‘So many workers are killed each year in industrial accidents, and the companies can’t be trusted to do the right thing, and we pay for it with our lives. The accident on the east side in ’72, another death — it was the last straw. This work is my legacy, my way of taking what happened on the bridge and doing something with it. It’s given me a purpose, a battle to fight. ’
‘I still have nightmares,’ Antonello said. He hadn’t told anyone about the nightmares, not even Paolina, though of course she knew. ‘And sometimes a noise — a bolt of thunder, a car backfiring, a jackhammer — and I’m back under the bridge looking up, and I can see the whole fucking thing moving and the men falling … and it’s as if Bob and Slav are saying, “Don’t forget us. Don’t fucking forget us.”’
‘Look, mate,’ Sam said, leaning across the table, ‘I don’t think Bob or Slav or any of the other blokes would want you to spend your life suffering. They’d want us to be happy, like we would’ve wanted them to be happy if things were the other way around. We paid for that memorial, the unions and the blokes — the government and the companies wanted to forget the whole fucking thing, but we wouldn’t let them. We haven’t forgotten them. Fuck, we’ll never forget them.’
‘I should’ve died that night. It was meant to be my shift. I was supposed to be up there and Ted was supposed to be on the ground. We did a switch.’ Antonello had mostly kept silent about the switch in shifts. He’d told himself it would only make things worse for Ted’s family.
‘Nello, it’s been thirty-nine years. None of those blokes deserved to die, and if we’d died we wouldn’t have deserved to die. It was the fault of the companies. Not your fault. Not my fault.’
‘But I saw stuff that was wrong and I didn’t —’
‘Yeah, we all did. That’s what we are trying to change — workers’ and bosses’ attitudes, both. Trying to get workers not to ignore problems, to stand up and say when things are wrong. But it’s tough. Who wants to risk losing their job?’
‘Or lose faith? We were all so committed. We loved that bridge. We thought we were big bridge builders, some kind of heroes.’
‘We were proud of what we were doing. Nothing wrong with that.’
‘We were fools, Sam. Fodder for the companies, for the government. The bridge, that was the important thing — the bridge and joining the bloody city together and progress. And they used us and we fell for it, for the whole thing. We fell for it.’ Antonello had forgotten where he was and his voice had risen. The chef and the barman stopped playing pool and stared at him. He wanted to yell, at Sam, and at the two young men who probably had no idea that thirty-five men had died building the West Gate.
‘Sorry,’ he said, and the chef went back to play his shot. Antonello watched him lean across the pool table, the cue aimed at a ball in the far corner. He was focused on the game, taking his time, shifting to the right and back, and again, as if nothing else existed. It took him three shots to finish the game. The barman laughed. ‘At this rate, I’ll still be paying for your drinks into the next century.’
‘And now Ashleigh,’ he said to Sam in a quieter tone.
‘How is your family coping?’ Sam asked.
‘They’re struggling. Alex is a mess. My daughter-in-law hasn’t left the house for weeks. She’s obsessing over the court case and Jo — the young woman who was driving — and making sure that Jo pays. As if locking the girl away will make everything better.’
Sam reached out and put his hand on Antonello’s shoulder.
‘I was an absent father even though I was home. Even when I was playing games with them, I wasn’t there. But now, watching Rae and Alex, I see how obvious it is when parents aren’t coping. My granddaughter Jane is so sad. She misses her sister and now her parents are falling apart. She stayed with us a couple of nights, and with some friends too, but it’s tough. She’s closest to her mother.’ He paused. ‘I was a poor role model. Paolina has been the strong parent. She’s held the family together, but now she’s sick, so she can’t do it.’
From the gaming room the loud beeps and bells of a slot machine jackpot broke out, followed by exclamations and laughter. Antonello felt like a man waking up in the middle of the night to a neighbours’ party and realising that while he was sleeping other people were living.
