Bridge of Triangles by John Muk Muk Burke Page B

in the night and no one had had time to sandbag their houses or lift side-boards onto drums. Many of the people muttered about the Godforsaken land and how they were going to pack up and go. How they didn’t belong. How they were losing their fight with the land. Of course afterwards they would go and push out the mud and scrub down their walls and grow old and bitter in the memory of their losses.
    No one understood the floods except the other people of the river. They lived not by a river but in the whole world. The landscape was not separated into hills, valleys, rivers, flats. The river was the sky. It lived for a time in the sky. But there was no time. It hid and played under the dry flats and flowed across the face of the burning sun. It filled the space between the stars and as the whole great play of light and dark, of shifting water and wind-swept earth rolled around with its birds and lizards, kangaroos and snakes, everyone moved effortlessly like shadows in the bush, just as the sun moved away for the wind. Floods do not arrive either catastrophically or quietly—they are always here. The river is a tide.
    Sissy looked at the wet miserable huddle of people: Jack was standing over with his sister. She looked at her kids. She felt lost.
    Sissy was a small girl. The river was in flood. The sky was black as she walked up the hill with Paula. She held Paula’s sweaty hand. She was wrapped around with love.
    Pine Hill: the Old Granny and Paula were there now. Not here with strangers in a raining night all wrapped up in Army blankets. So she cursed the man. She knew she was alone.
    But she remembered, half remembered when everything just was.
    She walked up the hill to Aunty’s. The floods swirled in the droughts and the earth was parched in flood. The sun shone at night and the moon whitened the world by day. There was no yesterday or tomorrow. Now was when Paula let the chooks out. Now was when they sat up at Pine Hill eating damper with the big quiet faces all around.
    She hated these people because she did not belong. Did she belong with the big quiet faces?
    She wanted to run. She wanted to smash the tall towers of white plates and run away into where the shattered fragments of white crockery fell quietly, and as they fell they changed into a broad hot white plain where two still kangaroos with little burnt front paws stared across the distance—across all time—and stared at her in the eternal silence. And all was alright again.
    Sissy knew then that she would leave Jack. She could seehim now talking with his tight haired sister who nervously clutched a large green handbag. Sissy knew that Jack and his sister were silently cursing the river. But Sissy did not curse the river. She cursed the man. Sissy was not one with the river, but she understood her mother, and as Sissy would have said, her mother understood the river. Unlike the man, Sissy had an instinct for survival. But her bitterness grew when she finally realised she could never go back to when she hadn’t seen the difference between her mother and herself.
    â€œOnly the whites drown—unless they take us too,” her thoughts were abjectly bitter.
    And her bitterness and hatred and self-doubt all came together in a sickening surge of half-knowledge that made it impossible for her to hold on to any concept of “us”.
    Earlier that day, when Sissy had told Jack that the river would flood, her words had been utterly unable to cross that vast gulf between her world and her husband’s.

The waters receded. The people went back to their private battles. The Leeton family was dropped off at Waterbag Road by Mr Dawson. (It was Mr Dawson who had employed Jack at the garage.) The dwelling was one main room with a corrugated iron lean-to attached. At one end of the lean-to was a flimsy tin cooking area. The main room, where cows had been milked, still had a few stray bolts sticking up from the concrete floor where a