thought of Africa as a hot place and therefore a place of cool clothes.

So I have to watch, you know, what I eat.

He nodded again and dabbed at his mouth, which was quite clean, with the paper serviette.

Plus, I’m supposed to walk a lot, so I walk a lot. Here. In Karakarook, I mean.

He was watching her as she talked. She could not seem to stop. She was afraid she might go on telling him things about her heart attack until the Panorama Cafe closed.

She made a wild grab at a subject that was not herself or her heart attack.

I’ve been noticing your ring, she said. It’s unusual. Isn’t it?

It was like a call for help.

She watched her own big hand suddenly shoot out across the table and take his, turning it over to look at the ring.

It’s my engineer’s ring, he said.

He stared at it as if he had never seen it before.

We all have them.

Now he was the one who could not seem to stop.

Engineers, that is. They give them to us when we graduate. They’re made of iron. Originally, anyway. From the Montague Bridge, you may have heard of it? Famous collapse back in the 1890s. Great loss of life.

He twisted the ring round and round.

It reminds us, you know. Of what can happen.

It was as if he was looking for something on the ring, the way he was turning it and turning it.

If you don’t do your sums right.

How fascinating, she said brightly.

She wished she had not, because she had found it to be, in fact, fascinating. The trouble was,
Howfascinating
did not sound as if you were fascinated.

Sometimes, the harder you tried to be sincere, the falser it came out.

No, really, she added.

That made it worse.

Outside, the afternoon went on and on, sun pouring down blankly from the sky on to the few scattered clouds and the flattened landscape below. A big black bird circled slowly on extended wings on the same level as the windows, curving around and around, carving a spiral through the air.

Douglas was trying not to look at the view, although it was what he had brought her all this way for. They were far enough back from the edge, and there was enough framing around the window, to make the hot weak frightened feeling controllable, but it was better, on the whole, not to look out.

He thought he had probably come to the end of the subject of the ring, and he sat trying to think of something else. There was more he could tell her about it. How Kipling had written the
Oath ofEngineers,
for example. But a person was not supposed to
go on and on,
in conversation. You were supposed to take turns.

When she had taken his hand, he had seen how large and strong hers were, the nails square and short. Her watch had a big frank stare like a man’s.

And what are you doing in Karakarook? she said finally.

Oh, he said, pleased to have a new subject. I’m here to put up a new bridge.

Then he thought that might sound boastful.

Just a very small one. Whack in a concrete beam.

She nodded, and looked as if she wanted to hear more.

It’s something of an interest with me, concrete, he said. As it were.

He wondered why he had added that.

Concrete! she exclaimed.

People have the wrong idea about concrete, he started. They’ve got this idea it’s not natural, but it’s just calcium carbonate, dig it up out of the ground.

She nodded and he was encouraged. All his life he had wanted to convince people to give concrete a chance. It was the most unjustly despised material. When you said
concrete,
all people thought of was cheap high-rise towers with stains running down the sides, ugly schools with obscene graffiti, underpasses smelling of piss.

It was not good at bending, that was true. If you wanted it to bend, you had to combine it with steel, which bent rather than broke. The strength of the concrete, the flexibility of the steel: it was the perfect marriage. The thing no one seemed to really appreciate about concrete was the way it was a kind of negative. It just took up whatever space was left vacant for it. You could say it revealed the shape of the imagination.

And yet people snorted when he tried to share his enthusiasm.
Concrete!
they would go, and their eyes would start to flicker past his shoulder, looking for someone better to talk to. Even in at the Department they thought he took it a bit too seriously. At the Christmas party one year they had made him a Christmas stocking out of concrete, for a joke.
Just what I always wanted,
he had said, being a good sport, and everyone laughed, but then turned away to their own conversations.

Did you know, he began, that it’s not really a solid at all. It’s really a very thick liquid.

She looked startled, and he rushed on.

It actually keeps on flowing even after it’s set. It’s called creep.

Creep? she repeated.

They don’t understand it, he said. What it does when the water hits the mix. They know what happens but they don’t know why. On a molecular level, I mean.

He was afraid he was losing her, and rushed on.

People want to pretend it’s something else, he cried, trying not to shout in the quiet room. He felt a fleck of saliva jump out of his mouth.

They make it into blocks, pretend it’s stone. Cover it with pebbles, that sort of caper.

He could not believe he had said caper. She was watching him closely, but he did not know what her look meant.

Like vegetarians giving you lentils in the shape of a chop.

Too late he thought
but what if she’s a vegetarian.
He could only press on.

It’s an insult to the chop, plus it’s an insult to the lentils.

She laughed suddenly, showing sharp eye-teeth, but he was not sure whether she was laughing at the idea of insulting a lentil, or at him.

