The Bridge

by Enza Gandolfo

  Alex sobbed through the service until he got up to speak about his little girl, his first-born — Ashleigh as a toddler he’d spun in the air, as a little girl who loved playing dress-up, who he’d chased in circles around the backyard. He spoke of Ashleigh as if she’d never reached adolescence. Rae had planned to speak too — public speaking was part of her job; every day for thirty years she’d stood in front of hundreds of children, teachers, and parents — but when the time came she didn’t stand up.

  There were other speakers. One of Ashleigh’s high-school teachers. Her Aunt Michele, Rae’s oldest sister. No one mentioned Jo or the accident. Rae and Alex had forbidden mention of that girl.

  Two days earlier, Alex had said, ‘Rae and I plan to speak at the funeral, but we don’t know if we’ll be able to or what we’ll be able to say. I want you to, Dad — I want you to tell them about my baby.’

  It was impossible to refuse. Later, at home, he said to Paolina, ‘Why did they ask me?’

  ‘Because they think you’re strong. You look strong, Antonello. You look strong.’

  The night before, he’d sat at the kitchen table, after Paolina had gone to bed, to write the eulogy. But hours later, the sheet of paper in front of him was covered in small sketches of Ashleigh’s face. The sight of them shocked him. He’d spent his youth drawing. As a child in Vizzini he’d drawn the old stone houses that ran along both sides of the main street; the young women in their bright floral dresses, and the older women in black dresses and scarves, walking up the stone roadways to the market. He’d been good at quick, funny sketches of his friends. At school in Australia, he’d created sketches of his classmates and cartoon characters, of the streets and the houses in his neighbourhood, of the birds that lived in the swamp by the Yarra River or along the creek in Cruickshank Park — especially the rosellas and finches, birds he’d never seen before, with feathers of dazzling colours, but also the seagulls and the crows, which gathered whenever he and his brothers went fishing. His ability to draw had helped him at school. The Australian boys who picked on the wog kids who couldn’t speak proper English didn’t pick on him; instead, they lined up at his desk with their comic books and their demands, and he acquiesced, drawing them pictures of their favourite superheroes. That way he managed to avoid being bullied.

  Drawing was something he did; it had been as natural as eating and sleeping, as playing soccer with his brothers after school. His hand taking up the pencil automatically and without hesitation or thought. He sketched without any plan, and the image made itself on the page as if it might have been there waiting, a kind of retracing; a kind of sorcery. And then he’d stopped.

  When it was Antonello’s turn to speak, he made his way to the lectern. He hadn’t written a eulogy. On the sheet of paper in front of him were the sketches of Ashleigh: her face, her long hair, her wide eyes. At the bottom of the page there were a couple of dot points — Paolina’s suggestions — Ashleigh’s love of writing, her sense of humour, her determination to be a lawyer like Geoffrey Robertson, whom she’d hero-worshipped since she saw him on a Hypothetical on television. How they were so proud of her, and that she was an attentive granddaughter.

  He began. ‘Ashleigh was …’ He couldn’t bear to look up. The chapel was full of friends and family and so many people he didn’t know. The living — many of them old and sick — while his granddaughter was dead. But he told them about the day Ashleigh was born and how both sides of the family rushed to the hospital and filled the waiting room, how excited they were when they saw Ashleigh, the most beautiful baby in the world, and how that only seemed like yesterday. The first-born grandchild. He told them about her sense of fun. About the pleasure she took in reading and singing, in writing and debating, in having a good argument, and in sport — she’d tried everything at least once, he told them, including fencing and judo and horse riding. ‘She was a loving daughter and granddaughter, and a loyal friend,’ he said. And he told them she was a blessing and that he would miss her forever. He planned to say something about forgiveness, to remind them that the dead are dead and the living need to go on living. To remind them that the cliché was true. He wanted to tell Alex and Rae and Jane that if they didn’t move on they wouldn’t be able to build a life worth living. He wanted to shout, ‘And you may as well all be dead too.’ He wanted to tell them not to make the same mistakes he’d made. But when he looked up, he saw Sam, and he stopped mid-sentence. He was sure it was Sam, no doubt, even after all these years. He was older. He’d lost most of his hair. But it was Sam, sitting in the middle of the chapel, his eyes red from crying. And it took all Antonello’s effort not to call out to him, but he did catch his eye for a moment. After that he could muster only the strength to thank everyone for coming, for their support, and make his way back to his seat.

