The Bridge

by Enza Gandolfo

  ‘You know, I don’t know why some people reacted one way and some another. Some survivors didn’t recover at all, went on to have heart attacks, cancer, early deaths. Some went off the rails — depression and anxiety. Post-traumatic syndrome, they call it now, but for years some of us were only partly human, going through the motions, like ghosts. I wish I knew what made the difference because I’d like to give it to Alex and Rae and Jane. I’d like to give it to you. No matter what you do, no matter if you’re sad and miserable your whole life, no matter if you make yourself sick, Ashleigh won’t come back.’

  ‘I know,’ Jo said.

  ‘And it won’t make a difference to Alex and Rae and Jane and their grief.’

  ‘But it doesn’t seem right that I can keep living.’

  Blindness, death, a desire to stop witnessing and living — he understood these urges. They were impossible to argue against. ‘I loved my granddaughter. She was perfect,’ he said, and could sense the tears coming. Soon he would be weeping in front of this girl. ‘I wanted her to have a long and beautiful life. To be happy. To have a magical life, where everything worked. If I could, I’d give my life so that she could live hers. But it’s not possible. If you die, that will cause more misery. It won’t bring Ashleigh back. For the people you love, the best thing you can do is forgive yourself and allow yourself to live.’

  ‘I hear Ash’s voice all the time. She’s in all my dreams,’ Jo told him.

  Antonello nodded. ‘It’s not Ashleigh haunting you, it’s your own grief and guilt.’

  ‘I need to tell you something,’ Jo said. ‘We were arguing that night.’

  ‘Friends argue sometimes.’

  ‘We argued because I was scared she didn’t want to be my friend anymore.’

  ‘If only we knew when we were going to die, when our friends, the people we love, are going to die, we could make sure we weren’t fighting, that our last words are the right ones.’

  ‘There’s something else,’ Jo said. Behind them, the council rubbish collection truck pulled up and a man climbed out. Jo paused. He was a council worker, in a green work vest and shorts, a stout man with a round belly and thin legs. He glanced in their direction but didn’t say anything. They watched him take a wheelie bin from the back of the truck and roll it along the boardwalk.

  ‘What is it?’ Antonello asked, and then regretted it. He preferred not to be told secrets, even in his own family.

  Jo sighed, and Antonello thought she had changed her mind. ‘I’ve got a box of Ash’s journals,’ she said.

  ‘Her journals?’

  The council worker had exchanged the empty bin for a full one and was now rolling it back up the boardwalk. He hoisted the bin into the truck, hesitated again, and watched them for a few seconds. Antonello thought he might call out to them, but he didn’t. He banged the door shut behind him, started the motor, and drove away.

  ‘Yes, all her notebooks. She wrote in them every day.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Antonello said. Ashleigh and her notebooks, her journals. Are you spying on us? Paolina had teased her sometimes. ‘I heard Rae say something about not having found the journals, about where they might be hidden.’ He remembered that the day after the funeral when he and Paolina went to the house, they’d found Rae in Ashleigh’s bedroom, crawling under the bed. The wardrobe doors were open and all Ashleigh’s clothes were spread on the desk, over the chair. The chest of drawers was empty too. ‘Rae, what are you doing? It’s too soon for all this,’ Paolina had said, assuming that Rae was packing up Ashleigh’s clothes. Rae had avoided their questions. Of course: Rae had wanted the journals.

  ‘I have them. She kept them in my room, in this old safe. I never paid much attention. Every time she filled one up, she came over and put the next journal in the safe. I mean, we didn’t talk about what would happen to the journals, and I don’t know what to do with them.’

  ‘Why did she hide them at your house?’

