‘I thought I might never see you again,’ Sam said, and Antonello heard the reproach. What kind of man refused to see his best friend?
‘I’m sorry, Sam. At first I needed to be alone, I didn’t want to see anyone. And then it seemed too much time had gone by.’
Antonello remembered watching Sam coming up the driveway and shaking hands with Paolina’s father, who was digging over the soil in the vegetable patch. Sam knocked and pounded on the door while he stood inside the bungalow, gripping the back of the chair to stop himself from falling, from caving into himself, his head throbbing. His body shaking.
‘I gave up after Alice left,’ Sam said. ‘I had my own shit and I thought, bugger you.’
Antonello nodded. ‘I know for some of the blokes it helped to get together, working on the plaque and the memorial, and even on finishing the bridge, but for me…’
‘It was fucking hard for all of us,’ Sam said, pushing his empty glass aside.
‘Another round?’ Antonello asked. His own glass was still half full.
Sam nodded, and Antonello called out to the barman, ‘Same again.’
‘A couple of times I set out to come and see you,’ he continued. ‘Once I got as far as your gate. And then I thought I’d come back to work on the bridge and I’d see you on the site, but the week we were due back I got so sick I couldn’t get out of bed. They call them panic attacks now. I had the shakes so bad that at one point they did tests for Parkinson’s. Paolina was pregnant and we had the mortgage and I had to work. My father organised a storeman’s job at Bradmill’s. Most days the only sunlight I saw was through the gaps between the storeroom door and the containers. I stayed there for a couple of years, until Sandy organised the job in the library. So I took it and went back to school to retrain.’
‘White-collar.’ Sam grinned and ran his finger around the inside of his own collar. ‘Bit of a change from rigging.’
‘I miss the rigging. The library’s okay, but I miss being outside. Even miss the height work, even those freezing mornings.’
‘Great view, though, across the whole city. I loved the heights.’
‘You sure did.’ Antonello smiled. ‘No bloody fear.’ The barman put the drinks on the counter and Antonello stood up, paid, and brought them over.
‘I was young and silly. I thought I was invincible. Becoming a union organiser knocked some sense into me. Sometimes it feels too much like a desk job, so I hit the road and visit workers around the region.’
‘You’ve done a lot of good. I’ve seen you on the telly, at the rallies. You’re…’ Antonello was choking up and had to stop and take a breath. ‘I’m proud of you, Sam, proud of you.’ Over the years, when he’d seen Sam on television, he’d had the urge to shout out, that’s my best mate.
Sam shrugged. ‘It hasn’t been easy. I was a fucking mess for a long time and did a shitload of drinking. The survivors, we had permanent spots at the bar. Alice and I fought every day until she left. I blamed her, but it wasn’t her fault. Not mine, either.’
‘You were crazy about her. I thought you guys’d be together forever,’ Antonello said.
‘Still a bit crazy about her,’ Sam said, shaking his head.
‘I’m sorry, Sam.’ Antonello sighed and remembered Alice, a nonstop talker who loved going to the San Remo and being the only Australian girl there, and dancing all night with Sam, and plotting to convince Sam’s mother it wouldn’t be the end of the world if he married an Australiana.
‘She’s happy, married with a couple of kids. And I’m happy too — I met Judith twenty-years ago now, and we’re good together. She already had two boys, so it was an instant family. Alice and I’ll always be friends.’
‘We needed help, but no one offered,’ Antonello said.
‘No, I thought going back to the bridge would help, but it was tough. There were days working on the bridge when it shook, when I was sure I’d fall… I could hear Bob’s voice calling me and I wanted to fall. There were times I considered, just a step, just a step, and I’d be gone too.’
‘It’s surprising no one did,’ Antonello said.
‘Blokes died in other ways: heart attacks, strokes. But yeah, these days they’d have us all on suicide watch. I believed if the bridge didn’t get finished, Bob and Slav and the other blokes would’ve lost their lives for nothing. As if the fucking bridge was something. And I thought I owed it to ’em to get the thing done. I wanted to see it finished. Alice and my mother were furious. Finally, they agreed on something… But I went back. Most of the time, I was either drunk or hung-over, but it was the only way I could keep going. And the bloody companies were as bad as ever — as if they hadn’t learnt anything from the accident, nothing. So of course there were strikes and stopworks, and money was tight. Alice was trying to get pregnant. She had two miscarriages and I wasn’t around. It was the last straw. After she left, I lost the house and had to move in with my parents. Now, that was hell.’
Antonello nodded and they both laughed at the memory of Sam’s bossy mother.
Could he have made a difference to Sam’s life? If he’d let Sam into the bungalow, if he’d picked up the phone, would life have been better for both of them? The sharp yank of regret: another trap.
‘Things got worse until Gary Willis gave me a job.’
‘Gary Willis, I remember him. He was a racist bastard,’ Antonello said before he could think to censor himself. Gary had been their shop steward on the bridge. He was a tough guy, prepared to stand up to the bosses, but often that put him off side with the men as well. In hindsight, they knew Gary had been right about so many of the problems on the bridge: the asbestos in the welding blankets and gloves, the damage to hearing caused by constant loud noise, the lead and chromium in the paints, the need for scaffolding and guards, and of course the problems with the structural design and the construction processes. There had been so many accidents. The men who survived were still paying the costs years later, but no work meant no pay, and that meant not enough money for the mortgage or the rent, to buy food or pay bills. So even for the committed unionists, it became difficult.
‘He wasn’t all bad,’ Sam insisted. ‘He taught me a lot.’
‘He hated us wogs,’ Antonello said. ‘He never referred to any of us by name — we were the dago bastards or a pack of bludgers and scabs, even when we were out on strike.’ At one meeting, after the workers voted against Gary’s proposal to strike, Gary had let loose on the fucking dagos, who shouldn’t have been allowed in the fucking country. Antonello and Sam and Slav had been in his line of vision. He stood only inches from Antonello’s face with his fists raised: ‘You should fucking go back to where you fucking come from.’ Antonello wasn’t a fighter; even as a child he’d avoided boyish tumbles. But he wanted to hit Gary that day. Sam and Bob had to pull him away. In Gary’s eyes, he was scum, he could see that.
‘The day I started working, my father said to me, “You never step onto a work site without union membership. Otherwise, the bosses will screw you. When everyone stands together, that’s when workers can have some power.” So I’d expected the unionists to be the good guys,’ Antonello said.
‘Okay, yes, Gary can be a bastard, but he was right about Freeman Fox and World Services — they didn’t know the fuck what they were doing. He was right about a lot of things, including Milford.’
With the mention of the Milford Haven Bridge, Antonello winced; he felt as if Sam had taken a swipe at him. Milford should’ve been the warning that saved them. Four men had been killed. The Milford and the West Gate had the same design, by the same company. Gary organised a meeting and urged them to strike. Then the engineer, Michael Shields, came to talk to them. ‘I’m one of the best engineers in the world. I’ve worked on more bridges than most of you have had hot dinners,’ he said. ‘The West Gate is safe. If I didn’t think it was safe, I wouldn’t be working on it.’ Of all the engineers, Michael Shields had been most like them, down-to-earth, a father of young children. He sounded confident. ‘Our bridge isn’t the same as the bridge in Wales. We have a stronger bridge — it’s better designed, it’s better built.’