Free The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville

long-distant flood the middle of it had been pushed downstream by a raft of drifting timber. Generally that was the end of it with bridges: they broke up then and washed away. But this one seemed to have chosen to bend rather than break. The centre piers had allowed themselves to be shifted bodily downstream through the sand of the riverbed and then, as the flood receded, they had planted themselves back in. On the top, the timbers of the roadway had slewed around on their bolts into a stiff curve that was higher one side than the other, like a shrugging shoulder.
    Now the bridge looked weak, but it was not. It had been damaged, but the damage was the very thing that made it strong.
    However, it was condemned. The file had come to Douglas Cheeseman, in at Head Office: Replacement of the Bent Bridge. It was a straightforward job. You demolished the old one, straightened up the approaches, and put in a prefabricated concrete beam. He had done it before, many times. The old timber bridges had all been built around the same time, so they were all wearing out together too.
    Knocking down the old timber bridges was not his favourite job. He liked them, the innocent clumsy structure of them, the way the wood developed personality in its old age, although as a professional he could see how inefficient and over-engineered their structure was.
    He was a good engineer. He had always been good at the sums. He sat at his desk with the surveyor’s figures, doing the site plans and working out the specifications. The plans for the Bent Bridge were rolled up in his hand now.
    Out on site, you were never parted from your plans. They were your Bible. They got dog-eared, yellowed, smeared with mud, peppered with little holes from where you had unrolled them on the ground.
    But although so sacred, the plans were only the start. Once you got out there on the site everything was different. No matter how carefully done, the plans could not foresee the variables. It was always interesting, this moment when you saw for the first time the actual site rather than the idealised drawings of it.
    He knew men who hated the variables. They had their plans and by golly they were going to stick to them. If the site did not match the drawings it was like a personal insult.
    He himself liked the variables best. He liked the way that the solution to one problem created another problem further down the line, so that you had to think up something else, and that in turn created another problem to solve. It was an exchange, backwards and forwards. Some men thought of it as a war, but to him it was more like a conversation.
    The variables had been the unexpected reward for getting through the exams and out on the sites. The other thing had turned out to be the bridges. They had a special fascination for him. He had been told there was even a word for people like him: he was apparently a pontist.
    In the beginning, he had tried to get Marjorie interested in the bridges, but she had glazed over more and more as time went on. She had always made him promise not to start on about your everlasting bridges, when they’d gone out with other couples. Just give it a rest, Douglas, people aren’t that interested.
    He had bored her to death. It had been unreasonable to expect her to be interested. Oh Douglas, she had cried in exasperation one windy day on the Glebe Island Bridge. Doug-las! She had had a way of spinning out his name that had always filled him with apprehension. He blamed himself, now, for not catching on sooner.
    In the end the pleasure of a good bridge had become one more private thing that you did not try to share.
     
     
    He walked out on to the middle of the bridge, being careful to stay in the centre of the roadway. There was no guard-rail and, with the vertigo, he had learned to steer well clear of edges. He watched his boots, moving along the old timbers to the middle of the bridge. You were generally all right if you kept something in the foreground.