Three Bridges Black

By Tony Brickley

A politician’s promise, can you imagine a thinner thread?

A copper’s secret, perhaps a chance to exorcise his own demons.

An American veteran and his convincing ways, we do love convincing ways.

A young girl’s will and determination, we do love...

The attack on Katie Bradshaw took 10 minutes, give or take.

Her revenge took 10 months, no give, no take.

Only one was pleasurable.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Sep 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781786121066

Tony Brickley

This is the author’s second work, the first being The Playground Hunter. He lives with his wife and family on Australia’s southern coast.

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About the Author

This is the author’s second work, the first being The Playground Hunter. He lives with his wife and family on Australia’s southern coast.

Email: [e-mail]

Copyright Information ©

Tony Brickley 2023

The right of Tony Brickley to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528905039 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781786121066 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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I’ve got a yarn I can tell you while I’m lying here. It’s a good one too, I reckon.

But in the end, I suppose you’ll be the judge of that.

A story the new man in my life told me. A little tale I found hard to cotton on to at first, especially while I’m stuck here three sheets to the wind wrapped in a poorly fitting blue hospital gown, the town’s doctor come gyno about to kneel at the altar of my private parts. Jesus these should have been my salad days.

Best you head off to pick up Stephanie’s baby bag, Col, she won’t be heading out of here without your son, ‘son’.

The smiling Doc joked. Now back to you, young lady.

The blue shirted clean-shaven town doc of a hundred years certainly looked the part. He spoke quietly and with his usual sense of calm, but the tail end of an ominous looking tattoo protruding just past his shirt sleeve spoke to a previous life, a life lived far away from Thee Bridges I pondered, as he kindly returned his attention to…well you can imagine.

So here I am holed up in the Three Bridges Hospital for a few more days. It got me to thinking about this tale the man who had recently become my new husband had told me in secret, a real hush hush kind of secret, a tale as I said I found hard to fathom in parts, unbelievable really. But I sat there my jaw dropping, enjoying it just the same. It only happened some eight months before I conceived the little chap that was about to flood from me.

It involved two local girls, one of whom planned and then orchestrated what turned out to be a small ensemble cast of Three Bridges innocents; politicians, Chinese neighbours, a black American, and two local detectives, one of whom ended up married to me.

I only played a ‘walk on’ part along the way but as it turned out, there I was all the same, a member of the cast ‘caught up’ if you will. Coincidence wrapped up in a little bad timing really.

Anyway, I found it hard to get my head around it but by gee it changed the landscape around these parts. In the end it changed the whole country really.

But like I said during my last contraction, I suppose you’ll decide that for yourself.

So, I’m off. Doc’s slipped his gloves on. Nurse Pru is patting my hand and telling me that Col’s made it back in time.

In fifteen minutes, he may wish he hadn’t.

Stephanie Gray-Jurgen.

I Could Do with a Friend

Coincidence: (noun) A remarkable concurrence of events etc. apparently by chance.

Openica Willis

The assault on my friend Katie Bradshaw took a total of ten minutes give or take. Katie’s revenge took ten months, no give, no take. Only one was pleasurable she would eventually tell me.

My journey with Katie began after a smack in the mouth resulting in what was now my blackened left eye and a bleeding perforated ear drum, both of which were just about healed. It was mid-February in what became the scorching summer that started off the really strange year of 2019. My bashed in face was slowly healing thanks to the soft, caring ‘slightly swollen in the heat’ hands of a thoughtful woman named Pru Shepard. Nurse Pru to all.

Did I say a strange year? Well, given the chance I think I’d change that to…well something else altogether.

Nurse Pru, in her white nurse’s uniform with its blue striped collar and her old-fashioned upside-down nurse’s watch, applied all the care needed to heal a woman’s wounds in our ‘Three Bridges’ hospital.

Working her way toward retirement in her small circa 1970s dull brown brick twelve room hospital with every second air conditioner packing up in the tortuous heat. ‘An orderly hospital is a well-run hospital’ she told many more ‘customers’ than me but somehow seeming to make the point more often to me than most. She did however importantly apply a great deal of common sense on how a woman, or in my case a twenty-two-year-old girl, could avoid getting those bruises again. She did this by uttering the following words by way of statement.

’I never want to see you back in my hospital again…love."

Her warning always seemed as stern as it was direct. The ‘love’ at the end was heartfelt, wrapped up for the women she cared for in a warm quilt of kindness usually delivered with a pat on the hand, a brush of the hair on a forehead, or a kiss on the cheek. Gestures so important to women who in some cases literally thought it was less scary to live shivering and covered in bruises on rain sodden streets than go home to, well… go home to men.

