The bridge - Page 4
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 14: The Trouble with Paradise
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Wayne Macauley
AS I SAT ON THE LOG THREE DAYS LATER waiting for evening to finally fall, I felt as ready for the crossing as I would probably ever be, though my hand had begun to throb a little and I'd broken a lace on my boot. The problem of hunger had to some extent been solved, in the strangest of ways, the day before. I'd been lying in bed, my preparations more or less complete and feeling too weak anyway to do anything more, gazing absent-mindedly at the pattern the camouflage formed on the cloth at the entrance to my hut when I saw it shift a little – strange in itself as there had been no breeze for days – and then saw, crawling through the gap at the bottom, a bird: medium-sized, a chocolate-brownish colour with white tips on its wings, a kind I'd never seen before. I watched it bob and weave its head as it looked around the hut. It took a few quick light-footed steps and stopped beside my bed, where it cocked its head to one side and looked at me as if about to ask a curious question. I flung my hand out to grab it, but it flew up towards the ceiling. I leapt up, almost fainting for an instant, and lunged at it as it fluttered in the corner above where my shelves used to be. I managed to grab it by the wing while the other flapped madly, showering feathers in my face, and then somehow wrap my other hand around its body. It thrust its beak into the flesh, drawing blood, and kept trying to peck at the wound it had made as I slowly moved my hand up towards its neck; the beak fell open, snatching for breath. I throttled it until the flapping subsided – staring it all the time vengefully in the eye – then put its head under my foot and pulled until I heard a little crack. I had the fire lit within minutes, and by the time it was a good hot bed of coals I had plucked out the wing and tail feathers and skewered it through with a stick. I fell upon this meal as if I'd never eaten before in my life, crunching the bones and swallowing the entrails whole, until what no more than an hour before had been a living thing was now no more than a beak and a pile of blackened quills and bones. The best of these bones I kept in my pocket, and I sucked them throughout that and the following day with a pleasure far greater than any pebble had ever given me.
Darkness was already washing the last grey glow from the sky in the west as I made my final preparations that night. I changed the bandage again on the throbbing hand, re-threaded my boot with a piece of string, tied the water bottle to my waist and looped the rope around my body. In a few hours I'll be gone, I thought; by tomorrow all will be resolved one way or the other. If I have any doubts, it's too late to be dragging them up again now. I walked out on to The Paddock for the last time and waited in a kind of happy trance until even the after-image of that last grey evening glow had faded from my eyes and, as they opened one by one around me, I picked a bunch of the prettiest flowers and tied them up with string. I didn't light a fire that night – it would only have given me a stronger hankering for some beans – but just sat on the log sucking a bone, waiting for what I thought was midnight to come around, making a final check of the things I would carry with me and repeating over again in my mind the pattern of boards on the bridge.
The next morning found me waist-deep in mud. I had followed the pattern for the first half– hour or so without fault, and beyond that groped my way along the handrail, hearing only the sound of stick against board and the rise and fall of my breath until I had eventually reached out my hand and found nothing, tapped the stick before me and heard a very different sound, then gingerly put my next foot forward and felt it touch solid ground. Against all expectations, I had somehow arrived on the other side of the bridge and stood a good five minutes in the pitch black and silence wondering what to do next. I took out my water bottle and wet my lips – and my shirt too, having missed my mouth in the dark – then groped back again for the comfort of the handrail. It was some kind of fear, I suppose, the fear I think of being found standing there stupidly on the edge of the bridge come dawn, that then made me take a few tentative steps out into the dark and, waving the stick out in front of me like a kind of extended limb, a few more. Half an hour later, as I stood in mud up to my knees, believing I had walked so far inland as to have encountered some kind of swamp and too confused or simply too tired to find my way back, I cursed those first few impulsive steps and was still cursing them when, some hours later, completely exhausted and now in mud up to my waist, I nodded off to sleep.
Dawn brought the greatest shock of my life. The stick was now resting on the surface of the mud; my forearms lay across it, my head on my forearms, my torso bent from the waist at a right angle to my legs, now completely submerged beneath me. The ‘caw' of a bird I think it was – the morning type – that first stirred me from the strangest of dreams. I opened my eyes and saw Ball, lying face down a few feet away from me almost completely covered in mud and recognisable only by the colour of his hair and the boil on the back of his neck. Through the mist beyond Ball, I could just make out the black water of the river and, to my right, very clearly, the bridge.
