He remembered, too, going through the bungalow — it must have been a month or so after the collapse — and searching for sketchbooks and his drawings of the bridge. Paolina refused to tell him where she’d hidden them. When finally he found a couple of them, he built a fire in the metal drum his father-in-law kept for boiling sauce bottles and threw them in. Paolina tried to stop him, pulling at his arms, at the sketchbooks half eaten by the flames. Defeated, she cried, and the ash and smoke choked the backyard. He never sketched again, not even with his children and grandchildren.
For whole days he sat at the kitchen table or on the back doorstep and smoked cigarettes, one after the other, the panic and fear so overwhelming, the sense of looming disaster unbearable. On those days, he didn’t want Paolina to leave the house; he pleaded with her to stay home. When she left, he worried about her all day, and if she was late, he paced up and down the driveway until she arrived.
Only his brother-in-law Giacomo understood. ‘It doesn’t matter how far away you go. Moving away is pointless. The ghosts are everywhere.’ Giacomo’s ghosts stalked him — they were relentless and mocking, and he was tormented. He didn’t talk about the war, and he didn’t ask Antonello about the bridge. The two brothers-in-law, both talkers as children, had lost their tongues, but sometimes in the middle of the night, when they couldn’t sleep or their nightmares were unbearable, they found each other in the garden. They sat on the old chairs Paolina’s father kept under the fig tree, or on the bungalow doorsteps, and reminisced about their boyhoods: Giacomo’s in Yarraville, Antonello’s in Vizzini. Those long-ago memories of the time before the war, before the bridge collapse, when the life that stretched out in front of them was seductive.
Almost two months after the accident, they’d discovered that Paolina was pregnant. His insomnia worsened. The surging panics became more frequent. The sense of impending doom followed him everywhere. He changed his shift at Bradmill’s so that he could walk Paolina to work and be there in the afternoon to walk her home. He didn’t tell her that sometimes he didn’t go home at all, that he sat in the park and watched the school. He didn’t go to work unless he knew that Paolina’s parents or Giacomo were home. Before he left the house he checked that the gas stove was turned off, that the windows were locked. Often, he had to turn back at the front gate and check everything again.
When Alex was born and the nurse handed him their little baby boy, all clean and wrapped up in a blue blanket, Antonello took him reluctantly. The panic rose in waves. His hands shook. The sensation was like the vertigo he’d experienced that first time he went up high on a building site; it left him numb and unable to move. His mother noticed and took the baby. ‘I can’t wait any longer to hold my grandson,’ she said. Relieved, but still trembling, he handed his son to Emilia. Surrounding him in the waiting room were all the fathers who had died on the bridge and all the children they’d left behind.
When the bridge works were completed, all the survivors were sent an invitation to the opening and a toll pass for an initial trip across. They came together in a Victorian government envelope with a letter from the Premier that he couldn’t bear to read. He ripped it into tiny pieces. He swore he’d never drive across the bridge.
For years, the strongest, most persistent impulse was towards death; a desire to stop living. Now Alex and Rae wanted to stop living. But life didn’t stop. It went on whether you lived it or not. You have to choose life. This is what he needed to tell them — you have to choose life. If you stop living, you may as well die. If you stop living, you aren’t going to be able to love again, and everyone you know will pay for that, everyone.
Chapter 20
Long days and long nights, no relief at the end of either. No difference. No beginning and no end. There was nothing to mark time, and yet time passed. Sarah rang to tell them that the hearing would be in the new year, probably not until June. The courts had a backlog of cases and Jo wasn’t considered a risk to the community.
Could she spend all those days in the dark room, waiting in limbo?
Summer was on its way now — set on its course like the container ships that slid into the bay from the sea, slow and languid. In the two months since the accident, Jo had left the house twice, and only to go to the police station. Once for the interview. A second time to sign her statement. Before the accident, she rarely spent a whole day at home. She’d been busy — work, school, the gym, hanging out with Ash.
On the days Mandy was at work and Mary didn’t visit, Jo dragged herself to the back verandah and sat looking out at her mother’s garden. She avoided looking over the fence at the bridge. She was meant to be doing something: at least preparing herself for what was to come. But the world was a blur. She tried to shift the angle, to stand in a different light, but the picture refused to come into focus.
Ash was everywhere. Jo knew ghosts didn’t exist, but Ash’s voice was clearer than her own. She rarely slept, but when she did Ash appeared in a recurring dream: Ash, kneeling in a garden bed in the centre of a large kitchen, her face pasted with dirt. Rivers of dried mud wound around her legs. No sense of inside or outside.
‘What is it like to be dead?’ Jo asked.
Ash was digging. Mud caked into her fingernails.
‘What is it like to be dead?’
The morning light was streaming in through the kitchen window. Ash was wearing the blue top and skirt she’d worn to the party. The flowers in the garden were dying: yellowed stems, rotting petals.
Jo marked all the would-have-been milestones from her bed — the school formal, their graduation, the beginning of their VCE exams. English would have been her first, Geography her last. Were Mani and Laura going on with their lives as if nothing had changed?
On the morning that would’ve been the first day of the Schoolies Week holiday at Byron Bay they’d planned a year ago, Jo, unable to bear the house any longer, waited until Mandy left for work and got dressed. Like a small-time criminal in an American detective series, she put on a pair of sunglasses and a cap as a disguise. She opened the front door to a hot wind and a heady cocktail of diesel and petrol as cars and trucks hurtled down Hyde and Francis. Next door, Mrs Nguyễn was listening to morning television. Across the road, behind the cyclone-wire fence, there were several men in safety jackets and helmets. The tanks, still and defiant, shrugged them off. The men reminded her of the plastic characters her Grandpa Tom used to buy her as a child. In the evenings they’d build tall towers with her blocks, a world for the miniature men and women, and her grandfather would make up the stories.
She locked the door. At the gate she hesitated, unsure which way to go. Against the clear sky the bridge was monumental, a towering monolith. The sight of it made her want to crawl back into the house.
If she went into Yarraville, no more than five minutes away, it was likely she’d see someone she knew. She couldn’t imagine that. For almost two months now, her mother, her grandmother, Sarah, and the police were the only people she’d seen.
If Ash were alive, they might’ve gone to Williamstown for a swim on a warm morning like this. They might’ve spent the day sitting on towels on the crowded beach, surrounded by families with picnic baskets and beach shades, playing spot-the-cute-guy, reading novels, falling asleep in the sun, and speculating about their VCE results.