On 15 October, the thirty-ninth anniversary of the collapse, there was a small gathering at the memorial under the bridge. Sam rang and invited Antonello, but he made excuses and didn’t go. Instead, he waited until late afternoon and went to the bridge on his own. He tried to remember the days, the weeks, the months after the bridge collapsed. There were so many funerals he couldn’t distinguish one from the other. He hadn’t slept for days, until he went to a doctor who gave him sedatives. There were weeks of hiding out at home, of not being able to get out of bed. In his memory, the time after the accident stretched out long and black.
He remembered, too, going through the bungalow — it must have been a month or so after the collapse — and searching for sketchbooks and his drawings of the bridge. Paolina refused to tell him where she’d hidden them. When finally he found a couple of them, he built a fire in the metal drum his father-in-law kept for boiling sauce bottles and threw them in. Paolina tried to stop him, pulling at his arms, at the sketchbooks half eaten by the flames. Defeated, she cried, and the ash and smoke choked the backyard. He never sketched again, not even with his children and grandchildren.
For whole days he sat at the kitchen table or on the back doorstep and smoked cigarettes, one after the other, the panic and fear so overwhelming, the sense of looming disaster unbearable. On those days, he didn’t want Paolina to leave the house; he pleaded with her to stay home. When she left, he worried about her all day, and if she was late, he paced up and down the driveway until she arrived.
Only his brother-in-law Giacomo understood. ‘It doesn’t matter how far away you go. Moving away is pointless. The ghosts are everywhere.’ Giacomo’s ghosts stalked him — they were relentless and mocking, and he was tormented. He didn’t talk about the war, and he didn’t ask Antonello about the bridge. The two brothers-in-law, both talkers as children, had lost their tongues, but sometimes in the middle of the night, when they couldn’t sleep or their nightmares were unbearable, they found each other in the garden. They sat on the old chairs Paolina’s father kept under the fig tree, or on the bungalow doorsteps, and reminisced about their boyhoods: Giacomo’s in Yarraville, Antonello’s in Vizzini. Those long-ago memories of the time before the war, before the bridge collapse, when the life that stretched out in front of them was seductive.
Almost two months after the accident, they’d discovered that Paolina was pregnant. His insomnia worsened. The surging panics became more frequent. The sense of impending doom followed him everywhere. He changed his shift at Bradmill’s so that he could walk Paolina to work and be there in the afternoon to walk her home. He didn’t tell her that sometimes he didn’t go home at all, that he sat in the park and watched the school. He didn’t go to work unless he knew that Paolina’s parents or Giacomo were home. Before he left the house he checked that the gas stove was turned off, that the windows were locked. Often, he had to turn back at the front gate and check everything again.
When Alex was born and the nurse handed him their little baby boy, all clean and wrapped up in a blue blanket, Antonello took him reluctantly. The panic rose in waves. His hands shook. The sensation was like the vertigo he’d experienced that first time he went up high on a building site; it left him numb and unable to move. His mother noticed and took the baby. ‘I can’t wait any longer to hold my grandson,’ she said. Relieved, but still trembling, he handed his son to Emilia. Surrounding him in the waiting room were all the fathers who had died on the bridge and all the children they’d left behind.
When the bridge works were completed, all the survivors were sent an invitation to the opening and a toll pass for an initial trip across. The
y came together in a Victorian government envelope with a letter from the Premier that he couldn’t bear to read. He ripped it into tiny pieces. He swore he’d never drive across the bridge.
For years, the strongest, most persistent impulse was towards death; a desire to stop living. Now Alex and Rae wanted to stop living. But life didn’t stop. It went on whether you lived it or not. You have to choose life. This is what he needed to tell them — you have to choose life. If you stop living, you may as well die. If you stop living, you aren’t going to be able to love again, and everyone you know will pay for that, everyone.
Chapter 20
Long days and long nights, no relief at the end of either. No difference. No beginning and no end. There was nothing to mark time, and yet time passed. Sarah rang to tell them that the hearing would be in the new year, probably not until June. The courts had a backlog of cases and Jo wasn’t considered a risk to the community.
Could she spend all those days in the dark room, waiting in limbo?
