Enza Gandolfo - The Bridge

He thought of Alex and what he might think if he saw his father talking to this girl, Ashleigh’s killer. Alex would feel betrayed. And Rae as well. Alex had said he wished they had never met her. He’d said he never wanted to see her again. He cursed her. I hate that girl. I hope she rots in prison . It sounded like hate. It had all of hate’s outside features, all of hate’s intensity, but he didn’t think Alex and Rae hated Jo. There was too much sadness and grief for any other feeling to find room in their hearts. That was the problem: grief was ravenous. It found its way into each pore, took residence in the body and the mind, making it impossible to distinguish any other feelings. Sometimes grief, unbearable and relentless, disguised itself as hate, as anger. Hate mobilised; grief drained. After the bridge collapsed, Antonello was broken and battered, like an animal left wounded by a clumsy hunter. He was suicidal; he saw no way out. Time , Paolina and his parents told him, give it time , but instead he buried the grief under hatred and anger, and then he spun it into a cocoon that kept him at a distance from everyone.

In Alex and Rae, he saw himself: the younger man who’d survived the collapse of the bridge but remained lost, unavailable to his family, as if he’d been buried under the debris. His son and daughter-in-law drifted through the house as if they were alone; they didn’t recognise each other or Jane. They loathed any evidence of the world continuing in Ashleigh’s absence. It was this girl’s fault. It was all her fault, that was true, but of course he knew that it was also not true. Death and disaster were intruders — they barged in unexpectedly, and they didn’t discriminate. There was no God’s will or God’s grand plan .

Maybe it was fate. Was that a contradiction, to do away with God and give fate so much power? Paolina said it was. That for there to be fate there had to be something beyond the human, something or someone that planned life out. Could there be fate without orchestration? Was Ashleigh fated to die young? And if she were, did that mean Jo was blameless?

Or was it the randomness of life? Meaningless. Unplotted.

Or was it the fault of the flawed individual? Of the reckless girl who didn’t think of the consequences? Jo hadn’t considered the possibility of an accident. The engineers hadn’t considered the possibility of the bridge collapsing. Was it possible to create a world in which accidents didn’t happen? This question had often kept Antonello awake at night, but he had no answer.

Was it fair to blame Jo for Ashleigh’s death? The law thought so. And so did Alex and Rae. The accident was her fault. It was due to her recklessness. But Ashleigh wouldn’t rise from the dead because Jo was locked up in prison. The Royal Commission had laid the blame for the bridge collapse on the companies, but Bob and Slav had stayed dead.

‘Come with me,’ Antonello said again, and Jo followed him until they were standing in front of the West Gate Bridge Memorial. He pointed to a list of names: the men and their occupations.

‘I was there when they died,’ he said. The day Antonello first set eyes on the memorial, had first allowed himself to visit the bridge to read the names of his dead friends — like a list of fallen soldiers on a war shrine — he’d been furious at the inclusion of their occupations. Carpenter, rigger, ironworker: these men were fathers, husbands, brothers, and best friends. They were soccer and football players. They were jokers and kidders. They were gardeners and car enthusiasts. Fishermen, pool players, and surfers. And then there was all they could’ve been — grandfathers and lifelong friends. They weren’t only workers. Not fodder for the city, vehicles for its progress, fools and easy prey. But the memorial was put up by the survivors, not the companies. The men, his mates and co-workers, had raised the money. They chose the wording. He couldn’t destroy their memorial, he couldn’t blow up the bridge. He couldn’t do anything except mourn his friends.

For almost forty years, the West Gate stood oblivious to the cost those men paid. Every day, thousands of people drove over the bridge and complained about the traffic and the delays, annoyed at the way it choked at peak hour. They sat in their cars and listened to music or talked on their phones, argued with their children in the back seat. They drove over it on their way into or out of the city. They didn’t see the memorial or the names — most of them didn’t know about the accident, and if they had known once, it was now long forgotten.

‘I worked on this bridge and I was here when it collapsed, in 1970. I lost two of my best mates. Here, Slav, he was a bit of a scholar and a poet. And Bob, he was my boss, like an uncle. He taught me everything I knew about my job. I spent more time with him in the four years before the collapse than with any other person — more time than I’d spent with my wife.’ He paused and sighed. Jo lifted a hand to the letters of Bob’s name, tracing them like a child tracing letters of the alphabet.

‘And these other blokes: men I went to the pub with, played soccer with, sat in the lunchroom with, men I saw every day. I didn’t know some of them well, but when we saw each other down the street, we’d smile and say hello, and we’d nod towards each other as we explained to whoever we were with, he works on the bridge too . We were so proud of the bridge. We were building this bridge, our bridge, the biggest, longest, better than any other bridge… we bragged about it. Some of our other mates were sick of us talking about it, but we thought we were doing something amazing. It wasn’t our fault it fell. The government had an inquiry and they said it was the companies. We noticed things, saw things, we fought, we went on strike. Yet we didn’t fight every single thing. We were tired of saying, Hey, that’s wrong , or That looks a bit dodgy to me , because we didn’t want… we wanted to be the heroes who made this amazing bridge.’

Antonello stopped and glanced at Jo. Her eyes were shut tight, and he assumed she’d stopped listening to him, like his children, who rarely listened to him. But then he saw Jo’s cheeks were red and glistening. She was crying.

‘I felt guilty after the bridge collapsed. Guilty about all the things I hadn’t said, not noticed, refused to notice. Guilty because I didn’t die, because I lived and they didn’t and I wanted to be dead too. And part of me did die. Part of me has never been the same again, ever. It’s taken the death of my granddaughter to see the futility of it.

‘Some of the men who were there when the bridge collapsed, who survived, they were braver than me — they faced the tragedy, the deaths, the horror, and decided to make sure it didn’t happen again. They’ve fought for better conditions for workers, they’ve worked their whole lives to make sure we don’t have another tragedy… they’ve lived and loved and made the world better. I wish I’d been able to do something.

‘You know, I don’t know why some people reacted one way and some another. Some survivors didn’t recover at all, went on to have heart attacks, cancer, early deaths. Some went off the rails — depression and anxiety. Post-traumatic syndrome, they call it now, but for years some of us were only partly human, going through the motions, like ghosts. I wish I knew what made the difference because I’d like to give it to Alex and Rae and Jane. I’d like to give it to you. No matter what you do, no matter if you’re sad and miserable your whole life, no matter if you make yourself sick, Ashleigh won’t come back.’

‘I know,’ Jo said.

‘And it won’t make a difference to Alex and Rae and Jane and their grief.’