The Bridge

by Enza Gandolfo

  ‘How dare she keep them all this time? How dare she? I’ve been going mad looking for them,’ Rae said, but she didn’t touch the box. ‘Have you looked at them? Read them?’

  ‘No. I don’t think I have any right.’

  ‘Do I?’ Rae said and began to sob. Antonello extended his arms and she pressed into him. He couldn’t remember ever hugging his daughter-in-law. They kissed on the cheek occasionally, but it was a habitual greeting, not a demonstration of affection. Antonello liked Rae — she was a loving wife to his son, an excellent mother to his granddaughters, a caring daughter-in-law. She was thoughtful, polite, and warm, but even though they’d known each other for more than twenty years, seen each other several times a week, loved the same people, this was the first time there had been any intimacy between them. He continued holding her until he heard her breathing returning to normal. Then he pulled the chair out so she could sit down.

  ‘You don’t need to read them now. Maybe later. Maybe never. But they’re yours. They belong to you and Alex.’

  They stayed silent for a while, and Antonello sat down next to Rae.

  ‘I used to be able to deal with anything.’

  ‘You’re the strongest person I know,’ Antonello said. ‘This is the hardest thing, the worst thing, that could ever have happened to you. But, Rae, you have to decide to live and to continue, to love Jane, and Alex, and the kids at your school, and your life. Otherwise everything will die.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can do that. I’m scared I can’t. I’m scared if I do that, Ashleigh will disappear, and it’ll be as if she was never here.’

  ‘Ashleigh will not disappear. Never. Rae, you and Alex and Nicki and everyone, you think I’m hard and detached —’ Rae looked like she might protest, but he continued, ‘We both know it’s true. When the West Gate collapsed, when my friends died, I wanted to kill myself. If it hadn’t been for Paolina, I would’ve done it. And then we had the kids, and suddenly I was a father. I loved them, but I couldn’t get too close. I was so angry and sad and bitter about everything, about Bob and Slav, about all the men who died. I worried about the kids dying, about Paolina dying, about my dying and leaving them alone and fatherless. It wasn’t rational. And what a waste, Rae, what a waste. It didn’t make Bob or Slav’s deaths any easier to deal with, it made it harder, and I made it hard for everyone, harder than it needed to be. You have to find that strength. It’s there, Rae, somewhere. You have to find it, and use it so that you can save your family.’

  ‘The family is broken. Ashleigh is my first-born. Before her we were a couple, but she made us into a family. It’ll never be the same. Never. She’ll always be missing.’

  ‘Yes. Every day. There is a permanent gap. There’ll always be sadness and grief. But there can be other things too.’ Antonello stood up. ‘What about a coffee? I’ll make it.’

  At this, Rae smiled. ‘Really? Can you make coffee? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you at the stove.’

  ‘Italian men have a reputation to maintain,’ he said, smiling back at her. ‘My mother used to say it brought shame on the woman if the man was seen doing anything domestic. My zia, my mother’s sister — you didn’t meet her but you would’ve liked her, she was a strong woman with a sense of humour — she insisted once that my father make her coffee, but it was so awful she spat it out. I make good coffee, and since Paolina has been sick, I’ve learnt to cook too.’

  ‘Of course,’ Rae said. ‘Coffee, yes. But I can make it …’

  ‘No, please, let me,’ Antonello said. He knew his way around Rae’s kitchen, having babysat his granddaughters throughout their childhood.

  Rae pulled the box of journals towards her, but didn’t open it. ‘Ashleigh wrote in her journal every day. I’d ask her sometimes: what are you writing? When she was younger, she’d tell me, even read bits out to me. They’d be about what she did at school or pony club. As she got older, she’d tell me to mind my own business. It used to make me so mad. I was her mother. I knew her best, and suddenly she had secrets from me. I was so stupid to get angry about it. I’m a teacher, I know all teenagers have secrets from their parents. We had so many stupid fights.’