  Outside the chapel, Antonello was subsumed in the crowd of mourners. Men shook his hands, women kissed him, unknown hands patted him on the shoulder; friends, acquaintances, cousins he hadn’t seen for decades expressed their sorrow. Strangers cried before him.

  And then there was Sam, standing in front of him. ‘I’ve missed you,’ he said and they embraced.

  Not wanting to bring attention to herself, Sarah sat at the back of the chapel. She listened to the eulogies: the Ashleigh they spoke about was bright and spirited. A little wild and prone to taking risks, but no one said that directly. Overall, if you believed the stories they told, she was a good kid — kind, considerate. But in Sarah’s experience — and she’d been to her share of funerals now — people didn’t speak ill of the dead, especially when the dead were young.

  No one had mentioned Jo, but when Ashleigh’s grandfather said something about friendship during his eulogy, a ripple of whispers had run along the seat in front of Sarah. Not even the celebrant mentioned Jo directly; he spoke about love and forgiveness, about tragedy. He talked about the risky nature of youth and families left devastated.

  Outside the chapel, the young girl who had answered the door at Ashleigh’s house, who Sarah assumed was her sister, was standing in the middle of a group of teenagers. A boy gave her a cigarette, and she took it with the confidence of a girl who knew that her parents were no longer watching. Sarah hoped to catch a glimpse of the two girls, Mani and Laura, but their photographs had been kept out of the newspaper and there was no way to distinguish them among the mourners. Moving to the edges of the crowd, where the smokers were gathered, she lit a cigarette.

  ‘Where is that girl, what was her name — Jo or Joanna — you know, they were always together?’ an older man asked a small group of smokers who were standing in a circle not far from Sarah.

  ‘She was driving,’ another bloke said. ‘Plastered, apparently. Not a scratch.’

  ‘I heard they’d all been drinking,’ the woman with him whispered, leaning in as if she as sharing a secret.

  ‘Yeah, but the other girl was driving.’

  ‘God. They don’t think, and everyone else has to pay for it. I can’t see Alex and Rae getting over this.’

  Did any of these people know Jo or Ashleigh? It was likely they were work colleagues of Rae or Alex’s, who’d never met the girls.

  ‘No. Nothing worse than a kid dying. Let’s face it, we all did dumb things when we were young. Only difference is we survived.’

  ‘Has the girl been charged?’

  ‘Yep, culpable driving.’

  ‘So they still have the court case to get through?’

  ‘Apparently there’s a backlog of cases and it might be months yet.’

  ‘I hope the judge is tough. The message has to get through to these kids.’

  Sarah sighed and butted out her cigarette.

  The days after Ashleigh’s funeral were empty, breathless days. Voices seemed to go missing, to be lost. Even Jane, a noisy, boisterous, uncontainable adolescent, had withdrawn. She rarely spoke, and when she did her voice was barely audible. Rae cried, sobbed, and
paced, but refused to be comforted, wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t be touched, pushed her sisters, her parents, even Alex away. Alex raged. Banging his fist on the tables, throwing things across rooms. He cleared the whole of the vegetable garden pulling out plants that hadn’t yet matured. Soon all that was left was a lemon tree pruned to a stump and the Hills hoist spinning in the wind.

  ‘He’s like a bear in a cage,’ Gary, Rae’s father, said to Antonello, as the two men stood on the verandah looking over the back garden, watching as Alex stuffed the green waste into the bin, pressing down with his hands before climbing into the bin and stomping and stamping on the broken twigs and branches, on the leaves and grasses, like his ancestors once stamped on grapes to make wine.

