The Bridge

by Enza Gandolfo

  ‘We are doing something.’

  ‘Something exciting. We should have an adventure.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Let’s steal a car and go for a joy ride.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Come on, Jo, there must be something we can do. We’re sixteen — our lives shouldn’t be so boring.’

  ‘I’m not bored.’

  ‘But you’re boring.’

  ‘Fuck off. If I’m so boring, go and hang out with someone else.’

  ‘Don’t get your knickers in a knot.’

  ‘Okay. So what are we going to do then?’

  ‘I want to do some spraying!’

  ‘Spraying?’

  ‘Graffiti.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My cousin Peter and his mates have been tagging the neighbourhood. Let’s go with them.’

  ‘We’ll get into trouble.’

  ‘Come on, don’t be such a wuss. You can be too much of a fucking goody-goody, Jo, and you’ll have plenty of time for that when you’re old and have kids and a house, and have to spend every night sitting in front of the TV, wiping snot off your kids’ noses and worrying where you are going to get the money to pay the bills …’ Ash kept at it until Jo felt her life was already over, and if she didn’t do something soon she would get old overnight.

  It took Ash ages to convince Peter and then it took him time to convince his mates. In the end they said yes because they were all worried Ash would tell Peter’s mum about the graffiti. They agreed to meet at midnight in the goods yard at the back of Yarraville Station.

  Sneaking out wasn’t difficult. Mandy slept at the back of the house and Jo slept at the front, and there were several rooms in between. At eleven, Jo made a hot chocolate and went to bed. She listened to Mandy turn off all the lights and lock the front door. She listened to her walk down the hallway to her room. Then she waited until her mother was asleep and, with her shoes in her hand, she tiptoed down the hall, making sure to avoid the creaky floorboards and close the door carefully as she left.

  Once she was outside, she started to worry. At the gate, she hesitated, considered turning around and going back to bed, but she didn’t want to let Ash down. Across the road, the tanks shone under the lights, and the traffic across the West Gate was a series of speeding fireflies.

  Jo ran all the way down Hyde Street, across and into Francis Street, down Stephen Street into Schild, and then Anderson past the shops, down Ballarat and Murray and into the goods yard. When she arrived, the others were waiting. There were four boys and Ash. Two of the boys were carrying backpacks.

  ‘Now,’ Peter said, ‘if I say run, then you run as fast as you can straight home and don’t stop, and if you get caught you don’t fucking know us, never seen us before, don’t know our names.’ Peter was a pimply-faced teenager a year or so older than Jo and Ash. He’d been kept down at school so they were in several classes with him.

  The boys led the way. They stopped under the Somerville Road overpass, where the council workers had recently painted over the last lot of graffiti with grey paint, leaving them a large blank canvas. The boys took out their spray cans and started tagging. Ash joined them. ‘Come on,’ she said to Jo.

  ‘What will I tag?’

  The boys laughed. ‘Fucking amateurs,’ Peter said. ‘Your tag is your ID. You put it everywhere, as many places as possible. For fuck’s sake.’ He shoved a spray can in her hand. ‘Here, hold it straight. And then write your tag.’

  Jo’s heart thumped and she thought she might throw up. But she was excited too. Alive. Full of energy. She wanted to tag. She pushed the nozzle down and wrote Jojo. The letters were fuzzy, only just readable.

  ‘You’re a fucking toy,’ Peter said.

  ‘Give her a break,’ Rico, one of the other boys, said.

  Peter thumped the boy on the arm, hard. ‘What, you got the hots for her?’

  Rico thumped him back and they began wrestling. Until they heard a car coming — then they all ran and hid in the shadows, behind trees, under the steps of the overpass. When one of the cars turned out to be a police patrol car, Jo thought she might wet herself. Adrenaline. Heart racing.

  ‘Wasn’t that great,’ Ash said when the cop car had driven away and they came back to look at their tags. Ash insisted they all walk Jo home, and she was grateful. Along the way, Peter and Rico and the others stopped to graffiti fences and walls, and Jo and Ash giggled and laughed. But Jo was still trembling when she climbed into bed.

