The Bridge Page 9

  ‘My mother used to say your mother was born with no tastebuds,’ Paolina said with a laugh.

  ‘Once, I said to my mother, “Why do we have to do everything with Zia Pina? All you do is fight.” She slapped me. Tu sei una cretina, she yelled at me. È mia sorrella.’

  After they hung up, Paolina sewed a small tag, ‘This is for Rosa’, on the Non Disturbare sign before she put it back in the drawer.

  Outside, Antonello lined up his three rows of ten stakes. As the tomato plants grew, he would train them up the stakes and they’d bear fruit — enough tomatoes to share with his children, Alex and Nicki, and their families; with the neighbours; with friends. This year Paolina might not be the one to pick them. She might not be the one to put them in paper bags and distribute them. Although the cancer had slowed, it hadn’t stopped. Death was as sly and as agile as the black cat skulking in the bushes, its eye on the birds blinded by the lure of Antonello’s garden. Her children and her grandchildren would mourn her and move on with their lives, but Antonello would be alone. Alone in the garden. Alone in the house. She couldn’t shake the feeling of guilt and sorrow, the sense that she was abandoning him.

  Paolina made a cup of tea and sat at the kitchen table. In front of her was that morning’s Herald Sun. She unfolded it and turned the pages, reading the headlines. The image of the temporary suicide fence on the West Gate Bridge caught her attention; she knew it would’ve caught Antonello’s. The photograph was taken at peak hour, early morning. The traffic heading towards the city was heavy: several lanes of cars and trucks bumper to bumper.

  ‘Four times the number the bridge was made to hold,’ Antonello repeated often. The bridge collapsing again was an ongoing possibility. And the falling dreams persisted, though neither mentioned them — what was there left to say? It had been almost forty years now, and she was used to being woken by his cries, by his legs hitting hard against the mattress.

  In the months after the collapse, she’d been adamant they should move away, but Antonello refused. In hindsight, she understood he was suffering from post-traumatic stress, but none of the survivors went to counselling. The doctors treated their physical injuries and gave them sleeping tablets.

  Antonello and Paolina saw the bridge daily; there was no avoiding it. Whenever they went to the shops or walked to Alex’s house or picked up their granddaughters from school, the bridge towered over them. Whenever they took the train into the city or headed for a drive to Williamstown or Altona, it was there, a deep scar on the horizon. Antonello never drove across it, not even to visit Nicki in Port Melbourne, on the other side of the bridge.

  Paolina watched him hammer in the last stake. She loved him. She belonged to him, and he to her, but he wasn’t the man she married. That Antonello, young and carefree, existed only in her memories and imaginings, constructed from what ifs and if onlys. He was phantom lingering at edges of their marriage. For years she prayed he’d return, but he never did.

  The bridge was having a bad year. In the summer, a father stopped at the top, picked up his young daughter, and threw her over the side, into the river below, while her helpless brothers, aged two and six, sat in the car watching and crying. A few days later, a teenage boy, bullied at school, strolled onto the bridge — where walkers are banned — and jumped off.

  ‘The West Gate is a well-known suicide spot,’ Alex had told her recently.

  ‘I’ve never heard any reported.’

  ‘There are media protocols to stop the reporting,’ Alex had explained. ‘After each suicide reported in the newspaper, there is a spate of other suicides, copycatting.’ Copycat: an insult her students had often flung at one another. Copycat from Ballarat … It was a child’s word, for harmless teasing and mocking, for childish games, for wanting to be included and liked, for wanting to do what your friends were doing.

  Paolina turned her attention back to the newspaper article. According to the journalist, it was predicted that the temporary barriers would prevent at least two suicides a month. She whispered a short prayer for all those people in such despair that they saw death as their only option. Even with the cancer and the treatment, which was awful, she could not imagine voluntarily giving up her life.