  There had been no contact with Jo or her mother. No card. No apology. Antonello considered going to Jo’s house and knocking on her door. But he doubted an apology would make any difference. Would it make any difference to anyone? Dead is dead. What is done is done.

  Would it have made any difference if the companies had apologised after the bridge collapsed? Would it have made any difference if they’d come knocking on their doors and begged for forgiveness? Most of the men went back to work on the bridge the week after the collapse; they needed the income. Antonello hadn’t gone back, but Sam had rung him, to tell him that the men had been gathered together, that one of the engineers had spoken, thanked them for the great work they had done during the rescue operations, acknowledged that they had saved lives. But the Royal Commission was underway, he told them, and so there was no work; they were all sacked. A week’s wages. No compensation. The site was closed. There were no jobs.

  The companies, the company directors, the engineers should’ve done more. They should’ve gone to the funerals and begged the widows, the parents, the children for forgiveness. They should’ve taken care of the families and kept the survivors on the payroll instead of sacking them within days of the collapse, while they were still going to funerals, still burying their mates.

  Some of the survivors, including Sam, were called to give evidence by the Royal Commission. They relived the moments before and after the collapse in detail. Antonello wasn’t called. He hadn’t been up at the top; he hadn’t witnessed the events that lead to the accident. The papers reported on the hearings regularly. One witness, an inspector, was quoted as saying the bridge was put together like a patchwork quilt. When she read the paper, Emilia said no patchwork quilt she made would fall apart so easily. For Antonello, the newspaper reports were infuriating, the men were often portrayed as naïve, easily betrayed — by the companies, by the engineers, by the unions, and by the bridge itself.

  For months he didn’t work. He refused to see any of the other men. He didn’t return Sam’s calls. Twice Sam came to the bungalow and knocked on the door, but Antonello didn’t let him in. He spent hours sitting on the doorstep looking out across the garden. Sometimes he sat with Giacomo and they smoked a cigarette, not speaking. When Paolina came home from school, she talked and he listened. He stopped reading the papers. Turned off the TV and radio at news time. He didn’t want to hear about the bridge or the Commission hearings or the world going on as if nothing had happened.

  Two months after the collapse, Antonello’s father took him aside and said, ‘You have to go back to work. There’s a job at the factory. I asked the foreman, you can start tomorrow.’ Antonello agreed without even asking what the job entailed. The men at the factory treated him as if he were a returning war hero — they patted him on the back as he passed, they shook his hand as they introduced himself. He worked in the storeroom and he spent his days loading boxes on and off trucks. He lived and worked in silence. While others around him talked and laughed, he was mute.

  The Royal Commission interviewed fifty-two witnesses, the investigations took nine months, but the report when it was released didn’t make a difference to him. Not to Sandy, either. Not to the other widows and orphans. The thirty-five men stayed dead. The Commission found the companies hadn’t paid enough attention. … There were errors of judgment, failure of communication and sheer inefficiency … Error begat error. Careless. The bridge had mattered more than the men. The men were expendable. Events moved with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. Antonello remembered reading those words. A Greek tragedy? Was all life a Greek tragedy? As soon as the report was submitted, the government made plans to complete the bridge. Many of the survivors continued to feel betrayed by the companies and the government, but they went back. To finish the job. To honour those killed. To make the city whole. Antonello couldn’t go back.

  ‘It takes more courage to live,’ said the old Greek widow he encountered at Footscray Cemetery after the collapse, ‘more courage to keep going.’ Giacomo had given him the same advice before he left Australia in his fifties, after twenty-five years of depression, to live in Vietnam, with the hope that hard work helping rebuild the country he felt guilty for destroying might give him purpose.

