The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville

come, and the bridge had decided to bend rather than break, each timber had swivelled slightly on its bolt. Some parts had been squeezed together, and in others long wedge-shaped cracks had opened up. But each individual beam had not moved very far. Beam by beam they hardly bent at all. To see that, you had to look along the whole bridge.
    On the far side of the bridge she could see that another, more substantial road ran along beside the river on the other bank, joined by the bridge to the one she had used, making a big H-shape. She decided to take the other road back to Karakarook. There could be something wearisome about repeating yourself.
    She could feel the sun on her back now, starting to get hot and harsh in her eyes. It was hard to leave the bridge, the water, the sense of stillness. The slice of shadow underneath was already smaller, shrinking in beneath, and blacker. In the middle of that crisp line of shade, the shape of her own head provided a knob, like a handle, of extra shadow.
    From up here she could see the two shoe-shaped dents she had left in the sand, slowly filling with water but keeping their shape. Beside them were four smaller holes where the dog had stood. She could drop down dead, right now this minute, with another infarction, and long after she herself had been reduced to a smudge of smoke from a big busy chimney, the shape of her shoes would still be here. The shape of her shoes would go on proving she had been there, day and night, in light and in darkness, until the river rose and washed them away as if she had never been.
    No one would know, though, except the dog.
    Where the shadow met the light on the sand further along, she saw that there were two other holes in the shape of shoes, also filled with water. They were just like hers, but they were not hers.
    As she watched, two big bumbling insects dipped quickly into the water in one of the other footprints, as if tasting it, and up again. Twining around each other they dropped into one of her own prints, hovered, and danced together out of sight under the bridge.
    She moved her head and watched the shadow on the sand move too. A fly spun into her ear as if with an urgent message, then it was gone, leaving silence behind.
    The sky was thickening into a hard blue. A cicada started up, stopped, started again, was joined by another on a different pitch.
    She decided to take it slowly on the way back. There was something to be said for having respect for a dicky ticker.

CHAPTER 6
    DOUGLAS WAITED UNTIL the dust of the truck’s passage up the hill had settled, then walked a little way along the river-bank. When he came to a fence, he thought for a moment he would have to go back, but he found a sagging strand of wire and forced it down with his foot so he could get through.
    He felt light-hearted, adventurous. He was a cautious man. It did not take much to make him feel he was having an adventure. There’d been no bush in his suburb, just street after street of tidy houses with red-tiled roofs and a front path with a curve that it did not need. But he’d been a conscientious Scout as a boy. He’d got his Fire-Lighting Badge and his Tent-Erecting Badge and had got a Special Mention for Knots.
    The grass in the paddock was long, perfect for snakes. He thumped along, stamping his feet the way they had shown them at Scouts. He imagined the snakes, all over the paddock, waking up in the long grass, feeling the vibrations along the ground, sliding away.
    Fire-Lighting, and Tent-Erecting, and Knots. He felt pretty confident about any of those, and he was all right on Snakes, too.
    He was heading for the chimney of the ruined house, but the river drew him. He sat on a log, listening to the water chinkering over the stones, enjoying the way the casuarinas swept back and forth overhead with a soft whistling sound.
    Over the river in the bush covering the steep hillside, a bird was making a lot of noise. The books always talked about birds singing, but