Bridge of Triangles by John Muk Muk Burke

Since the lady in the hut next door had been thesubject of Sissy’s and Rose’s speculations as to when her baby would be born, Chris had pondered hard and often on the matter of babies’ origins. Now Barry was about to tell him. At last he would know just how the hospital was able to give a lady a new baby. A baby which had once floated beyond the great dreaming sky-hill where the magic and light of orange peel scalloped clouds promised hints of other worlds—where all things began and to which all things belonged eternally.
    There was nothing anatomically wrong with Barry’s explanation. The basics were absolutely correct. In that empty room, standing on those stained floorboards, listening to this grinning eleven-year-old Sydney boy whom Chris had no doubt knew everything in the world, a turmoil and a grey floating unreality gripped the atmosphere. The last stage of Chris’s arrival in the world had been reached. Was there really no magic? Did he not begin beyond the great looming sky-hill which dipped down to touch the rim of the world? No, everything screamed that Barry was wrong—and yet perhaps he was right for Sydney. Yes, that was it—in Sydney everything was changed. But back home—his real home where the Old Granny’s kewpie dolls had hung around the walls and the great laughing Paula had stooped over the mint-perfumed washing tub and where the rocking sky was huge and clean in its infiniteness—why back there things were as they really were. Sydney was all wrong. His soul tried to resist it.
    When Jack started sending maintenance Sissy allowed Joe first and then Mary to take the train to the court house and pick up the money. But Joe returned with practically none of it and Mary with about half. So it was established that Chris would go. The money was due for collection every second Wednesday and Sissy could not be away from the frypan factory so regularly. The boy missed half a day’sschool to take the dull red train across the sprawling suburbs. He would make his way to the courthouse. At the end of the veranda was a glassed-in office. Here Chris learned to sign his name in a large book in exchange for the precious brown envelope. Sissy had told him to fold it up and carry it in his pocket. Chris knew the money was from his father.
    Who was his father? Chris sensed that he was a man more acted upon than acting. That his father resented being organised showed in the man’s quiet determination never to find merit in the actions of others. After all to recognise any inherent goodness in others might allow them to come too close to him—to discover that his bullying strength was a flimsy front. That they might not find he was all good in a world he sharply divided into good and evil. Jack Leeton was a man who could not live with his own faults, the awareness of which drained him of his life energy. His children were there—constant accusers of his culpability and weakness. He attempted to deal with his perceived inner emptiness by instigating a simple formula for what he called honesty. And this worked when dealing with horse flesh or the man who sold chicken mash, or the general store which permitted him to put things on tick because “Jack is so reliable”. The subtlety of his dishonesty in relationships naturally eluded him because of his fear of human closeness. He never discovered that he could work out his own rules for living. He lived by the rules of others while all the time telling them to get fucked. Yet where Sissy was concerned things were different: she could stick around if she wanted to. But she must question nothing. She must never attack the fabric of his flimsy fortifications. And for a while it seemed to do. He was a strong man not afraid of hard work. He was the father for her kids. He might really love her. In the beginning she did not realisethe price she was being asked to pay—how far she would move from her country and