Enza Gandolfo - The Bridge

‘Where is that girl, what was her name — Jo or Joanna — you know, they were always together?’ an older man asked a small group of smokers who were standing in a circle not far from Sarah.

‘She was driving,’ another bloke said. ‘Plastered, apparently. Not a scratch.’

‘I heard they’d all been drinking,’ the woman with him whispered, leaning in as if she as sharing a secret.

‘Yeah, but the other girl was driving.’

‘God. They don’t think, and everyone else has to pay for it. I can’t see Alex and Rae getting over this.’

Did any of these people know Jo or Ashleigh? It was likely they were work colleagues of Rae or Alex’s, who’d never met the girls.

‘No. Nothing worse than a kid dying. Let’s face it, we all did dumb things when we were young. Only difference is we survived.’

‘Has the girl been charged?’

‘Yep, culpable driving.’

‘So they still have the court case to get through?’

‘Apparently there’s a backlog of cases and it might be months yet.’

‘I hope the judge is tough. The message has to get through to these kids.’

Sarah sighed and butted out her cigarette.

The days after Ashleigh’s funeral were empty, breathless days. Voices seemed to go missing, to be lost. Even Jane, a noisy, boisterous, uncontainable adolescent, had withdrawn. She rarely spoke, and when she did her voice was barely audible. Rae cried, sobbed, and paced, but refused to be comforted, wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t be touched, pushed her sisters, her parents, even Alex away. Alex raged. Banging his fist on the tables, throwing things across rooms. He cleared the whole of the vegetable garden pulling out plants that hadn’t yet matured. Soon all that was left was a lemon tree pruned to a stump and the Hills hoist spinning in the wind.

‘He’s like a bear in a cage,’ Gary, Rae’s father, said to Antonello, as the two men stood on the verandah looking over the back garden, watching as Alex stuffed the green waste into the bin, pressing down with his hands before climbing into the bin and stomping and stamping on the broken twigs and branches, on the leaves and grasses, like his ancestors once stamped on grapes to make wine.

There had been no contact with Jo or her mother. No card. No apology. Antonello considered going to Jo’s house and knocking on her door. But he doubted an apology would make any difference. Would it make any difference to anyone? Dead is dead. What is done is done.

Would it have made any difference if the companies had apologised after the bridge collapsed? Would it have made any difference if they’d come knocking on their doors and begged for forgiveness? Most of the men went back to work on the bridge the week after the collapse; they needed the income. Antonello hadn’t gone back, but Sam had rung him, to tell him that the men had been gathered together, that one of the engineers had spoken, thanked them for the great work they had done during the rescue operations, acknowledged that they had saved lives. But the Royal Commission was underway, he told them, and so there was no work; they were all sacked. A week’s wages. No compensation. The site was closed. There were no jobs.

The companies, the company directors, the engineers should’ve done more. They should’ve gone to the funerals and begged the widows, the parents, the children for forgiveness. They should’ve taken care of the families and kept the survivors on the payroll instead of sacking them within days of the collapse, while they were still going to funerals, still burying their mates.

Some of the survivors, including Sam, were called to give evidence by the Royal Commission. They relived the moments before and after the collapse in detail. Antonello wasn’t called. He hadn’t been up at the top; he hadn’t witnessed the events that lead to the accident. The papers reported on the hearings regularly. One witness, an inspector, was quoted as saying the bridge was put together like a patchwork quilt. When she read the paper, Emilia said no patchwork quilt she made would fall apart so easily. For Antonello, the newspaper reports were infuriating, the men were often portrayed as naïve, easily betrayed — by the companies, by the engineers, by the unions, and by the bridge itself.

For months he didn’t work. He refused to see any of the other men. He didn’t return Sam’s calls. Twice Sam came to the bungalow and knocked on the door, but Antonello didn’t let him in. He spent hours sitting on the doorstep looking out across the garden. Sometimes he sat with Giacomo and they smoked a cigarette, not speaking. When Paolina came home from school, she talked and he listened. He stopped reading the papers. Turned off the TV and radio at news time. He didn’t want to hear about the bridge or the Commission hearings or the world going on as if nothing had happened.

Two months after the collapse, Antonello’s father took him aside and said, ‘You have to go back to work. There’s a job at the factory. I asked the foreman, you can start tomorrow.’ Antonello agreed without even asking what the job entailed. The men at the factory treated him as if he were a returning war hero — they patted him on the back as he passed, they shook his hand as they introduced himself. He worked in the storeroom and he spent his days loading boxes on and off trucks. He lived and worked in silence. While others around him talked and laughed, he was mute.

The Royal Commission interviewed fifty-two witnesses, the investigations took nine months, but the report when it was released didn’t make a difference to him. Not to Sandy, either. Not to the other widows and orphans. The thirty-five men stayed dead. The Commission found the companies hadn’t paid enough attention.… There were errors of judgment, failure of communication and sheer inefficiency… Error begat error. Careless. The bridge had mattered more than the men. The men were expendable. Events moved with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy . Antonello remembered reading those words. A Greek tragedy? Was all life a Greek tragedy? As soon as the report was submitted, the government made plans to complete the bridge. Many of the survivors continued to feel betrayed by the companies and the government, but they went back. To finish the job. To honour those killed. To make the city whole. Antonello couldn’t go back.

‘It takes more courage to live,’ said the old Greek widow he encountered at Footscray Cemetery after the collapse, ‘more courage to keep going.’ Giacomo had given him the same advice before he left Australia in his fifties, after twenty-five years of depression, to live in Vietnam, with the hope that hard work helping rebuild the country he felt guilty for destroying might give him purpose.

Seeing Sam at Ashleigh’s funeral was both a shock and a relief. So many times over the years he’d longed to see his friend again but didn’t have the courage to seek him out. So many nights, Sam appeared in his dreams. They should’ve helped each other after the accident. Sam tried. But Antonello hadn’t been able to face him, to talk to him. Thirty-nine years — was it possible, could it be that long? There was so much that he remembered about those years. Watching Sam run around the soccer field — hopeless, no ball skills, but he and Slav and the rest of the men all keen to be on Sam’s team because he made them laugh, made them roll on the ground with laughter, laughing so much they couldn’t kick the ball. Rising early on Sunday mornings, even though it was their one day to sleep in, so they could sit together by the river and fish and talk about their futures, about the houses they’d buy, the girls they’d marry, the families they’d have… the holidays they’d take together, maybe even back to Italy.