Summer was on its way now — set on its course like the container ships that slid into the bay from the sea, slow and languid. In the two months since the accident, Jo had left the house twice, and only to go to the police station. Once for the interview. A second time to sign her statement. Before the accident, she rarely spent a whole day at home. She’d been busy — work, school, the gym, hanging out with Ash.
On the days Mandy was at work and Mary didn’t visit, Jo dragged herself to the back verandah and sat looking out at her mother’s garden. She avoided looking over the fence at the bridge. She was meant to be doing something: at least preparing herself for what was to come. But the world was a blur. She tried to shift the angle, to stand in a different light, but the picture refused to come into focus.
Ash was everywhere. Jo knew ghosts didn’t exist, but Ash’s voice was clearer than her own. She rarely slept, but when she did Ash appeared in a recurring dream: Ash, kneeling in a garden bed in the centre of a large kitchen, her face pasted with dirt. Rivers of dried mud wound around her legs. No sense of inside or outside.
‘What is it like to be dead?’ Jo asked.
Ash was digging. Mud caked into her fingernails.
‘What is it like to be dead?’
The morning light was streaming in through the kitchen window. Ash was wearing the blue top and skirt she’d worn to the party. The flowers in the garden were dying: yellowed stems, rotting petals.
Jo marked all the would-have-been milestones from her bed — the school formal, their graduation, the beginning of their VCE exams. English would have been her first, Geography her last. Were Mani and Laura going on with their lives as if nothing had changed?
On the morning that would’ve been the first day of the Schoolies Week holiday at Byron Bay they’d planned a year ago, Jo, unable to bear the house any longer, waited until Mandy left for work and got dressed. Like a small-time criminal in an American detective series, she put on a pair of sunglasses and a cap as a disguise. She opened the front door to a hot wind and a heady cocktail of diesel and petrol as cars and trucks hurtled down Hyde and Francis. Next door, Mrs Nguyễn was listening to morning television. Across the road, behind the cyclone-wire fence, there were several men in safety jackets and helmets. The tanks, still and defiant, shrugged them off. The men reminded her of the plastic characters her Grandpa Tom used to buy her as a child. In the evenings they’d build tall towers with her blocks, a world for the miniature men and women, and her grandfather would make up the stories.
She locked the door. At the gate she hesitated, unsure which way to go. Against the clear sky the bridge was monumental, a towering monolith. The sight of it made her want to crawl back into the house.
If she went into Yarraville, no more than five minutes away, it was likely she’d see someone she knew. She couldn’t imagine that. For almost two months now, her mother, her grandmother, Sarah, and the police were the only people she’d seen.
If Ash were alive, they might’ve gone to Williamstown for a swim on a warm morning like this. They might’ve spent the day sitting on towels on the crowded beach, surrounded by families with picnic baskets and beach shades, playing spot-the-cute-guy, reading novels, falling asleep in the sun, and speculating about their VCE results.
Hyde Street was empty, so she headed north, towards Footscray Station. Anxious someone might see her, she found it impossible to walk, and so she ran, sweat building before she’d reached the next intersection. But she kept going, into the station and onto a train seconds before it left. She scanned the carriage. There was a woman with two young children: one, a baby sleeping in his pusher; the other, a little girl in a fairy costume with her face pressed up against the window. The mother was sending a text with one hand, the other lightly touching her daughter’s back. Two seats down there was a man in an orange workman’s jacket, reading the newspaper. At the other end of the carriage, four women, all of them in their sixties, talked in low voices to each other. Jo didn’t recognise any of them, but she sat as far away as she could.
