Enza Gandolfo - The Bridge

And he remembered his excitement on his first day at the bridge, arriving early and standing on the viewing platform, sketching the outline of the twenty-eight piers, thick, solid concrete towers rising out of the water in a snaking curve from west to east. After a week of rain, it had been a perfect Autumn morning, clear and fresh. Everywhere, even in the most industrial pockets of the west, where warehouses and factories butted up against one another, the lawns and the trees and of course the weeds that poked through cyclone fences and in-between cracks in paths were all a deep green and overgrown.

He remembered his mother cooking him a big breakfast of scrambled eggs with cavolo nero she’d collected the previous day, along with brassica, pigweed, and wild fennel on one of her scavenging excursions around Cruickshank Park. ‘Lucky for us,’ she said to Antonello, ‘the Australiani don’t understand these plants. There are plenty, especially after good rain.’

‘Big job, building a bridge,’ she said as she spooned more eggs onto his plate.

‘Hey, some for me. I work too.’ Franco winked at Antonello. ‘She thinks you’re building that whole bridge on your own.’

‘There they are,’ Bob had said later that morning, stepping up on the platform. ‘Those piers are our giant stilts and we’ll be heaving the girders onto those stilts. Hard to imagine that those piers are going to hold all that weight, all that fucking concrete and steel, a whole fucking roadway, and the traffic, the cars and trucks. It’ll be bloody amazing driving across the bridge.’ He elbowed Antonello and pointed at the tallest pylon. ‘Hey Nello, imagine that, your first bridge, mate, and it’s a beauty. We’ll be so high up; we’ll see the river and the bay, and the whole bloody city. The views will be great from up there. To die for.’

They had both stared across at the city centre on the other side of the river, and Bob added, ‘Hope you’re wearing your woollies, it’ll be cold up there. Freeze your balls off if you’re not careful. It’ll be worth it, though — we are gonna make history here. Bloody hell, son, you and me, part of history.’

And he remembered a warm afternoon when the breeze came from the sea, and Slav recited A.D. Hope’s ‘The Death of the Bird’ as they sat on Sam’s front verandah, waiting for Sam’s mother to call them in for dinner. He could remember the whole poem, even though he hadn’t read it in all those years. The poem opens with a bird’s migration towards summer and love, but it is the bird’s last migration and when, finally unable to keep flying, the bird falls, nature is indifferent.

‘It’s such a sad poem,’ he remembered saying to Slav. ‘Why do you like it so much?’

‘For everyone there will be a last migration, but in the meantime, let’s enjoy the view, the experience, the flying.’

‘Cheers,’ said Sam as he poured them each another wine, ‘let’s drink to that.’

For Jo, the funeral had been a marker, a rope across a finish line. An end and a beginning. After the funeral, she planned to think about what was next. About the court case and prison and life after that. But the funeral was over and she wasn’t sure that any future was possible. Did she have the right to a future? To a life? Could she spend the rest of her life in bed, in the dark, avoiding everything?

Before the accident, she’d imagined going to university. Some kind of job. Marriage. Children. Six children. A big, busy family. Enough children to fill all the spaces in the house. Enough children so that each child had several siblings and wouldn’t be lonely. The kind of family that filled a kitchen at dinner time; a noisy house. But there would be none of that. No husband. No children. Who would want a killer for a wife? For a mother?

At the hospital, on the night of the accident, while she lay in bed in the Emergency ward, her mother had stood in the gap in the curtain, half in and half out, and said, ‘We, you and me, we are going to have to learn to live with this.’ Live. Jo didn’t want to live. She wished she didn’t exist, that she’d never existed, that there was a way of travelling back in time to wipe herself out.

One morning a couple of days after the funeral, Jo switched the computer on for the first time since the accident. Avoiding her email and Facebook — all those places where someone might try and contact her — she googled ‘suicide’ and ‘suicide methods’ and found over 42 million hits. So many people thinking about dying, about ways to die; so many people wanting a way out. For the first time in days, she was calm. There was a sense of relief. A way out was possible.

Pills. Poison. On one site there was a list of twenty-four poisons, including water. Eight litres of it would be enough. She would have to drink and drink and drink… Carbon monoxide was another, but there was no car. She hadn’t even thought about her car — no one had mentioned it. She assumed it had been destroyed, compacted into a thin sheet of metal, thrown into landfill and buried.

Alcohol. She could drink herself to death. She hadn’t touched alcohol since the party. She went to the cupboard in the hallway where they kept wine and spirits. But it was empty. She went outside and opened the recycle bin: it was full of empty bottles. The stench of wine was a slap, and she reeled back from it. She hated the taste of wine, of spirits. She drank sweet mixed drinks when she went out, and only then to suppress the anxiety. So much drinking. All of them — Ash and Laura and Mani, everyone they knew: why did they drink so much?

There were websites that explained, step by step, how a person could hang themselves. Sites giving advice on guns. On how to get them. On how to use them. There were sites listing places high enough to jump off. The West Gate Bridge was still on the list, even though with the barricades it was almost impossible. But the bridge would be the perfect location — what if it were possible? What if she snuck onto the bridge at night, climbed the fence, and let herself fall? Jo was a good swimmer. A good diver. What would it take to stay under the surface? To refuse to take in air? Fill your pockets with stones , one post said, like Virginia Woolf. Jo read Woolf’s suicide note posted on another site — her fear of going mad, the voices in her head, the inability to keep going. The belief in death’s release, the peace of a long deep sleep. No more anxiety. No more sadness.

If she died, everyone would understand how much she loved Ash. They’d realise she hadn’t meant to hurt Ash. They’d know she was sorry.

‘Show that you are remorseful,’ Sarah had said.

You want to do everything I do, even die. Really?

Mandy stood outside Jo’s room, listening for signs of life. Jo hadn’t been a quiet child. Before the accident, they had fought constantly about the volume of the music and the television. Now it was the silence that woke Mandy in the middle of the night. It was the silence that vibrated through the house, the silence that drew her to Jo’s room, listening for her daughter’s breathing. To make sure she was alive, that she hadn’t killed herself. Suicide. Two of Jo’s classmates had suicided when they were sixteen. They had seemed like normal kids living normal lives.

Mandy remembered arriving at the hospital on the night of the accident — there had been a moment when she thought Jo was going to jump out of the bed and run into her arms. But Mandy had kept her arms folded, deliberately shutting Jo out. Standing half in the cubical and half out, she’d barked at her daughter, ‘What have you done?’ Now she felt guilty, a bad mother , but still she could not bring herself to open the door, to go to her daughter, to forgive her.