The Bridge

by Enza Gandolfo

  Alex told them about the knock at the door in the middle of the night, and waking up in a panic and running down the stairs, and stopping and hesitating, and looking around and seeing that Jane and Rae were there, but no Ashleigh.

  ‘Ashleigh?’ Alex had called out her name.

  ‘She’s not home,’ Rae said. ‘I looked in her room.’

  ‘I knew,’ he told them, ‘I’d known all the time as I was running down the stairs, but I kept thinking it’s okay, she’s slept over at Jo’s, she’s fine, she’s asleep, she’s fine, she’s fine. Rae knew too. We both knew. I could see the cops through the glass panel, but I couldn’t move. My body was numb, but my head was racing and I was running through all the reasons that might bring the cops to the door.

  ‘I hoped that someone had broken into Jim’s place — he’s away and we have the key. And I hoped it was about you, Mum, you’d been rushed to hospital or you’d had a fall or something, or something at Rae’s school, or something to do with work — maybe the Premier had been attacked and they needed me to go in to the office … I thought — no, I wished, as hard as I could, that it was someone else, that it was you or the Premier or … anyone. Anyone else, but not Ashleigh. I wished everyone else dead, everyone else, anyone else. Anyone. But I knew.

  ‘When I saw the cops, a man and a woman, I knew it was bad news. They asked to come inside and we all sat down in the lounge room and there was a long pause where none of us said anything. The policewoman was almost crying even before she started talking. And I wanted to stop her. I wanted to gag her. I wanted to stuff something in her mouth to stop her from saying anything … When she said it, when she said “an accident”, Rae asked, “How bad?” But I knew, I knew, because otherwise they would’ve rushed us out to the hospital. And then …’

  Alex couldn’t stop talking; a torrent of words spewed out of him. He described the policewoman and what she’d said, how she’d told them that his baby, his daughter, had been killed, moments from home, under the West Gate Bridge.

  ‘The bridge?’ Antonello whispered.

  Alex didn’t hear him and kept talking. ‘They spun out of control …’

  Paolina’s hand reached out for Antonello’s. He let her intertwine her fingers with his but he dared not look at her. The bridge, the fucking bridge. His granddaughter, his beautiful Ashleigh, had taken her last breath under the bridge, on the road where thirty-nine years earlier, they lined up the dead. Thirty-five stretchers cloaked with white sheets. A graveyard.

  ‘There was silence. No one screamed, no one said anything. All the way to the morgue, we sat in the back seat of the cop car in silence. I didn’t dare speak, I willed Rae not to speak. I was hoping and praying that it wasn’t her, that they had the wrong girl. I didn’t want to say Ashleigh’s name. I didn’t want Rae to say Ashleigh’s name, as if we could keep her alive by not speaking, as if saying her name might make her death real when we knew it wasn’t real, because it couldn’t be.’

  Antonello remembered the cop tapping him on the shoulder and telling him they’d found Slav’s body. He stood by the stretcher hoping, praying, that it was not Slav, and then he saw Slav’s arm, the only part of his body not covered by the white sheet, and the old gold watch, its glass face cracked. It was Slav’s father’s watch. Slav never took it off.

  Antonello listened to Alex. It was important to listen. It was important to let Alex speak. It was important not to be sucked back into past by the bridge.

  Alex was describing Ashleigh’s body, his little girl, cold and still and covered in blood. He told them that Rae collapsed. He thought it was a heart attack, but he couldn’t bring himself to do anything. He watched her fall, watched the police run to her, watched them call a doctor, watched Rae waking, heard the doctor saying she’d fainted and she was fine. He told them how shocked he was that Ashleigh was lying there dead but his heart and Rae’s heart were still beating.

  Antonello’s heart kept beating its irregular beat — atrial fibrillation, an ageing heart, an old man’s syndrome — but it too was beating.

  ‘Jane was on the couch, waiting — she was wearing her tomcat pyjamas, and I wanted to yell at her to take them off. They’re too happy, those pyjamas. She sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, she was sobbing, and she’s so young and I wanted to say, “No, it wasn’t her. Ashleigh’s alright — it was another girl, Ashleigh’s safe.” But I had to tell her it wasn’t a mistake, that her sister was dead. That we came home without her. All we have is a bag with her phone and the choker she was wearing. That’s all we have left.

