The Bridge Read online

  Her grandmother came back wracked by grief, but she remade her life. Emilia didn’t think she had that strength. Antonello was her baby. Named after her favourite artist, Antonello da Messina, whose painting of the Madonna hung on the wall of her childhood kitchen. She believed he was destined to be an artist, to leave a legacy, to live a long life.

  Emilia remembered her uncle as she lit candles to thank God and all the saints for her son’s life. And she prayed for the other women, including her friends Sandy and Marisa, Slav’s aunt, who weren’t so lucky, whose men hadn’t survived the bridge collapse. And she prayed for the men, who died without the last rites, that God would forgive their sins, and welcome their souls into heaven.

  The collapsing bridge buried the hut that contained all the work cards and the time clock, as well as Bernie, the only one who knew how many workers clocked on that morning, and so it took a couple of days to confirm that there were sixty men on the site. Sixteen men at the top and more men in the hollow tunnel of the span, most working to strengthen the bridge. They fell 150 feet to the ground. There were men in the huts, in the cranes, in the elevator, and on the ground below. In The Age on 16 October it was reported that thirty-two men were confirmed dead, not all had been identified, and the names of several men could not be released until relatives — some living overseas — could be notified. There were eighteen men in hospital, six of them in a serious condition, and three workers, including Bob, were unaccounted for. Rescue workers continued digging through the rubble.

  The rescuers found Bob’s body on the third day after the collapse, crushed, and almost unrecognisable. He’d been wedged under tons of debris.

  Sandy asked Antonello to speak at Bob’s funeral.

  ‘Do it for Sandy,’ Paolina said, trying to give him courage. They were sitting drinking coffee at the small square table in the front room of their two-room bungalow.

  ‘You have no fucking idea how hard this is for me,’ Antonello yelled at Paolina. It was the first time he’d raised his voice at her. It shocked both of them, and neither spoke for several minutes. Antonello ran his hands over the surface of the table, speckled red and white. The table was secondhand. As soon as they had put out the word they needed one, plus a few chairs and a wardrobe, their aunts and uncles opened up their garages and furniture poured out. These older relatives who, after years of hard work in textile factories, in motor-vehicle manufacturing plants, on building sites, and on the railways, had renovated their kitchens, updated bedrooms, and bought new furniture — some of it ornate and imported — but were unable to discard what was useful and functional. Paolina made green curtains they could pull across the window for privacy. In a small glass cabinet, given to them by Zia Teresa, Paolina displayed their wedding presents: crystal glasses and gold coffee cups, a water jug engraved with swirling flowers. They hung pictures on the wall, including a reproduction of the Virgin Annunciata, by Antonello’s namesake, fifteenth-century artist Antonello da Messina. On Paolina’s request one of her aunts had sent the print from Sicily. She had framed it and given it to Antonello on their first night as a married couple. Next to it was one of his watercolour sketches of the half-made bridge. The bridge at sunset, its snaking curves reflected as ripples of light on the river. When Paolina had suggested framing and hanging his sketch on the wall, he said, ‘Only real art belongs on the wall.’ She wrapped her arms around him. ‘This is as real as art gets, and I want it on our wall.’ He was embarrassed but also secretly pleased. La nostra prima casa. The bungalow everyone else called tiny and cramped was an oasis, bright and warm and magical.

  Now the room closed in on Antonello. It was airless and stuffy. Like a coffin, he thought, like a coffin. He avoided looking at the sketch. He avoided looking at Paolina. Unable to sit any longer, he got up and pulled the sketch off the wall. Paolina flinched.

  ‘Get this fucking thing out of here,’ he said, dropping it hard on the table. The glass shook in the frame. ‘I never want to see it again.’

  ‘Okay,’ Paolina whispered, reaching her arm out to touch him. ‘I will. Please, Nello, sit down, talk to me.’

