The Bridge

by Enza Gandolfo

  At the hospital, on the night of the accident, while she lay in bed in the Emergency ward, her mother had stood in the gap in the curtain, half in and half out, and said, ‘We, you and me, we are going to have to learn to live with this.’ Live. Jo didn’t want to live. She wished she didn’t exist, that she’d never existed, that there was a way of travelling back in time to wipe herself out.

  One morning a couple of days after the funeral, Jo switched the computer on for the first time since the accident. Avoiding her email and Facebook — all those places where someone might try and contact her — she googled ‘suicide’ and ‘suicide methods’ and found over 42 million hits. So many people thinking about dying, about ways to die; so many people wanting a way out. For the first time in days, she was calm. There was a sense of relief. A way out was possible.

  Pills. Poison. On one site there was a list of twenty-four poisons, including water. Eight litres of it would be enough. She would have to drink and drink and drink … Carbon monoxide was another, but there was no car. She hadn’t even thought about her car — no one had mentioned it. She assumed it had been destroyed, compacted into a thin sheet of metal, thrown into landfill and buried.

  Alcohol. She could drink herself to death. She hadn’t touched alcohol since the party. She went to the cupboard in the hallway where they kept wine and spirits. But it was empty. She went outside and opened the recycle bin: it was full of empty bottles. The stench of wine was a slap, and she reeled back from it. She hated the taste of wine, of spirits. She drank sweet mixed drinks when she went out, and only then to suppress the anxiety. So much drinking. All of them — Ash and Laura and Mani, everyone they knew: why did they drink so much?

  There were websites that explained, step by step, how a person could hang themselves. Sites giving advice on guns. On how to get them. On how to use them. There were sites listing places high enough to jump off. The West Gate Bridge was still on the list, even though with the barricades it was almost impossible. But the bridge would be the perfect location — what if it were possible? What if she snuck onto the bridge at night, climbed the fence, and let herself fall? Jo was a good swimmer. A good diver. What would it take to stay under the surface? To refuse to take in air? Fill your pockets with stones, one post said, like Virginia Woolf. Jo read Woolf’s suicide note posted on another site — her fear of going mad, the voices in her head, the inability to keep going. The belief in death’s release, the peace of a long deep sleep. No more anxiety. No more sadness.

  If she died, everyone would understand how much she loved Ash. They’d realise she hadn’t meant to hurt Ash. They’d know she was sorry.

  ‘Show that you are remorseful,’ Sarah had said.

  You want to do everything I do, even die. Really?

  Mandy stood outside Jo’s room, listening for signs of life. Jo hadn’t been a quiet child. Before the accident, they had fought constantly about the volume of the music and the television. Now it was the silence that woke Mandy in the middle of the night. It was the silence that vibrated through the house, the silence that drew her to Jo’s room, listening for her daughter’s breathing. To make sure she was alive, that she hadn’t killed herself. Suicide. Two of Jo’s classmates had suicided when they were sixteen. They had seemed like normal kids living normal lives.

  Mandy remembered arriving at the hospital on the night of the accident — there had been a moment when she thought Jo was going to jump out of the bed and run into her arms. But Mandy had kept her arms folded, deliberately shutting Jo out. Standing half in the cubical and half out, she’d barked at her daughter, ‘What have you done?’ Now she felt guilty, a bad mother, but still she could not bring herself to open the door, to go to her daughter, to forgive her.

  Jo didn’t talk to Mandy about suicide. But the signs were all there: Jo’s despair, her silence, her refusal to leave her room. Mandy knew that Jo was struggling to imagine a life in the aftermath of the accident. How did people keep living when grief was weighed down by guilt? So at night, she kept vigil at Jo’s bedroom door, sometimes for hours at a time, shivering in the cold hallway, afraid to go to bed until she heard a murmur or a sigh, signs of life. Suicide watch.