  When the coffee had finished hissing and gurgling, Antonello poured it into the small antique espresso cups that had belonged to his mother, Emilia. They were dainty and fine, with gold rims. Alex had claimed them when his grandmother died — each of the grandchildren came to claim a memento before the house was cleared and sold. Alex said that whenever he thought of his Nonna Emilia, he pictured her drinking coffee out of one of those cups. Rae had laughed when Alex brought them home, but twenty years later they continued to drink espresso from them.

  Antonello passed Rae her coffee and sat down. ‘I can’t imagine what a young girl would find to write about — boys and boring grandparents,’ he said, and Rae laughed. But the box remained unopened between them.

  ‘I’m afraid … I’m going to leave them,’ Rae said, ‘until Alex gets back. And then we can decide together.’

  When Antonello arrived home, he found Paolina asleep in front of the television. She looked serene, and he tiptoed around her. It was amazing, he thought, how hard she found it to sleep at night and how easily she slept in the daytime. She was in her gardening clothes, old jeans and a frayed t-shirt. Her gardening shoes, a worn-out pair of runners, were outside the door. She’d been up early, before him, weeding and pruning in the garden — small jobs she had the strength to do. The breakfast dishes were in the sink, so he washed those and made sandwiches for lunch from the leftover meatloaf in the refrigerator. The meatloaf had been a little dry, but he was learning. Meatloaf and relish — not homemade relish, not anymore, no one seemed to do that anymore. He poured two glasses of water and took everything out to the table in the backyard. When he returned, Paolina was stirring. He sat beside her and put his hand on her cheek.

  ‘You decided to come home.’ Paolina smiled.

  ‘Tu sei la mia casa,’ he said as he kissed her gently. ‘And I have made you some lunch.’

  ‘Handsome, and you can cook. I guess I’ll keep you, Nello.’

  Chapter 26

  Some days are sprints: time races, and the day seems to end before it has begun. Other days drift, time stretching and expanding, with no end in sight. Mandy’s days were long. Monotonous and repetitive. She longed for change, but the only change on the horizon was Jo’s sentencing, and it would come soon enough.

  Jo had spent the afternoon with Sarah, working on her statement for the court case. She could hear them working. When they finished, it was short, a brief apology. A public recognition that the accident was Jo’s fault. A declaration of grief and guilt, of how much Jo missed Ashleigh.

  Sarah had left, and Mandy and Jo were sitting on the edge of the back deck, looking across the bush garden, with its native flowers and plants, to the old ghost gum. ‘That tree should be chopped down. One day, one of those branches is going to fall on me when I’m in the backyard, and it’ll kill me,’ Rod, their neighbour, said to Mandy whenever he had the chance.

  ‘I’m not cutting that tree down,’ she told him, after years of trying to placate him, of trying to convince him the tree was safe.

  ‘You’re a cruel and careless woman,’ he had said, the last time they spoke about it. This was after the accident, and she understood his reference to it. He was furious, and she’d expected he might finally take legal action, but for months he hadn’t said a word.

  The tree was a beacon. Every evening when she sat on the back doorstep, or stood at the kitchen window, if she focused on the tree, on its white trunk illuminated under the moonlight, she could imagine another life was possible. A life away from the suburbs. A house surrounded by creeks and hills and a large garden. She remembered her mother’s suitcase with the magazine clippings — hundreds of clipped images of country cottages, of places where the morning arrived with the sound of birds and where th
ere was a front verandah on which a person could sit looking out for miles, seeing only green and blue.

  She’d finally confessed to Jo that she’d made up her mind to sell the house a few years ago and that she’d been planning to put it on the market after Jo’s exams. ‘Are you angry?’

  ‘No, I thought as much. You should sell as soon as you can,’ Jo said.

  ‘But you love this house,’ Mandy said.

  ‘Whenever I heard you talk about the possibility of moving, I’d get upset. I wanted us to have this house forever. Grandpa’s house. But everything is different now, and I think moving away is a good idea.’

  ‘I don’t know anymore. I planned for so long to get as far away from here as possible and was so worried about how you’d react, but I don’t think now is the time. We’ve got to get through the court case and the sentencing.’