  He resisted the urge to push her hand off his shoulder. Every muscle was tense and taut, ready to snap. The heat rising, rage burning hot, a fever, inevitable, uncontrollable, explosive. And destructive. He recognised his father in himself. Anger was his father’s master: it pulled the strings, cracked the whip, and his father was weak and helpless in its wake. He blasphemed. He abused. He cursed. He smashed plates, punched holes in walls, threatened. And the family scattered, terrified. Now that rage was aroused in Antonello, like a wild animal waking to find himself trapped. He feared it was untameable — furious and feral. The desire to surrender was irresistible. If he stayed in the bungalow, he would yield to it. And so he left, slamming the door shut behind him and running fast, with no idea where he was going.

  Not to the bridge. Away from the bridge.

  The anger pounded through the soles of his feet. His knee screamed with pain, but he kept running. Fools. He and all the other men were fools. They had believed the lies. The bridge was so important. Bringing a city together. They worked so bloody hard on that bridge, as if they were called to it. Tough and dangerous work. But they felt lucky to be doing it. Fools. They were fools, so excited to erect the trusses, to slide the spine units into place. Long days, double shifts, so eager to see it come together, piece by piece, taking shape. Each arm, east and west, reaching out to the other with an irresistible longing.

  He and Slav and Sam, so happy to be working on the bridge. It was a big job. Essential and important work, so everyone said. His cousins, his soccer mates, even some of his Australiani neighbours who hated the dagos who’d taken over their street, patted him on the back when they saw him. Hey, heard you’re working on the West Gate Bridge.

  Why didn’t he and the other workers pay more attention? Why didn’t they listen to the unions? The English companies didn’t care — it was all about the schedule, not the men, he knew that. There had been enough fuck-ups, so many demarcation disputes, a never-ending inventory of problems. They should never have trusted them. How many times had the engineers asked them to do work they were not qualified for? Laughing it off as if anyone could do any job, as if they were all unskilled idiots, replaceable.

  Initially he’d gone to all the stop-work meetings, voted to down tools, and marched off the site. So many strikes, sometimes it seemed they were at a stop-work meeting or on strike and picketing the site every week. A day or a half-day lost in a fortnight. But nothing had changed, and over time they’d gotten sick of it, they’d given up. He wanted to save up for a house, Sam for a wedding. They caved. They joined more than one union, so they could do what the engineers asked, even when they didn’t have the right training. They started voting against the strikes. The companies continued to blame the men for the delays and the mounting costs, the timelines stretched further and further. The bridge had become the butt of jokes in the newspapers and on the TV news, on talkback radio, at barbecues, at the bar in pubs across both sides of the river. That bridge ain’t ever going to be finished. The government blamed the companies, the companies blamed the unions, the unions blamed the companies, but in the end the workers were always the scapegoats. They were the ones who paid the price for other people’s bad decisions.

  Sweat dripped down his neck. His knee throbbed. The pain intensified. When he stopped running, he found himself at the Altona end of Francis Street, outside the Footscray Cemetery. His knee was the size of a football. He leant against the cyclone fence and gazed across the cemetery. It was a bleak, arid landscape, a wasteland of concrete tombstones. There were few trees. And some splashes of colour from the bouquets of decaying flowers, of faded plastic flowers.

  He could see that there were mounds of dirt and empty plots waiting for the dead. It was here that on the next day, and the day after, and the day after that, he’d stand watching his workmates being lower
ed into the ground. It was next to those plots he would stand, watching other men’s wives and children, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, weeping. Bob would end up here. And Slav too. Slav, who grew up with a view of the Adriatic Sea, here between two major roads, surrounded by truck fumes and car exhaust.

  Nauseous, Antonello leaned against the cyclone fence, which rattled under his weight. He vomited. The acrid stench made him gag, and he threw up again. The back of his throat ached. His eyes watered over, and for moments the world was a blur. When he recovered himself, he looked up. On the other side of the fence an old woman dressed in black — including a black scarf and thick tights — was staring at him.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked in a Greek accent, and he noticed that around her neck hung a thick gold chain and a cross. Without waiting for a response, she asked, ‘You Greek?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Antonello shook his head. She backed away from the fence. ‘Sorry, I’m okay. Just a bit sick. Sorry, not Greek. Italian.’

