Enza Gandolfo - The Bridge

‘Where are we going?’ Jo asked, even though it was obvious.

‘You know,’ Mandy replied. Life required courage; the past needed to be confronted. For some people, lighting candles, meditation, and prayers provided relief. For some people, faith was their anchor. But Mandy didn’t have faith, not in God. Mary always said, blessed are those that have faith . It sounded like criticism to Mandy, as if Mary saw her as one of the damned. She understood that Mary’s faith gave her solace, and solace was what everyone wanted. For Mandy, solace came from facing problems head-on.

At the base of the bridge, they stopped at the small roadside memorial for Ashleigh. It had been carefully maintained; several bouquets of fresh flowers tied to the cross. Only the cards and notes had deteriorated: faded, crumbled, the words smudged where the ink had run.

‘That night, I was so angry. So angry I couldn’t speak. I wanted to yell at you and Ashleigh. I wanted to tell you both how stupid you were, how reckless, but I knew there was no point. I knew I should’ve been more supportive, but I couldn’t…’

‘We — no, me, me, I was driving, I shouldn’t have been driving. So stupid. My fault, all of it, I know. We — not just Ash and me, but you and Ash’s family and everyone — are paying for it. I’m so sorry, so sorry, but sorry doesn’t make any difference.’

Above them, on the bridge, the traffic was sparse. The river caught and reflected the lights in bands of yellow and green and red, luminous waves of colour fluttering like flags on a carnival ride.

‘I used to love the bridge at night,’ Jo continued. ‘But it’s different now — the lights feel too strong, and I feel too exposed. I’ve been scared to come here, scared I’d run into Ash’s parents. Or Jane. I want to get the accident out of my head. To get Ash out of my head. Even when I’m talking, I hear Ash. I can’t think.’

‘Jo, honey, she’s dead. It’s not her,’ Mandy said.

‘I know. I tell myself, I tell her, you’re dead, Ash . But I can hear her voice. I tell her I’m sorry. I tell her I wish it hadn’t happened. That I wish she was alive.’

‘But she’s not,’ Mandy said, drawing her daughter into an embrace.

‘No, but I don’t feel alive, either.’

Memories of Ash were relentless. Some memories were like songs stuck in her head; they played over and over again. They were fifteen and sitting on a bench in the park, each of them with their iPods, their different music, in their own world. Ash pulled one of the earplugs out of her ear, and then she pulled one out of Jo’s ear. ‘We should do something.’

‘We are doing something.’

‘Something exciting. We should have an adventure.’

‘Like what?’

‘Let’s steal a car and go for a joy ride.’

‘Sure.’

‘Come on, Jo, there must be something we can do. We’re sixteen — our lives shouldn’t be so boring.’

‘I’m not bored.’

‘But you’re boring.’

‘Fuck off. If I’m so boring, go and hang out with someone else.’

‘Don’t get your knickers in a knot.’

‘Okay. So what are we going to do then?’

‘I want to do some spraying!’

‘Spraying?’

‘Graffiti.’

‘What?’

‘My cousin Peter and his mates have been tagging the neighbourhood. Let’s go with them.’

‘We’ll get into trouble.’

‘Come on, don’t be such a wuss. You can be too much of a fucking goody-goody, Jo, and you’ll have plenty of time for that when you’re old and have kids and a house, and have to spend every night sitting in front of the TV, wiping snot off your kids’ noses and worrying where you are going to get the money to pay the bills…’ Ash kept at it until Jo felt her life was already over, and if she didn’t do something soon she would get old overnight.

It took Ash ages to convince Peter and then it took him time to convince his mates. In the end they said yes because they were all worried Ash would tell Peter’s mum about the graffiti. They agreed to meet at midnight in the goods yard at the back of Yarraville Station.

Sneaking out wasn’t difficult. Mandy slept at the back of the house and Jo slept at the front, and there were several rooms in between. At eleven, Jo made a hot chocolate and went to bed. She listened to Mandy turn off all the lights and lock the front door. She listened to her walk down the hallway to her room. Then she waited until her mother was asleep and, with her shoes in her hand, she tiptoed down the hall, making sure to avoid the creaky floorboards and close the door carefully as she left.

Once she was outside, she started to worry. At the gate, she hesitated, considered turning around and going back to bed, but she didn’t want to let Ash down. Across the road, the tanks shone under the lights, and the traffic across the West Gate was a series of speeding fireflies.

Jo ran all the way down Hyde Street, across and into Francis Street, down Stephen Street into Schild, and then Anderson past the shops, down Ballarat and Murray and into the goods yard. When she arrived, the others were waiting. There were four boys and Ash. Two of the boys were carrying backpacks.

‘Now,’ Peter said, ‘if I say run, then you run as fast as you can straight home and don’t stop, and if you get caught you don’t fucking know us, never seen us before, don’t know our names.’ Peter was a pimply-faced teenager a year or so older than Jo and Ash. He’d been kept down at school so they were in several classes with him.

The boys led the way. They stopped under the Somerville Road overpass, where the council workers had recently painted over the last lot of graffiti with grey paint, leaving them a large blank canvas. The boys took out their spray cans and started tagging. Ash joined them. ‘Come on,’ she said to Jo.

‘What will I tag?’

The boys laughed. ‘Fucking amateurs,’ Peter said. ‘Your tag is your ID. You put it everywhere, as many places as possible. For fuck’s sake.’ He shoved a spray can in her hand. ‘Here, hold it straight. And then write your tag.’

Jo’s heart thumped and she thought she might throw up. But she was excited too. Alive. Full of energy. She wanted to tag. She pushed the nozzle down and wrote Jojo . The letters were fuzzy, only just readable.

‘You’re a fucking toy,’ Peter said.

‘Give her a break,’ Rico, one of the other boys, said.

Peter thumped the boy on the arm, hard. ‘What, you got the hots for her?’

Rico thumped him back and they began wrestling. Until they heard a car coming — then they all ran and hid in the shadows, behind trees, under the steps of the overpass. When one of the cars turned out to be a police patrol car, Jo thought she might wet herself. Adrenaline. Heart racing.

‘Wasn’t that great,’ Ash said when the cop car had driven away and they came back to look at their tags. Ash insisted they all walk Jo home, and she was grateful. Along the way, Peter and Rico and the others stopped to graffiti fences and walls, and Jo and Ash giggled and laughed. But Jo was still trembling when she climbed into bed.

Were some people more alive than others? Was loneliness a kind of death?

Sometimes Jo had been lonely, even with Ash as a friend.

One of the things Jo admired about Ash was her willingness to reveal details about all aspects of her life. Until recently, Jo thought that this meant Ash didn’t have secrets. She’d told Jo all about sex with Kevin, all of the intimate details. How it hadn’t gone well the first time, stage fright, he was a virgin . She told Jo about her arguments with her parents and her sister. About the arguments her parents had, about her mother’s affair with a teacher at school that almost ended up with her parents divorcing — family secrets no one was supposed to know. About an old neighbour who lured Ash into his house once when she was eight and showed her his penis. She described the penis and told Jo it wasn’t the first one she’d seen because her father sometimes walked around the house naked, and so it hadn’t been the sight of the penis that made her cry — it was a small , shrivelled thing . She cried because he wanted her to touch it. She screamed and ran, her neighbour giving chase, but she’d made it out of the house and told her parents and then watched out of the window as the police dragged him away.