The Bridge

by Enza Gandolfo

  Blood test. A syringe. Drawing of blood.

  ‘To look at her you wouldn’t know there’d been an accident.’

  ‘Drunk?’

  ‘Looks like it. Smells like it.’

  Mandy holding the curtain aside. Standing half in and half out.

  Nothing. Not a word. Mandy silent, refusing to meet her eye.

  Please yell at me.

  How did they get home? Was it the back of a taxi? A police car? Falling, falling into her bed. Her head drowning in memories and nightmares.

  ‘The passenger in the front seat is dead.’

  ‘Your friend is dead.’

  ‘You killed Ash.’

  Ash is dead.

  At 7.00 am, the alarm triggered the radio. Jo hit the off button with a hard thump. At the café they’d be opening up soon. Ted and the staff … did they know about the accident? News travelled fast in Yarraville. The morning regulars arriving with their dogs, their iPhones and earplugs, on their way back from boot camp at the park or their Pilates class, lining up even before the coffee machine was fired up. The sweep of gossip between orders, patrons picking up fragments. Soon they’d hear about the accident. Just a story to them. There would be shock, horror. There would be pity and fury.

  It would be impossible to go back.

  Ash would never again come into the café, arriving in her safety jacket, covered in the smell of the dogs she’d been walking, and ask for a strong macchiato to go.

  Ash would never again sit in a classroom in the school where they had been students for the last six years. And Jo would never again sit next to Ash with Laura and Mani, gossiping when they should’ve been working. Never again giggling at silly jokes.

  An accident. Accident. The word didn’t seem right. Accident was too small and slight. Accidents: a broken plate, a ball through a window, spilt milk …

  If only. If only. If only.

  If only she hadn’t been drinking.

  If only Kevin had come along. If only he’d driven.

  If only they’d stayed home studying. Isn’t that what VCE students were supposed to do?

  If only they didn’t know Rosie.

  If only they had left the car at the party and caught a taxi home.

  If only she hadn’t read Ash’s journal.

  If only she’d left good enough alone.

  If only they had never met, never been friends.

  If only she’d read the signs … There must have been signs.

  If only … if only she’d died too.

  Ash was going to do things with her life. Ash was smart and ambitious and going to make a mark in the world. Ash was beautiful. Everyone liked Ash.

  Jo should be dead. She should’ve been the one to die.

  Everyone would be thinking, It should be Jo dead.

  But Jo wasn’t dead. Her heart was beating. She was breathing.

  Across her belly and chest there were a few bruises, purple and black blotches spreading. No broken bones. No permanent damage.

  ‘Jo?’ Mandy called out through the closed door. ‘The police are here. You have to go with them to the station for an interview. They’re waiting.’

  Jo listened to Mandy walk back up the hall to the lounge room, tracking the creak of the loose boards under her mother’s feet.

  ‘You can sit if you want,’ she heard Mandy say. ‘Would you like a drink? Tea? Coffee?’

  ‘No thanks, Mrs Neilson, we’re fine.’ It was a woman’s voice.

  To find her clothes, Jo switched on the bedside lamp. There was an untidy mound on the floor next to the bed. On top was the red dress, ripped and stained with blood. Jo threw the dress onto the floor and grabbed a pair of crumpled blue jeans, giving them a shake. Her belly and chest ached when she moved. She unbuttoned her pyjama top and pressed her fingers, hard, into the translucent purple bruises. The pain intensified; she pressed again. She gasped, then pressed harder. But the pain eased. It was bearable. She’d have to finish dressing and come out. She slipped her feet into her thongs, ran a brush through her hair, and tied it into a ponytail. She noticed her phone on the bedside table. It was turned off. She didn’t remember turning it off — she didn’t remember bringing it home. She hesitated at her bedroom door, then went back and slipped the phone into her pocket. All she wanted was to go back to bed and never have to get up again.

  ‘Are you coming, Jo?’

