Chapter 5: That Fucking Bridge Over the Woronora

Monday, Freda asked herself around to have coffee with Maria, knowing the Alison would be at school and David and Maureen at work. Maria is no more embarrassed or ashamed of their lifestyle than her husband or wives are, so when Freda found that Maria didn't get the subtle approach and it can't be said that she is either naïve or ignorant, Freda asked straight out and Maria told her straight back. Maria is so proud of her lifestyle, her husband and her two wives, that she brags about them, like a young boyfriend bragging to his mates about his new girlfriend. Half way through her second cup of coffee Maria's waters broke. Freda began to panic, while Maria being an old hand simply rang 000, and then the hospital's maternity ward and asked Freda to be in touch with Manny to tell Maureen, and she would tell David on the two-way.

The ambulance only had to come from Miranda, the next suburb, so it arrived there in five minutes and Freda spent the rest of her day in heaven, minding six of the most perfectly mannered little angels, and reading some book by Dr. Seuss. Freda couldn't have children: 'barren' was the expression often used but not the whole answer, as her uncle may have had a lot to do with it; the expression 'physiological' had been expounded by some doctors.

Maureen was out on council business and David's radio reception was iffy at best as was the current technology, so Manny left a phone number at the desk and spent the rest of the day at David Newman's house, green with envy and happy as a pig in shit at having six delightful little girls for Freda and him to mind and read to. He would take Freda any way he could get her but he did miss having children. Being upper management in a major council does not seem to qualify them to be able to adopt children. The real fact was that he did not bribe the right person when he applied.

David was down in the new subdivision, at The Bonnet on the Georges River, below Como West. He might as well have been on the moon. Maureen was at the newly-built library at Menai, which sat like a shag on a rock surrounded by scrubland and as yet was bereft of books. No phones yet and a single lane bridge to traverse over the Woronora River called by one and all 'That Fucking Bridge Over the Woronora'. The local State and Federal Members of Parliament were all Liberal, but the State and Federal Governments were both Labor, so therefore no bridge. It will be a long, long time before Labor would be voted into those electorates.

Alison received the message in class, and when the lecturer objected to her leaving while he was prattling his sparkling wit, she told him to go fuck himself. The lecturer placed an official reprimand to the Dean, but the Dean had had to go to an official dinner the previous night and couldn't get there because ten thousand of their own students, male and female, were marching through the CBD chanting "one, two, three, four, we don't want your fucking war". The Dean did not think that the sanctimonious prat was going to have the reprimand approved because a senior female student's wife was in labour. Days like these are made to try us.

That Fucking Bridge Over the Woronora

David arrived at the office an hour after normal finishing hours to retrieve his bike and a piece of paper was stuck to it. Maureen had been stuck on the zigzagging Woronora Bridge western approaches for an hour, in a council car which David had noticed was still missing. David found her because he rode the Norton along the pedestrian footpath down the eastern winding approaches then along the footpath across the rickety bridge, only just missing anglers. They left the Council car parked beside the bait and general store at the west end of the bridge, again traversed the bridge on the pedestrian walkway and against the traffic direction, closely missing the fishermen again and avoiding the temporary traffic lights that had been there for over thirty years, in one form of technology or other. The timber planked bridge was a fifty years older than that again, constructed something like 1917. It had much in common with grandfather's axe. (Grandfather owned an axe, the best axe he had ever had. Over the years he had replaced the handle a dozen times and the head twice and it was still the best axe he had ever owned.)

Same bridge circa 1920's

Maureen and Alison were both wearing their fashionable micro miniskirts. Maureen's top was a council uniform white blouse, smart and modest. Alison's was a university's female student's approved blouse with no bra where her entire breasts peeked out from inside her wide gaping sleeveless arm holes. Brassieres were not de rigueur at that time in the fashion cycle, and naked breast display was.

They were escorted by and holding hands with David who was wearing the black leathers he had bought when he was thirteen, with his hair in a ponytail hanging down to his leather hipster black jeans held in place by a silver studded black belt. The belt was mainly decorative, although it was the only thing stopping the pants top button from snapping open. All three had arrived at the hospital at exactly the same time.

