The Bridge Read online

  The men also talked about Bolte’s long speeches on grief and tragedy. He had guaranteed that a Royal Commission would investigate, and that workers would not return to the site until it was safe. And he had declared that finishing the bridge would be a way of honouring the dead.

  ‘Well, the job does have to be finished,’ he heard Johnno say. Antonello watched the men down their beers and make pledges to return. He was shocked and disappointed that so many of them seemed to have bought the Premier’s empty promises.

  As soon as he could, Antonello slipped out of the pub and headed for the riverbank, keeping his back to the ruined bridge. Behind him, the punt was crossing from east to west. Once the bridge was built, there wouldn’t be any need for the punt. He would miss it. On weekends, there was a carnival atmosphere. From a small food stall on the side of the road, a father and son sold fish and chips, party pies and pasties. Drivers lined their cars up, waiting for the ferry, and went to buy hot fried food. It was here Antonello ate his first Chiko Roll, hot and peppery. And his first ice-cream from the local Mr Whippy van — not as good as the gelato back home, but sweet and soft and creamy.

  On the ferry, he loved to hang over the rail, watching the river and feeling the spray on his face. As the punt forged a channel through the water, children ran in between cars and bicycles, and adults lit cigarettes and caught up with neighbours and workmates, as if they might be on a yacht sailing the Pacific instead of an old punt chugging across the Yarra.

  He tried to picture the river and the bank long ago, when it was called Birrarung and the only way across was in canoes. Was it possible to turn time back? He imagined destroying what remained of the bridge — blowing it up, or pulling it down, every last piece. He imagined gathering all the survivors together so they could tear the bridge down. They were the bridge builders: they had built it, and they could take it apart. Return the river to itself. If only he could make a ghost of the bridge. He would go back for that. He would go back to obliterate it.

  He kept going until he was almost in Williamstown. From a phone booth, he rang his brother Vince. Vince didn’t ask any questions. He arrived in his old Holden, picked Antonello up, and without a word drove him home the long way, through Newport and Altona, avoiding the bridge.

  At Slav’s funeral, Antonello gave another eulogy, and as he spoke the words floated over the congregation, shrouding the church. He couldn’t hear his own voice above the sound of Slav’s Aunt Marisa sobbing.

  In the fortnight after the collapse, Antonello attended eleven funerals: Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Presbyterian, and even Jehovah’s Witness. There was no difference — each family was heartbroken. There was nothing to say, nothing that could be said. The survivors — some in bandages and casts, or leaning on walking sticks — turned up dressed in suits and ties and sat behind the families of the dead, wounded sentinels unsure of their obligations. Outside, after each service, some were as silent and withdrawn as Antonello; others were loud and angry; some were militant, their voices punching fists of rage into the crisp spring air. Their bridge was in ruins, their mates dead. They were all lost.

  2009

  Chapter 4

  As if orchestrated by a callous conductor, the morning came crashing into the room. First the warning bells of the railway gates, followed by the blaring horns of the first trains — one city-bound, one headed for Werribee. Then the screech of the exhaust brakes as the semi-trailers, weighed down by replenished tanks from the refineries and the CSR sugar plant, were caught by the lights at the intersection of Francis and Hyde on their way to the freeway. Mrs Nguyễn’s aging alsatian, Wes, his deep bark setting off other dogs in a call-and-response. The rasping cries of the wattle birds. The neighbourhood was waking from its slumber as grumpy as an old man after a big night: joints aching, belly churning, and head screaming. It was 6.05 am. Mandy Neilson sighed and wrapped the pillow around her head to block her ears, and imagined the quiet stillness in the neighbourhood when her grandmother first moved into the house as a young bride in the 1940s, almost seventy years ago.

  All her life Mandy had lived in this house, but all her life she had dreamt of moving to the country. A cottage on a riverbank: nothing too grand, something small and isolated, surrounded by bush or forest.

  The cottage, the idea of it, she had inherited from her mother. ‘A pie-in-the-sky dream,’ her father, Tom, called it. He wasn’t being cruel, just realistic. ‘Wishing don’t make it so, Sal,’ he said whenever Sal brought it up. In her last year, Mandy’s mother was too sick to get out of bed. By that time, even if they’d won the lotto, or her father picked every trifecta for the whole racing season, there was no likelihood of a cottage for Sal.