  ‘Yes.’ The bathroom smelt of disinfectant and vomit; the acid, the bile, the memory of it was in her throat. She brushed her teeth and washed her face without looking in the mirror. Maybe she didn’t exist at all and there would be no reflection in the mirror. Maybe she was dead. She wished she wasn’t alive. She wished she didn’t exist. Was that the same as wishing she was dead?

  The hallway was a clutter of shelves and dressers, of books and ornaments. It was her job to dust the hallway once a week. To pick up each thing, each book and vase and crystal animal, to lift each doily … on those days the hallway seemed so long, but ten steps, that’s all it was, ten small steps and she was in the lounge room: one couch, two beanbags, a television set, and a coffee table squeezed against the wall under the window. The two cops sat side by side on the couch. The man’s legs stretched halfway across the room; the woman had hers tucked back. Mandy sat on the edge of a chair she’d dragged in from the kitchen. The cops were familiar, both of them. But Jo couldn’t place them. School? Or were they customers at the café?

  ‘I’m Constable Lumina,’ the woman said. ‘This is Constable Peters. We met at the hospital.’

  She remembered their voices. You understand that the young woman in the front seat, Ashleigh, is dead. You understand the blood test is to check your blood alcohol concentration. You have to consent to the test.

  They managed to go home, to sleep, to spend time with their families, and get up and put their uniforms back on, and their guns and batons, and go back to work.

  She didn’t meet their eyes. Shame, guilt, grief, sadness — she couldn’t describe her emotions.

  ‘You might want to grab a jacket,’ Constable Lumina said. ‘It’s cold outside.’

  Jo noticed her feet. Thongs. It occurred to her that thongs and jeans might be inappropriate for a police interview. She stood up to go back to her room, and came face to face with her mother. Mandy’s face was milky white. The hollows under her eyes were deeper and darker, and her lips were thin and pale. Mandy handed Jo a jacket. It was the black windcheater with a broken zipper — she only ever wore the jacket to the gym, on cold mornings. It was old. It was the jacket she threw in the locker and on the floor of the car.

  No one cares about your fucking jacket.

  Jo turned to look at her mother, but it wasn’t her mother’s voice. The cops were outside now. There was no one else in the house.

  Voices came and went, especially in her early adolescence; her head overflowed with voices as if it were tiny cell filled with people. You’re fat. You’re ugly. You’re stupid. You’ll never be popular. You don’t get anything. Your friends are only pretending. But those voices were her own voice, playing her doubts back at her like a chant. This wasn’t her voice. No one cares about your fucking jacket. This was Ash’s voice.

  Ash’s voice: how was that possible?

  The cop car was parked on the nature strip. Constable Lumina held the back door open. Mandy slid all the way across, buckled her seatbelt, and rested her head against the door. Jo followed. As soon as the car started moving, the nausea returned. Jo’s mouth was dry. She worried she might be sick. She took a deep breath. Her mother passed her a water bottle, and she took a sip and handed it back.

  Jo scratched at her nail polish: blue satin, Ash’s. The floating blue flakes fell like coloured snow and then disappeared. Her nails were now a mix of blue and purple, the colour of the night sky on smoggy Melbourne nights.

  The cops discu
ssed rosters, forms, schedules, the weather (a 70 per cent chance of rain). Constable Lumina complained about the number of semi-trailers on the road, and Constable Peters said his father had been a truckie for twenty years. Life on the road was tough. As a boy, when he’d gone on a road trip with his father, he counted fifty-six abusive drivers. The two cops talked as if they were alone in the car, as if the back seat were empty, but Jo sensed their restraint as tight around their throats as a noose. She imagined they longed to turn around and tell her exactly what they thought. She focused on their conversation, on their words, on imagining herself in the cabin of Constable Peters’ father’s truck, between the man and the little boy.

  ‘Dad never talked about stress. I don’t think stress had been invented yet.’ Constable Peters laughed. He had an unexpected laugh, loud and jolly, the sort that might land a man a job as a Father Christmas in a crowded department store. When he stopped laughing, his voice softened. ‘At least, not in my neighbourhood. He’d be away for days, even whole weeks, and we were so excited because he was home, but he couldn’t keep his eyes open. By the time his energy came back, and he started chasing us around the backyard or playing cricket with us in the street, it was time for him to go away again.’