  Antonello left the hammer on the low brick fence that surrounded the garden, discarded his gloves, and limped towards the bench under the lemon tree. His back was stiff. His knee ached. The doctor said he needed a knee reconstruction, but the knee was a legacy, and he didn’t think he could have it repaired. His body was sluggish and unreliable. As a young man he had taken his strength for granted. Six days a week of physical labour, extra shifts whenever he could get them, soccer after work, and dancing on Friday and Saturday nights. The first time he danced with Paolina, they waltzed and rocked and twisted around the dance floor, resting only when the band took breaks. She was so light in his arms, he was so strong. He remembered the sweet smell of her jasmine perfume and the pleasure of his hand on the hollow of her back.

  Antonello could hear the shouts and laughter of children and their parents making their way to the oval for Saturday afternoon football. He could hear the constant hum of traffic on the bridge. Every day, at least once a day, he gave the bridge his undivided attention. At least once a week this included a pilgrimage to the site to stand in front of the monument to the dead, but today he stayed in the garden and whispered their names: Slav Stronvenji and Bob Westland and young Ted Richards, whose surname he hadn’t learnt until after the collapse. It was a prayer of sorts, though not to any God, but to the ghosts, ever present, and to the unfinished business between them.

  His past was a web of black tunnels. Some days he was trapped in them for hours. Some days the chanting of the names was the only way to stop the memories, and the pain, but the morning’s newspaper articles about the bridge had triggered his anxiety. His hands were shaking. And when he closed his eyes, to calm himself, he was sucked back in time as if through a portal. He could see himself, a young man, standing on the viewing platform, gazing up at the half-made bridge. It was a cold morning, and ominous black clouds threatened rain. He was waiting for Paolina’s class. The children, when they arrived after 10.00 am, were wearing scarves and jackets. Twenty-four excited ten-year-olds, lined up in twos on the viewing platform.

  In the days beforehand, Paolina had researched bridges as symbols — of crossings and transitions, of journeys between places. Antonello helped her draw pictures of bridges in her workbook and on project paper, pictures she planned to reproduce with coloured chalk on the blackboard. He helped her find copies of the bridge designs and photographs of different kinds of bridges: logs tossed over streams, with people walking across like trapeze artists on balance beams; small wooden bridges for pedestrians; bigger wooden bridges made to be used by horses and carts. Then the modern bridges — the Sydney Harbour, the Golden Gate, and the George Washington.

  Slav helped Paolina look for poems and songs about bridges. But they found that many of the poems were about bridges falling, like ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’. She left those off her list, and settled instead on Will Allen Dromgoole’s ‘The Bridge Builder’.

  She and Slav insisted on reading the poem to Antonello. ‘This poem is about you and your workmates,’ she said, ‘building a bridge for the future.’

  She asked Antonello if he would talk to her students about the bridge. He told her there were people whose job it was to talk to schoolchildren, but she insisted she wanted him to talk to them too, and he agreed because he knew she was making an effort, working against her own apprehensions.

  After the education officer, Robert, had spoken to the children about the bridge and its construction, Antonello told them about his job as a rigger.

  ‘Is it scary up there?’ one of the boys asked.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Antonello said, ‘but you get used to it.’

  ‘How do they stick those giant towers into the water? Seems like they’d fal
l over,’ another kid called out.

  ‘They’re called piers or pylons, and they’re solid concrete,’ Antonello said. ‘I can tell you they dug deep holes to put them in.’

  ‘Your husband is cute, Miss,’ Antonello heard a girl call out cheekily.

  ‘I am going to be a rigger,’ another girl said.

  ‘Girls can’t be riggers,’ a boy yelled back.

  ‘Yes, they can.’

  Soon all the children were arguing and it took some effort for Paolina to settle them.

  ‘Come on, children, Mr Milovich and Mr Bassillo have work to do. Say thank you and good-bye.’

  ‘Thank you Mr Milovich and thank you Mr Bassillo,’ the children called out in a sing-song tone.

  Antonello chuckled as he watched them disappearing around the corner. He turned and caught sight of a tanker gliding under the bridge towards Williamstown. On the eastern side, the punt waited for the ship to pass. The piers stood tall and grey, formidable, twenty-eight of them in a row, like gravestones. Gravestones. He made the sign of the cross over his chest and said a prayer. Dear God, please keep the bridge safe.