Her parting words well thought through as it turned out, Nurse Pru would then stand, turn and walk out of my room almost indignantly.

I thought she did that because she cried sometimes. I asked her once, but she denied it. She would then tell me to ‘behave myself’.

On the day she wheeled me out of her hospital in a steel framed plastic handled wheelchair that wobbled more than a Coles supermarket trolley she said to me that the Occupational Health and Safety clowns are ‘running the place now Openica’. Pru for her part having the shits at having to perform that particular task when it was obvious to all that cared to look that I could walk just fine, unless of course I would be required to walk on my ear, an ear I could only just hear her out of, and not very well as it was filled with cotton gauze. Between that and the bend in my nose that caused my own snoring to keep me awake most of the night, nurse Pru wasn’t the only one with the shits.

My friend Katie Bradshaw’s journey began two weeks later on February the first of that same deadly hot summer after being released from the very same hospital, having been cared for by the very same head nurse. Wheeling her out into the sunlight flanked by her parents, mother Daisy looking tired having lost weight these past weeks making her already wafer-thin frame look as if she would fall frail to the ground at any moment. Katie’s broken father Taylor trying to stand upright in front of the assembled Three Bridges press wishing he had four arms as he tried to herd his family around him.

Nurse Pru couldn’t help but tear up as the glint of the sun caught her eye. God bless you little blonde Katie love she said as she handed her over to her mother. Nurse Pru having spent many an hour infatuated combing Katie’s silky blonde mane.

Daisy stood her daughter up from the wobbly front wheel drive as Taylor thanked the head nurse again, then turned around to watch the only two women in his life walk away toward his colourfully painted family wagon, it’s red and green shadowing the bright blue floral artwork announcing the family business name ‘Cococabanas’ beach shades.

His swollen red eyes never again to be far from his daughter he had decided without telling a soul.

Thank you, Pru. Taylor had one last go before returning to his wife.

He turned toward the gathered journos.

Thank you all for being here, but you will understand our need for peace at the minute. He spoke timidly, politely avoiding questions with the hint of a smile wrapped in a tortuous grimace.

As the Bradshaws were leaving the hospital the two scented candles on the fireplace of my rented home were diminishing as quickly as my innocent, naive first love was being extinguished between the calloused fingers of a man who had now cried twice before this beating, standing over me on this stinking hot day, a day that he promised such a beating would be the last. He screamed ‘would never ever happen again’.

I’m so sorry, Openica, he would grovel, Openica, I love you. Those next three words always came out next from behind his lying teeth ‘I love you’ wrapped in ‘It won’t happen again.’

This time, just as the time before, I was crouched on the floor crying, gasping for air praying to a god who had so far failed to help me, I promised myself that if I got up, crawled away from this beating, I would walk away. No one’s chattel ever again, certainly no man’s.

Certainly not Hardy Ellis’s. Yes, Hardy Ellis, was his name Hardy ‘You can be my lathesth punthing bag’ Ellis…you thucking bithch the lisping prick said, as he stuttered standing over me for what unbelievably even to me, turned out to be the last time. Even a silly dumb bitch like you Openica I whispered into my one still working ear ‘can’t go on like this’ then in that moment, yes, I would no longer be Hardy’s possession.

Katie all five foot of her, me five and a couple. We had known each other in junior school then all the way through Three Bridges ‘Home of the Skyblues’ high school, from the age of six when we first met as juniors in knee length skirts, ironed yellow and blue checked shirts. We had ponytails back then.

Katie’s pretty blonde hair always flowing around her shoulders, across her cheeks. Me more uneventful, brown over brown later to be tinged with a bit of Hardy Ellis blood-red over brown. Our long purple coloured school socks pulled up to above our knees, our skinny white baby legs a secret to the rest of the world. Especially the foul-mouthed boys.

It was our world as we knew it right through until we had reached sixteen. We had started to find ourselves by then, both of us finding ways to extort new Levi’s from our parents.

Having been occasional friends through High school, often classmates as seniors, sometimes reluctant softball buddies and non-attending choir members, we had on occasion been close enough to swap thoughts, laugh and hang shit on the boys as they threw hard rubber balls at each other. We had a sharing of a mutual hatred for school sports days, geology, math but we had never been besties. In the ebb and flow of the teenage school yard we had crossed paths many times, spoken often, but knew very little of each other, those personal details hidden in private conversations kept for only the very closest of friendships.

