By the time she left Gopals, the rush hour was over and the workers in a hurry to get home had been replaced by couples holding hands, friends going out to dinner or for a drink in one of the expensive bars hidden down laneways or on the top floors of converted commercial buildings. Sarah loved to walk, especially at dusk; she could walk around the city for hours. But she was a faller and had to be cautious. Raised footpaths, cracked bitumen, and loose gravel often caught Sarah unawares. A tendency to trip, slip, spill. Falling to the ground. Missing steps and failing to take gutters into account. Cobblestones, slate, any uneven ground. Her ankles twisted. Weak foundations. It wasn’t a chronic condition, but it required attention. She had to watch her step. Over the years there had been multiple scraped knees and twisted ankles, bruised arms and hands. She’d split her lip, cracked a couple of teeth, and broken her left arm in two places. So the walking she loved was laced with fear and foreboding.
Even as a child she’d frequently fallen. Her falls drove her mother — netballer, runner, and, more recently, golfer — mad. A woman with excellent balance, she didn’t understand Sarah’s lack of it. ‘You don’t take after me or your father.’ This was one of the only times Sarah heard her mother say anything positive about her father. ‘When he was young he could run so fast that everyone wanted him on their team.’
‘Watch your feet,’ was Sarah’s grandmother’s advice. She was a faller too.
It was the blood that bothered Sarah’s mother. When Sarah came home in tears, with blood dripping down her leg or arm, her mother tried to be sympathetic. If Sarah came home long after the fall, her clothes torn and stained with dry blood, crusty scabs forming on her skin, sympathy was impossible. ‘Not again.’
‘It’s not my fault. It was an accident.’
After each fall, Sarah undressed in the bathroom and sat on the side of the bath while her mother washed the sores with cottonbuds and hot water, and dabbed them with Dettol. Sarah ground her teeth, clenched her fists, and bit down hard on her tongue, but she didn’t cry, not even when the sting seemed unbearable; it was her fault, after all, for being careless, for taking after her grandmother.
Sarah walked with too careful a step for a woman her age. Her eyes were on her feet. Walking this way, it was possible to cover kilometres and see nothing. Nothing but the cracks and stains of the bitumen. Nothing but the litter: cigarette butts, lolly wrappers, crushed soft drink cans, and flattened bottle tops. If the fear took control, and it did sometimes, the possibility of falling would rise like a fever, like a blush, like a panic. And walking took a force of will.
Sarah had been avoiding the West Gate for years. But Jo had crashed under the bridge, and for Sarah to understand what had happened and the details in the police report, she needed to visit the accident site.
The next morning, Sarah headed for the bridge. She left the car across the road. It wasn’t possible to park under the bridge — the scaffolding for the maintenance works was a complex web, metal towers rising to grip concrete piers. A crippled bridge: cracked, overloaded, tired. Built in the 1970s to take the city into the next century, it was now carrying a volume of traffic that many said was beyond its capacity.
‘They’re not adding on,’ said her engineer brother, Paul, at one of their fortnightly family dinners. ‘You can’t add on to a bridge. They’re narrowing all the lanes to create an extra lane each way.’
‘Robbing Peter to pay Paul,’ her mother said.
‘But won’t that make driving on the bridge more dangerous?’ Sarah asked.
‘No evidence of that,’ he said. ‘It’s like airlines reducing the space between seats.’
‘That’s proven to be dangerous — what about thrombosis?’ Sarah’s other brother, Jake, said.
‘It might be dangerous,’ her father announced, ‘but they won’t publish any of those findings.’
‘Engineers aren’t the enemy,’ Paul said. ‘We give you what you want. No one wants to be stuck in traffic.’
The dinner-table banter went on and on, as it usually did. But Sarah was haunted by her brother’s comment: We give you what you want. Did anyone ever explain the consequences of giving people what they wanted? Would people, would whole communities, cities, countries, reject progress if they knew the consequences? Was that what engineers and scientists were afraid of?
It was after ten and the traffic on the bridge was flowing. It was sunny, but not yet hot. Under the bridge, the mangroves were alive with birds. A group of older cyclists flew past, their voices as loud and bright as the lycra pants and shirts they wore. In the distance a couple were jogging, their Irish wolfhound, the size of a small pony, galloping towards a fisherman sitting on the banks of the river. The fisherman laughed and patted the dog as if they were old friends.
Sarah gazed up at the bridge and thought about Ada falling. Driving her mother’s brown Nissan to the top, pulling over to the emergency lane, making sure the note was on the dashboard, stepping out onto the roadway, climbing the barrier, and falling. Falling into the river.
There are two types of jumpers, Sarah had read in a report about suicides off the West Gate: those who hesitate and those who don’t.
Ada didn’t hesitate. The cops told the family that the VicRoads security staff weren’t able to reach her in time.
‘They don’t jump,’ a cop told her once. He didn’t know about Ada. They were in a meeting at police headquarters in the city, and the chairperson had called for a short tea break. She wanted to run away from him. ‘Everyone uses that expression, “jump off the bridge”, but they don’t jump. They sit or stand on the barrier and they let themselves fall.’
Sarah imagined Ada as an eagle diving.
Finally, after years of resistance, the government had installed safety barriers, and now the authorities declared it was impossible to jump, to fall, to suicide off the bridge. Sarah didn’t know if that was true or not. People found ways to scale walls. The Berlin Wall. Prison walls. You couldn’t lock the passage to the underworld. Too late for Ada. But Ada would’ve found some other way to die.
‘Most days,’ Ada told Sarah a few weeks before she died, ‘I wish I didn’t exist.’
For over an hour, they’d been sitting outside the European restaurant in a patch of sunshine, drinking coffee and watching a group of gay-marriage activists demonstrating on the steps of Parliament House. They’d talked about work — the challenges of legal aid and the perils of nursing — and about friends. Jess, who was in London, ‘making ethereal installations’. Sue, who was doing her PhD in Sydney. They’d been gossiping and laughing before Ada made the comment.