  Before the illness, Sal was a formidable woman, tall and strong. She ruled the house and was social, and socially minded. Women from the street gathered in her kitchen in the mornings drinking tea, sharing stories and gossip. She volunteered at the school tuck shop once a week and cooked extra food for an elderly neighbour whose children were ruthless and neglectful. Yet in that last year of her life, she became gaunt. Her voice was barely audible; to catch her words, Mandy lowered her ear to her mother’s lips. Sal lost interest in people. Refused to let the neighbours in. She reserved her strength for both her children, John and Mandy, but especially Mandy, her youngest. In the afternoons, after school, Mandy sat on her mother’s bed. They ignored the traffic and Sal’s shallow breathing, and conjured up their dream home: a short stroll to the river where Tom and John could fish, with a large and rambling garden — a section for vegetables and a section for flowers — surrounded by native bush where they could meander without ever seeing another person. They flicked through the magazines Sal’s sisters brought when they came to visit, and tore out pictures of gardens, of furniture. Of cottages like theirs.

  Mandy kept her mother’s clippings in an old suitcase under her bed. They were dried and yellowed. They were waiting.

  The neighbourhood was going through a real-estate boom, and all sorts of people were moving in. Posh people, her father would’ve called them. Posh and up themselves. Last week, after years of thinking about it, Mandy had organised a property valuation. A woman in a black suit, high heels, and a silk scarf in the company’s yellow and red arrived with a clipboard and a tick-the-box list. She marched through the house, inspecting and making notes. Mandy, embarrassed, sat in the kitchen waiting for the verdict. The house was a dump, a rickety double-fronted weatherboard. Her parents had inherited the mortgage from their parents, and with it the accumulated wear and tear. With the help of a mate who knew a bit about plumbing, her father had moved the toilet inside and put a shower head over the bathtub. It leaned a little to the left, and they hadn’t been able to get rid of the hammering in the pipes.

  Mandy had repainted a room or two, but otherwise there had been little upkeep since it was built in the 1920s. It was old and tired. The stumps at the back of the house were rotting, and the hallway sloped downwards. The house couldn’t stand on its own two feet. The roof leaked — over the bath (not such a big issue) and in a couple of places along the hallway. On days when the rain was a downpour, Mandy placed buckets in prime locations before she left for work, just in case. They never overflowed, but once when her daughter, Jo, and Jo’s best friend, Ashleigh, were in the house alone during a storm, they filled the buckets with tap water, right up to the rim. When Mandy came home, she panicked and even rang a couple of local plumbers to get quotes to have the roof fixed, until Jo and Ashleigh broke into a fit of giggles and confessed.

  There were cracks in the plaster in every room. Outside, there were missing weatherboards. Mould in the bathroom grew around the base of the bathtub and ran up and down the walls. It couldn’t be stopped, even with bleach and hot water and hours of Mandy’s scrubbing. The first time they moved the furniture in Jo’s bedroom, when she had insisted on redecorating, they were surprised to find that under Jo’s bed the pale carpet was a rich royal bl
ue, and the roses, everywhere else a washed-out pink, were a deep red. At the inspection, Mandy half expected the agent to laugh and say, ‘You think someone will want to buy this dump? Seriously?’ But it seemed even with the traffic and the pollution, even with the Mobil terminal across the road, her run-down house would sell and she would be able to afford a couple of acres somewhere in central Victoria.

  She’d sell at the end of the year, once Jo finished school. She hadn’t told Jo; it made sense to wait until after the exams. No point causing her extra stress. Mandy imagined herself sitting in the passenger seat of the removal van, all her possessions stacked in the back. She imagined staring into the rearview mirror as the house, the tanks, and the West Gate Bridge disappeared.

  Down the hallway, Jo slept as if the traffic were a soft lullaby sung to her by her mother — though that would’ve been a different mother because Mandy couldn’t hold a tune, and her lullabies, when she’d attempted them, hadn’t soothed Jo to sleep.