  ‘Everything is lost and broken. I was meant to keep her safe. I’m her father. I was supposed to keep her safe.’

  Antonello saw that his son’s face was wracked with grief and fatigue and anger. Alex no longer looked like himself — his eyes were hard, his jaw tight, and deep furrows had formed across his forehead. He told them Jo was speeding and drunk. ‘She’s fine, though, a couple of scratches,’ he said, his voice slow and heavy. ‘She’s home. She’s okay. She’s okay. All in one piece. Home in bed. And her fucking mother can stand at the door and watch her sleeping … They said Ashleigh was already — my baby — gone when the ambulance arrived, that they tried, but they couldn’t …’ Alex banged his fist on the table.

  Ashleigh gone. Taken at the bridge. Antonello’s head throbbed. He’d planned to destroy the bridge. After the collapse, he’d spent hours lying in bed, walking around his father-in-law’s garden, imagining ways he might blow it up or tear it down. He should’ve destroyed the bridge. He should’ve stopped them from finishing it. If only, if only, then his granddaughter might be alive. Instead she was dead. So young, so beautiful. He expected to see her running into the kitchen, sneaking up behind Paolina and covering her grandmother’s eyes with her hands and whispering guess who in Paolina’s ear. And Paolina laughing as she guessed all the wrong people. He expected her to run into the kitchen and laugh at her father, teasing him for thinking she was gone when she was upstairs asleep all that time.

  But Ashleigh would never run into the kitchen again. She had died at the base of the bridge. He didn’t want to think about the bridge. Or Ashleigh. Or death. He wanted to stop thinking.

  ‘Poor Jo,’ Paolina murmured.

  ‘How dare you say that, Mum?’ Alex shouted, slamming his fist on the table again, his face flushed. Paolina gasped. He’d never yelled at his mother. Not even when he was a teenager. Never. But now, a middle-aged man, thickening around the waist, hair speckled with grey, he towered over Paolina. ‘Don’t you dare feel sorry for her,’ he roared. ‘She was driving and she was drunk and speeding and she killed Ashleigh. And she’s alive.’

  ‘They were best friends, Alex. They loved each other. She must be going through hell,’ Paolina whispered. She put her hand on Alex’s where it had come crashing down on the table, but he pulled it away. When Paolina reached for him again, he moved away from the table.

  ‘Do you know what it’s like to lose a daughter? I feel dead. No, I am dead. I want to be dead.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Alex. Ashleigh is my granddaughter — I love her too. I’m sorry.’ Paolina took the rosary beads out of her pocket and ran them through her fingers. ‘Let’s say a prayer.’

  ‘Jo’s alive and my baby, my daughter, is dead. And I don’t want to hear any of your religious shit. No God, no forgiveness. I don’t want to hear any of it. Do you hear me?’ Alex snatched the beads out of Paolina’s hand and threw them across the room, where they smashed against the wall. Paolina cried out. Alex yanked open the sliding door and slammed it shut behind him so hard that Antonello thought the glass might break.

  Antonello picked up the rosary beads and handed them to Paolina. She kissed the cross and clutched the beads to her chest. His faith had collapsed with the bridge, pulverised into dust along with the concrete structures, along with the lives of his friends and workmates. If he went to funerals and weddings, he st
ood outside the church with the smokers, refusing to go inside. For years, Paolina avoided mentioning God or religion and rarely went to church, but she’d insisted the children were baptised, and they were, though unlike their cousins they didn’t go to Catholic schools. She kept her faith to herself. But after her diagnosis, Paolina prayed more openly, carrying rosary beads like a talisman everywhere she went.

  They’d spent so many hours in this kitchen, and in earlier versions of it, watching Ashleigh and Jane grow up. They’d squeezed around the table with the whole extended family to celebrate all of Ashleigh’s birthdays. They’d watched her blow out the candles, and each year, waited for Paolina to say, “Cut the cake now, but don’t touch the bottom or you’ll have to kiss the nearest boy.” They were there all the years when Ashleigh screwed up her face at the idea of a boy and a kiss, until the last birthday, when she’d grinned and touched the bottom and kissed her boyfriend Kevin, who’d turned bright red.