I was sitting watching the heat haze that had already begun to form over the slowly melting bitumen outside the window of Morris Black’s cafe. Drinking a vanilla thick shake on my own, the cold of the ice cream frothing inside the old-fashioned steel milk shake thingy that Morris kept for special occasions causing droplets of water to cascade down the metal sides tingling their way around my cold fingers. ‘Not all waves make it to shore’ I thought. Watching the droplets trying to defy gravity, I sat alone with just fifteen minutes to go according to the big overhead clock that sat above Morris’s head as he stood by his old-fashioned cash register. Fifteen minutes before my 8 am shift at McDonalds was due to start.

The local McDonalds that had for twenty years sat with its bright lights, its big yellow ‘M’ glowing directly opposite Morries Cafe, across busy Domain Road. Lost in thought wondering to myself how the hell I ever got my job in the first place. I continued to suck frozen ice cream through the world’s thickest straw.

My friend Morris owned his little cafe he called Three Bridges Black. A name he thought was a clever play on words; one because his surname was Black, two because Coffee can be black, thirdly he himself was black, real black. For as many years as I had known Katie, many years before I had known him, Morris the sixty-year-old owner was as black as any man God had ever painted skin, was taller by a standout than the locals. An ex American marine with a gentle soul he had been given leave in Australia sometime during the Iraqi war. The first one, he had told me once, the one we went shit house in, the one George Senior stuffed up, Penny. Penny being a name he often slipped into.

Openica, he would say to me, when that shit fight was over, I decided to move down under for some ‘peace and quiet’.

I believed him. His customers believed him. I think the staff at McDonalds believed him too because they always came for a feed at ‘Three Bridges Morrie’ after their shifts, refusing to gorge themselves from the boxes of frozen burger buns and so-called French fries that arrived daily by truck, unloaded by Pakistani drivers as if they were frozen bundles of meat… Ha, it just dawned on me they were boxes of frozen meat. Pulling them apart ‘the team members’ would dry reach as they smelled the reek. Embarrassingly they would then front up and overcharge the well-meaning public as they queued up and filed in one by one toward their counters, through their doors and drive ins, relentless across the black melting bitumen that was now becoming the steaming dual carriageway that served as Three Bridges main road.

Morris had given me some occasional days working for cash.

He knew I needed it especially over the past eight months while my boyfriend Hardy was helping me to grow up with his fists.

Morris had also given me a room to sleep in if I was caught out. No charge, no con. When I was bleeding…having stumbled across me when closing up one chillingly cold Friday night back in July just a minute past 11pm. Him standing upright all tall and black, me sitting bleeding with my knees curled up underneath my chin, rain soaked elbows wrapped around my knees, shivering and shaking, my bloodied hands wiping at tears, my left ear ringing as loudly as a Rolling Stone roadie as I wiped the blood away, blood that trickled like biting mosquito’s down my neck.

Bending down he lifted me as you would lift a five-year-old at Christmas, cradling me in one strong black arm as he swung the doors of his cafe open.

He had helped me find a little two bedder up in Chance Court. Number three. It was old and half abandoned, the remnants of which had seen better days, been a local show winning rose garden now struggling to hang on to life in the draining heat. Mrs Chance, who the street was named after, had lived in the cream rendered 1960s cottage since the first years of her marriage to Alan, the then town mayor, until she passed a year ago. She had willed it to her son, now living in Queensland, uninterested and not caring a fuck what the old place, hand built by his old man, had meant to his mother. He just went ahead and rented it out. Morris knew the son from somewhere way back when they had crossed paths during an argument that Morry had intervened in, saving Mrs Chance’s son’s arse from a hiding back in the early 2000s.

I don’t know how, but in the end, I selfishly didn’t care how Morris did it, but he arranged for me to get the house cheap the only condition being that I pay the rent every week to ‘Morris himself in cash’ and that I keep the yard clean. No more was asked of me; no more was expected of me. I learned much later that ‘the pay Morris the rent’ clause allowed him to top up any missing cash if I was ever short. That way I would never get behind or get the arse.

My mate Morris would drive by my little renter to make sure the yard was tidy. I knew this because whenever I had trouble keeping up with the weeds and gutters and crap, he would be there raking leaves or sometimes mowing. I would be so embarrassed that if I drove past and he was cleaning up I would go around the block a couple of times.

It didn’t matter much in the end because Morry would always finish his mowing, sit on the broken front step, have a beer, wait for me and then stand up all tall and…shit…hug me then walk off to his old green station wagon never saying a word or asking for an explanation as to where I may have been.

Just maybe how I was? If I was OK? How I was going? Just making sure I was home? I don’t know how to explain it really…just a big black softy. All I knew was I hadn’t seen Hardy since he last belted the crap out of me. I was sure that Morris had something to do with his disappearance but then Morris seemed to have a hand in most things that happened around ‘the Bridges’.

