by Ashley Hay
“What I liked best,” said Ted, his hand on the gate’s catch, “was a trick he did with a great big horseshoe magnet, the way things flew in towards it. He let me have a hold of it afterwards—I was running around the hall trying to pick up anything I could.” He cupped his hands together, a rough approximation of a horseshoe—a rough approximation of an arch. “That’s what it is, magnetic: pulling us all in to itself and keeping us close by.”
Joy smiled. “I like that,” she said. “I like that story best.” She was leaning back against Joe now, his arms around her like the sleeves of an extra sweater while his hands rubbed together and then rubbed their warmth into hers. Her breath hovered in the air after her words—Ted imagined its little mist taking on the shape of letters. Then, “Let’s get in out of this chill,” she said, stepping out of the embrace. “There’s some cake.”
If the bridge was like a giant magnet, charged up and pulling its workers and other devotees in from all over the city, then it was pulling in a great band of chroniclers too. Artists—photographers and painters in the main—were relinquishing every other subject for this one, even before it reached its whole, perfect shape. Which comforted Ted: he wasn’t the only one who found the process so attractive.
“Even the clergy are seduced,” said Joe the next morning as they went in for their shift. “One fellow, a vicar from the north side, takes a picture of its progress from his window every morning. You’ll see him around sometimes—our mascot padre, some of the blokes call him. Seems a nice enough chap, although he does seem to confuse rivets with God in terms of what’s holding the thing up.” He paused a moment, seemed to hesitate a little. “He’s made a book out of some of his pictures. I was thinking of getting it for Joy, but I don’t know. She makes—you know, like Nipper, she makes a bit too much of things sometimes, takes stories on a bit too hard, and I don’t know whether it would keep her mind off getting down to the bridge itself, to have all these pictures of it, or if it would just make her think about it even more.” He lit himself a smoke, drew a breath. “Anyway, anyway,” his voice bustled on, “if I don’t get this one for her, there’s bound to be another one later.”
A buzz, high in the air, interrupted him, the two men stopping to stare up towards the plane, thin against the brightness of the sky. “There’s photographers talking their way onto those too,” said Joe, “coming at us from all angles, and we’re not even done yet. And then there are the government blokes, and the magazine blokes, all crawling around it and over it and nearby and snapping away. And women—I heard there are women setting themselves up with paints and what-have-you around its edges. Of course I can’t tell Joy that, or that’ll be her next plan, suddenly taking up drawing.”
They stood a moment, Ted, at least, imagining Joy with a blank pad of paper and a handful of pencils, striding through the mess of the site and up, straight up and onto the arch. He wondered what she’d see, what she’d draw.
From above the bridge came the purr of another plane’s engine, and they watched it make its way towards the city from the west.
“And after I get up there,” said Ted, watching as the plane cut precisely through the narrow gap still waiting to be filled in the bridge’s arch, “the next thing’ll be a ride in a plane. That’d be something, Joe, up there, under the clouds. Even the bridge’d look small from up there.” He’d dreamed of its shape from high up in the blue, dreamed of the line it would make across the water and how high you’d have to be to make that line no more substantial than the thin mark of a pen.
“Up in the clouds, eh?” said Joe, cuffing him, but gently. “Lots of blokes got their chance for that in the war, and it got a lot of them killed too.” He shook his head. “Get this job done and I’m happy to stay on the ground forever. You can keep your loop-the-loops.” But Ted heard, as he walked away, that his friend was whistling a familiar song: “I’m Sitting on Top of the World.”
He hummed the tune’s next phrase, but quietly, very quietly. Here he was: rolling along.
“You’re lucky to have found yourself such good friends,” Ted’s mother said when he went down to see her the next weekend, bursting with talk about Joe and Joy, about their house, their backyard full of stories. “I thought you’d be all full of your barge and your nice new job, but you haven’t stopped about your lodgings since you got here. Nice to be closer than you were at your gran’s, I guess, and nice for a change.” She pushed a plate of biscuits and a cup of tea towards him, poured some tea into her own saucer to let it cool. “And what about your bridge?” she said. “Will it hold up long when they’re done?”