  Mandy had gone back to work. What choice did she have? She had requested a transfer and they moved her to a store in Glen Waverley. At least when she was at work she had people to interact with and things to do, and some days she forgot about Jo, about Ashleigh, about the accident, for whole hours at a time. It took her an hour and a half to get home, she didn’t hurry, hesitating each time before she opened the front door and called out, ‘Jo, I’m home. Jo, are you there?’ Jo took her time to respond, and sometimes not until Mandy had called out a second or third time, ‘I’m here. Where else would I be?’

  With some coaxing, Jo began to come out at dinnertime, and they sat at the table together. Mandy talked about the weather, about people at work. She was careful not to complain about travelling to Glen Waverley, or about missing her old workmates. Neither of them mentioned the accident or Ashleigh. Mandy planned to talk to Jo about getting a job or going back to school, but she couldn’t stand the idea of Jo out in the world where she might run into Alex or Rae or Jane or some of her schoolfriends. And she was worried, ashamed, and so sad. She didn’t think they’d ever be able to see anything, do anything, in any other way. Plus there was the trial to get through. ‘It might be six months or longer,’ Sarah had told them.

  Sarah was collecting character statements from people prepared to say Jo was a good person, that Jo wasn’t the sort of young woman given to being irresponsible, but Mandy worried that Sarah wouldn’t find enough people willing to make positive statements. Not that Jo had ever been a bad kid. But who did they know? Jo didn’t belong to any clubs or community groups. Mandy didn’t have influential contacts. ‘I don’t know any politicians or business managers, anyone like that,’ she had told Sarah. ‘My neighbor, Mrs Nguyễn, likes Jo and she’s happy to sign a statement. But she doesn’t want to go to court. Those kinds of places make her nervous. She asks me to go with her if she has to talk to someone at the bank or Centrelink. My other neighbours — well, Bob has been in and out of prison most of his life, and the rest are renters I don’t know.’

  ‘I want you to promise me,’ Mary said, ‘that you won’t do anything silly.’ She was sitting opposite Jo at the kitchen table.

  ‘Too late for that, Nan, don’t you think?’ Jo put her sandwich down. She hadn’t eaten peanut butter and honey sandwiches since she was a fat twelve-year-old. But her grandmother had made them, and spent a long time coaxing Jo out of her room. White bread, in neat triangles, and a pot of tea. The sandwiches were comforting.

  ‘What’s done is done,’ Mary said. ‘But I mean, you won’t do anything to hurt yourself?’

  Jo didn’t tell Mary she’d spent the morning googling suicide methods.

  ‘Things’ll get better,’ Mary said.

  Your grandmother is a Pollyanna. It was one of Mandy’s more common complaints about Mary. It was true, Jo thought, but maybe it was a special gift, to believe that things would turn out alright.

  ‘You think that’s possible, Nan?’

  ‘I know it seems like it’s the end of the world. But bad things happen to everyone. Everyone makes mistakes. Slowly life will get better. I know that from experience. You’re young. I’m old, you have to trust me.’

  ‘I can’t imagine anything ever getting better. Ever.’ Jo knew that Mary’s early life had been difficult. Mary’s father had died when she was a child, and her mother had spent years in psychiatric hospitals. Jo had heard some of her grandmother’s stories about the poverty, the loneliness, of growing up in a house with elderly grandparents who never stopped grieving for their son. ‘How poor were you?’ Jo and Mandy often teased Mary when they could see she was about to tell a story they had heard before. But Mary told the stories anyway, and talked about God and strength and carving out a life.


  ‘I haven’t told you how my father died,’ Mary said.

  ‘No. Was he sick?’ Jo sensed a story coming. Listening to Mary was better than listening to Ash’s voice or her own circling thoughts.

  ‘I don’t know if he was sick. These days we’d say he must’ve been.’ Mary hesitated. ‘This is a story I thought I’d never tell you,’ she said. ‘I was five years old and playing in the backyard with my baby doll and an old pram, taking the doll for trips down the path that ran around the lemon tree, through the lawn, past the barbecue, and to the vegetable patch. I was singing ‘Rock-a-bye Baby’ and watching the doll, pretending I was its mother.’

