Free The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville Page A

When he was safely in the middle of the bridge he stopped, turned around, and carefully looked up. There was the ute, already dusty, and Chook leaning on the bonnet rolling another cigarette. Beside it was a tussocky paddock full of cows, and further back there was a rise with a ruined chimney and some poplar trees.
    He suppressed the impulse to wave idiotically at Chook, and turned cautiously around, until he was looking at the other bank. A steep slope of bush, still in shadow at this hour, slanted down towards the bridge, with the road skewing around sharply through it, washed away into deep corrugations. It had been poorly planned in the first place, he could see that, with no thought for drainage. He knew without looking that the plans called for a new alignment that would cut in around the slope less steeply. The surveyor had marked it all out with fluorescent orange tapes that flut tered around the trunks of the trees that would have to be cut down.
    He wondered if the Heritage Committee knew about the trees having to go, as well as the bridge.
    He looked down at his boots and watched as they carried him steadily, calmly, along the middle of the bridge. At the far end there was a loose fence-post that he pushed sideways, and he slid down the bank. It was steeper than he thought, and he arrived at the bottom in a shower of pebbles and dirt. In the silence he could hear them continuing to pour down the slope behind him.
    Under the bridge it was cool and dank, full of rich organic smells. He stood with his boots sinking in the soft sand. The piers spanned a small glassy pool, each one disappearing into its own reflection. He looked at them with sympathy. His own teeth were somewhat similar, ringbarked at gum-line from years of unscientific brushing.
    Pale sand fanned out underwater where the current slowed and shelved away into deeper, darker brown water against the far bank. Over there a dragonfly danced above a pucker of current. Upstream and downstream of the pool, the water bubbled mildly down through slopes of rounded stones.
    There was a quiet secretive feel under here, crouching on the strip of damp sand. It was like hide-and-seek. He had always preferred to be the one doing the hiding. The water bubbling through the stones was like someone talking to you, keeping you company. Pale bands and twists of light reflected upwards from the water, stippling and shimmering over the dark timbers, making a secret upside-down world.
    As he watched, a leaf twirled down out of the trees. It floated under the bridge where the water went black, and he waited for it to come out into the light on the other side.
    He looked at the uprights, each one a whole tree trunk. Even after a hundred years shreds of bark still clung to them in places, and you could still see the knobs where branches had been roughly lopped off. It was not so much a bridge made of timber as a bridge made of trees.
    There was no great engineering in these old bridges but he had noticed how often there was exceptional workmanship. Here, for instance, a neat bit of squaring had been done on the timbers of a joint so each one slotted in snugly against the other. The long-dead men who had built this bridge had even gone to the trouble of countersinking the bolt-heads, pecking out a tidy hole to get it all as tight as a piece of cabinetwork. It was tricky, working hardwood like that, but they had thought it worth doing.
    True was the word carpenters used. It was as if they thought there was something moral about it.
    In his books about bridges he had seen photos of the old-style timber-cutters with their axes, posing beside the stumps of huge trees. They stood in their waistcoats, the foreman with his jacket on, holding their axes. Under the heavy moustaches their faces were serious.
    Now the Inspector had declared it Past Repair, stamped the words in red on the file, and Douglas Cheeseman had come along to knock it down.
    It seemed like a mark of respect to confirm