  ‘… romantic thing you’ve ever done? Something to make your partner take notice. Ring us now.’

  Without opening her eyes, Jo raised an arm and slammed the snooze button on the alarm. The radio stopped and she slipped further down under the warm doona. The station played top-100 hits, and in between three comedians, the morning radio hosts, delivered endless jokes, mostly at the expense of celebrities and politicians, but also at the expense of a string of people who rang in to tell their stories. The hosts invented silly pranks, and from across the city eager listeners volunteered to participate. There were numerous wedding proposals and even a couple of on-air weddings; people confessed sins and secrets as if the radio weren’t a public broadcasting service, as if there were no possibility of their loved ones discovering they had been betrayed, lied to, deceived. The hosts revelled in devising competitions that required people willing to look ridiculous and foolish — to turn up on the steps of Parliament House in their underwear or to sit all morning in their bathers on deckchairs on the steps of Flinders Street Station. The stunts were childish and not even funny; Jo didn’t consider taking part, no matter the prize. There were times, though, even as she rolled her eyes at these people, when she envied them and their propensity for joy and abandonment — their willingness to be ridiculed and laughed at, to allow their secrets and flaws to be exposed.

  ‘They’re bogans. Not a brain between them,’ Ash had said one day in response to Jo’s bewilderment that a young woman gave her name and suburb.

  ‘Bad enough she’s a nymphomaniac with a weird fetish, but telling the whole world, so embarrassing,’ Jo said.

  With the hope they might catch the afternoon sun, they were sitting in a row on a wooden bench, the skirts of their school uniforms hitched up and their legs stretched long. A group of boys were playing handball against the brick wall of the canteen, and the regular thump of the ball and the boys’ yelps and shouts broke the silence of the deserted school yard. The junior students were back in class. Jo and Ash with Mani and Laura had a free period. They and the boys should’ve been in the library studying.

  ‘In VCE you don’t have time to waste,’ their History teacher said as she rushed past pushing a trolley of books. The girls waited until she disappeared into the staff room and burst out laughing.

  ‘Wonder if Ms Sacks heard you talking about nymphs with a fetish for men with big bellies. She’s running to the staff room to tell them about Kinky Jo,’ Mani said.

  ‘Jo? Kinky, as if,’ Ash laughed.

  When the bell rang and they stood up, pulled down their skirts, and rushed off to collect books from their lockers. Jo thought about Ash’s as if. As if anyone would believe boring, anxious Jo could be kinky, is that what Ash thought?

  The radio started up again but as the first bars of Lady Gaga’s ‘Just Dance’ came on, Jo hit the snooze button. Moments later, she heard her mother’s bedroom door open.

  ‘Jo,’ Mandy called out. ‘Are you awake?’

  Jo pulled the doona over her head. She felt her mother’s irritation, the silent, seething scent of it wafting down the hallway.

  ‘There are some things,’ Mandy had taken to saying, ‘that aren’t worth fighting about.’ It had become an automatic response at the end of their frequent arguments. In Jo it spawned an uncontrollable loathing, like nausea brought on by the unexpected swallow of rancid milk. This loathing and the accompanying urge to yell abuse at her mother had become compulsive. Mandy’s inane questions — How was school? Did you hang out with Ashleigh today? Do you want chicken for dinner? — her lame clothes, her boring unhealthy dinners, so irritated Jo that it seemed impossible to imagine a future in which they might get along.

  ‘I’m always walking on eggshells and biting my tongue,’ Jo overheard Mandy telling Mrs Nguyễn over the fence. ‘Everyone tells me to grit my teeth because surviving the teenage years is tough, but it’s a temporary stage and we’ll get along better when Jo’s older.’

  ‘Of course. She’s young, a teenager. It’s all those hormones,’ Mrs Nguyễn said.

  ‘I’ve no idea how mothers and daughters get along, or even if it’s possible. I’m winging it,’ Mandy said. ‘Sometimes I miss my little girl.’ Mandy repeated this too often.

  ‘The little girl you miss,’ Jo always told Mandy when she brought this up, ‘is in your head, all sugar and spice, it isn’t me. It was never me.’