They were taken in to see Maria in the ward and when asked what relationship they were to the patient they all said 'she's my wife'. For some reason no one was willing to argue with David. It might have been the skin-tight black tee-shirt barely containing his body on his muscular frame, his six pack, his pecs and deltoids, which were observable simply by looking and without him needing to flex his statuesque body. His leather pants were the same and most of the assisting medical staff checked his wife's condition just to see his penis outlined almost to his knee. When he had bought these clothes they had been loose and floppy on him. Now they were too short for his long legs and tucked into the top of his bike boots.

The rumour spread like wildfire right through the hospital that when he came in, he was accompanied by two other wives. Maria was sitting on a chair beside the bed looking at the pictures in a magazine. She hadn't even had a contraction. David remained there to keep his youngest wife company, reading to her out loud excerpts from the magazine so she could understand the relationship the pictures had to each other and hence the story's subject. Her inability to read didn't bother him a whit. The whole family often sat with her reading articles and stories; their children too young to read yet usually sat around them fascinated.

Maria kept her hand resting on his thigh tightly grasping his visibly outlined penis. Maria absolutely loved these pants and often contemplated having a photo taken with him wearing them, but didn't think a chemist would develop it.

Alison drove Maureen the eight minutes home about 6:00 PM, where everything was fine at home. Manny was covered head to tail with little girls, reading Green Eggs for the tenth time, and Freda was the central casting supplied applause audience and union-organised snack maker. Maureen and Alison told them that they could go home now and they were so visibly disappointed that they invited them to stay for dinner.

Then the phone rang.

Rachael Alison Maureen Newman was born 6:15 PM, Monday the 1^st of March, 1971 weighing 6lb neat. Maria had one contraction and David almost caught the little girl mid-flight she was spat out so fast: Maria hadn't even had time to get onto the bed. It was pure arse luck that half the newly on-shift nurses had come down to cop a peek at the husband's dick down to his knee in Maternity Room 205 that medical help arrived instantly on site. Two of the male nurses swore they had fallen in love.

Interns checked mother and baby out, and decided that they were in better nick than the nursing staff perving on the husband, and the mother skipped down the ward aisle one hour after the birth without even a twinge of discomfort. The female Obstetrician on duty watched with a jaundiced eye, because her own last born took three days of labour and she couldn't walk for a week. She still can't skip fifteen years later: not that she tries. David found a public phone and got a disbelieving Alison to come and pick them up, as even David didn't think they should bring the newborn baby home on the back of the bike, no matter how good a bike it was.

Freda and Manny were still there and they had just decided that he'd had too many beers to drive home. Freda had just set the driver's seat to her liking when the phone call came through; Manny hated Freda adjusting the seat to suit her, as it takes him a month to adjust it back to suit him.

Rachael Alison Maureen Newman was welcomed home by the family and friends at 7:40 PM, less than an hour and a half after the birth. Freda was astonished to see Maureen - meek, frightened of a mouse Maureen - and needing no one, spit in the Devil's eye Alison, both play with David's obvious as hell penis and make it become tumid while encased by the stretched pant leg with nowhere to go. They fawned over him like some god while Manny did the grandpa thing with the baby; he of course didn't notice a thing and wouldn't have cared if he had.

She was even more shocked when the new mother, thinking she was unobserved, offered to give David a head job, as she was horny as hell. David took her into their bedroom and, after a tight high-pitched shriek, she returned ten minutes later with THAT look on her face. Freda kissed David goodbye and couldn't help but slip the tongue in as he smelled so strongly of pussy perfume. David gave her a shocked expression and Freda licked her lips and gave him a smouldering look. Anyone willing to give his wife a head job, two hours after her giving birth, is her type of husband.

Maureen rang Freda next morning to tell her that her periods were due yesterday: they'd come like clockwork ever since her menses began but now they'd missed. She had rung Maria first, and they had both advised her the same thing: a bad day yesterday may have thrown her system out of kilter. Her mother killing and stabbing people all around her hadn't changed the timing by a microsecond so she'd wait a week to prove them all wrong.

A week later Maureen saw her GP and he did the test. Two days and a phone call after that, Maureen told everyone that she was pregnant, and probably became so the first time their man poked it in her. Maureen, Maria, Alison and David were absolutely in raptures and were telling everyone. Not everyone was happy, but not everyone was happy the good looking arsehole had three wives and one of them had the hiring power for the complete council.