  ‘By the time those kids are in high school, the punt will be history. The cars and the trucks will come and go on the bridge, and they won’t notice the ships.’ Bob came up behind him. They collected their sandwiches from the lunchroom and headed for the riverbank. Crows, gulls, and miners flew around them, undisturbed by the bridge building. The birds flew out towards the tankers and the punt, and circled to land by the men in the hope that they’d be thrown scraps.

  ‘Sometimes I don’t think we are ever going to finish this bridge,’ Antonello said.

  ‘Me too. But imagine that, a fucking half-made bridge. I’m sure the politicians would love that. I can hear Bolte,’ Bob said, and then, mimicking the Premier’s measured voice, ‘“Oh, I’m so pleased to announce the launch of the half-made bridge, a legacy I will be remembered for — alongside the hanging of that mongrel Ryan.”’ Bob was laughing so much that he couldn’t finish the sentence.

  Antonello chuckled. ‘You could’ve been a politician, Bob.’

  ‘Sure, and the bridge could be a public art sculpture, but it’s meant to be a bridge.’

  ‘Some of the blokes think it’s doomed. Sam’s mother has been saying it’s cursed and that we should get a strega to come and take the evil eye off and remove the curse.’

  ‘A strega?’

  ‘A witch.’

  ‘Well, maybe a witch would help. Can’t make it much worse. Just when I think things are going smoothly, something else happens. Too many problems, we all know that. What worries me is that everyone is tired of all the problems, all of us — the bosses, the bloody engineers, and the workers too. When everyone is exhausted, that’s when problems happen.’

  Why hadn’t he listened to those premonitions, to those warnings? Antonello gripped the side of the bench. He could feel tears falling.

  When he opened his eyes, he caught sight of the prickly pear. The fruit was beginning to turn orange and yellow. His next-door neighbour was on a mission to get Antonello to cut it down. ‘You know it’s a noxious weed,’ she insisted. She said they had a moral obligation to only grow plants native to the area. Their disagreements were usually friendly — they both supported the Greens, they agreed that more should be done to address climate change and to ensure land rights for Indigenous Australians — but he refused to give in on the prickly pears, and no amount of coaxing from Paolina, who said their relationship with Kathy was more important than any plant, would change his mind.

  It had taken him a whole afternoon to cut all of the fronds that were growing towards Kathy’s side of the fence. But he couldn’t bear to cut it down. In the valleys between Vizzini and the neighbouring towns, farmers grew fields of prickly pears and sold the fruit at the market. Prickly pears reminded him of home.

  Since he’d stopped work to be with Paolina, he spent most of his spare time in the garden. The broccoli and the broad beans were ready to pick, and soon there would be eggplants and capsicums too. The Italian parsley in Paolina’s raised garden had gone wild, and the first shoots of the bulbs the girls helped their grandmother plant were beginning to appear. On their next visit, he’d act out his disapproval, so they could roll their eyes behind his back and laugh. It was so much easier with his grandchildren than it had ever been with his children.

  Once, his daughter, Nicki, had asked him about the bridge. She was doing a project for school. He refused to talk about it, but she persisted and persisted. They fought. Their relationship had never been great, but it was worse after that. He should’ve told her about the bridge, but he was afraid he couldn’t tell it as a story or a piece of history. He was afraid to tell her that he’d seen things, known that there were problems, and remained silent. So often he’d told his children to be responsible, to look out for each other and for their friends. How could he tell her that he was at work the day they jacked up the box girders on the west side, and that when the two half boxes were not the same height, he didn’t insist they take them back down? How could he tell her he was one of the riggers who hoisted ten big blocks, each one weighing 8 tons, up to the top and spread them across the higher span to force it down? How could he tell her that he was there early the following morning, only weeks before the collapse, and that he knew the blocks hadn’t worked?

  The phone alarm woke Paolina. It was 2.00 pm and she needed to take her medication. She rose slowly from the recliner and went to the bench. There the pills were lined up in small plastic jars, and on the pinboard was a list: which pills, how many, with or without food, and time of day. She poured a glass of water from the filtered jug and took six pills, one at a time.

