Enza Gandolfo - The Bridge

Ash told Jo things that, if they had happened to Jo, she wouldn’t have told anyone, not even Ash. She didn’t tell Ash about the girls at primary school who said she was too fat to play with them. Neither Mandy nor Ash knew about her trip to Fitzroy, when she stood outside Ian’s house. She hadn’t told either of them about the anxiety, about the doubt, about the voices in her head telling her over and over that no one wanted to be her friend.

‘Are some people’s lives worth more than others?’ Ian Williams had asked their Geography class once, during a lengthy discussion about poverty in India. He’d given them an article to read about a train accident in the rural south of the continent — hundreds had died, yet only the three white tourists were named. They talked about the way accidents or disasters overseas only seemed to matter if Australians were killed. Of course, they all agreed every life should be equal, but the world was unjust. Anyone weighing up her life and Ash’s life, measuring their worth against each other, would agree they weren’t equal.

Jo had been back for a week when Sarah rang to tell her the date for the hearing had been confirmed for 15 June, a week after Jo’s twentieth birthday. ‘Seems a long way off, but you need to prepare yourself,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s not going to be easy.’

‘No,’ Jo responded. Listening to Sarah’s advice — prepare yourself, you might get as much as five years — Jo didn’t say much. It will be no picnic . Sarah actually said picnic ; Jo almost laughed. She’d seen many films and TV shows in which prisoners were harassed, bashed, raped. Even if prison weren’t as bad as that, it would be bad, in ways she couldn’t yet imagine. Otherwise, what was the point of it?

For the next four or five years, her life wouldn’t be her own. She would live in the confines of an institution with strict rules and no way out. Her life would be in the hands of other people, and they’d decide what she would be allowed to do or not do. For the last five or so years, she’d been resisting and resenting her mother’s desire to exercise authority. She hated her mother’s rules. She hated being confined in the house. Some people chose to be secluded. To be alone. To work in jobs where someone else made all the decisions. Could she be one of those people? Would confinement and the loss of freedom be a relief? Would it stop the endless and relentless voices in her head? Would she be able to give her life over?

Through a friend Mandy had worked with, Jo found a job cleaning a local office block. It was a big block and there were several cleaners. Each had their own floor, their own trolley of cleaning equipment and cleaning chemicals. Jo’s shift began at 10.00 pm. At 12.30 she had a tea break, and at 2.30 a meal break. The other cleaners called the second break ‘lunchtime’ and congregated in the third-floor kitchen, which had a television set that was on all the time. By ‘lunchtime’, the only stations going were the shopping channels — fitness equipment, home gadgets, and beauty products that eradicated wrinkles and made people young again. Sometimes Grace, who was from Ethiopia, walked down the stairs to Jo’s floor to ask her to read the label on a bottle, or the note left by Rob, the supervisor who organised all the communication with the people who owned the building. Grace was a gregarious mother of four, and she was embarrassed about her inability to read in English. The notes weren’t difficult to explain: The toilet wasn’t cleaned properly; The cleaner needs to vacuum under the desk; A woman lost her diamond earring somewhere, please look out for it . Grace always wore a headscarf and a long skirt. The building air-conditioning was turned off by the time the cleaners arrived, and Grace was usually sweating. When she stopped to talk to Jo, she wiped her forehead with the handkerchief she kept in an invisible pocket. She often asked Jo to join them for ‘lunch’. Jo smiled and said, ‘Maybe,’ but she didn’t go. Most of her co-workers were migrant and refugee women twice her age. They worked so their children could get an education. They were kind to her, but curious about why she, a young Australian girl , was working as a cleaner. ‘My children all go to university,’ Grace said, showing photos on her phone of her son in his graduation gown.

Only Rob mentioned the accident. He was a regular at the café where Jo had worked. ‘I was sorry to hear about the accident,’ he said to Jo one night. ‘I guess that’s why you left the café. Though it’s not right, Ted sacking you.’

‘He didn’t sack me,’ was all she said in response. They were standing outside. It was almost three o’clock. He was smoking and she was drinking a cup of tea.

‘Well, if you need someone to talk to,’ he said, inching closer.

‘No, I don’t want to talk about it.’ She moved away.

He shrugged his shoulders, butted out his cigarette, and went back inside.

Counting your lucky stars.

I don’t feel lucky at all.

You’re alive.

I feel dead.

You have no idea what dead feels like.

Please, Ash, leave me alone.

It’s you that can’t leave me alone.

It was a long narrow hallway with a row of doors on each side. From behind a red door, about halfway down, came the thunderous rhythm of instrumental music. Jo carried a heavy box full of notebooks. She pushed the door open with her body; it opened into a garden, and the music came to a sudden stop. There was a lush overgrown lawn, rambling bushes, tall gum trees, climbing roses. A garden shed. A park bench. A table. In the middle of a green patch there was a campfire, the flames contained by a small circle of grey stones.

Jo’s shoulders and arms strained under the weight of the box, and before she reached the fire, it slipped out of her hands, landing with a thump as it hit the ground. She sat on the grass. The fire glowed and sparked. Her cheeks turned hot.

She straightened and opened the box and stared at the notebooks. Ash’s first journal, pink with a ballerina twirling on the cover, was on top. This journal predated her friendship with Ash, was filled out long before they met. Stories of another life, of a girl young enough to want to be a ballerina. By the time they met, they were more cynical — they laughed at little girls dressed in pink, at little girls with tiaras and tutus, as if they hadn’t been young themselves.

‘Not good to burn synthetic materials. They give off toxins.’ A man stood behind Jo. He wore a suit and a tie and carried a clipboard. He was standing outside of the perimeter of the light radiating from the fire, and she couldn’t see his face. ‘You’ll have to rip the pages out and then throw the cover in the bin.’

‘Who are you? Where did you come from?’

The man stepped closer, and Jo noticed that he had a long grey beard, wide and full at the top, finishing in a narrow point at his waist. The man ran his free hand down the beard, stroking it like one might pet a dog or a cat. ‘The plastic. You can’t burn the plastic.’

‘But I can’t open the journal. I don’t have the key.’

‘She trusted you with the journals, but not the key?’

‘The others, the later ones, don’t have locks.’

‘So she did trust you,’ the man said as he walked away. Jo listened to his shuffling footsteps and the crackle of the fire. A fruit bat flapped its wings as it flew back and forth between the next-door neighbour’s apple tree and a peach tree in a garden several streets away.

‘Will you burn them?’ the man called from the other end of the garden.

‘I don’t know.’

‘If you aren’t going to read them, what’s the point?’