The Bridge Page 7

  ‘You just did, mate.’ The hosts laughed.

  ‘Jo, shower’s free,’ Mandy yelled.

  Jo hit the off button on the radio. ‘Okay, I’m there.’

  On Saturdays, Jo’s shift at the café started at 7.30. If she was out of bed by 7.00, she could manage a shower and breakfast. If she left it any longer, she’d have to skip breakfast, and there was no hope of getting anything at the café until after ten. She threw the covers off, got out of bed, and walked straight down the hallway and into the shower. By the time Mandy called out ‘Coffee?’, Jo was dressed and heading for the kitchen.

  They sat down opposite each other at the square formica table, each in their usual positions, Jo facing the back door and Mandy the hallway. Flicking through that morning’s newspaper, Mandy took bites of her toast while Jo poured milk into a bowl of no-name breakfast cereal. They both drank their instant coffee the same way, with milk and no sugar, out of identical heavy Bulldogs mugs. ‘Anyone can tell you’re mother and daughter,’ people had told Jo numerous times. Of course, there were the obvious things: light brown hair that hung straight and flat, and that you could do nothing with, the sort of hair that hairdressers wanted to highlight, and the identical scattering of freckles over the bridges of both their small noses. But Mandy had hazel eyes, more brown than green, while Jo had her father’s smoky-blue eyes, underscored by dark shadows, which intensified after a late night or not enough sleep. She had his olive skin too — it went dark brown at the slightest hint of summer sun — and because her mother and Ash, who were both susceptible to sunburn, were envious, she thought of it as her best feature.

  Jo wore two earrings in each ear — an elongated silver loop and a stud in the shape of a tree. On her left shoulder, a tattoo of a flock of black birds. Mandy was one of a handful of women of her generation who hadn’t pierced her ears. Mandy said Jo did these things to annoy her, and to be different, and to fit in. ‘Give me a break. Which is it?’ Jo retorted whenever the topic came up.

  Jo pierced her ears the first time when she was eleven; the earrings and the cost of the piercing were a birthday present from her paternal grandmother, Mary. She’d worn earrings ever since. The second piercings were a whim. She was thirteen, and the process involved a sewing needle, boiling water, and a great deal of blood and pain. When Ash turned eighteen and they were both legal, they had gone to get tattoos together; Ash’s was an eagle feather, on her thigh. Ash’s mother listed infections and diseases. Mandy talked about rebellion and regret. Together Jo and Ash were impervious. But it was the last time they had conspired. That was almost six months ago now.

  ‘How did your meeting with the careers teacher go?’ Mandy asked.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Jo shrugged her shoulders in a dismissive gesture she hoped would shut her mother up. The meeting with Mrs Chang hadn’t gone anywhere. In her list of preferences for courses she might want to do at university, she had listed Architecture and Urban Design and Planning at the University of Melbourne and RMIT, but Mrs Chang, whose cluttered office was surrounded by brochures on every career imaginable, said, ‘Great to aim high. But you need to be practical too. What are you going to do if you don’t get in?’ She went on to tell Jo that her teachers predicted she would get a ‘respectable’ VCE score if she ‘put her mind to it’, probably something in the high 60s, but it was unlikely to get her into any of the courses she’d listed, all requiring scores of 75 or above.

  ‘You could apply for Architecture at Deakin in Geelong, you might get in there.’

  ‘I want to stay in the city,’ Jo said.

  ‘What about other careers, teaching? You could teach History or Geography. They seem to be your best subjects,’ Mrs Chang suggested.

  Jo shook her head. ‘I don’t want to be a teacher.’

  ‘You’re a sensible girl with a level head. You’d make a good paramedic or nurse, or one of the other health professions would suit you. Nutrition. Not physiotherapy, though — everyone wants to be a physio, it’s hard to get in.’ Mrs Chang was squinting at a list on the computer monitor.

  ‘No, I don’t want to look after sick people.’

  Mrs Chang showed no sign of disapproval or frustration. ‘There are so many jobs to choose from that it can be confusing,’ she said. ‘Problem is, everyone thinks you have to find the one thing you love — that’s a lot of pressure. Most people work to make a living. You just have to find something that you don’t mind doing.’