  Jo pushed the plate with the remainder of the sandwich away from her. Mary frowned and pushed it back towards Jo. ‘Eat,’ she said. Jo grimaced, but didn’t respond. It seemed to Jo that her grandmother hadn’t aged in the last twenty years — she’d been an old woman when Jo was little and she was an old woman now. Her hair was a soft cloudy white, and she still wore it in the same short bob. It was difficult to imagine Mary as a little girl pushing a doll in a pram.

  ‘I can still remember my mother’s scream, a high-pitched cry, and I knew it was bad, so I ran into the house, calling, “Mummy, Mummy, where are you?” She didn’t respond, and I couldn’t find her until I heard the door of my parents’ bedroom bang shut, and there was my mother standing against the door and yelling at me, “Go away, go back into the backyard. Go now and don’t come back. Go.” She was so angry, she didn’t look at all like my mother. My mother had the most beautiful blue eyes — “smiling eyes”, my father called them — but the woman at the door had dark, bulging eyes, and she wouldn’t look at me.

  ‘I was a little girl, so I don’t remember everything. But I remember I was scared. I hadn’t heard my mother yell before. I stopped and my mother shooed me away like she did our old cat, Ginger, when she came too close to the table at dinnertime, waving me away with her hand. She opened the door and slid back into the room, slamming it shut and yelling. I cried. I called out to her. I wanted her to come back out and pick me up.

  ‘My grandparents said they found me sitting on the back doorstep pulling the farm animals off my dress — I loved that dress. My mother had made it on her treadle Singer sewing machine. Around the hem, she’d sewn felt farmyard animals. They held hands and paws to form a ring-a-rosie. I must’ve heard the sirens, the ambulance and the police. It was a couple of days before my grandmother told me that my father was dead, and that my mother was very, very sad.’

  ‘Suicide?’ Jo asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I still don’t know. Maybe my mother knew. Maybe my grandparents, but no one ever talked about it. He was a coward. Let himself off the hook, and killed everything for the rest of us — for my mother, for his parents, for me. My mother changed. She hated music, especially the radio. She hated seeing me playing with my friends. We couldn’t live in our house, so we moved in with my father’s parents. My mother spent the next ten years in and out of hospital. My mother became stuck. If you get stuck, it can be impossible to get unstuck. I don’t want you to get stuck.’

  But Jo was stuck. She didn’t identify with Mary’s mother in the story. She wanted to know more about Mary’s father, and the desire to make life stop.

  ‘Please promise me,’ Mary pleaded, interrupting her thoughts, ‘that you won’t hurt yourself.’

  Jo promised.

  Cross my heart, hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye. Ash’s singsong voice in her ear. So many pinkie promises, little fingers locked together.

  After Mary left, Jo went back to her room, to the list she’d made of suicide options. She longed to fall into a long deep sleep, for all the anxiety and pain to disappear. But though she might not deserve to live, she knew she wouldn’t be able to kill herself. And not just because of what it might do to her grandmother and her mother.

  Jo screwed up the list and threw it in the bin. And then took it out, unscrewed it, and ripped it into tiny pieces and threw them in the bin. To live — what would that mean? Prison, first, but after that? She couldn’t keep living in her mother’s house, down the road from Ash’s family. She’d have to leave. Run away. She’d change her name. To Smith or Jones or Brown. An ordinary name. A name that no one would remember. Anna Smith. Kate Jones. Live alone in some remote place as far away as possible.

  You can’t run away from me. You can’t run far enough.

  Where did the missing go? People disappeared; they disappeared for a lifetime with no trace. Jo had written an essay on missing people for a school assignment in Year 9. She’d discovered that it wasn’t a crime to go missing. The police refused to spend too much time looking for adults who went missing unless there were suspicious circumstances — blood, abandoned cars, break-ins. Some people just stepped out of their lives. Sometimes without even leaving a note. More than 35,000 people a year, in fact. Some came back or were found after a couple of days. But others kept going, leaving everything behind. At the time, she’d imagined the fear of being discovered would be unbearable; a lifetime of looking over one’s shoulder. Now, she thought of the relief of being anonymous and unattached.