I didn’t need to worry so much. I heard whispers that Hardy and his rusty powder covered plasterers Ute had fucked of out of town somewhere out west. Rumours somehow had my brother Wallace involved in that little episode. I don’t know nor care really, all I knew was that I had not seen the coward with the lisp around the streets of Three Bridges for weeks and that suited me just fine.

When I think back now, I really didn’t realise it, but I still did care for the people in my life.

I cared a lot really. Morry was a big afro coloured doona, a living security blanket. I would say out loud to no one sometimes that he was a real pain in the arse and then I would apologise to myself just as quickly for saying it.

Morry always told me that good men were like good parking spots; they were all gone, or something or other he would say, always forgetting whether it was they were gone or they were taken, or they have disappeared or some such. God, I used to laugh, he could never ever get it right.

Three Bridges Black did OK, but not great. Turns out that no one does great with a golden arches franchise across a busy road, but Morris owned the land and the shop with its little two-bedroom unit attached out the back behind the storage room and noisy freezers. Like a blue fairy wren around a table of toast crumbs he gathered up enough to eke out a living.

The shop and the unit had been newly repainted. The white timbers with green edging Morris had done himself last spring in between the odd thunderstorm, the nosy locals wandering by watching as the enormous black man climbed up and down his trusty Bunnings ladder, day after day painstakingly sandpapering and then hand painting each timber panel.

Inside the little shop Morris had re-sanded the hardwood floors and oak serving counters. He had also stained where necessary and applied polish liberally. They were kept spotless and treated with love, even by the customers who sat smoothing their hands across them as they waited to be served. So different were they than the cold sterile counters that served as wrapping benches for the often lukewarm under cooked hurriedly served food that would come your way across the road.

So, I don’t need a lot of money to get by, Openica darling, Morris would say to me, always finishing every short conversation we ever had with darlin’ or Openica darlin’.

I never heard him use it again with other customers. It had become very personal and comforting for me to hear. He forgot it one time when he was busy, and I was walking out. I must have shot him a look because he doubled back and smiled at me by way of apology… darlin’ he called out over the heads of the paying McDonalds haters that were still happy to pay for a decent hamburger.

Why are men so hard to please? I mumbled to myself again. Why are they so hard on me? Men, Jesus, men. Is it just me? Yeah, maybe it’s me, maybe I do complain too much, maybe I am clingy, maybe I expect too much. Is that wrong I wondered, still questioning myself, not trusting the answers to even the simplest of questions, only my brother and Morris being the exceptions of course to the answer of good and bad men. But in the end, I had a job. A steady shift working job and some money coming every Thursday fortnight.

So, on that day under the clear sky of a Three Bridges morning, that’s all that mattered to me as I started to feel a little overcome, crying into a crumpled tissue I had hidden in the back of my jeans.

A job as it turns out, surprise, surprise…Morris had shuffled across the always busy Domain Road on an always busy Monday morning to push his way into a room with a struggling air conditioner sitting above the head of the McDonalds Three Bridges manager full to the brim with his own self-importance, but not quite full enough to stop him going dry in the mouth when the six foot four inch black American with sweat dripping freely from his brow and down across his glistening cheeks, his grease stained cooking coverall wet with black man sweat as he walked into Rory boy’s office and told him he was there for the job.

What? What? What do you…? Job? The manager made a mess of half a sentence before being cut off as he sat quietly, almost timidly, allowing Morris to interview for a job, a position that the manager did not have and had not advertised but a job that the next day he rang and told me I had been lucky enough to secure.

I don’t know how that shit happened, but it did, at a time in my life when no man had done me any favours. At a time when no man thought much of Openica Willis, Morris Black had sweated his arse off back and forward across Domain Road puffing and smiling.

As it turns out I didn’t know this at the time but some men, real men, don’t need to spend their lives apologising for bad deeds. Some men will spend a lifetime making good for mistakes, some men will play the victim, some just like to punch you in the face and have their way with you. Turns out Hardy was number three.

Morris the big black cafe owner turned out to be a man that never had to apologise to the fairer sex, and that, as it also turned out suited me just fine.

This was my fifth straight week of part time work suffering, along with many of my ‘crew’ my ‘teammates’, the rants of Rory Kirk.

Now it was just five minutes until my 8 am shift was due to take over from the all-nighters, all-nighters that had put up with the drunken pick-up lines of every tradie in town. I was sitting alone looking out the window wondering. I say wondering but perhaps more bathed in self-pity really. I was due to start in that place I mentioned across the road, and it was now near the top of the hour, so I dragged