There was a critical moment with biscuits. The moment when they were so perfectly soft they squashed warm and soggy against the roof of your mouth had to be balanced against the moment later when they folded and melted into a sludge at the bottom of your cup. Ted concentrated on the science of it, thinking about the size of the bridge compared to the smallness of everything in his mother’s house.
“It’s funny,” he said slowly. “It looks really big from far away sometimes, and really small up close. Then other times I’m right underneath it and it’s the biggest thing in the world. Sometimes it looks heavy, and then sometimes it looks like all the bits of it are very fine somehow, like they might snap away in the wind. Joy says it’s the light—I don’t know. But it’s tricky.”
“Tricky like you wouldn’t trust it to take your weight?” His mother, not a small lady, had a fear of weak wooden veranda slats, of rickety chairs, of stepping or sitting on something and feeling it fall away underneath her. “Or tricky like newfangled?”
“Tricky like you might catch it changing, from thin to thick, big to small, if you could just look at the right time.” He stirred another spoonful of sugar into his half-drunk tea. Joy had talked about watching shifts end, watching the men come down out of the sky, watching the bridge’s frame settle into stillness, “as if it had given itself a shake and got rid of all these things that had been clambering about, hanging on.” Just this past week, the bridge had tried to shake itself free at the wrong time; one of the men working with the rivets, high up and straight over the place where Ted’s barge was parked, had lost his grip and made to follow Nipper Anderson down through air and water into that thick, banking mud. But the hose of his air gun caught somewhere and held him on, like a harness—which wasn’t a story, thought Ted, that he needed to share with his mum. He’d spent days wondering what the man had felt, had seen, in the instant of falling before he was jerked back up like one of those new American yo-yos. He’d spent days wondering if it was a sensation like this that woke him up, startled, from his uncaught dream. Joy had spent days imagining it was Joe, even Ted—“either of my boys”; curled up and anxious in the face of what hadn’t happened.
“Anyway,” back in the kitchen, back with his mum, “the arch is so close now. It’s like someone’s inking it in really slowly, and sometimes when you’re standing somewhere on the shore and you look up in a hurry, it seems as if the two pieces have already met, while you weren’t looking.”
“I heard they were doing all the sums for it in England,” said his mum, “which sounds a bit daft. I’d have thought you’d do better to have men making their sums where they can see the thing. I don’t like a bridge I can’t trust, and I don’t trust a bridge made by people who can’t see it.”
“You just have to think it’s magic, Mum, like the way it’s a great big curve made out of all straight pieces.”
But she shook her head. “Your fancy imaginings. I trust a boat,” she said. “I might just stick with ferries if I ever need to cross that water.”
Catching the train back up to the city, Ted wished he’d done better at making her like it—or at least making her think it was a good thing. Maybe if he took her a bit of steel next time, something with weight she could feel. Maybe if he found her a photograph. He leaned his head against the carriage window, pressing hard to stop it bouncing with the train’s jolts and rattles. He’d get a ph
otograph. And he’d stop talking about it shrinking and growing, coming and going.
Back at the house that afternoon, walking down the hall and into the kitchen, he called out his hellos to no answer. In the middle of the table sat a heavy book whose leather cover was embossed with gold. Parables of the Sydney Harbour Bridge by the Reverend Frank Cash, that enthusiastic vicar Joe had talked about who leapt out of bed every morning to take a photograph of the bridge. Here was his book, his thoughts about engineering, about steel, woven around bits of scripture and morality, and his pictures all the way through. Ted traced the word, Bridge, in its title, before flicking through the pages and taking in sentences at random.
This, the greatest and most important work of its kind undertaken by man, he read, and it displays outwardly, with most shining light, a faculty which men often call reason, and others call, the image of God . . .