Only two people got on at North Melbourne. A young woman and her boyfriend. They were having conversations — separate ones, into their mobile phones. The girl was speaking in Vietnamese, at a rapid pace. The boy was speaking in English, and his conversation was clipped. The other person was doing most of the talking. Yep … Sure … No … Maybe …
At Flinders Street Station, she followed the other passengers up the escalators, lined up to scan her train pass, and only stopped when she was standing next to the flower seller. Bunches of gerberas and roses, lilies and orchids. Their perfumes, too sweet, shrunk against other smells: car fumes, fried chips, cigarette smoke. Ash’s mother, whenever they came back through Flinders Street, would buy flowers. Sometimes two or three bunches. ‘Mum, can’t you get flowers in Yarraville?’ Ash would complain. She hated sitting on the train with her mother, with the flowers, with her mother talking about the flowers, with her mother taking up an extra seat with the flowers, especially on the busy trains when people would kill for a seat. No one ever asked Rae to move the flowers.
From the steps, under the clocks, Jo glanced across at St Paul’s Cathedral. She scanned the crowds standing at the intersection, waiting to cross Flinders Street, waiting to cross Swanston, waiting at the tram stop, walking up and down the steps, walking along the path in front of Young and Jackson.
Jo and Ash had gone into Young and Jackson once, with a man they met on a tram. ‘I’m here on holidays and don’t know anyone. Can I buy you a drink?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Ash said. And all three of them jumped off the tram and headed for the pub. ‘I’ll show you a real tourist sight. A real piece of Melbourne history — the naked Chloé,’ Ash said, winking at Jo.
The man, whose name they didn’t know, was in his thirties. He seemed excited, his wide mouth spreading into a broad grin. Two young girls, a painting of a naked woman, alcohol — what more could he want?
The publican took one look at them and asked for IDs. They didn’t have any. Ash and Jo ran out of the pub giggling. They didn’t see Chloé and lost the bloke. Ever since, they’d planned to go back together one day.
So you’ll never go in to see Chloé? Promise.
‘Promise.’
Laura and Mani would have finished their VCE. She and Ash would never finish theirs — all that work, all that angst, for nothing. She couldn’t move out of home and find an apartment in the city without Ash. She couldn’t go to university without Ash. She couldn’t travel — to Japan and South Africa and New York — without Ash. She couldn’t get married without Ash. Or have children and become a mother.
Jo walked down the steps and joined the mid-morning crowd waiting to cross Swanston Street, the bulk made up of a group of schoolboys carrying heavy backpacks and talking about getting takeaway. She made her way past the pub, past Dangerfield, with its gothic outfits in the window, past Flora and the smell of h
ot curries, past a second-hand bookshop, and into Degraves Street. Cafés lined both sides of this laneway and tables took up the centre. But she remembered another Degraves Street. Smoking cigarettes in school uniform. Brazen girls with too much time on their hands. … And suddenly there was Ash, swinging her bulky backpack over her shoulder. And her long red-brown hair tied in a ponytail, stray hairs floating in the breeze. It couldn’t be Ash, she knew that, but she followed the girl, desperate to catch her, to see her face.
‘Please turn around.’
Catch me if you can.
Past offices, a beauty school, a university, boutiques, and more cafés; past groups of students standing in doorways smoking cigarettes; past men in suits; past shoppers carrying large bags; past young people in neat office attire, plain and conservative; past young people all in black, with multiple piercings; past young people in jeans and too-short t-shirts slipping between cars and taxis. Everyone was going somewhere. Everyone had somewhere to go.
At the corner of Flinders Lane and Queen Street, Ash disappeared, on a tram or around a corner. One moment of looking away and Ash was gone and out of sight. Jo had nowhere to go. There was nowhere to go but back. Jo leaned against the concrete wall of an office block. Her head swirled. She closed her eyes. She took a few deep breaths. Could she go back far enough to change everything? Could time be unspun? Back to that afternoon, the table covered in books, a red journal not opened, not read? Back to the first day of high school, resisting the urge to become Ash’s best friend? Back to her birth in a hospital in Footscray, where the baby wasn’t born to a woman living with a boy not ready to be a father? If she went back far enough, would Ash come back to life?
All those teenage years, telling each other stories of an adult life lived together, imagining it into being. All those years of feeling so lucky because she had a best friend. Looking down at the lonely girls in the schoolyard, so pleased not to be one of them, so pleased all her wishing had come true.
The Bridge Page 27