  She didn’t think about forgiveness. She didn’t believe in God. Before Ash died, she believed the dead were dead, gone. She and Ash made fun of the religious people — Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses — who came door to door, selling God as if he was a vacuum cleaner, as Mandy would say.

  ‘God forgives everything. You have to be sorry and be prepared to do the penance,’ Mary often said.

  What penance would make up for killing you, Ash?

  Are you kidding? Penance?

  Ash had big plans and all kinds of ambitions. She was going to be a renowned lawyer. She was going to fight for human rights across the globe. She was going to work for the United Nations.

  Did she owe Ash a life?

  Did she owe the world Ash’s life?

  You owe me.

  Sarah and Mandy were sitting on the back verandah, looking out at the backyard. At the tall gumtree, at red bottlebrushes in full bloom, at the kangaroo paws — orange and yellow — and the clumps of native grasses. It was a mild spring evening. The bridge, visible over the back fence, was a dark line against a pink and grey sky.

  Mandy brought out two glasses and a longneck.

  ‘No thanks, I still have to drop the car off at the office,’ Sarah said, shaking her head at the offer of a beer.

  ‘Just in case you change your mind. It’s the only thing I have. I threw out all the alcohol in the house last week. A friend brought this around, homemade beer, her father makes crates of it. It’s not great, but it’s not too bad. Drinkable.’

  Sarah rolled a cigarette. She’d been on her way back to the office from a meeting in Williamstown when she decided to drop in on Mandy. She was still working on developing Jo’s case and wanted to get more sense of the relationship between the two girls, and also the two families.

  ‘We come from different worlds,’ Mandy said when Sarah asked about Ashleigh’s family. ‘Sometimes I felt like I wasn’t good enough. Early in the girls’ friendship, Rae and Alex made lots of suggestions. About sending Jo to this class or that, but those classes — I mean, they’re for kids, but they cost a packet … But we were civil and polite to each other. We’re not friends, never socialised, but we trusted each other with the girls.’

  ‘What about Ashleigh and Jo?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘Rae and I, both of us thought they wouldn’t be friends for long. Ashleigh was at the top of the class. Jo isn’t academic. I mean, she’s fine, you know, she gets through, but I think Rae thought Jo wasn’t smart enough to be Ashleigh’s friend — not that she ever said that to me, but I could tell that’s what she thought. She would say things like, “Ashleigh helped Jo with her homework,” “Ashleigh is so quick at maths, so much better than me, my God,” “A
shleigh reads so fast.”’

  ‘Do you think Ashleigh used that against Jo?’

  ‘Jo’s not dumb.’ Mandy shrugged. ‘They’re both readers, but Ashleigh finished a book every couple of days, whereas it takes Jo weeks. But, look, Rae and Alex didn’t interfere — they’ve been good to Jo. I guess they were used to having her around: they invited Jo to all the family events, even holidays. And I invited Ashleigh to ours, but of course we don’t do as much. Got so we didn’t go anywhere without Ashleigh.’

  ‘Did Jo like going to Ashleigh’s house? Did she feel comfortable there?’

  ‘Yes, at least as far as I know.’

  ‘Jo said Ashleigh wanted to be a lawyer?’

  ‘That girl wanted to change the world …’ Mandy choked up and couldn’t finish the sentence. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. It is sad.’

  After Mandy composed herself, Sarah continued. ‘Mandy, have you talked to Jo about why she and Ashleigh were arguing in the car?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was Ashleigh ever mean to Jo?’

  ‘I don’t think so, no.’

  ‘Do you have any idea what they were fighting about?’

  ‘No. You’re supposed to know your kids, what’s happening in their lives, but I don’t know much about Jo’s life, not much at all. One minute you know everything there is to know about your child, and suddenly they have a separate life and the parent has no access. Most of the time I have no idea what Jo is thinking or feeling. How is it possible that I have no access to my own daughter?’ There was despair and regret in Mandy’s voice. Sarah reached out and put her hand on Mandy’s arm and they sat together in silence for several minutes.

  Chapter 19