  ‘You should sell and move away.’

  ‘I want you to have a home to come back to.’

  ‘This doesn’t feel like home anymore.’

  Mandy could see that Jo was close to tears. Since she’d met Antonello and handed over the journals, Jo had spent a lot of time crying. Mandy felt like crying too. But they had to be brave for each other. She wrapped her arm around her daughter’s shoulder. ‘I will make sure you have a home to come back to.’

  After Antonello took the journals, Ash’s voice stopped. Now Jo was overwhelmed by the absence of Ash, by the black hole in her life without her friend. Now she was sobbing in her sleep, waking not with Ash’s voice in her head, but with a longing to see her, to talk to her, to talk things through with her. Waking up thinking, I’ll ring Ash and tell her about Mum wanting to sell the house. I’ll ring Ash and talk to her about prison, about going to prison. These thoughts, small and momentary, were followed by the realisation again and again that there was no Ash, that she would never speak to Ash again. And then the regret that Ash wouldn’t fulfil her dreams, wouldn’t become a lawyer, wouldn’t work for the United Nations, wouldn’t have her own Hypothetical-style program on television … That Ash would never have a life.

  Sadness was the dominating emotion. She was sad for Ash’s family: for Jane and Antonello, and for Rae and Alex, who now had their daughter’s journals but not their daughter. She was sad for Mandy and Mary and the lives they’d lost. And she was sad for herself. Sad for the house that would be sold and would soon belong to other people, people who did not know the story behind the mural that refused to disappear, or why there was an industrial safe in the front bedroom. Sadness lingered like smoke after a fire; it saturated everything.

  She mourned her old life and her old self.

  ‘Our world has collapsed,’ Mandy said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jo said. She’d apologised over and over again. She’d continue to apologise for the rest of her life, even though she doubted it would make any difference. It wouldn’t change anything. Jo hoped that Ash’s family would get some satisfaction, some resolution, from seeing her punished. Knowing she was in prison might give them a way through to something else.

  ‘I hate thinking of you being locked up,’ Mandy continued. ‘How can I go on living, move somewhere new, when you’ll be there?’

  ‘I hate thinking of you here,’ Jo said. ‘I’ll cope better if you aren’t here, if you have gone somewhere else. And anyway, it’s not good for either of us to wake up every morning and look at the bridge.’

  ‘Lots of people around here have spent their lives waking up to the bridge, with all the memories, with all the connections. Maybe it’s better to look at death in the face than to turn away from it.’

  There was no escaping the bridge. It was impossible to see the ghost gum and not the bridge behind it. It was impossible to step out of the front gate and not be aware of its looming presence. It was a grey span across their skyline. It was embedded in the local community, had become a symbol of the west — Westgate Motors, Westgate Computer Care, Westgate Brewers, West Gate Pasta Supplies …

  The only place on their small block where you could stand or sit and not see the bridge — though you could still hear it — was in the left-hand corner of the front yard, under the canopy of an old plum tree.

  Mandy wasn’t sure what she was going to do. Was it possible to make a new home somewhere else? What made a house a home, anyway?

  There were times when Mandy was so besieged by their street, by the stench of the petroleum, of the car fumes, of the rattle and roar of the traffic, that her body seemed to dissolve. ‘On some days,’ Mandy said, ‘living here, I feel like I’m drowning.’ On those days, the smell was everything; it was as if she carried it with her wherever she went, even if she went away, miles across town. On those days, Mandy kept expecting the people sitting next to her on trams or trains or standing across from her at the supermarket counter to say something about the smell, to tell her off, to move away in disgust. On those days, the smell invaded everything, from her nostrils to the pores of her skin. It settled on her, made itself at home.

  It was true there were other days when the smell was hardly noticeable at all and she’d be surprised when a visitor asked, How do you stand the foul smell? Or when she heard someone walking past on their way to the path along the river or to Williamstown say, How anyone can live here? and peer through the bushes, curious to see what kind of strange creatures were capable of surviving in such an awful place.