  ‘Jane found one of her journals and she read it and made jokes about what Ash wrote and told Rae, and Ash was angry. She said she had to keep them away from her family because she thought Rae would read them if she had the chance, so it was safer to keep them locked up in my room. But now I don’t know, I mean, I haven’t … I can’t keep them there forever. Soon I’ll go to prison and I think my mother might sell the house. But I can’t leave the journals and I can’t take them with me, and I can’t leave them for my mother to deal with …’

  ‘You need to give them to Alex and Rae.’ Antonello tried to give her the time she needed. He’d demand she give the journals back if he had to, but he hoped she’d come to that decision herself. He glanced at the path beyond them, towards Yarraville, and waited.

  ‘I think sometimes Ash wrote in her journals about how pissed off she was at her mum and dad and Jane. It might be hurtful now, and I don’t know if she’d want her family reading them.’

  ‘They’ll have to make that decision for themselves, whether they read them or don’t read them. But you have to give them the journals. They don’t belong to you.’

  Jo moved away from the memorial to sit on a nearby concrete block. Antonello followed her gaze across Stony Creek, the Backwash, and the Yarra to the outline of the city. He could still recall the view of the city from the half-made bridge almost forty years ago. Over the years, he had watched Melbourne expand in all directions. Often he’d wondered about the impulse that drove developers to build taller and taller buildings, and he’d thought about all the workers, especially the riggers, who put those buildings together. And he wondered if the bridge made all that growth possible.

  ‘Do you think it will collapse again, the bridge?’ Jo asked.

  ‘I know it will,’ Antonello said.

  He waited for Jo to ask him about the bridge, but she obviously had other things on her mind.

  ‘I understand that everything that belonged to Ash now belongs to her parents, of course. That’s what the law says, that’s what Sarah says. But I don’t know if that’s what Ash would’ve wanted. If I give them to you, am I betraying Ash? I keep asking her, but she won’t tell me.’

  ‘Ashleigh is dead, Jo. She can’t tell you. And the Ashleigh you talk to is in your head, is you. You’re hoping and praying and wishing so hard, she seems real. Give the journals to her parents.’

  Antonello had his own doubts. Of course teenage girls wrote about their parents, about love and hate. He imagined there were sections of Ashleigh’s journals that Alex and Rae might find difficult, sections that might make them even sadder than they already were. And maybe they’d be better off not to read them.

  ‘If I give you the journals …’ Jo said. ‘Can I give them to you? Can you give them to Rae and to Alex? Because I can’t take them there.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes, now.’

  It only took a few minutes to reach Jo’s house. From the street the house was hidden by shrubs and trees. There was an old wire fence, leaning towards the footpath under the weight of several bushes, and an iron gate, rusted at the hinges, a little out of sorts, so that it scraped on the ground as Jo pushed it open. It wouldn’t take much to fix the gate — Antonello had a couple of hinges in the shed that would do. He thought about this as they walked up the path. The house was a rundown weatherboard cottage with a small verandah. Jo opened the door and led him down the hallway, past delicate crystal ornaments on a small bookshelf, to the kitchen. Inside the house was a sharp contrast to the outside: it was old and worn but impeccably clean and ordered.

  Jo’s mother was standing at the sink chopping vegetables. In the background, the Eagles were singing ‘Hotel California’, and she was humming along.

  ‘Mum,’ Jo called, and when Mandy turned around, ‘You remember Ash’s grandfather?’

  Antonello watched Jo’s mother’s face turn pale. ‘Oh, yes, of course,�
� she said, hesitating and then holding out her hand for Antonello to shake. ‘Please sit down. I’m so sorry for your loss … So sorry. Ashleigh was a lovely girl.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I know, Mandy, I know.’

  ‘Maybe you can make a cup of tea, Mum? I’m going to get Ash’s journals.’

  ‘Ash’s journals? You have them?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jo said over her shoulder as she left the room.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘No, thank you, I had coffee this morning. Not so long ago.’

  ‘I didn’t know about the journals,’ Mandy said. She wasn’t old, perhaps late thirties, but she looked exhausted. He’d once seen a row of trees after a bad storm, barely standing, refusing to collapse, but it was obvious that one more gust of wind and they’d topple over. That’s how Mandy struck him. ‘I mean, I know Ashleigh kept journals, but I didn’t know they were here.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone knew. One of their secrets.’