  Were some people more alive than others? Was loneliness a kind of death?

  Sometimes Jo had been lonely, even with Ash as a friend.

  One of the things Jo admired about Ash was her willingness to reveal details about all aspects of her life. Until recently, Jo thought that this meant Ash didn’t have secrets. She’d told Jo all about sex with Kevin, all of the intimate details. How it hadn’t gone well the first time, stage fright, he was a virgin. She told Jo about her arguments with her parents and her sister. About the arguments her parents had, about her mother’s affair with a teacher at school that almost ended up with her parents divorcing — family secrets no one was supposed to know. About an old neighbour who lured Ash into his house once when she was eight and showed her his penis. She described the penis and told Jo it wasn’t the first one she’d seen because her father sometimes walked around the house naked, and so it hadn’t been the sight of the penis that made her cry — it was a small, shrivelled thing. She cried because he wanted her to touch it. She screamed and ran, her neighbour giving chase, but she’d made it out of the house and told her parents and then watched out of the window as the police dragged him away.

  Ash told Jo things that, if they had happened to Jo, she wouldn’t have told anyone, not even Ash. She didn’t tell Ash about the girls at primary school who said she was too fat to play with them. Neither Mandy nor Ash knew about her trip to Fitzroy, when she stood outside Ian’s house. She hadn’t told either of them about the anxiety, about the doubt, about the voices in her head telling her over and over that no one wanted to be her friend.

  ‘Are some people’s lives worth more than others?’ Ian Williams had asked their Geography class once, during a lengthy discussion about poverty in India. He’d given them an article to read about a train accident in the rural south of the continent — hundreds had died, yet only the three white tourists were named. They talked about the way accidents or disasters overseas only seemed to matter if Australians were killed. Of course, they all agreed every life should be equal, but the world was unjust. Anyone weighing up her life and Ash’s life, measuring their worth against each other, would agree they weren’t equal.

  Jo had been back for a week when Sarah rang to tell her the date for the hearing had been confirmed for 15 June, a week after Jo’s twentieth birthday. ‘Seems a long way off, but you need to prepare yourself,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s not going to be easy.’

  ‘No,’ Jo responded. Listening to Sarah’s advice — prepare yourself, you might get as much as five years — Jo didn’t say much. It will be no picnic. Sarah actually said picnic; Jo almost laughed. She’d seen many films and TV shows in which prisoners were harassed, bashed, raped. Even if prison weren’t as bad as that, it would be bad, in ways she couldn’t yet imagine. Otherwise, what was the point of it?

  For the next four or five years, her life wouldn’t be her own. She would live in the confines of an institution with strict rules and no way out. Her life would be in the hands of other people, and they’d decide what she would be allowed to do or not do. For the last five or so years, she’d been resisting and resenting her mother’s desire to exercise authority. She hated her mother’s rules. She hated being confined in the house. Some people chose to be secluded. To be alone. To work in jobs where someone else made all the decisions. Could she be one of those people? Would confinement and the loss of freedom be a reli
ef? Would it stop the endless and relentless voices in her head? Would she be able to give her life over?

  Through a friend Mandy had worked with, Jo found a job cleaning a local office block. It was a big block and there were several cleaners. Each had their own floor, their own trolley of cleaning equipment and cleaning chemicals. Jo’s shift began at 10.00 pm. At 12.30 she had a tea break, and at 2.30 a meal break. The other cleaners called the second break ‘lunchtime’ and congregated in the third-floor kitchen, which had a television set that was on all the time. By ‘lunchtime’, the only stations going were the shopping channels — fitness equipment, home gadgets, and beauty products that eradicated wrinkles and made people young again. Sometimes Grace, who was from Ethiopia, walked down the stairs to Jo’s floor to ask her to read the label on a bottle, or the note left by Rob, the supervisor who organised all the communication with the people who owned the building. Grace was a gregarious mother of four, and she was embarrassed about her inability to read in English. The notes weren’t difficult to explain: The toilet wasn’t cleaned properly; The cleaner needs to vacuum under the desk; A woman lost her diamond earring somewhere, please look out for it. Grace always wore a headscarf and a long skirt. The building air-conditioning was turned off by the time the cleaners arrived, and Grace was usually sweating. When she stopped to talk to Jo, she wiped her forehead with the handkerchief she kept in an invisible pocket. She often asked Jo to join them for ‘lunch’. Jo smiled and said, ‘Maybe,’ but she didn’t go. Most of her co-workers were migrant and refugee women twice her age. They worked so their children could get an education. They were kind to her, but curious about why she, a young Australian girl, was working as a cleaner. ‘My children all go to university,’ Grace said, showing photos on her phone of her son in his graduation gown.

