Enza Gandolfo - The Bridge

From the steps, under the clocks, Jo glanced across at St Paul’s Cathedral. She scanned the crowds standing at the intersection, waiting to cross Flinders Street, waiting to cross Swanston, waiting at the tram stop, walking up and down the steps, walking along the path in front of Young and Jackson.

Jo and Ash had gone into Young and Jackson once, with a man they met on a tram. ‘I’m here on holidays and don’t know anyone. Can I buy you a drink?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Ash said. And all three of them jumped off the tram and headed for the pub. ‘I’ll show you a real tourist sight. A real piece of Melbourne history — the naked Chloé ,’ Ash said, winking at Jo.

The man, whose name they didn’t know, was in his thirties. He seemed excited, his wide mouth spreading into a broad grin. Two young girls, a painting of a naked woman, alcohol — what more could he want?

The publican took one look at them and asked for IDs. They didn’t have any. Ash and Jo ran out of the pub giggling. They didn’t see Chloé and lost the bloke. Ever since, they’d planned to go back together one day.

So you’ll never go in to see Chloé ? Promise.

‘Promise.’

Laura and Mani would have finished their VCE. She and Ash would never finish theirs — all that work, all that angst, for nothing. She couldn’t move out of home and find an apartment in the city without Ash. She couldn’t go to university without Ash. She couldn’t travel — to Japan and South Africa and New York — without Ash. She couldn’t get married without Ash. Or have children and become a mother.

Jo walked down the steps and joined the mid-morning crowd waiting to cross Swanston Street, the bulk made up of a group of schoolboys carrying heavy backpacks and talking about getting takeaway. She made her way past the pub, past Dangerfield, with its gothic outfits in the window, past Flora and the smell of hot curries, past a second-hand bookshop, and into Degraves Street. Cafés lined both sides of this laneway and tables took up the centre. But she remembered another Degraves Street. Smoking cigarettes in school uniform. Brazen girls with too much time on their hands.… And suddenly there was Ash, swinging her bulky backpack over her shoulder. And her long red-brown hair tied in a ponytail, stray hairs floating in the breeze. It couldn’t be Ash, she knew that, but she followed the girl, desperate to catch her, to see her face.

‘Please turn around.’

Catch me if you can.

Past offices, a beauty school, a university, boutiques, and more cafés; past groups of students standing in doorways smoking cigarettes; past men in suits; past shoppers carrying large bags; past young people in neat office attire, plain and conservative; past young people all in black, with multiple piercings; past young people in jeans and too-short t-shirts slipping between cars and taxis. Everyone was going somewhere. Everyone had somewhere to go.

At the corner of Flinders Lane and Queen Street, Ash disappeared, on a tram or around a corner. One moment of looking away and Ash was gone and out of sight. Jo had nowhere to go. There was nowhere to go but back. Jo leaned against the concrete wall of an office block. Her head swirled. She closed her eyes. She took a few deep breaths. Could she go back far enough to change everything? Could time be unspun? Back to that afternoon, the table covered in books, a red journal not opened, not read? Back to the first day of high school, resisting the urge to become Ash’s best friend? Back to her birth in a hospital in Footscray, where the baby wasn’t born to a woman living with a boy not ready to be a father? If she went back far enough, would Ash come back to life?

All those teenage years, telling each other stories of an adult life lived together, imagining it into being. All those years of feeling so lucky because she had a best friend. Looking down at the lonely girls in the schoolyard, so pleased not to be one of them, so pleased all her wishing had come true.

Her grandmother said that wishing for too much was bad luck. The sort of bad luck no one could shake.

On the way back home, Jo couldn’t avoid the West Gate. Surrounded by scaffolding, it looked wounded, unable to hold itself up. An old soldier buckling under the weight of history, of trauma. As she came closer to it, she remembered the wheel slipping. The car spinning. The screams. The air was grainy, dirty. The dust was coating Jo’s skin, getting into her pores.

‘Jo. Jo.’

At the sound of her name, faint and in the distance, she shuddered. It wasn’t Ash’s voice. When she looked up she caught sight of a man walking a bicycle. He was waving. It was Kevin. He was heading towards Jo. She could not face him; her heart was racing now and she was trembling. She ran across the road and into the Stony Creek Reserve. Once she was sure he had not followed her, she sat under a tall river red gum. There was a cool breeze and it took her a while to calm down.

The first time Jo had met Kevin, it was at a club at the beginning of the year. Ash and Kevin were already there. Jo spotted Ash in the middle of the crowded dance floor.

‘That’s Kevin,’ Ash said, pointing to a nerdy-looking guy sitting on his own. ‘He’s not much of a dancer.’

Jo longed to talk to Kevin about Ash, to ask him, Is she really dead? She wanted to ask if Ash was talking to him. She wanted to ask if Ash had been trying to push her away. She wanted to tell him about all the things she and Ash had done together over the years. About the shoplifting, about going into Young and Jackson, about sneaking out at night to graffiti the walls of the underpass, about climbing out of their bedroom windows to go to parties their parents had forbidden them from attending, about sitting on the roof of Ash’s house at midnight and smoking their first joint and the way the city had swayed under the moonlight, and about the nights they spent sleeping together in each other’s rooms, about waking up with Ash’s arm wrapped around her waist… about the fear, the anxiety, that Ash would find someone better. Did Kevin know that feeling?

Sarah strolled past the building where her meeting was scheduled for ten and down the road to a small café in a laneway: five empty tables along the wall, and a counter behind which two women in white gloves were constructing mountainous sandwiches. Sarah ordered a coffee and took out her notebook.

‘I can’t think of anyone,’ Jo had whispered when Sarah asked for a list of people to contact.

‘Come on, Jo. There must be people you’d go to for a reference.’

‘Who’d give me a reference? For what?’

‘Before the accident, though?’ Sarah prodded and pushed, cajoled and coerced, and Jo finally relented and offered a few names — the manager at the café, her school principal, Mrs Chang, Ian Williams. ‘If they remember who I am, they might say I was okay.’

‘There have to be more.’ Sarah had turned to Mandy.

‘How many more?’ Mandy asked.

‘We want it to look like hundreds of people would speak for Jo, even if it’s only three or four who we offer as character witnesses. It has to be the right three or four.’

‘They let you do that?’

‘Yes.’

Mandy had emailed Sarah a list of all Jo’s teachers over the thirteen years of primary and high school. She said she couldn’t remember all the teachers, that she wasn’t one of those friendly mothers who chatted with the teacher as if they were old friends: she’d combed through all the school reports and class photos to find their names. She said she had asked Mary for the names of the two priests at St Augustine’s — she wasn’t sure if they would provide references, though, given Jo hadn’t been to a service for years and she wasn’t baptised, and so not one of them.