Free Bridge of Triangles by John Muk Muk Burke Page B

sort of felt the poor thing squelch around till the high pitched screaming stopped. Then he’d kept sticking a finger in his ear to see if the insect had floated out on the slippery butter. This noise, he decided, was the sound of silence. He lay there thinking about that in a vague sort of half sleep. His mum’s face and trains and the TV and ants on concrete drifted all around a lonely man huddled in front of a smoky fire in a little place in a lane a great distance from here, and none of it would go away, not even when he finally slept his first sleep in Sydney.

The Sydney days at Rose’s became weeks and Clarrie was getting sick of everyone. Sissy had been led by Rose’s two boys to the low cream painted school and enrolled her four kids on the first school day after the family arrived from the bush. She fidgeted and spoke in low little whispers in the school office when answering questions about the birthdates of her kids and where they’d been to school before and everything. But the bespectacled lady was helpful and had a kind smile and the only thing Sissy had to do was sign her name. She did this slowly and rested her free hand carefully on the enrolment forms. Keith was led off to the infants in shuddering sobs and Joe went off to the big school and Chris and Mary were put into different classes.
    No one seemed to notice Christopher Micky Leeton, not even the teacher very much. He was given a free-standing table and a chair with a curved wooden seat to himself. Sydney seats he thought of them as. All the seats in the room were like that. The kids scraped them about and had different haircuts and seemed smart and probably had TV’s. He saw a few of them furtively glancing at him. A couple smothered giggles into their hands and he thought he heard them say something about his hand-me-down clothes. He looked out the window at the grey scudding sky and the few birds. Sydney did not have many birds he decided.
    The teacher seemed not to care if the boy did any work or not. Perhaps his mum had said he was only staying a few days or weeks.
    Routines at this school were different from the one he’d known back in the bush. Here the huge crowd of kids had a big assembly every morning and the teachers sat up on a stage. Songs were sung very loudly and uniformed kids carried flags to the platform and stood there holding them until the assembly ended. Even prayers were said. The Leeton kids had barely begun to adjust to these newrequirements when Clarrie kicked them out of Aunty Rose’s place.
    The first the kids knew of it was when Sissy, for the second time, came to their school and took them out long before home time. The only thing he really liked about that school was that if you put some money in a brown bag first thing in the morning it came back late in a box with a pie and a cream bun in it. Chris had never eaten a cream bun before. And the only school work he ever remembered was when the teacher drew with his hairy hands a map of Australia and marked where first Captain Cook arrived and then Arthur Phillip had settled the country.
    â€œBut what about the people who already lived here?” Chris had said.
    â€œWell, they didn’t really live here. Not properly—not like us. They just moved away a bit further into the bush. You’ve got to understand, they just wandered around the place—there was plenty of room for everyone. Now let’s get back to how the first people in the new settlement set about clearing the land and building their houses.”
    Something disturbed the boy deeply. Sitting in a strange room surrounded by strangers a vague recognition that something of enormous importance had just been said, but he couldn’t identify just what it was. It was somehow connected with the accepted convenience of the teacher’s explanation—the dismissive tone and the neccesity to now get back to a discussion of things that really mattered.
    A vivid