Co-operatively Friendly:

Freda had had an epiphany, the discussion of which was what the original visit with Maria was for, but the baby's birth had, for the want of a better term, aborted. David was so fertile that Maureen had even bragged that the time she became pregnant he hadn't come in her at all, but had come in Alison's mouth and she only had some leftover sperm pushed into her. She laughed that after that, and the next few days, he came inside her so often she was still leaking semen a week later and needed to use a tampon to soak up the excess. Maureen was so happy she was walking on air. Together they were very open with their friends about the sexual lifestyle.

Freda's idea was that David is a friend, and friends do favours for their friends. The next Saturday, Manny and Freda dropped into see the Newman family and while Manny roughhoused with the kids, Freda asked her friends for a favour.

As it happened, David wasn't home, as a replacement sewer line, half way completed at Oyster Bay had had all its reinforcing collapse, and although it wasn't David's job, he was the only one available. To the amazement of the emergency call-in gang, David was in the bottom of the hole up to his knees in mud and raw sewage being just another hand, as the job had been shorthanded from the start. It took six hours just to make the site safe and when asked for his pronouncement of what had gone wrong, he simply told them that the engineer in charge shouldn't be replacing washers in taps and had the managerial aptitude of an apprentice hole-digger.

An independant Supervising Civil Engineer looked at the work and he agreed with David and the man was sacked. To the relief of the original gang they then fell under David's auspices, and all of a sudden the job went right and was completed a week earlier than scheduled. David had worked on many jobs such as this from the very early age of fifteen and he was now twenty two; of course that detail wasn't for general knowledge though they knew that he had been with the council for seven years. His own method of supervision was fairly basic: supply the workmen ample to do the job, place a senior man who understands the techniques as leading hand on that job exclusively, and give him accurate direction as to how it should be done.

Every couple of days David visited every job under his watch and decided with the leading hand if it was going well or if they should change anything, and he'd also speak to the workmen to see if they were happy about the job itself. It would surprise an awful lot of upper management that the hands do care and lose interest when what they say is dismissed out of hand. It neither surprised David nor interested him that the work crews thought he could walk on water, albeit polluted with mud and raw sewage. Upper management thought he was more valuable than the Council's Assistant Manager, and the rest of lower middle management - i.e. at David's level - hated his guts. Half of them were army retirees and their army method of management just didn't work here.

When David returned home, he reeked so badly that even the girls wouldn't go near him. Manny was there though, and he questioned him on the job. They were professionals and it was talked through as professionals, and that the smell made Manny's nose hairs curl was neither here nor there. David washed himself in heavy-duty disinfectant soap four times, naked in the back yard, then Manny rinsed the soap off with the hose. Freda had performed this self-same chore for Manny in his earlier years. Manny, personally, thought people who look as good as David should be put up against a wall and shot for making the rest of the ordinary looking Joe Blows - people like Manny - look as bad as they really were.

Manny asked David for a favour. Manny's trouble was that he knew that, though David had three wives who he was as devoted to as Manny is to Freda, David simply did not look at other women. Manny looked, but with him it's a male thing and the appreciation of feminine beauty, where David simply didn't look. And everyone who worked with him knew it. David had been consistently and intentionally placed in charge of innocent little female nuevo-Civil Engineers who were spending time with council doing what was basically work experience. He expected them to work as he did, and when one of the hands told him that his apprentice is in the hole and basically naked because she's saturated (it's that current female fashion thing again), David would say, "So?"

Well David is utterly faithful to his women; it sounds strange but it is so. "Freda and I have asked your women as we thought it was only fair. We would like you to have sex with Freda and see if you can make her pregnant. It is an imposition on you I know, but we are into the desperation stage and wouldn't ask this favour of you as a friend otherwise."

David was squatting naked on the back lawn totally aware of his surroundings. He was a very clever man though he didn't realise it: eventualities that simply wouldn't occur to others stare him in the face as obvious. David knew that Freda was watching from a back window, him being naked, and it did not affect him erotically at all. He also knew that it was not true from the opposite point of view: he had noted the kiss that Freda gave him the night Rachael was born; he had felt the hunger.