  Jo didn’t mind waitressing, but could she spend the rest of her life as a waitress? Follow your passions, teachers in earlier years advised, but maybe that advice was for the clever people. Like Ash. Ash and Jo read the same books, discussed their essays, and came up with a shared set of ideas, but in the process of writing and handing them in, Ash’s essay evolved into an A+ and Jo’s dwindled into C–.

  Ash was going to be a lawyer. No one suggested a fallback position to her. Their friend Mani planned to study music. She might scrape through VCE if she were lucky, but she didn’t care. She had a long list of fallback positions: music teaching or music production or sound technology … Not that she needed them — her band was going to get millions of hits on YouTube and record companies would be killing one another to sign them up, and if that didn’t happen they’d go on Australia’s Got Talent. Laura was doing VCE to placate her parents, but she wanted to be a beautician. She brokered (her father was in finance) a deal with her parents that if she passed VCE, they would pay for a beauty therapy course. Laura’s mother was determined to get Laura to university, to make sure she had a degree and a profession. Laura said her mother lit candles at the local church once a week and prayed to St Joseph to change her daughter’s mind. But Laura wasn’t worried; her parents were sticklers for keeping promises.

  Jo sat on the other side of Mrs Chang’s desk and stared at the large photograph of Halong Bay, the limestone rocks rising out of the green water and disappearing into the mist. ‘Is that where you grew up?’

  ‘My mother came from one of the floating villages in the bay.’ Mrs Chang paused and turned around to look at the photograph. ‘I went last year for a holiday. So many punts and tourists.’

  ‘It’s a great photo. Looks peaceful.’

  ‘I took it for my mother. I had it blown up and framed, but she gave it back to me.’ Mrs Chang let out a long sigh. She was a tall, slender woman in her late fifties. She wore two- and three-piece suits in pastel colours — baby blue, salmon pink, lavender — with silk blouses and high heels. Her manicured nails were painted in hues that matched her outfits. She was out of place at the school, where most of the teachers dressed in various shades of denim. Jo had trouble imagining her on a boat in Halong Bay.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She says it is hard enough to forget. Vietnam has a sad history. Sometimes things happen to people that they want to forget.’ She glanced at her watch and frowned. ‘So, enough chat, Jo. Were you listening to my suggestions? Or is your heart set on studying urban design?’

  Mr Williams, Jo’s Year 10 Geography teacher, had introduced her to urban design. His passion was ‘environmental justice’, making industrial areas safer, more liveable. He had a long list of activist ‘wins’ that included saving forests, saving rivers, and helping secure the vote for Indigenous Australians. Ian, the students called him — at least when the principal wasn’t in earshot — and rolled their eyes when he became overly zealous, picking on their plastic drink bottles, on paper wastage, on the clothes they wore, going on about where they were made and how much the manufacturers paid poor workers in Asia. He spent several classes trying to get them to stop eating meat by showing them gruesome videos of abattoirs and chickens in battery farms.

  Jo volunteered for one of his ‘urban regeneration’ projects and helped plant three hundred trees along Stony Creek, the polluted waterway that snaked its way through several industrial
suburbs from St Albans to Yarraville. It was hard work. They cleared weeds, broke up the hard topsoil to reach the rich brown loam underneath, and planted drooping sheoak, river red gums, and various acacias — just saplings, most less than 10 centimetres high. For weeks after, Jo researched local trees. She discovered the western suburbs had fewer trees, and certainly fewer mature trees, than other areas of the city. She discovered the council’s list of significant trees and went exploring along the Maribyrnong River, where there were the native kurrajongs and sugar gums, as well as date palms and pepper trees. The majestic old elms, in Stephen Street, in Fairlie Street, and at Footscray Primary School, were her favourites: from their sturdy grey trunks they rose 20 metres, but while their canopies were wide and dense, their roots were shallow and visible, like the veins of her grandmother’s hands.

  She didn’t mention the elms to Ian. They were an introduced species, and he would not approve.