  ‘Did you know about the journals? I mean, you and Jo — I didn’t know she was talking to you.’

  Antonello recognised Mandy’s anxiety. She was embarrassed having to ask a stranger about her own daughter. This is what children reduced you to. He knew that feeling; he was often surprised by what other people told him about his children. He remembered one parent–teacher night when a middle-aged woman dressed in gypsy clothes — a long, flowing skirt and a peasant top — had asked them if they had talked to Nicki about her sexuality. He had no idea what the woman was talking about but, when he glanced across at Paolina, he could see she wasn’t surprised at all. He sat silently while the two women discussed the possibility that his daughter was gay, the possibility she loved women, as if it were something obvious that only the blind would have missed. It turned out Nicki was bisexual, but that came later, and was also a surprise. And there were other things too — Alex joining the Labor Party, and then a choir. His children were strangers who lived in the same house. Sometimes a look or a mannerism, the tone of their voices, reminded him that they were of the same stock, of the same blood, but otherwise their lives were outside his grasp. Paolina wasn’t surprised by their children’s announcements, by their children’s interests and passions or their sexual choices, so he imagined that mothers noticed things fathers missed. But here was Mandy, looking lost. Her discomfort was palpable.

  ‘I ran into Jo at the bridge. She was on the boardwalk. I don’t think she saw me, otherwise I think she would’ve left before I arrived there. But then we were both there and we talked.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I mean, her going to the bridge must be difficult for you.’

  ‘It’s fine, Mandy. I know she misses Ashleigh. I know she feels terrible and guilty and sad. I know. She loved Ashleigh too.’

  ‘And the journals?’

  ‘She told me about the journals, about having them and not knowing what to do with them, worrying whether to give them to Alex and Rae, what will happen to them if she leaves them and you sell the house while she’s in prison.’

  ‘She talked about prison, about selling the house?’ Mandy said, turning away from Antonello. She filled the kettle and turned it on.

  ‘She didn’t say much — mostly it was about the journals. I said she should give them to Rae and Alex.’

  ‘That’s what I would’ve said, if I’d known.’

  ‘She asked me if I’d take them.’

  When the kettle boiled, she pulled out two cups. Antonello didn’t remind her that he didn’t want tea. He watched her fill both cups with hot water, dunk a teabag in and out of each, and place one cup and the sugar and milk in front of him. The tea was already stronger than he liked it. Weak and black was the only way he could drink it, when he drank it at all, which wasn’t often. Coffee with milk for breakfast. Coffee, black, at morning tea. That was it. After that, if he drank, it was red wine, although not during the day. He used to drink during the day, when he was younger, when he was a rigger, when some of them went to the pub at lunchtime even though they weren’t supposed to. Even though it was irresponsible and dangerous, especially for the guys who had managed a second drink and then went straight back to work and onto the cranes, into the lifts, hoisting steel and concrete. Of course, in the library, they did occasionally go out for lunch, for a birthday or a promotion, and he did have a wine or a beer, but when they went back to work, the only machinery they had to operate was a computer.

  ‘How are Rae and Alex doing?’ Mandy asked.

  ‘Not great. They’ve sent Jane to spend some time with friends on a farm by the coast, which is good. But Rae and Alex aren’t doing well at all.’

  ‘I wish I could help, do something, but I think I’d be the last person they’d want to see.’

  ‘They have friends and family around. You have Jo to worry about.’

  ‘Yes. Everyone must be so angry at her.’

  ‘Yes, we’re angry at Jo and at Ashleigh and at the other two girls too. Stupid. How many times have we told them not to drink and drive, not to get in a car with a drunk driver … But it’s useless now. And we all make mistakes. My wife would say it’s God’s will, but I don’t believe in God. I think it’s more random than that. It’s bad luck.’

  ‘Bad luck …’ Mandy said, as if she were testing out the words.

