Bridge of Triangles Read Online Free PDF Page B

who’d really stopped living just after returning from New Guinea, spoke at last and merely said, “Be quiet woman.” It was as if he thought that the woman could never become a real Leeton—ever.
    And that’s the way they’d been for years. Jack loved his wife in the only way he could—with a sense of tired duty which had long since replaced passion. She’d grown to hate his solid back and refusal to involve himself, apart from when she’d come home drunk after two or three days with her mob. Then he’d hit her across the face and call her a drunk black bitch and then they could finally and briefly try to love each other.
    â€œNow stay shut up will you?”
    But Sissy never could. She hated his broad back and his acceptance of her two oldest kids. She was frightened he’d destroy in the kids that which he couldn’t destroy within her. That the little she valued about herself—her real self—and which might possibly have been born into her kids, would be destroyed. She hated him because she could not be herself. She knew she would completely forget just what that self was if she did not leave.
    Sissy hated him almost as much as his own family tried to hate him for getting mixed up with Girlie’s mob. There were two things the Leetons would never forgive—marrying an Abo and marrying a Catholic. Sissy was both. But even in old Mrs Leeton’s acidic mind not even an Abo Catholic could marry a bloke while carrying someone else’s baby. Yet Sissy did just that two days before Jack flew to fight the Japanese in New Guinea. The boy was born a few shades darker than his mother. When Jack limped in from the warand saw this boy child and a girl child already crawling he said not a word. Instead he bought a strong horse and a second-hand spring cart with his final army pay. The horse was hobbled over on the flats and the cart stood in the oleander backyard. By the time the dreaming boy was born into his world of fire Jack had been fettling on the railway for a good year. Sissy at last could centre her bitterness for all the world on something real—and it was Jack Leeton.
    Jack finally took to the drink himself but that was years after all the kids had grown up. It killed him in the end. But way back then, when Sissy taunted him and he himself wondered why he’d lived, he was still a young, strong man. With reponsibility for four kids. And a landlord who wanted rent for the oleander yarded house opposite the saleyards.

“Let him come and chuck us out. Just see how far he gets with me!”
    â€œBe quiet woman,” and Jack continued to pack tea chests onto the spring cart.
    â€œAnd just where the bloody hell are we gonna live? Just tell me that?”
    But she knew he had plans to pitch a tent down by the river.
    â€œYou won’t catch me living down with all them blacks...” and then she laughed. “Jesus, what a joke. Anyway, I’m not leavin’ this house and neither are my kids, so tell old Cooper to go to buggery.”
    Jack ignored her and kept carrying mattresses and boxes out to the cart.
    Eventually Sissy started to carry things out too. “Just stay out from under my bloody feet youse kids!”
    As the woman carried out blankets and clothes and a billy full of cutlery she kept at the silent man.
    â€œA fine mess you’ve got us into. Why couldn’t you have stayed on the horse—or at least have done the bloody job properly?”
    â€œBe quiet woman.”
    Early in the afternoon the man drove the cart out onto the road and headed right towards the river. The saleyards were deserted and a dirty wind worried the puddles along the road and pushed the huge sky away so it could not be touched by the torments of this world. The kids perched on mattresses and stared with a kind of dumb trust at their parents’ backs. The horse trotted along never minding if it went through mud holes or dry dirt.