  ‘You were such a good child, so —’

  ‘Mum, for fuck’s sake.’

  Little provocation was needed to trigger these fights. The child her mother conjured up in these conversations reminded Jo of the girls in the junk-mail catalogues, in their pink dresses or polka-dot jumpsuits, grinning as they skipped off the page. Jo had been a chubby child, not like the other girls her age, who were either waif-like ballerinas or lanky football-playing, tree-climbing, somersaulting tomboys. She hated being reminded of her ‘fat’ days. She hated that her mother remembered with affection the child she wanted to forget.

  From bed, Jo could sense her mother stopping to take a deep breath, and then expelling it. Or maybe she was counting: one, two, three.

  ‘Jo? Jo!’

  ‘I heard you,’ Jo yelled back, and in a whisper, ‘Fucking leave me alone.’ She rolled over so her back faced the door.

  ‘Don’t go back to sleep or you’ll be late. I’m going to jump into the shower — then it’s all yours.’

  When Mandy turned on the shower, there was the usual hammering followed by Mandy’s loud cursing. Jo sighed. The house was a dump, no arguing with that, but it was their home and Jo loved it. Her first ever memory was at this house. She was three years old. She didn’t remember any of the back story, but she’d been told the details often: after weeks of fighting, her mother decided to leave her father, packed up all their clothes into two suitcases, and called a taxi. In her memory, it was like a scene from a movie — when they arrived, the taxi door opened, and Grandpa Tom, a tall, lanky man with weathered skin and thick brown hair, was leaning against the verandah post, smoking. When he saw her, he twisted the cigarette butt between his fingers, threw it into the garden, and opened his arms wide. She ran straight to him. He picked her up and swung her around until the world turned into a whirl of shapes and colours. When they stopped spinning, she wrapped her arms around his neck; he smelt of tobacco and sweat. Her small hands ran over the prickles of his unshaven chin.

  ‘Welcome home, Joey girl,’ he said and he took her to the front bedroom. ‘This is your room.’

  It was a light blue, the colour of her grandmother Mary’s hydrangeas that they sometimes made into bouquets to take to church.

  ‘Blue is my favourite colour,’ Jo said.

  ‘Is it?’ Mandy said with a laugh.

  In the room there was a big bed. At the flat, Jo’s cot was small and narrow, and squeezed into the corner next to her parents’ bed.

  ‘Where is your bed?’ Jo asked her mother, an
d together the three of them toured the house. Every time Mandy told this story, she added, ‘Jo didn’t ask for her father, not once.’

  Holding Grandpa Tom’s hand, feeling the rough, calloused skin, she was safe. That memory was a memory of coming home. The house was her home. She loved that everywhere the marks of the past, of her grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ lives, were there waiting for her to discover. Not cut away under a cosmetic surgeon’s knife, gone forever, like Ash’s house, renovated several times until the Californian bungalow was a ghostly façade. The inside of the old property had been gutted and a new one architecturally designed. A whole new upstairs floor was added that housed the bedrooms, and downstairs there was a big open-plan living area with a long table and a wall of glass windows and doors that looked out into the landscaped garden. There were new silver appliances, glistening and glowing, and feature walls in colours with foreign names, like aubergine and turmeric.

  Jo couldn’t imagine ever selling the house. It would be a betrayal of her grandparents who spent a lifetime trying to pay it off, who died in debt. Mandy owned it now. Uncle John made a few good deals — paid off the last ten thousand and signed the house over to Mandy. ‘An act of charity,’ Aunt Joy called it.

  Jo would inherit it and she would leave it to her children.

  ‘… And what did you skywrite?’

  ‘Well, I wanted them to write, Jade, you have the sexiest pussy ever.’

  The female host, obviously miffed, said, ‘Watch your language.’

  ‘Sure, sure no offence meant. I thought she’d think it was funny. Anyway, the guy wouldn’t write that in the sky. He said he would get fined or arrested or something. So in the end we agreed it would say, “Jade, I love you. Marry me?” A bit lame but I thought it’d still be romantic. I thought Jade’d get a real hoot out of it being in the sky, you know. Anyway, I paid him the dough and waited. Well, the arsehole — can I say that on radio?’