  Seeing Sam at Ashleigh’s funeral was both a shock and a relief. So many times over the years he’d longed to see his friend again but didn’t have the courage to seek him out. So many nights, Sam appeared in his dreams. They should’ve helped each other after the accident. Sam tried. But Antonello hadn’t been able to face him, to talk to him. Thirty-nine years — was it possible, could it be that long? There was so much that he remembered about those years. Watching Sam run around the soccer field — hopeless, no ball skills, but he and Slav and the rest of the men all keen to be on Sam’s team because he made them laugh, made them roll on the ground with laughter, laughing so much they couldn’t kick the ball. Rising early on Sunday mornings, even though it was their one day to sleep in, so they could sit together by the river and fish and talk about their futures, about the houses they’d buy, the girls they’d marry, the families they’d have … the holidays they’d take together, maybe even back to Italy.

  And he remembered his excitement on his first day at the bridge, arriving early and standing on the viewing platform, sketching the outline of the twenty-eight piers, thick, solid concrete towers rising out of the water in a snaking curve from west to east. After a week of rain, it had been a perfect Autumn morning, clear and fresh. Everywhere, even in the most industrial pockets of the west, where warehouses and factories butted up against one another, the lawns and the trees and of course the weeds that poked through cyclone fences and in-between cracks in paths were all a deep green and overgrown.

  He remembered his mother cooking him a big breakfast of scrambled eggs with cavolo nero she’d collected the previous day, along with brassica, pigweed, and wild fennel on one of her scavenging excursions around Cruickshank Park. ‘Lucky for us,’ she said to Antonello, ‘the Australiani don’t understand these plants. There are plenty, especially after good rain.’

  ‘Big job, building a bridge,’ she said as she spooned more eggs onto his plate.

  ‘Hey, some for me. I work too.’ Franco winked at Antonello. ‘She thinks you’re building that whole bridge on your own.’

  ‘There they are,’ Bob had said later that morning, stepping up on the platform. ‘Those piers are our giant stilts and we’ll be heaving the girders onto those stilts. Hard to imagine that those piers are going to hold all that weight, all that fucking concrete and steel, a whole fucking roadway, and the traffic, the cars and trucks. It’ll be bloody amazing driving across the bridge.’ He elbowed Antonello and pointed at the tallest pylon. ‘Hey Nello, imagine that, your first bridge, mate, and it’s a beauty. We’ll be so high up; we’ll see the river and the bay, and the whole bloody city. The views will be great from up there. To die for.’

  They had both stared across at the city centre on the other side of the river, and Bob added, ‘Hope you’re wearing your woollies, it’ll be cold up there. Freeze your balls off if you’re not careful. It’ll be worth it, though — we are gonna make history here. Bloody hell, son, you and me, part of history.’

 
; And he remembered a warm afternoon when the breeze came from the sea, and Slav recited A.D. Hope’s ‘The Death of the Bird’ as they sat on Sam’s front verandah, waiting for Sam’s mother to call them in for dinner. He could remember the whole poem, even though he hadn’t read it in all those years. The poem opens with a bird’s migration towards summer and love, but it is the bird’s last migration and when, finally unable to keep flying, the bird falls, nature is indifferent.

  ‘It’s such a sad poem,’ he remembered saying to Slav. ‘Why do you like it so much?’

  ‘For everyone there will be a last migration, but in the meantime, let’s enjoy the view, the experience, the flying.’

  ‘Cheers,’ said Sam as he poured them each another wine, ‘let’s drink to that.’

  Chapter 18

  For Jo, the funeral had been a marker, a rope across a finish line. An end and a beginning. After the funeral, she planned to think about what was next. About the court case and prison and life after that. But the funeral was over and she wasn’t sure that any future was possible. Did she have the right to a future? To a life? Could she spend the rest of her life in bed, in the dark, avoiding everything?

  Before the accident, she’d imagined going to university. Some kind of job. Marriage. Children. Six children. A big, busy family. Enough children to fill all the spaces in the house. Enough children so that each child had several siblings and wouldn’t be lonely. The kind of family that filled a kitchen at dinner time; a noisy house. But there would be none of that. No husband. No children. Who would want a killer for a wife? For a mother?