It took me some time to piece it all together, it was too much to believe in one gulp, but it was obvious that I was standing waist-deep in the mud of the riverbank about twelve metres from where I'd let go of the handrail the night before, that I'd walked around in circles until I'd somehow walked back towards the river, and was now looking out, to my great consternation, at the mist that enshrouded the far side and my camp: behind me was the countryside I had mistakenly thought myself to be walking in, somewhere the swamp I had even more mistakenly thought myself to be standing in. It took a little longer to fit Ball into the picture, but it seemed by first impressions that I may have been right about the sea after all, and the tide, though it brought no fish, had somehow brought my old companion, full moon by full moon, back up the river until, on the opposite bank, he was almost back where he started. He was not the Ball I remembered: his hair was falling out and the collar of his shirt had begun to rot away, but at least he was buried, or very nearly – which is more than I could ever do for him – and this gave me no small comfort in the midst of my present troubles.
I turned from Ball again towards the bridge, and could at least congratulate myself for having thought to bring a length of rope: there above me and to my right one pile of the bridge sat up a little above the level of the boards. I converted one end of the rope to a lasso and, after only a few attempts, I had found this pile and pulled it tight. And after ten minutes or so of heaving, hand over hand, I had pulled myself up out of the mud and finally stood where I should have remained standing all those hours before.
The sun was still struggling up somewhere in the east, but already the light was enough for me to take my first real look at this side of the river. I did, and was suddenly struck by the strange sensation that I had not crossed the bridge at all. In front of me, no more than thirty paces away, was a clump of trees in every detail the same as the one that concealed my hut; beyond it lay grass and more scattered trees, the vista I knew so well. It was only after taking a few steps forward and peering more closely at this clump of trees that I saw for the first time, hidden amongst them, what looked like a sheet of corrugated iron and, a little further away to the right, an old rusted drum set up above the ground on rocks. I stepped back a few paces and coughed – a small, affected cough – and suddenly the fear I never thought I'd feel washed over me like a wave. A shiver went round the back of my head and buzzed up in my temples. I took out the white piece of cloth and hung it on the end of the stick. I coughed again, but there was no response. There were thirty paces of open ground between me and the clump of trees. I drew myself up to full height and, with the white cloth dangling from the end of the stick in one hand and the bunch of Night Flowers – badly crumpled – in the other, I slowly made my approach.
It was a hut all right, much sturdier than mine: three corrugated iron walls and a roof the same, and a curtain of hessian sewn together at the entrance. I put a hand on the coals in the bottom of the drum and thought I detected a faint glow of warmth. I approached a little closer, suddenly aware that I'd lost a boot, perhaps somewhere in the mud, and knocked softly three times on the wall of the hut. I stepped back and waited, feeling as I did that I should for some reason be smoothing down my hair, and finally, now certain there was no one in there, I parted the hessian at the entrance and stepped inside. It took me a little time to adjust my eyes to the light, and I stood there with a small living thing palpitating above my heart as I waited for each object to slowly assume its shape. There was a bed, similar to mine though raised off the ground on four rocks and a sheet of iron; a pile of empty bean cans in one corner and beside it a pile of unused cloth and hessian; three empty shelves, in every way identical to mine, stacked one above the other on rocks. But the shelves were not all empty, and with my eyes now better adjusted I could see on the bottom one, weighted down with a small pebble, one lonely piece of paper torn hastily from a pad. I picked it up and stepped out into the light.
To my Leader, my comrades, or whoever may read this note. I have stood guard here for just over six months with little to report. The supply drops have mostly been successful and I have managed as best I could, supplementing my diet with fish. Thirteen days ago I fired on the enemy for the first time as he sailed past the Eastern shore of the island out towards the centre of the lake. He returned my fire without making contact and a few days later I saw his body washed up in the mud. The following week the boat drifted up on to the Western shore and I have secured it there for my use. In the absence of further orders I have decided to cross the channel in this boat, secure the mainland end of the bridge, and re-establish my guard post there. In case the enemy should find this note first, I am withholding my name and rank. Yours, 3923-2872-1774.
JUST AT THAT MOMENT I HEARD a familiar drone in the east, looked up to see the plane roaring in overhead, saw a door fling open and the parcel fly out, and watched as it descended swaying into the mist on the far side of the bridge. ♦