Ever looked at how a freeway curves? Or a pedestrian overpass? Or what about those wheelchair ramps? Pure poetry!

She had stopped laughing now.

If it was expensive, it would be a cult.

He stopped himself. There was more to say, but he thought the look on her face might be the one he had become familiar with over the years.
Glazed over,
they called it. It meant you were bored.

Sorry, he said. I’m being a bore. My wife always said I was a bridge bore.

He wished he had not mentioned
my wife.
It was too complicated to go into, the divorce and so on.

There was a little silence.

And you? he asked. What brings you to Karakarook, Harley?

He hated the way that sounded, like his mother doing her
gracious
thing with the boys.

I’m helping them get their museum going.

Pardon?

A Heritage thing. For the tourists.

Oh!

I work for the Applied Arts Museum in Sydney. Textiles, mostly.

Oh, he said again.

He wished he could think of something else to say.

They’re turning up some fine old things. Bush quilts and so on.

He nodded, wondering if he should ask what a bush quilt was. The way she talked, she assumed everyone knew what they were. Maybe they did.

They both looked out the window, but there was nothing to say about all the different kinds of brown lying flattened under the sun. The conversation seemed to have run into a cul-de-sac again.

The dirty curtain was pushed aside and the woman came over with the bill, putting it face down in front of him.

They both looked at it.

Like a prompt card! Harley suddenly blurted on a laugh.

Her big finger pointed to the words printed on the back of the bill: THANK YOU.

He laughed in a high-pitched way that sounded frantic. Then there was a silence in which they looked at each other’s chins, at each other’s shoulders. They did not quite look at each other’s eyes.

Good view, she said. Shame you can’t see it.

It’s okay, he said, and gave a kind of guffaw. I’m not good with heights, actually, he went on quickly, to cover up the guffaw. They had to sedate me once, to get me down off the top of the Port Gordon Bridge.

She might as well know how hopeless he was.

The South Tower. On a stretcher. Quite funny, in retrospect.

He laughed, demonstrating how funny it was in retrospect, but she did not join in.

The curtain parted again and a metal bucket with a mop in it was propelled out. With a great rattle and clank, the woman drew the mop out of the water and squeezed it between the rollers of the bucket, then started flopping it around on the floor. A strong carbolic smell filled the room.

He glanced at Harley. She glanced at her watch.

Better be going, he said, quickly, before she did.

She unhooked her handbag from the back of the chair and stood up.

Thank you for the tea, she said, but a fly landed on her face as she spoke, and she frowned and brushed at it, so the words had an ironic sound.

He suppressed the impulse to start apologising again. As he got his wallet out and glanced uncertainly towards the woman with the mop, he had one last look at the big bland sheets of distant scenery laid out below. Standing up, the height started to give him the starey sick feeling. He looked away quickly.

Her back seemed very large and powerful, walking away. He wondered how he had ever found the courage to ask her out, and whether he would ever dare to do it again.

 

 

She drove home filled with lightness like a balloon inside. As she bowled along the road, seeing the white ute up ahead now and again, and seeing its dust in the air above the road, she sang out loud.
Dah DEE, dah DEE, dah dee DAH, the WILD colonial boy.

He was not such a duffer as he seemed. The thing about the concrete was interesting, and he was right about freeways, although it sounded a bit silly until you thought about it. She had once nearly had an accident on the approach to the Harbour Bridge, getting so involved in the way one curve of the roadway moved around and across another one as the road curved upwards.

It was funny how you could live your whole life surrounded by something as ordinary as concrete, and never think of it as special, until you met someone who did.

It occurred to her that
being a duffer
might be something he did to protect himself, the way
having a dangerous streak
was what she did.

The way the shadows laid themselves out along the ground from the base of trees, the way the rounded paddocks curved away like cheeks: it all filled her with silly pleasure. Some sad-looking sheep in a paddock stared up as she passed, and she shouted out the window at them,
Buck up, sheep!
and they looked apprehensive and began to move tentatively along in a line.

When they had nearly hit their heads together, reaching for the sauce bottle, it must have looked quite funny. She wished now that she had laughed. That would have been the right moment to laugh, not the other moment. He would have been able to join in. They could have laughed at themselves, together.

But they had not, just pretended nothing was happening. She supposed it was like that, on a
date.
Especially a
first date.
She caught herself thinking,
next time.

As she turned on to the main road, a truck passed with
John &Kevin Ridgely, Water
Bores painted along the side in curly writing. He had said his wife called him a
bridge bore.
She knew without having to ask that he was divorced. Something about the way he said it.
My wife.
She could tell him about
John and Kevin Ridgely,
Water
Bores.
He seemed like the kind of man you could make that sort of joke with.