Shock Forest and other magical stories by Margaret Mahy

Author:Margaret Mahy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Bridge Builder

My father was a bridge builder. When I was small, bridges brought us bread and books, Christmas crackers and coloured pencils – one-span bridges over creeks, two-span bridges over streams, three-span bridges over wide rivers. Bridges sprang from my father’s dreams threading roads together – girder bridges, arched bridges, suspension bridges, bridges of wood, bridges of iron or concrete. His bridges became visible parts of the world’s hidden skeleton. When we went out on picnics it was along roads held together by my father’s works. As we crossed rivers and ravines we heard each bridge singing in its own private language. We could hear the melody, but my father was the only one who understood the words.

There were three of us when I was small: Philippa, the oldest, Simon in the middle, and me, Merlin, the youngest, the one with the magician’s name. We played where bridges were being born, running around piles of sand and shingle, bags of cement and bars of reinforced steel. Concrete mixers would turn, winches would wind, piles would be driven and decking cast. Slowly, as we watched and played, a bridge would appear and people could cross over.

For years my father built bridges where people said they wanted them, while his children stretched up and out in three different directions. Philippa became a doctor and Simon an electrical engineer, but I became a traveller, following the roads of the world and crossing the world’s bridges as I came to them.

My father, however, remained a bridge builder. When my mother died and we children were grown up and gone, and there was no more need for balloons and books or Christmas crackers and coloured pencils, his stored powers were set free and he began to build the bridges he saw in his dreams.

The first of his new bridges had remarkable handrails of black iron lace. But this was not enough for my father. He collected a hundred orb-web spiders and set them loose in the crevices and curlicues of the iron. Within the lace of the bridge, these spiders spun their own lace, and after a night of rain or dew the whole bridge glittered black and silver.

People were enchanted with the unexpectedness of it. Now, as they crossed over, they became part of a work of art. But the same people certainly thought my father strange when he built another bridge of horsehair and vines so that rabbits, and even mice, could cross the river with dry feet and tails. He’s gone all funny, they said, turning their mouths down.

However, my father had only just begun. Over a river that wound through a grove of silver birch trees he wove a bridge of golden wires, a great cage filled with brilliant, singing birds; and in a dull, tired town he made an aquarium bridge whose glass balustrades and parapets were streaked scarlet and gold by the fish that darted inside them. People began to go out of their way to cross my father’s bridges.

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