Outside, a cloud passed in front of the sun and a black bird, the tips of its feathers held out like fingers, swept into the backyard with a hard, scraping cry. Ted shivered, pulled his coat around him at the neck, the way Joy held her cardigan tight against drafts and bad thoughts, and the cloud passed.
The bridge as an image of God. He tapped his fingers across the words. Reckon this bloke dreams about it, he thought. What had Joe said about making a bit much of something?
The Bridge is truly sacramental. It displays, against our southern sky, day by day, a further and progressive visible expression of faculty, which can be seen and known, in no other fashion. And in proportion as the steel tracery webs out fascinating figures amidst the fleecy clouds (so lofty it would seem), so there will be displayed outwardly for our delight, more and more of the invisible originative faculty of man.
“Sacramental.” Ted sounded out the syllables. Funny word. He wasn’t even sure it belonged in the sentence. He’d probably never paid enough attention on Sundays, but wasn’t it something to do with communion, the wafers and the wine, something to do with divinity?
Skipping across a page here, a chapter there, he saw deckways and girders, cranes and pylons, blessings and panoramas. A very real analogy exists between the Main Arch Span of the Bridge, and the span of life allotted to man . . . and . . . I (a steel member) make a fine sight, shining red in my red coat of paint, and as the creeper crane hoists me from the barge in the stream—
That’s me, thought Ted, that’s me.
—I am always the admiration of thousands of eyes . . . and . . . Every construction, every building made by man, casts a representation of itself when it comes between a light or the sun, and any other body. And man, in his imagination, peoples worlds, both visible and invisible, with shadows . . . and then, On Falling Off.
Ted smoothed the pages back, pressing a little too hard into the V of the spine as the door swung open and Joy’s voice called, “Anyone here?” She came into the kitchen where Ted stood.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said, taking the book from him and cradling it a moment before she leafed through to its introduction. “ ‘The Rev. Frank Cash can claim to be the only person outside of those connected with the bridge, to have unlimited access to the work,’ ” she read aloud, “—lucky bugger—‘and in seeking his information he has shown a complete disregard of personal risk.
“ ‘The “Mascot Padre”,’ ” she read on aloud, running her finger down the list on the contents page, turning first to the chapter on rivets, then to the chapter on the divine city. “ ‘I am not sure which aspect people will wonder at most on the first crossing,’ ” she read, “ ‘the strength of the structure, or the beauty of the outlook.’ ”
“I tried to talk to my mum about it being . . . you know, beautiful,” said Ted, unwrapping the bag of biscuits his mum had sent back with him, “but she was just worried that it might fall down. It’s a nice book though, and handsome.”
“From Joe,” said Joy. “More stories, more pictures—I think he thinks he can buy me out of wanting to get onto it myself. But it does feel a bit . . . well, it does feel a little bit like rubbing it in.”
Ted fiddled with the lid on the biscuit canister, unwilling to side with one over the other.
“I mean, it’s lovely,” said Joy. “It’s lovely, and must have cost him . . . well . . .” She set two teacups, two saucers, ready on the table. “But these photographs are beautiful, and it is a handsome book. And he must know I’ll get up there one day, somehow. I’m sure of that—I’ve got to somehow.” Her fingers were tense against the book’s open pages; her voice sounded tense too.
Ted poured the boiling water into the pot, listened to the sizzle as he set the kettle back down on the heat, opened the stove and threw in another handful of kindling, another couple of dried-out orange rinds—Joy loved the smell they gave the fire. Makes a bit too much of things, he remembered again and, watching her fingers clutch fast at the surface of the book, he saw something of what Joe had meant.
“I thought I’d go in and watch them close up the arch,” she said then, her voice steady again. “Joe reckons it has to be soon. Then I thought, you know, I could try to draw it or something, and then no one would mind that I was there. One of the blokes says there’s a few women around the site now, trying to draw it. I wonder where you go to see what they make of it, how they see it, after they’ve finished.” She poured tea, then milk, spooned sugar, and stirred the two cups, her eyes focused on the nowhere of halfway across the kitchen floor.
