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Sport 40: 2012

The Swing Bridge

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The Swing Bridge

I went to stay with my mother when I was five months pregnant. She was living near Queenstown with her partner Marston Holt, a furniture maker who’d built a small retreat in a valley about a half- hour drive from town. You had to cross a swing bridge to reach it.

Marston was from the United States. He was a Californian who’d emigrated to New Zealand in the seventies after losing his brother to a deadly melanoma. He’d planted miles of native bush all over his land to shade it from the sun. By the time he met my mother, there were only two places left on the property where the sunlight wasn’t filtered thin by bush. Those two places were the middle of the river and the swing bridge up above it. The bridge was where they dried their washing. It was usually decorated with my mother’s jeans and skirts and the colourful stretchy tops she liked to pre-soak in a brightening solution.

I arrived on a Monday carrying my old blue rucksack. It was a relic that Marston had dug out of the barn for me once, the old tramping kind with a lightweight aluminium frame. I preferred the word rucksack to pack. I pronounced aluminium like aloominum. I was only half making a joke. The rucksack was full of rented movies and paperback puzzle books—all I wanted to do while I was there was lie on the couch and be entertained or sit up at the table solving crosswords and eating Mexican food. My mother’s good at cooking but Marston’s guacamole is the best you’ll ever eat.

The first thing Mum did when she saw me was take the rucksack off my shoulders. The second thing she did was hold me close like I was just a little kid.

‘Cytomegalovirus’ the GP had said when the results of my test arrived.

‘That could be a problem.’

I’ll say it could be a problem, I thought. It was a bloodthirsty word. Cyto—like cells, like a psycho; megalo—a megalomaniac!

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‘It’s fairly common,’ she said, ‘but most people don’t even show symptoms. It’s dangerous for the baby though, so if you don’t mind I’d like to refer you to Foetal Medicine for some tests.’

She asked me if I worked with small children and I mentioned that I sometimes looked after my niece.

‘Do you ever kiss her on the lips?’ she asked.

‘On the lips?’ I said.

‘Pregnant women should never kiss small children on the lips.’

‘That’s a new one,’ I said. ‘I haven’t heard that one before.’

I went home and told Evan. ‘I must have lost the rules for being pregnant,’ I said.

My mother hadn’t mentioned my trip home to anyone except for Marston. ‘I can spread the word in town. But only if you want me to,’ she said.

‘Thanks.’ I was unpacking my rucksack, stacking the books and movies on a carpenter’s bench at the back of the spare room. Metres down the bank the river rushed past. ‘I might ring a friend if I feel like it. But I’m mainly just keen to rest up.’

I’d taken ten days off work and it was good to be able to stretch out on the couch knowing that someone from an agency was handling the imagesetter for me, testing exposures, laying the large sheets of film out on the table, studying each line of type for mistakes. I was having trouble concentrating. The previous week I’d let a couple of errors slip through and the incorrect film had been plated and printed.

My mother unfolded the sofa bed and fitted it with old, soft sheets and a continental quilt that smelt of sunshine and the river. I offered to make a cup of tea but the kettle was still boiling when the telephone rang. It was Evan, checking to see whether I’d arrived. He asked me if I’d heard anything and I said no, and I got impatient with him because it was only Monday and the nurse had told us Thursday at the soonest.

‘She was incompetent though,’ Evan said, and I laughed a bit darkly because she’d been awful with the needle—trying to stick it straight in through my navel. The other nurse had been gentler. She’d moved the baby with her fingers until it was in a good position for the test.

After lunch, my mother went into Queenstown to look after the gallery. Marston was working too—fitting someone’s kitchen with page 394 a piece of custom cabinetry he’d made. I wandered around, looking through records and recipe books. I watched a movie for a while then got up off the sofa because I didn’t want to fall asleep. With the remote still in my hand, I opened the door of the lounge and stood on the flagstones in the sliding green light. Marston’s barn stood slightly downstream from the house at the end of a narrow stone path. Arranged against the wall were about fifteen old paint tins filled with dirt and planted with seedlings—ferns, grasses and a few divaricating shrubs with ziggedy stems sprouting small heart-shaped leaves.

More plants, I thought. My mother had given Marston a lopper for Christmas but it seemed like he’d never stop planting more trees. And now they’d crept all the way to the edge of the barn.

‘He won’t get rid of anything,’ Mum had told me many times. ‘Have you had a look around? It’s all just piling up in there.’ Marston had shipped all his belongings out to New Zealand in the mid seventies. There was a room in the barn so full that you could hardly even open the door. It contained untold boxes, chests that had never been opened and piles of junk that had gathered in the intervening years. I imagined serious treasures.

‘Old stumps he hasn’t been able to part with!’ my mother said.

‘Spare gas cylinders. Thirty-year-old packets of bandages.’

‘There’s no point worrying,’ I said. ‘It’ll work itself out.’

‘A pile of rubbish doesn’t work itself out.’