  When she was researching the trees, she wasn’t worrying. It was as if she’d taken a happy pill. She stopped watching what she was eating, fearful that she was going to put on weight with every mouthful; there were no voices in her head goading her about becoming the fat girl again. Anxiety about the future — about having no direction, no talents, no passions — no longer consumed every minute of her day. She stopped spending nights lying in bed creating endless disaster scenarios — her mother dying, the refineries blowing up, a terrorist attack in Melbourne. The conversations with her friends, especially Ash, went unanalysed and she didn’t go over them word by word, until even a simple exchange seemed fraught with double meanings, with intimations and innuendo.

  But she fell in love with Ian and all her insecurities resurfaced.

  ‘It’s a crush, you’ll get over it. And he’s old and not even that good-looking,’ Ash said.

  For more than a year Ian was the target of her affections, the main protagonist of her fantasies. She switched subjects to be in his classes. She went to demonstrations to watch him from the sidelines and accidentally bumped into him when he was on yard duty at lunch time. She imagined herself knocking on Ian’s door. She imagined following him down the hallway of his house, past the Save the Whale, Climate Change Is Here Now, and Plant a Tree and Breathe posters on the walls, to his bedroom, where they fell onto his bed, where they kissed and fucked and where over and over he declared his love.

  What was the difference between fantasy and reality? Was it possible to make fantasies come true?

  Since he left the school, Jo hadn’t seen Ian. She was grateful that he introduced her to environmental design, to the possibility of regenerating the industrial landscape. But she wasn’t going to be an activist. She wasn’t going to make the industrial suburbs more liveable. She would be lucky to get a job she didn’t hate.

  ‘Maybe if you made a list of possibilities,’ Mandy suggested.

  ‘Sure, I’ll do that.’

  ‘Jo.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I am trying to help.’

  ‘Mrs Chang said I could find something I don’t mind doing. Like you. You don’t mind the deli, do you?’

  ‘Jo, there is no need to be like that.’

  Jo didn’t respond, and they sat there for a while in silence.

  ‘What do you have planned for today?’ Mandy asked in a conciliatory, change-the-subject tone that Jo found even more irritating.

  ‘It’s Saturday — my plan’s to go to work, like I do every Saturday.’ She didn’t look up. She wanted to say, Why do you ask such stupid questions?

  ‘And after?’

  ‘Studying. Then going out with Ash to Rosie’s party,’ Jo said.

  ‘I haven’t seen Ashleigh for ages.’

  ‘That’s because we’ve got so much fucking — sorry, so much homework.’

  ‘I know it’s a hard year, but it’s almost over.’

  It wasn’t just that it was a hard year. Ash had changed; she was more distant, less available. The friendship was waning. Like the first drop in temperature after a long warm summer, the change was subtle at first. No storms. No heavy rains. But Ash was slipping out of Jo’s grasp. That was real. It wasn’t her imagination. Hanging on to it, pulling it back, was like being on the losing side of one of those tug-of-war games they played when she was in primary school — the more effort she made, the less available Ash became. Whenever they saw each other on a weekend, Jo planned to say something. Say something. Only she didn’t, and the periods of anxiety had grown longer and more frequent.

  For months, Jo had avoided her mother’s questions about Ash. What could she say anyway? Even if she did talk to Mandy, what help would Mandy be? The act of confiding was foreign to Jo, even with her mother, even when she was young. When the anxiety attacks first started, she tried explaining to Mandy. The rising panic that came with sweat, and nausea, and dizziness. Mandy didn’t understand. She was sympathetic and concerned, but dismissive: ‘You don’t have anything to worry about.’ Jo understood there were problems her mother couldn’t fix.

  And it wasn’t as if she and Ash had stopped being friends. They weren’t fighting. Not like they did when they were younger, those I never want to see you ever again fights. Those I wish you’d disappear down a big hole forever fights. They weren’t hanging out after school and on weekends, but they were together every day at school. Just yesterday, at lunchtime, they had been together with Laura and Mani at their usual bench, on the edge of the oval, and everything had seemed normal. They’d talked about going to Rosie’s party together, about what they would wear, who was going to take responsibility for organising a card to go with their gift, a voucher for a facial at the local day spa.