  When they arrived at the police station, there was no one standing on either side of the counter. The row of plastic chairs under the waiting area sign was empty. The walls were plastered with posters promoting the Police Ethnic Unit, the Neighbourhood Program, Defensive Driving. Jo had been to this station twice before: once when Mandy’s wallet was stolen, and another time to have a statutory declaration form signed. On both occasions they stood at the counter, facing the mirrored glass and their own reflections. Now, sandwiched between the two cops, they went past the counter, through the door, down the hallway, and into the interview room.

  ‘Your lawyer’s running late. We can’t start the interview until she gets here,’ Constable Lumina said. ‘You can wait here.’

  ‘I have a lawyer?’ Jo asked.

  ‘Court appointed,’ Constable Lumina replied.

  Both cops left the room. Mandy and Jo sat next to each other at the table. This was the first time they’d been alone since the accident. Neither of them spoke. Mandy’s anger, her disappointment, her sadness — these were the ocean of emotions that Jo didn’t want to disturb. She sat still and quiet, as if she were seawater prey and her mother the predator. As if being quiet and still would save her from her mother’s wrath. But Mandy sat next to Jo without touching, without speaking.

  The interview room reminded Jo of a small classroom at school, D3. The room had the same furniture. The same blue-vinyl steel-framed chairs. The same dull laminated tables, small and square. D3 had been Literature with Mr Russell, a thirty-something poet.

  ‘I’m a poet,’ Mr Russell announced at the beginning of the year as he handed out a sheet with a list of titles and dates. ‘My published poems. You might want to read them … out of interest, of course, no obligation.’ The students giggled and sniggered. English Literature was a small group of thirteen.

  Liam, one of the three boys in the class, called out, ‘Read us a poem, sir.’

  ‘You can read the poems for yourself. I’m giving them to you to rebut the myth “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach”.’

  ‘What? What do you mean?’ Liam asked.

  ‘Never mind. We’ve got mounds to get through.’ When he said it, Jo thought about the prisoners in The Great Escape — she’d watched the movie on a Sunday afternoon when she was supposed to be studying. In the movie, the prisoners dug a tunnel under the prison wall; they dug and thought about freedom, and they dug even though there was no end in sight.

  Mr Russell materialised each week in skinny black jeans and one of a series of black t-shirts with images of various punk bands or their albums. He pushed the tables together, for discussion. Jo avoided joining the discussions. Occasionally he picked on her, caught her eye or called her by name, asked her what she thought about the poems they were reading. They were studying Auden: ‘This Lunar Beauty’, ‘To Ask the Hard Question is Simple’, and ‘Lullaby’. She was supposed to have memorised the poems for the exam, but now the only poem that came to mind was Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ — she and Ash memorising it together, challenging each other, one stanza a week. Tyger Tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night / What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry? Their laughter and giggles after each stanza. But that was Year 11, a whole year ago now. Tyger Tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night / What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry? She kept repeating it, wishing the rest of the poem would materialise, closing her eyes and concentrating. Tyger Tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night / What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry? Tyger Tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night / What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry? If only the rest of the poem would come back to her, if only she could recite it in its complete form.

  When the door opened, Jo’s body tensed. A large woman came rushing into the room, banging the door shut. Jo jumped. The woman was at least six foot tall, and fat. The room shrunk as she dropped a bulging satchel to the floor, swung her heavy black cape off her shoulders, and rummaged through her bag until she found her phone and turned it off.

  ‘Sorry, apologies,’ she said. ‘The trains were a bloody mess this morning. Stolen copper. Can you believe that? Stolen copper? People steal copper from the railway line and that stops the trains. Unbelievable.’ And then, abruptly, as if taken by surprise by where she was, she stopped, apologised again, held out her hand to Jo and Mandy, and introduced herself. ‘Sarah Cascade. I’m your lawyer. From Victoria Legal Aid.’