  ‘When I was young, we drank and then drove home,’ Antonello said. ‘There weren’t all the ads and the warnings. I guess the laws were the same, but we didn’t think about it. People died on the road, but we kept doing it. We could’ve been killed or killed someone else, but we were lucky, I suppose. Not that I’m saying it’s okay — of course it’s not; they shouldn’t have got in the car, any of them — but they did and were unlucky and life won’t be the same for any of us again.’ Antonello paused. He was close to tears, but he didn’t want to cry in Mandy’s kitchen. The place was already infested with guilt and sadness; he wouldn’t add to it. He took a sip of the bitter tea and continued, ‘Jo is alive and she has to learn to live with it. She has to grieve and to face whatever the law decides is her punishment, and then she’ll have to learn to make a life for herself.’

  ‘That’s the hard thing. The difficult thing. Even for me. I think, what right has she to a life when she’s responsible for Ashleigh’s death?’

  Just as Mandy finished, they both noticed Jo standing at the door with a box.

  ‘It’s okay, Mum. It’s what I think too,’ Jo said as she put the box on the table. Mandy and Jo were no different to Alex and Rae. The accident had left them all with the sense of ruin, of good things gone irretrievably bad.

  ‘That sort of thinking is useless,’ Antonello said, too sternly, and then, regretting his tone, dropping his voice to a barely audible whisper, ‘I know how useless it is. There’s nothing fair about life. That kind of talk is useless, unless of course you want to be miserable for the rest of your life.’

  There was a pause. ‘Here they are, anyway,’ Jo said, breaking the silence. ‘These are all of Ash’s journals. I hope this is the right thing to do. I hope this is okay with Ash.’

  Antonello stood up. The cardboard box on the table had once held a dinner set — the image on the side showed blue-and-white-striped plates and bowls — and now it was filled with his granddaughter’s journals. And for the third time in less than half an hour, he was almost crying. ‘Thank you for the tea, Mandy. Jo, look after yourself.’

  He picked up the box. Even though it wasn’t heavy, his back twitched, but he didn’t hesitate, moving along the hallway, out the front door, down the path through the rusty gate, and onto the street. He wasn’t sure about the journals now he had them in his hands, but he knew he needed to take them straight to Ashleigh’s parents, without stopping. Because if he didn’t, he might change his mind. So many things people did in the name of protecting those they loved, but in the end you can
’t protect people; you have to give them what they have a right to. You have to let them deal with what there is to deal with.

  When he arrived at the house, he went down the side drive and knocked lightly on the back door. No one answered. He called out twice before Rae appeared in her pyjamas.

  ‘Nello,’ she said, and opened the sliding door for him.

  ‘Rae, sorry if I woke you.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t sleep,’ she said, moving aside to let him pass. ‘Alex is out. He told me where, but I wasn’t listening. I don’t know when he’ll be back.’

  ‘It would’ve been better to give this to both of you, but now I’m here …’

  ‘What is it? What’s in the box?’

  Antonello thought about delaying by asking for a coffee, by sitting down, but they were standing in the kitchen with the box between them, and what could he say that needed to be tamed, qualified, when the worst news a mother could ever hear had already been delivered and registered?

  ‘Ashleigh’s journals.’

  He watched Rae reach out to a chair and steady herself. Such a strong woman, his daughter-in-law — she ran a school and a household, and lots of people were scared of her: some of her teachers, many of her students. He’d heard her described as formidable and fearsome. But she was weak now, drained of her strength like a sick athlete whose muscles have gone soft.

  ‘Where?’ was all Rae managed.

  ‘From Jo.’

  ‘You went to see Jo?’ There was an edge to her question, an insinuation: how dare you? Or, how could you?

  ‘I went to the bridge, and she was there.’

  ‘All this time, she’s had these.’ Rae clutched the back of the chair, her eyes fixed on the box.

  ‘She didn’t know what to do with them. Ashleigh hid them at her house so no one would read them. She didn’t know what Ashleigh would want.’