  ‘What if I come to your place to get ready? We can drive around and pick up Laura and Mani on the way?’ Ash had asked.

  ‘No Kevin?’

  ‘I thought you’d prefer it to be just us.’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t like Kevin —’ Jo began.

  ‘No boys! We can all go single,’ Laura interrupted.

  ‘Sure,’ Mani said, grinning. ‘You just want to flirt all night.’

  They all laughed, and Jo watched Ash laugh. Was Ash just pretending they were friends?

  ‘Will you be home for dinner?’ Mandy asked.

  ‘No idea — don’t worry about dinner. I’ll find something to eat.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘It’s 7.20,’ Mandy said. ‘You’re gonna be late.’

  ‘Not if I run.’ Jo dropped the spoon into the half-eaten cereal, stood up and grabbed her phone, and ran towards the door.

  ‘Have a good day,’ Mandy called out, but Jo was gone, the front door slamming shut.

  It was almost noon, and the Two Hands Café in Yarraville was overflowing. Late risers were sitting down to massive plates of eggs and bacon, smashed avocado, and sautéed mushrooms, and filmgoers were eating quick lunches before the early afternoon screenings. There were long queues for takeaway and tables. Jo was clearing plates, her back to the door, when Ash’s sister, Jane, tapped her on the shoulder. Ash’s mother, Rae, dressed in her designer activewear — stripped leggings and a black top that Ash had told Jo cost a fortune — was standing at the end of the queue waiting for a table.

  ‘Hey,’ Jane said, ‘do we get to jump the queue because we’re, like, family? I’m practically your sister. And I’m starving.’ Jane was wearing the baggy ‘Thrasher’ t-shirt that Jo had given her for her thirteenth birthday. Jo noticed the glare from a woman standing ahead of them in the queue.

  ‘She’s joking,’ Rae said, loudly enough for the woman to hear. ‘How are you, Jo? I haven’t seen you for a few weeks.’

  ‘I’m good, just so much homework. No time to breathe.’

  ‘I’m going to give VCE a miss,’ Jane said.

  ‘We’ll see about that.’ Rae smiled at her daughter and Jane frowned.


  ‘I’m going to be a pro skater. I don’t need school for that.’

  Rae winked at Jo. Jane elbowed her mother. ‘Just wait and see.’ And all three of them laughed.

  ‘They might have degrees for skateboarders by the time you finish school,’ Jo teased.

  ‘But she thinks she’s already an expert,’ Rae said.

  The bell in the kitchen rang. ‘Argh, sorry, I have to go,’ Jo said. ‘I’m sure you’ll get a table soon. See ya.’

  ‘Bye, Jo,’ Rae said. ‘Say hello to your mum, I haven’t seen her in ages.’

  Jo headed for the kitchen, where the meals for one of her tables were ready to serve. Then a table asked for the bill and another table for water and a third, a large group of what looked like an extended family, wanted to order. By the time she had a chance for a breather, Jane and Rae had been seated at the other end of the restaurant. She was run off her feet for the next half hour and didn’t get a chance to talk to them again.

  Jane had said ‘like family’, but they weren’t family, even though until recently she had spent at least one, sometimes two, nights a week eating and sleeping at their house over the last six years. If she and Ash stopped being friends, she wouldn’t any longer have anything to do with Ash’s family. What would they be to her if she and Ash stopped being friends? Would they slip away, become acquaintances, and then finally strangers?

  Normally Jo worked an eight-hour shift, 7.30 to 3.30 or 8.00 to 4.00, but her boss, Ted, had reluctantly agreed to a five hour-shift, because she needed to finish her English essay.

  It was a mild spring day, except for the wind — almost a gust that, even when the sun pushed through the clouds, kept the temperature down. Normally by this time of the year, Melburnians could be heard yearning for warmer weather, but the city was still reeling from the Black Saturday bushfires in February. One hundred and seventy people dead, thousands of homes and hectares of land destroyed. As Jo left the café, she heard a couple talking about the fires and their hope that this year the holiday season would come with cooler temperatures and more rain.