  To be Sarah’s size was Jo’s worst nightmare. A vague memory grew clearer: her father and stepmother showing her photographs of fat women. Her father saying, ‘This is how fat people can get, as big as a side of a house. People this fat die young. People like this are lonely and miserable. They don’t have any friends. They don’t have any life. Not one worth living.’ The people in the pictures were huge — ‘obese’, her stepmother called them. She’d screwed up her face when she said the word, as if their fatness were contagious.

  If Jo had let herself get fat, would Ash still be alive?

  Jo’s grandmother Mary often bargained with God and with the Virgin Mary — for her knee to improve or for Jo to do well in VCE, and promising that in return, she’d volunteer to clean the church or buy the flowers for Easter Sunday or make a donation to the church fund or stop eating chocolate. Could Jo make a bargain with God? She wasn’t Catholic. She wasn’t baptised. Did God care? Was he open to making bargains with all comers? Mary did say, ‘We are all God’s children.’

  If she was willing to be fat, would God turn the clock back?

  ‘Now, I’ll get settled before we call them in,’ Sarah said, sitting down across the table from Jo. Sarah’s body was a series of soft rolls and folds; the top she wore was tight, and distorted red and yellow tulips stretched over the bulges and into the folds.

  Jo closed her eyes.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Sarah asked.

  Jo opened her eyes and nodded.

  ‘Sorry, stupid question,’ Sarah continued. ‘Look, sorry I’m late. We’ll talk more later. The police are going to ask you questions. They want you to make a statement. They want you to tell them what happened in detail. Step by step.’ Jo was mesmerised by Sarah’s bright red lips, her double chin, her pale neck.

  ‘I’ll be here. If I think they’re asking you a question that you shouldn’t answer, I’ll tell you. But otherwise I won’t interrupt. I’m here to make sure you are treated as you should be, within the law. Okay?’

  ‘Yes. But what if I don’t know … don’t have the answers?’

  ‘Let’s see how we go.’ Sarah turned to Mandy. ‘It’s best if you don’t interrupt, e
ither.’

  ‘Are they going to ask me questions too? Will they interview me?’

  ‘Not now, not today. Maybe later.’

  Sarah opened the door and called out, ‘We’re ready.’

  Both the cops came back in. Constable Peters was carrying a box, from which he took a small digital recorder. As he set up the microphone, Constable Lumina settled at the table with her notepad and pen.

  ‘If we’re ready,’ Constable Peters said, and turned on the recorder. ‘It’s 10.10 am on the twenty-first of September 2009. Footscray Police Station. Interview with Joanne Neilson. Conducting the interview, Constable Peters and Constable Lumina. In the room, we also have Ms Neilson’s lawyer, Sarah Cascade, and Ms Neilson’s mother, Mandy Neilson.’ He looked up. ‘Jo, please state your name and your address.’

  ‘My name is Jo Neilson. I live at …’ Her voice was small, distant, a whisper.

  ‘Can you speak a little louder? And say your full name,’ Constable Peters interrupted.

  She repeated her name and her address. In Jo’s head, her voice was booming. She waited for them to reel back, but no one moved. The two cops were staring at Jo. Sarah glanced up from her notebook, and even Mandy shifted in her chair so that she was facing Jo. To stop herself from fidgeting, Jo slipped her hands under her legs, like she had as a child. Back then, her legs didn’t touch the ground and she could swing her feet. She pressed down on her hands with all her weight.

  ‘What is your birth date?’ Constable Peters bent closer to the microphone every time he asked a question.

  ‘Eighth of June 1990.’

  ‘You are older than the other girls.’ This seemed like a statement to Jo, but when she didn’t answer, Sarah nodded in her direction.

  ‘The others are eighteen, or almost eighteen. I started school late.’

  Jo waited for Mandy to explain, to say what she usually said about keeping Jo back from school: ‘It’s not that Jo was slow or anything. Her grandfather was sick.’ But Sarah shook her head and Mandy slumped back in her chair, eyes fixed on her lap.