  ‘I meant,’ Paolina whispered, ‘the girls were always together, they were so close. It must be awful for Jo too.’ It was true that when they were together they shut the adults out, that when Jo was around, Ashleigh ignored her parents, her grandparents, her sister. And now she was dead because of that girl, that girl Ashleigh loved and had often chosen above her parents. But hadn’t they all, at some point, chosen other people above their parents? It was what young people did. It was part of growing up, wasn’t it?

  If Ashleigh was alive, she’d be telling them that they were overreacting, that accidents happen. She may or may not have learnt a lesson, and the accident would’ve been a lucky escape, all part of growing up.

  Stupid, reckless girls, all of them. Stupid, reckless.

  Ashleigh is dead. Ashleigh is dead. Ashleigh is dead. He repeated it to himself so that he didn’t forget. Because all he wanted to do was forget.

  Antonello understood Alex’s urge to break, to smash, to hurt. Underneath that rage was grief, the grief that Alex didn’t want to acknowledge, that he was trying to keep at a distance, the grief and the guilt, and the shame: ‘I was meant to keep her safe. I’m her father.’ That grief wasn’t going to go anywhere; it would never go away. It would weigh him down, pull him under. Eventually he’d have to surrender to it.

  ‘You’re right, Paolina,’ he said. ‘Jo deserves our pity. She might be alive, but being the one left behind, being the one responsible, that’s going to be hard.’

  Paolina squeezed his hand. ‘Yes. But we’ve all been left behind.’

  They retreated into silence. Outside, birds chirped and whistled. Alex paced, ignoring Lewis, the family jack russell who was nudging an old ball towards him.

  ‘I was remembering Ashleigh’s birthday,’ Paolina said eventually. ‘When they were planning the food and the music.’

  Antonello remembered too. The two girls had sat on the floor organising a playlist for the party. They had a laptop opened, an iPad connected. They both wore headphones. Rae wanted Ashleigh to help plan the menu for the party — she was running through lists of finger food — but Ashleigh was ignoring her mother. Occasionally, either Ashleigh or Jo pulled the headphones out and loud music came crashing into the room. Several times Rae told them to turn the music down. Later she said to Antonello, ‘Ashleigh’s controls are stuck on high speed, high volume, and when she and Jo are together, it’s impossible.’

  ‘They laughed so much when they were together. I loved to see them so happy.’ Paolina leant against Antonello. He stroked her head gently.

  The mystery of friendship. The randomness with which the two girls, so different, had found each other and become friends. And a memory returned to him, of a Sunday afternoon after a soccer match, he and Slav and Sam caked in mud and sweat, sitting on a bench outside the clubrooms. They’d lost the game, but they were happy. Slav, the best player of the three, the one that a league coach approached and invited to try out for the state team, was the least concerned. ‘I don’t care that much about soccer,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t play with you two.’

  Sam hit Slav hard on the arm. ‘What are you trying to say there, mio mate?’ Having adopted ‘mate’, Sam used it to refer to everyone, but with an Italian emphasis: ‘ehi mate’ or ‘mio mate’.

  Slav pretended to be knocked over by the hit. ‘Come on, Sam. I know Australians who can play soccer better than you.’

  ‘Would you like a coffee?’ Antonello asked Paolina. She nodded. He put the pot on and went over to the fridge for milk. On the door, there were photographs of Jane and Ashleigh, and one of Ashleigh and Jo, the two girls dancing at Ashleigh’s eighteenth birthday party. Ashleigh was caught in mid movement, her arms swinging. Ashleigh, with her mother’s pale skin and oval face. Jo’s features were more Italian than Ashleigh’s. Occasionally when they were out with the girls, people mistook Jo for their granddaughter. Ashleigh was thinner and more athletic. She was shorter too, and recently she’d started to wear those ridiculously high heels.

  ‘Killer heels,’ Antonello had teased Ashleigh at the party. ‘Well, at least if you get into trouble, you can use them as a weapon.’ The memory was so sad it choked him. But he didn’t stop breathing. Paolina didn’t stop breathing. Alex and Rae, they were still breathing. And Jane. Everyone else except Ashleigh was breathing.