  Only Rob mentioned the accident. He was a regular at the café where Jo had worked. ‘I was sorry to hear about the accident,’ he said to Jo one night. ‘I guess that’s why you left the café. Though it’s not right, Ted sacking you.’

  ‘He didn’t sack me,’ was all she said in response. They were standing outside. It was almost three o’clock. He was smoking and she was drinking a cup of tea.

  ‘Well, if you need someone to talk to,’ he said, inching closer.

  ‘No, I don’t want to talk about it.’ She moved away.

  He shrugged his shoulders, butted out his cigarette, and went back inside.

  Counting your lucky stars.

  I don’t feel lucky at all.

  You’re alive.

  I feel dead.

  You have no idea what dead feels like.

  Please, Ash, leave me alone.

  It’s you that can’t leave me alone.

  Chapter 25

  It was a long narrow hallway with a row of doors on each side. From behind a red door, about halfway down, came the thunderous rhythm of instrumental music. Jo carried a heavy box full of notebooks. She pushed the door open with her body; it opened into a garden, and the music came to a sudden stop. There was a lush overgrown lawn, rambling bushes, tall gum trees, climbing roses. A garden shed. A park bench. A table. In the middle of a green patch there was a campfire, the flames contained by a small circle of grey stones.

  Jo’s shoulders and arms strained under the weight of the box, and before she reached the fire, it slipped out of her hands, landing with a thump as it hit the ground. She sat on the grass. The fire glowed and sparked. Her cheeks turned hot.

  She straightened and opened the box and stared at the notebooks. Ash’s first journal, pink with a ballerina twirling on the cover, was on top. This journal predated her friendship with Ash, was filled out long before they met. Stories of another life, of a girl young enough to want to be a ballerina. By the time they met, they were more cynical — they laughed at little girls dressed in pink, at little girls with tiaras and tutus, as if they hadn’t been young themselves.

  ‘Not good to burn synthetic materials. They give off toxins.’ A man stood behind Jo. He wore a suit and a tie and carried a clipboard. He was standing outside of the perimeter of the light radiating from the fire, and she couldn’t see his face. ‘You’ll have to rip the pages out and then throw the cover in the bin.’

  ‘Who are you? Where did you come from?’

  The man stepped closer, and Jo noticed that he had a long grey beard, wide and full at the top, finishing in a narrow point at his waist. The man ran his free hand down the beard, stroking it like one might pet a dog or a cat. ‘The plastic. You can’t burn the plastic.’

  ‘But I can’t open the journal. I don’t have the key.’

  ‘She trusted you with the journals, but not the key?’

  ‘The others, the later ones, don’t have locks.’

  ‘So she did trust you,’ the man said as he walked away. Jo listened to his shuffling footsteps and the crackle of the fire. A fruit bat flapped its wings as it flew back and forth between the next-door neighbour’s apple tree and a peach tree in a garden several streets away.

  ‘Will you burn them?’ the man called from the other end of the garden.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘If you aren’t going to read them, what’s the point?’

  ‘Once they’re destroyed, they’re gone. I’ve got no idea what I should do. What’s the right thing to do?’

  ‘No right thing here.’

  ‘She never said what to do with them.’

  ‘She didn’t know she was going to die.’

  ‘I can’t keep them. And I can’t give them away.’

  The garden was rustling and shimmering. The fire was dying out. If it died out, Jo wouldn’t be able to burn the journals. She had no idea how to start a fire. If she didn’t burn them, she’d have to carry them with her forever. ‘Would you take them?’ Jo asked the man.

