Enza Gandolfo - The Bridge

‘You decided to come home.’ Paolina smiled.

‘ Tu sei la mia casa ,’ he said as he kissed her gently. ‘And I have made you some lunch.’

‘Handsome, and you can cook. I guess I’ll keep you, Nello.’

Some days are sprints: time races, and the day seems to end before it has begun. Other days drift, time stretching and expanding, with no end in sight. Mandy’s days were long. Monotonous and repetitive. She longed for change, but the only change on the horizon was Jo’s sentencing, and it would come soon enough.

Jo had spent the afternoon with Sarah, working on her statement for the court case. She could hear them working. When they finished, it was short, a brief apology. A public recognition that the accident was Jo’s fault. A declaration of grief and guilt, of how much Jo missed Ashleigh.

Sarah had left, and Mandy and Jo were sitting on the edge of the back deck, looking across the bush garden, with its native flowers and plants, to the old ghost gum. ‘That tree should be chopped down. One day, one of those branches is going to fall on me when I’m in the backyard, and it’ll kill me,’ Rod, their neighbour, said to Mandy whenever he had the chance.

‘I’m not cutting that tree down,’ she told him, after years of trying to placate him, of trying to convince him the tree was safe.

‘You’re a cruel and careless woman,’ he had said, the last time they spoke about it. This was after the accident, and she understood his reference to it. He was furious, and she’d expected he might finally take legal action, but for months he hadn’t said a word.

The tree was a beacon. Every evening when she sat on the back doorstep, or stood at the kitchen window, if she focused on the tree, on its white trunk illuminated under the moonlight, she could imagine another life was possible. A life away from the suburbs. A house surrounded by creeks and hills and a large garden. She remembered her mother’s suitcase with the magazine clippings — hundreds of clipped images of country cottages, of places where the morning arrived with the sound of birds and where there was a front verandah on which a person could sit looking out for miles, seeing only green and blue.

She’d finally confessed to Jo that she’d made up her mind to sell the house a few years ago and that she’d been planning to put it on the market after Jo’s exams. ‘Are you angry?’

‘No, I thought as much. You should sell as soon as you can,’ Jo said.

‘But you love this house,’ Mandy said.

‘Whenever I heard you talk about the possibility of moving, I’d get upset. I wanted us to have this house forever. Grandpa’s house. But everything is different now, and I think moving away is a good idea.’

‘I don’t know anymore. I planned for so long to get as far away from here as possible and was so worried about how you’d react, but I don’t think now is the time. We’ve got to get through the court case and the sentencing.’

‘You should sell and move away.’

‘I want you to have a home to come back to.’

‘This doesn’t feel like home anymore.’

Mandy could see that Jo was close to tears. Since she’d met Antonello and handed over the journals, Jo had spent a lot of time crying. Mandy felt like crying too. But they had to be brave for each other. She wrapped her arm around her daughter’s shoulder. ‘I will make sure you have a home to come back to.’

After Antonello took the journals, Ash’s voice stopped. Now Jo was overwhelmed by the absence of Ash, by the black hole in her life without her friend. Now she was sobbing in her sleep, waking not with Ash’s voice in her head, but with a longing to see her, to talk to her, to talk things through with her. Waking up thinking, I’ll ring Ash and tell her about Mum wanting to sell the house. I’ll ring Ash and talk to her about prison, about going to prison. These thoughts, small and momentary, were followed by the realisation again and again that there was no Ash, that she would never speak to Ash again. And then the regret that Ash wouldn’t fulfil her dreams, wouldn’t become a lawyer, wouldn’t work for the United Nations, wouldn’t have her own Hypothetical -style program on television… That Ash would never have a life.

Sadness was the dominating emotion. She was sad for Ash’s family: for Jane and Antonello, and for Rae and Alex, who now had their daughter’s journals but not their daughter. She was sad for Mandy and Mary and the lives they’d lost. And she was sad for herself. Sad for the house that would be sold and would soon belong to other people, people who did not know the story behind the mural that refused to disappear, or why there was an industrial safe in the front bedroom. Sadness lingered like smoke after a fire; it saturated everything.

She mourned her old life and her old self.

‘Our world has collapsed,’ Mandy said.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jo said. She’d apologised over and over again. She’d continue to apologise for the rest of her life, even though she doubted it would make any difference. It wouldn’t change anything. Jo hoped that Ash’s family would get some satisfaction, some resolution, from seeing her punished. Knowing she was in prison might give them a way through to something else.

‘I hate thinking of you being locked up,’ Mandy continued. ‘How can I go on living, move somewhere new, when you’ll be there?’

‘I hate thinking of you here,’ Jo said. ‘I’ll cope better if you aren’t here, if you have gone somewhere else. And anyway, it’s not good for either of us to wake up every morning and look at the bridge.’

‘Lots of people around here have spent their lives waking up to the bridge, with all the memories, with all the connections. Maybe it’s better to look at death in the face than to turn away from it.’

There was no escaping the bridge. It was impossible to see the ghost gum and not the bridge behind it. It was impossible to step out of the front gate and not be aware of its looming presence. It was a grey span across their skyline. It was embedded in the local community, had become a symbol of the west — Westgate Motors, Westgate Computer Care, Westgate Brewers, West Gate Pasta Supplies…

The only place on their small block where you could stand or sit and not see the bridge — though you could still hear it — was in the left-hand corner of the front yard, under the canopy of an old plum tree.

Mandy wasn’t sure what she was going to do. Was it possible to make a new home somewhere else? What made a house a home, anyway?

There were times when Mandy was so besieged by their street, by the stench of the petroleum, of the car fumes, of the rattle and roar of the traffic, that her body seemed to dissolve. ‘On some days,’ Mandy said, ‘living here, I feel like I’m drowning.’ On those days, the smell was everything; it was as if she carried it with her wherever she went, even if she went away, miles across town. On those days, Mandy kept expecting the people sitting next to her on trams or trains or standing across from her at the supermarket counter to say something about the smell, to tell her off, to move away in disgust. On those days, the smell invaded everything, from her nostrils to the pores of her skin. It settled on her, made itself at home.

It was true there were other days when the smell was hardly noticeable at all and she’d be surprised when a visitor asked, How do you stand the foul smell? Or when she heard someone walking past on their way to the path along the river or to Williamstown say, How anyone can live here? and peer through the bushes, curious to see what kind of strange creatures were capable of surviving in such an awful place.