Bridge of Triangles Read Online Free PDF Page A

far from her river gum beginnings. Yet it had become her home and shaped her with its harsh discipline and shallow wisdom. This she ambivalently valued and tried pathetically to pass on to her own children. But that first dribble of sherry under a twinkling river night, a night which thumped not just with shadowed kangaroos nor cried out only from the lonely throats of sheep, flowed on. As her mother had become the property of uncaring white men so she too had become the property of a white man. The essential difference was that Jack cared too much but did not know how to care. But that was years and years ago, wasn’t it?
    The train has left many times and still the stream of exiles laugh and frown and wait and stamp on foggy platforms or smoke in railway refreshment rooms where the sherry still says come to me, come to me.
    Another landscape saw tall ships tied up waiting but impatient, with night-time calls of readiness to sail with thetide to another Sydney. And these ships too had their exiles and that too was years and years and years ago, wasn’t it?
    So Sissy lived for a while in her dreamings. Somehow in Sydney with her four kids everything would be better. She could finally be her own boss. But then the horse threw Jack and as he lay in the hospital up on the rise in his own twilight of partly death and partly life, an atavistic superstitious guilt rose up and grasped Sissy in a way that filled her with a fear she’d never known. Did she love this bloke? Was that it? Certainly she was tied to him in a way she did not understand. He represented something safe for the kids although she was not sure just what.
    Why didn’t he die? What sort of woman was she that she could leave now—run away from something she deep down feared she’d caused. Her fear won and Sydney would have to wait. But she knew one day she would break free. But what about the kids? She didn’t know about the kids. They seemed different from her but she couldn’t be sure. She was confused.

The Old Granny had been right: her family was moving away. But she did not dream of the changes which her world would know before her own lonely departure. Even while Sissy planned the magical escape to Sydney with the kids the gap between the Old Granny and her family had widened into a chasm which separated the black from the white; the safe from the dangerous; the old from the modern.
    What was it the two women wanted? Yes, Rose had spent some time in Sydney with Clarrie and knew the bright lights. Lights that shed no light on who newcomers really were. Pub lights in the city which threw no light but a kind of freedom to forget. A jangling call to bars where smoke and music and bitter laughter camouflaged the fact that all the maps were lost. Rose and Clarrie in Sydney. How was Sissy to know that Rose only sometimes spent the night at their fibro house with its uncut grass and leaking gas out in the post-war black and white TV, fish and chips, Coca Cola suburbs? Finally Rose saw Clarrie as a gaoler, and in the same way Sissy needed to escape from Jack she had broken free of Clarrie. Only Clarrie didn’t give a damn. When Rose finally died Clarrie didn’t come to the burial. After all she had it coming didn’t she? How was Sissy to know that beyond and beyond and forever, all around her sister’s Aussie dream home, stretched countless mirrored images of their own tiled-roofed loneliness? That even the city ached for something it had quite forgotten. That the velvet seats in cinemas and the ferry to Luna Park and Manly once every fifteen months and Marks Foys’ Christmas decorations and the pub-sung Saturday nights were not enough? That the men in pubs were not soldiers recent from the war but more often those washing down shame because they’d not been soldiers ever. Or had been. Men who often cried into their beer as yet another true blue Aussie sang “Danny Boy”. How could Sissy know that even