I tried not to think about my mother’s point of view. When I looked at Marston’s barn I considered how well it was made. I admired its large golden door—a beautiful piece of wood that had allegedly been lacquered with seventeen coats of marine-grade polyurethane. Other people had families; Marston had his land and these buildings. He was connected to the things he’d made and the things he’d put in boxes. Compared with that, the connection he had to my mother and me seemed as fragile as the spider web that hung above the door.

I was given plenty of advice:

Stay optimistic. The baby can tell if you’re worried or stressed.

Be sure not to google. You’ll only regret it!

To help with a decision, make a list of pros and cons.

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I worried that I wasn’t optimistic enough. I googled without regret. Evan and I talked about pros and cons, but we couldn’t find any comfort in an opposing pair of lists.

Besides, it was still too early to make a decision. Whatever decision we made would have to be based on the result of my amniocentesis. We had four days to wait. Evan would fly down once the tests had come back. So instead of overthinking it, I watched movies and completed the first thirteen puzzles in the Brainerd Compendium. I helped my mother make dough for cornbread and took her spaniel out for walks over the hill tracks up behind the house.

We’d been told there was a fifty per cent chance my placenta would knock back the virus. If it did, we’d be let off the hook. If it didn’t, the odds became slipperier. It was likely the baby would die or be born with severe disabilities. Exactly how likely, and which disabilities, no one could say.

Our specialist recommended a late termination.

My mother arrived home from the gallery with a large cardboard folio under her arm. This meant she was bringing home artwork—her own. She hadn’t learned printmaking until the year she turned forty-nine and it was hard to imagine her now without colourful streaks of ink on her wrist or in her hair. She took an unlined notebook everywhere, pulling it out and scribbling furiously in the middle of conversations, looking past us at the way the light was falling on a hill or slanting through a cloud. ‘Always look away from a sunset,’ she told me once.

‘Show the reflection of the colour, not the colour itself.’ She gave me a print for my birthday. It always made me want to look over my shoulder.

The gallery was doing well, but it didn’t seem to be the business that had changed her. She was curious now. She was intrigued by things that might have scared her in the past. I remembered (almost with nostalgia) how her hand used to hover over the handbrake of the car while I was driving.

‘I started these before you arrived,’ she said, spreading a couple of prints across the workbench. ‘Inspired by your pregnancy.’ She looked at me intently. ‘Are you interested?’

The edges of the paper were shaded with dark blue and green, page 396 detailed with hatches of ink. The middle of the paper was white. Perhaps there was detail there—white ink on the vellum. Yellow. It seemed too bright to look at.

‘What pregnancy?’ I said.

It got under my skin the way my mother used people she knew as inspiration for her work. It was like catching yourself in the reflection of a bottle; everything upside down but you could recognise yourself by the colours you had on.

She leaned her head to the side and moved towards me.

‘Oh Zoe,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’

Something woke me that night. It was raining, the river was up, and Mum and Marston were talking in the lounge. My mother’s voice was coming from the direction of the windows that looked over towards the water.

‘I just don’t think it would help them.’

‘But if they knew about the Blooms. If they knew how strongly Levi felt about the testing—do you think that would make a difference?’

‘Wouldn’t it be easier if they didn’t know? Don’t you ever think not knowing would be easier?’

I turned over loudly in bed and pulled the covers closer to my ears. There was a creak and the room darkened as Marston pushed on the door to make sure it was shut.

When I woke in the morning I heard a truck drive up the valley. I went to the bridge to have a look and saw that a skip had been set down on the grass at the edge of the road.

That wasn’t like Marston.

He composted and recycled. When he came across an item that couldn’t be re-used he held on to it and waited for the technical advances that would rescue it from ending up as landfill. As a result, he’d created a kind of landfill of his own—a wooden lean-to at the far end of the property that had begun life as a shed for recycling and now floated raft-like in a sea of old metal, plastic and tanks of brown fluid. The fenced-off area was overshadowed by beech trees and crept with old man’s beard, honeysuckle and nasturtium.

I stood on the bridge and saw Marston approaching. Below me ran page 397 the river, quick and cloudy from the rain the night before. Usually it was hardly wider than a stream, today it was running high along the bank. I remembered my mother telling me about a time she’d lost a basket of washing off the bridge into water like this. She’d had to let the whole lot go. She only lost her footing for a second.

Marston reached the bridge on the road side of the river. It swung as he walked towards me and I braced my legs and held on to the rail. He nodded back towards the skip.

‘Making progress,’ he said.

He took off his cap and scratched his head. He’d had a ponytail when I met him but it had disappeared soon after. Not that it made a lot of difference; he still had heaps of hair.

‘I hope you’re not getting rid of your boxes,’ I said.

‘I’m making space in the barn.’

‘The recycling I could cope with.’ Marston looked at me seriously.

‘The things I wouldn’t do for your mother,’ he said.