  Antonello removed photographs that included Jo from the fridge and shoved them in the back of a corner drawer, behind birthday candles and matchboxes, business cards and brochures, paper clips and picture hooks.

  Chapter 10

  Sharp slivers of light pierced the room. A yearning for darkness propelled Jo out of bed and to the window. Trembling, she yanked the curtains shut and crawled back under the bedcovers, eyes closed, knees to chin. Cocooned. She should be crying, weeping, sobbing, but she hadn’t shed a tear, not one. Acid mouth. Stomach cramps. The night had been a series of runs to the bathroom, three or four times. Heaving and puking in the darkness. The stink of vomit and bile trailing her through the house. Her body rotting from the inside.

  Her mother hadn’t come to her. Not once.

  Loud and ponderous and unstoppable, the world was awake. Heavy trucks, grunting and grinding, sped towards the refineries and the wharves, Coode Island, the West Gate. The sounds reverberated around the house. Boom-gate bells. Factory sirens. A ship’s foghorn. Mrs Nguyễn’s alsatian, Wes, barking and Bob’s mongrel Lupie responding. The rattle of a wheelie bin rolled out to the curb. Mr Johnson’s hacking morning cough.

  Shut the fuck up. Stop. The day was coming, unwavering, relentless. It didn’t care about her or Ash.

  Once, not long ago, she had joined her neighbours and the local environmental group to demonstrate against the truck traffic, the refineries, the capitalist pigs who run big business and don’t give a shit about community. Fifty-three people, several children, and a dozen or so dogs camped on the footpath along Francis Street on a cold April night to highlight the uselessness of the truck curfew. They spread out sleeping bags and old foam mattresses, and every time a truck drove past they yelled and blew whistles and banged pots and took photographs of licence plates. Jo fell asleep. Mandy told Mrs Nguyễn, ‘Jo can sleep through anything.’

  On weekday mornings, Jo resented having to get up for school and not having enough time to sleep. This morning Jo wouldn’t get up. She wouldn’t get dressed. She wouldn’t argue with her mother as they ate their breakfast. She wouldn’t run all the way to Ash’s house and knock on the door so they could go to school together. No more Ash. Not ever.

  Ash dead. It was impossible. Not true. A bad dream. A nightmare. Clutching the twisted sheets, Jo ached for her mother, to crawl into the warmth of her mother’s bed, to be embraced by her mother, encircled in her arms. For Mandy’s welcome. Did you have a bad dream, darling?

  All night sleep mocked her. Not sleep. A state of semi-consciousness, out of which she was jolted when she remembered Ash was dead. And a swell rising … a hard fist
in the belly, and rivers of heat burning in her throat. The wheel slipping, the car skidding and skating and spinning and spinning. Body bounding and head whirling, and time slowing, and the screams. And more screams, and slamming the brake down hard. The car soaring. And crashing, amplified and vibrating and so close.

  Again and again, the screams. The sirens. The police. The ambulance. The ringing in her ears.

  ‘The young woman in the front seat didn’t survive the accident.’

  Dead.

  Laura and Mani were yelling and screaming. Laura and Mani were sobbing. Smashed glass and metal strewn across the road. The fluttering lights on the bridge. The half moon. Men talking, calling out, yelling. The clang of chains. Flashing orange lights. Horns and sirens. Alarms.

  And darkness, black and thick.

  ‘Open your eyes.’ A paramedic. Lying still. ‘She’s fine. Nothing broken.’

  ‘Concussion?’ Emergency Room lights, rolling corridors.

  The memories coming in a rapid stream. Surging. Spilling. Spewing.

  A cubicle. A nurse pulling the curtains across, glaring at her with scorn. ‘She can wait. She’s fine. To look at her you wouldn’t know there’d been an accident.’

  Police, doctors, nurses, questions.

  ‘You understand the test is to check your blood alcohol concentration. You have to consent to the test. Do you understand?’

  ‘You understand that the young woman who was in the front seat, Ashleigh, is dead. Do you understand?’

  No, I don’t understand. No, she isn’t dead.

  Was it possible to erase everything, to make it not true, a lie?