  She picked up the phone to reset the alarm and noticed a message from her old friend Alice. They had kept in touch even though Alice now lived interstate. Usually they talked on the phone once or twice a year, but since Paolina had told her about the cancer, Alice had been ringing or texting every week.

  They’d met at teachers’ college in the late 1960s, and it was through Alice that Paolina met Antonello. Alice had invited her to the San Remo Ballroom, and Alice’s boyfriend, Sam, came to pick them up. There were two other young men in the front seat. Sam introduced Slav and Antonello.

  ‘I thought Alice said you were Italian,’ Antonello said to Paolina once they found a table.

  ‘I am,’ she said. ‘I was born here, but my parents come from Sicily. It’s my hair, isn’t it? Everyone thinks I’m Australian because I don’t have dark hair. You know, there are Italians with blonde hair.’

  ‘Not many,’ he said, ‘at least not from the south. I don’t remember anyone in the village having blonde hair. Well, there was one woman with white hair, but she was an albino.’

  They both laughed. His laugh was hearty and free of any restraint. He was a handsome man, his hair black and wavy, his eyes almost as black as her brother’s. She hadn’t laughed for weeks. She remembered feeling guilty: she was enjoying herself while her brother was in Vietnam and in danger. She’d considered leaving — catching a cab and going home.

  ‘Where in Sicily is your family from?’

  His voice brought her back to the room, where the orchestra were playing ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’ and several couples were already on the dance floor.

  ‘Grammichele. And yours?’ she asked.

  ‘Vizzini — not that far from Grammichele,’ Antonello said. ‘I’ve been to Grammichele twice — a long time ago now, when I was a child. My father’s youngest sister married a man from Grammichele and they lived there. It is much bigger than Vizzini. It has a piazza in the centre with six roads leading to it, I remember. My cousin Andrea took me there, and we spent the afternoon running around the square and up and down the streets until it rained and we sheltered in one of the churches.’

  The waiters brought them a bottle of wine, and Antonello poure
d them a glass each. The band started playing Elvis hits and more couples moved onto the dance floor.

  ‘St Michael’s?’

  ‘You know it?’

  ‘No, I’ve never been,’ Paolina said. ‘My parents talk about the town so much that I’m sure I could draw you a map with all the main sights. We planned to go back for my cousin’s wedding last year, but my brother was conscripted and sent to Vietnam.’

  ‘Sorry, that must be difficult. I was lucky, didn’t get called up. Have you heard from your brother?’

  ‘He writes and he seems to be okay. He has nine months to go before his tour of duty is done. God willing, he’ll be home soon.’

  When the band started playing ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, Alice was suddenly standing behind them. ‘Come on, you two. No one should sit through Elvis. Nello, are you going to ask Paolina to dance?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Paolina responded. ‘Alice can be bossy.’

  ‘Dance?’ Antonello said, turning to Paolina.

  Alice laughed as she raced back towards Sam, who was rocking and rolling with an imaginary partner.

  ‘Yes, I’d love to,’ Paolina said, pushing back her chair.

  Paolina danced with Antonello all night. And when the music allowed it, they talked.

  ‘You remind me of one of my teachers, Signora Bellini. She encouraged me to draw.’

  ‘You draw?’ Paolina asked.

  ‘I’ve always loved drawing. My mother takes the credit. She wanted to name all her children after artists, but my father wouldn’t let her. I was the lucky last — all the grandparents’ names were used up.’

  ‘So you’re an artist?’

  Antonello shook his head. ‘I’m a rigger who can draw a bit. My mother wanted me to be an artist. “Artists live forever,” she says. But my father says artists need to put food on the table like everyone else, and art doesn’t pay much.’

  ‘And you — would you prefer to be an artist?’

  ‘No, I like rigging. My father’s right, you can’t make a living as an artist. Drawing isn’t work, it’s pleasure, and men need to work to look after their families. What about you? What did you want to do?’