The barn was lit with lightbulbs, strung together with extension cords hung over hooks way up in the rafters. Marston turned a switch and everything lit up. Only a couple of the walls were gibbed, the rest were bare beams. Two interior doors had bike locks looped through their big wooden handles. A ladder built into the wall led up to a half- finished loft.

I’d seen all this before; I’d just never been in further. Tracks led between piles of wood to the bikes and shelves, the doors and the ladder.

‘It’s this way,’ Marston said, and I followed him in.

He unlocked the door to one of the rooms and pulled it open. It smelled like old canvas tents.

‘It’s a big job,’ Marston said. ‘There’s a window over that way that looks down on the river. It’s boarded up with ply but when I get it lifted off—’

‘She’ll love it.’

‘The light will pour in.’

He asked me to wait while he moved things around. Then he began bringing out boxes.

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‘I’ll start a pile at the bottom of the ladder,’ he said. ‘When there’s no room left there, I’ll take the first lot of boxes to the loft. If you’re serious about helping you can sort through them. There are clothes and stuff that won’t have lasted. Don’t lift anything.’

‘That’s what the bags are for.’

‘Yep. Fill them up with rubbish and I’ll carry them over the bridge.’ He began bringing out boxes. I pulled off the packing tape and opened up the flaps.

There were boxes of clothes that had never been worn. I shook them out, checked them and put them all back. I found appliances— lanterns and torches and transistor radios, a record player in an old plastic suitcase. One box contained hundreds of batteries, all different sizes, still in their packets. They’d leaked acid and bonded together.

‘I’d forgotten about those,’ Marston said, putting them aside for recycling.

I found sneakers that had crumbled—they went into the skip— board games that the mice had gotten into, hiking boots with Californian dirt encrusted in the soles. There were tools, high-school yearbooks, seeds, uniforms and medals, ledgers and letters and photos.

Marston moved the boxes up into the loft. Not much of it was rubbish.

‘A lot of this gear belonged to my brother,’ Marston said. ‘We were planning to start a community here.’ He pushed something heavy across the boards of the loft and dust fell through the cracks, catching the light. ‘Everyone was talking about survivalists and retreaters back in those days. We had all this gear, all these books. I was the survivalist. Levi always liked the term retreater.’

He climbed down the ladder and collected another box.

‘Sometimes—not often—it doesn’t hurt to be one or the other.’

Evan decided to fly down early; he’d found a good fare and didn’t want to wait any longer. And right behind Evan, bad weather was headed our way. Out on the swing bridge the sky was still blue, but the forecasters spoke with the usual authority. The front would come in from the south, and the wind would pick up as the temperature dropped.

Mum closed the gallery early and collected Evan from the airport.

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He helped Marston cut wood which they stacked up in piles by the old-fashioned stove at the end of the kitchen. I hung washing in the barn and waited, making trips between the house and the bridge, looking south along the river.

‘Nothing yet,’ I called to Evan as he wound rope around a tarp pulled tight across the skip. The bad weather wasn’t supposed to last long but I knew that in storms the road would often close because of ice or slips or the river coming up. Inside the house, Mum stood in front of the pantry, stacking tins of fruit and vegetables. She opened the freezer and counted neat stacks of meat.

Apart from her gripe with the barn, which was more of a habit than anything else, Mum was usually pretty relaxed. Marston was always the worrier. But when the chips were down, they switched roles. Mum watched the river and looked at the trees. Marston lit the fire and admired his piles of wood.

At about four o’clock we heard a bang and I looked up to see an old green bucket, tipped on its side, skidding over the pavers and rolling into bushes by the river.

‘That’ll be the front,’ Marston said.

As the weather worsened Evan and I took books off shelves and thumbed through them. There were volumes on animal husbandry, simple power generation, yeast-making, spinning and growing gardens from seed. Between books I found an article by someone called Kurt Saxon. Someone had clipped the edges neatly and folded it in half. I read it twice.

Unlike the back-to-the-landers, the ecologists, the retreaters and such, survivalists are not non-involved pacifists. They are not necessarily eager to kill, either. They are simply aware that civilisation is cracking up and see the possible need for desperate measures to come through with a whole skin.

My mother poured wine and warmed bread in the oven. Marston brought a lantern and a tin of kerosene in from the barn. He made a couple of trips, returning once with a camp stove, again with an old diesel generator. If the civilised world was to end, I thought, this would be a good place to come.

When the snow began to fall I put my coat on and stepped outside, page 400 ignoring my mother’s warning. I went to the swing bridge, taking care not to slip in the ice on the boards. I held on to the rail, tipped my head back and looked up at the sky. The wind had dropped and fat flakes of snow fell towards me in slow motion, out of a close, grey mass that swirled like a body of water.

For a minute I was suspended in the space between two rivers— one above me and one below. Snow caught in my hair and melted on my face. I held on to the rail until my fingers hurt. Then I turned and went inside.