“Maybe it is something about beauty,” she said at last. “Or maybe because it feels miraculous.” And she picked up one of the cups, blew gently across the surface of the tea. “So big for this place, sometimes it feels like it’s shrinking everything else, pushing it down towards the ground. It’s like those folks who built the amphitheater on the harbor to watch the heads and wait for their savior to walk through. I went, you know, for a while, went and waited—not Jesus, it turned out, but a very nice young man from India. Joe doesn’t like me talking about it, but it was lovely to sit by the water and watch the light change. And why not wait for a miracle, if you’ve got the time?” She blew again across her tea, watched it lap against the rim of the cup. “Anyway,” she nodded to Ted across the table, “at least I’ve got two of you to wheedle stories from now.”
Ted fiddled with the cuffs of his shirt. “I reckon—I don’t know, but I reckon everyone’s paying attention to it,” he said at last. “Just some of them don’t know how to talk about it. And I reckon everyone, if they were really honest, everyone wants to get up in the air. I do, out there every day on the barge. I mean, the men are great and the pay comes, and I love the water, diving in some days off the edge of the workshops there with some of the blokes and we swim round . . .” Their bodies so small and pale in the darkness of its great big shadow. “But then Joe talks about the things they can see from up there—how far, out to the ocean and out to the mountains and the city shrunk to roads and rooftops underneath. I’d like to see that.” Daring himself. “I’d like to be brave enough to climb up too.”
She poured more hot water into the teapot and set it between the two of them. “Then we’ll go,” she said. “We’ll nick off one night and we’ll get up there and see the stars and the moon and the whole big city. What do you reckon, Ted? Do you reckon we could?”
It was infectious; it was a dream. He nodded and laughed, thinking it would never happen. He patted the cover of the Reverend Cash’s book. “We’ll read this up like a guidebook, and we’ll be right. He’s been up there hundreds of times.”
“We could go now if Joe wasn’t on his way home,” said Joy. “But I’ll get the soup on instead.” And she laughed herself.
It was ridiculous; it was all a bit of fun. He watched as she picked up the book and hugged it. And he said, but quietly, when she was almost out of the door, “Do you dream about it, Joy? Do you ever dream about it?”
She stepped back into the kitchen, the book held tight. “I used to dream, when Joe started up there. I used to dream he�
�d fall off, and I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. Nipper’s wife, you know, they say she had to go into some kind of hospital. That’d be me. But the dreams stopped, and he got on all right, and I fell in love with it, started trusting it. That last bloke, caught by the strap—it shakes me up, but I do trust it, and now I reckon I think so much about it in the day, I can give myself the nights off.”
And Ted smiled. Not like him at all, then.
He came across one of the bridge’s artists the next morning—a lady with a big block of paper propped up in front of her and her eyes, narrowed, flicking up and down between the steel and the page, the steel and the page. She was sizing up his bridge, her mouth screwed up as tight as her eyes, as if she was trying to suck in the essence of the structure somehow and didn’t much like its taste. She was shaded by the dome of a large black umbrella, its shape, its darkness a misplaced refraction of what she was trying to draw.
She was not, he reckoned, in a particularly picturesque spot, pressed so close to the concrete road that would carry trams and traffic up and across the water. He stepped forward, trying to see what she was doing.
Her page looked impossibly small for its subject, covered with diagrams that looked more like the workings he’d sometimes fancied he could see inching ahead of the thing itself. Thick red lines divided the rectangle into a grid, with pencil marks to indicate the shapes and angles of this big body of steel. Some sections were buffed in with shading; some had notes about colors. And down at the bottom, dwarfed by the arch, sat small houses and other little buildings—too insubstantial, surely, to anchor it all to the ground.
But the magic of it: she’d made it still and permanent while the thing itself kept growing new sections, bustling with movement. And the extra magic: she’d caught one of those spots where it looked as if the two arms of the arch had already touched—a private preview of the moment everyone was waiting to see.