  The tanks were their neighbours. Like most neighbours, there were days when they seemed friendly, benevolent, and then there were days when they appeared hostile, even frightening. Some days they could be ignored, some days they were hardly noticeable. But other days, they dominated the street and it was impossible to get away from them. On the worst days, the tanks, dirty grey and black, each with their own large red numbers, concrete and steel stained with rust, were monstrous and menacing, formidable, as they peered over the cyclone fence, leaning all of their heavy weight towards the house.

  But there were times, especially in the soft light of a winter’s morning or on days when the wind blew east and the scent of the garden permeated the air, when, even for Mandy, the sight of them was home.

  ‘Let’s wait,’ she said to Jo. ‘Let’s see what happens after the sentencing.’

  It was Jo’s twentieth birthday and Mary had made a cake, but it was sitting uneaten on the bench, and Mary had gone home in tears when she realised her desire to make it like any other birthday was impossible. Mandy and Jo peered over the fence at the bridge. It was peak hour and the traffic was building. The cars were multiplying, like rodents during a plague. They drove with determination, with a destination in mind, with purpose.

  Chapter 27

  The courtroom reminded Antonello of a church. In place of the large crucifix that usually stood above the altar, there was an Australian coat of arms, etched in black on a silver panel. The emu and the kangaroo held on to the shield. Below them, the judge’s wide bench, elevated on a platform, towered over the room. Below the bench there were two tables, separated by a small gap. On the right side, wearing wigs and long black gowns, the prosecutor and his assistant; on the left, Sarah and her assistant. Behind them, rows of chairs. On the left, the empty jury’s seats; to the right, the witness stand; and at the back of the room, in an elevated section behind a gate, the dock.

  The County Court wasn’t what he’d expected. He’d imagined a grand building, like the Supreme Court and the old Magistrates’ Court in Russell Street, but instead it was a modern office building, all concrete and glass. Inside, there was no ornate colonial furniture, no sculptured ceilings, no cedar or velvet.

  As if they were going to church, Paolina had insisted he wear a suit and tie. He was hot, and the collar made his neck itch. The family filed in and sat on the right side, behind the prosecutor. He and Paolina, and Alex, Rae, and Jane, Rae’s sisters and their husbands, and Nicki and Thomas took up the first two rows. When Kevin arrived with his mother, th
ey sat behind them. Laura and Mani and their parents sat in the back row. Jo’s mother, Mandy, was already in the courtroom. She sat on the other side, with Jo’s grandmother. Like Paolina, Jo’s grandmother held rosary beads in her hands, allowing each bead to slip through her fingers at regular intervals. There was no father: Antonello had a vague recollection of some story about a divorce and another family interstate.

  The proceedings were scheduled for 10.00 am, and at 9.45 they’d been led from a small meeting room into the courtroom by a young man who referred to himself as ‘the court clerk’, but looked, in his suit, like a fifteen-year-old schoolboy. Then he announced that the judge was unavoidably delayed, but he didn’t suggest they leave the courtroom, and so they stayed: the lawyers, on both sides, shuffled papers, made notes, and talked to each other in whispers.

  When the door opened at 10.30, everyone turned to look. At the sight of Jo being led into the courtroom by a police officer, Jane began crying. Rae put her arm around her daughter, and everyone turned back to face the front. Only Antonello’s gaze lingered as a policewoman opened the gate and led Jo into the dock, as she sat down and the policewoman pulled the gate shut. This Jo didn’t resemble the Jo he’d watched grow up, not even the Jo he’d met at the bridge. She wore a blue jacket and skirt, and her hair was neatly tied back. If he hadn’t known her age, he would’ve said she was in her late twenties. Paolina tapped him on the leg. ‘Turn around.’

  The prosecutor approached Alex and Rae. ‘It won’t be long now. The judge has arrived. She’ll invite you to read out your victim impact statements. Do you have copies?’ he asked.

  Rae and Alex nodded.

  ‘It’ll be difficult. We can read them for you, if you don’t want to read them out yourselves. The judge might also decide it’s better for her to read them quietly in her chambers.’