  The woman shrugged. ‘Una faccia una razza,’ she said.

  ‘You speak Italian?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Only this. My Italian neighbour likes to say this.’

  Antonello nodded. It was a common enough saying among Italian and Greeks in Melbourne. It translated to one face, one race or we are all wogs here. It wasn’t only the Australians who couldn’t tell the Greeks and Italians apart; even the Greeks and Italians could get it wrong. And there was a connection between the two ethnic groups, even though most Italians hadn’t met any Greeks, and most Greeks hadn’t met an Italian before they arrived in Australia.

  ‘Here, you have one of these,’ she said, handing him barley sugar through the gap in the fence. ‘Sometimes I cry too much, I feel sick. Sugar helps.’

  Antonello took the lolly. Please don’t ask me, he thought, please don’t ask me why I’m here.

  ‘Before my son died, I laughed all day. Now it is hard to laugh. My daughters say I must stop crying. I try. I smile at home. I am a good mother to them. I am a good grandmother. But in the daytime, they go to work and I come here to cry.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He wanted to ask her how she managed smiling at home, not crying. How she managed these two lives. How she managed to keep living.

  ‘Will you come to see my boy?’ She pointed to a row of graves to their left. His first impulse was to say no, but the woman caught him in her gaze, her green eyes beckoning. Initially he had assumed she was his mother’s age, but strands of grey hair were visible under the scarf, and the skin around her eyes was much more heavily wrinkled than Emilia’s. Perhaps she was older, or perhaps grief had aged her.

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  ‘The gate is there,’ she responded, pointing to a spot further along the fence.

  Antonello unwrapped the barley sugar as he limped along the path. She waited for him on the other side of the gate.

  ‘You’re hurt?’

  ‘Just my knee, it’ll be okay,’ he said, taking the bucket of flowers she was carrying. It was full of arum lilies, but they weren’t white like the ones in his parents’ garden — these were a mournful purple, and their odour was musty and damp. She led him along the cracked concrete path, between one of several long rows of graves, until they reached a black marble tombstone.

  ‘My Dimitri and his father,’ she said. Antonello set the bucket on the ground.

  The headstone was divided into three sections. On the left there was a photograph of a man in his early fifties, bald, with a large bulbous nose and black eyes. He was dressed in a suit and tie, his expression serious. Beneath it, Eleftherios Pantelidis, 1909–1969, was engraved in gold letters. The rest of the script was in Greek, and Antonello didn’t understand it. In the centre of the headstone there were two photographs, both of the same young man. In one he was wearing a leather jacket, unzipped, over a white t-shirt. He leant against a motorbike in a James Dean pose, thumbs of both hands in his jean pockets, slick coiffed black hair, eyes gazing into the distance, and only the slightest hint of a grin. In the second photograph, a close-up, Antonello could see his green eyes, same green as his mother’s. Dimitri Pantelidis, 1952–1968.

  ‘My husband can’t live after my son died,’ she said as she reached out to touch the photograph of her son. ‘One day he fell to the ground and did not get up again. I wanted to die too. But I breathe. I walk. I stand. I don’t fall.’ She pointed to the blank section of the headstone. ‘One day. One day I will be here too. Everybody comes here one day.’

  Antonello felt it again, the craving to be dead. If only he could fall to the ground and not get up again, like Eleftherios. To fall into a long and deep sleep.

  ‘People say my husband loved my son too much. But I love my son too much. I gave birth to him. I fed him. I looked after him. My husband was weak. He left me to suffer alone.’ She pulled the dead flowers from the vase and cleaned the grave, wiping it with a damp cloth. Antonello threw the dead flowers in the bin. When he came back, she had filled the vases with clean water and was arranging the lilies. She worked in silence, and he was grateful she didn’t ask him questions.

  ‘I need to go now,’ he said.