  He laughed. ‘What would I do with a girl’s journals? They’re full of girls’ stuff, boys and bras and complaints about her parents who won’t let her go out.’

  A car alarm screeched. Jo woke.

  Were the journals meaningless? Were Ash’s journals full of drivel, of teenage angst? Of frivolous things that didn’t matter?

  Inside the pages was Ash’s voice. Jo knew she had no right to read them, but should she give the journals to Ash’s parents or destroy them? Would reading the journals intensify Rae and Alex’s grief, their loss? Or was it possible that reading the journals could be an antidote to their grief?

  In the weeks after her return from Portarlington, Jo continued her early morning walks, usually after her shift, in the hour of semi-darkness before the sun rose, when the horizon was powdered with soft reds and oranges, and in the sky the moon was reluctant to give the night away. Avoiding the bridge and the village shopping area, she devised walks that took her to unfamiliar streets, through the reserves that skirted the river — Donald McLean, Anderson, and Stony Creek — hoping to avoid memories, to avoid Ash, hoping to find a new and unrecognisable suburb in which she might see the possibility of living. Down past the tanks, along the river, sometimes towards Williamstown, glancing across Port Phillip and imagining she could see clear across to Portarlington, the pier, and The George. Some days she allowed herself to remember Justin and the kiss even though she knew there was no point lingering on the impossible.

  ‘You should wear a suit, something plain and serious,’ Sarah said. She’d arrived early with some papers for Jo to sign. Her next appointment wasn’t until ten, so she’d said yes to a coffee. It had been a hot night and the house was stuffy, so they took their drinks outside, Sarah and Mandy on faded canvas deck chairs and Jo on the wooden step. In the background, the usual rumble of the traffic had been joined by screeching calls from the local magpies. The garden was dry, the leaves of some plants curled and sagged, and the stems were brittle and ready to snap. There was a distant smell of smoke from the fires around Macedon.

  ‘What difference w
ill what I wear make?’ Jo asked. Of course she knew she had to wear something serious — it’s not like she’d turn up in her jeans and t-shirt, or some little frivolous party dress. She understood the importance of looking respectful.

  ‘It’s hard to measure the difference clothes make — more when there is a jury, but even with a judge, it could have an influence. People think the law is set down, that it’s all about the facts, measureable and solid, and that’s true, but the law is also like anything else. There’s the human factor.’

  The talk of clothes and the judge brought the court case closer, and Jo floundered for the words to express what she was feeling, a sudden rush of emotion sweeping her up as if she were a twig in the path of a flooding torrent.

  ‘What should she wear?’ Mandy asked.

  ‘A suit. A blazer and a skirt, dark blue, and a plain top underneath the jacket — something subdued, grey or smoky blue.’

  Jo heard them talking about the suit and the shoes and where best to buy them as if she were drowning and their voices were faint murmurs from a distant shore. Those voices plunged her into the past, to the afternoon four months earlier when Ash was sitting on the same wooden step, talking to Kevin, her legs stretched out across the small gravel path that led down to the garden. Back to the afternoon she read Ash’s journal. The smooth red cover. And the pages filled with Ash’s writing, pages and pages about Kevin, about school, about Ash’s dreams … If only she hadn’t read the journal. Was reading it the act that changed the course of her life, of Ash’s life? Or does every act, every moment, have the power to shift and change the course of life? She recalled a movie, Run Lola Run, that she and Ash went to see at ACMI one night during their ‘arthouse film phase’. Lola has to take 100,000 deutschemarks to her loser boyfriend — Ash said the most unbelievable part of the film was that Lola would hang out with such a loser and want to save his life. Lola leaves the money behind on the train, where it’s picked up by a homeless man. Desperate, Lola goes to the bank to borrow the money from her father. The film has three scenarios, beginning each time from the same starting point. However, each scenario develops in different ways and has different outcomes — for Lola and for her boyfriend and for all the people she bumps into along the way. If only Jo could rerun her life from that point when her hand moved across the table and picked up the journal. If only Jo could rerun her life from the moment she stepped into the car on the night of the accident.