  ‘God bless you,’ she said. As he walked away, she took her rosary beads from her pocket and turned back to the grave.

  He drifted back towards the bungalow slowly. His knee was still aching. He avoided the streets from which the broken bridge might be visible. His rage, temporarily subdued, had retreated but it hadn’t disappeared — he could feel it there, gnawing at edges of his consciousness. In its place, a pulsating anxiety. If he hadn’t swapped shifts with Ted, he would most likely be dead. He should’ve been there with his mates. He should’ve fallen with the bridge, with Bob. He should’ve been crushed in the lift with Slav. If he shared these thoughts with the other men, with Paolina, or with his parents, they’d probably think him crazy. He was alive. He should be grateful for his life, he knew that, but he wasn’t grateful, and he had no idea how he was supposed to manage living, breathing, being with Paolina.

  Back in the bungalow, Paolina wrapped the sketch in newspaper and put it away in the top shelf of the wardrobe, underneath her rarely used dowry linen. From the bungalow window, she gazed out into the backyard. Her father was clearing a garden bed ready for the next planting; Giacomo was sitting on the small brick fence that surrounded the fig tree, smoking. His hand was trembling. The bridge collapse was an accident, it was not a war. With time she hoped that Antonello would return to the man he was before the accident, the man she fell in love with.

  ‘I was worried,’ Paolina said when he finally came home.

  ‘I’m sorry I yelled at you,’ he responded, collapsing exhausted onto the bed.

  ‘I understand you’re angry.’

  ‘I’ve never been this angry. I want to punch something, someone. I want to find the person responsible and hit them as hard as I can.’

  ‘Nello, that isn’t going to make anything any better,’ Paolina said. She lay alongside him on the bed so they were looking at each other. She caressed his face with one hand.

  ‘I know … But how could they let this happen? They killed so many men. They could’ve killed all of us, they didn’t give a damn. I’m angry at them. I’m angry at myself. Bob and Slav and Ted and so many others are dead and I’m not …’ He was sobbing now, the tears streaming down his face.

  ‘Nello, please don’t say that. If you … When I think that you might’ve … you might’ve died too …’ Paolina inched closer and wrapped her arms around him.

  Antonello buried his head in her shoulder. Death, willful death, at his own hand, was impossible. He’d made a commitment to Paolina; whatever happened now happened to the two of them. He wasn’t Eleftherios, he would not drop dead from grief. He would not leave Paolina.

  ‘We let the bridge collapse. We knew there were problems … and we didn’t do enough,’ he whisper
ed.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she whispered back. ‘Not yours or Bob’s or Slav’s or Sam’s.’

  Paolina held Antonello until he fell asleep. In the early morning when he woke, the bungalow was unfamiliar and he was as disorientated as an orphaned child waking up on his first morning in a dormitory. In Vizzini, his childhood bedroom was on the top floor, up three flights of stairs. The room was wall-to-wall beds, a double bed and a single bed, pushed together. There were no windows, and the wall was a partition that didn’t reach the ceiling. On the other side, his sisters’ room was identical. He was surrounded by the sounds of his brothers and sisters breathing, snoring, farting. He heard their dreams and nightmares. He belonged in that room. They should’ve stayed in Sicily. What madness had possessed his parents, what madness had made them take the family away from their home?

  Ten days after the collapse, Antonello gave the eulogy at Bob’s funeral. Bob as a boss. Bob as a mate, like family, like an uncle. Bob as a joker, as a dyed-in-the-wool Bulldogs fan. He talked about Bob’s love of the bridge, because Sandy asked him to. Bob was proud of being a rigger and a bridge builder, Sandy said to him before the funeral. Don’t forget. So he held back his anger; he didn’t mention betrayal, he didn’t criticise the companies or the engineers. It was there on the tip of his tongue, but he held back.

  After the funeral, the mourners gathered in the front bar of the Vic. Paolina and Emilia helped the other women to pass around trays of sandwiches, while the men drank and smoked too much as they told their favourite jokes and stories about Bob.