If she and Ash stopped being friends, would they become strangers? Distant acquaintances? Would they give a nod as they passed in the street? Or would Ash be so repulsed that she’d want to run away and hide?
Should I write about that? Imagine that, Ash: Mrs Hunt reading my essay in class, my essay about you and me. Throughout the afternoon, she deliberated about how to bring it up. But what could she say: ‘Why haven’t you written about me in your journal?’ Even in her head she sounded like a wimpy ten-year-old. Like the fat and lonely child she was before she met Ash.
Chapter 5
Paolina shifted her chair to catch the soft afternoon sun as it came in through the sliding glass doors. In the garden, Antonello was staking the tomato plants. He was wearing old khaki shorts and a singlet, and she could see his strong calf muscles, his strong arms. Her body was broken and weak; all her muscles were limp, and her skin so flabby that it reminded her of being a child forced to wear her older cousin’s too-big hand-me-down dresses. Even on good days, walking the fifty steps to the front gate to check the letterbox was a struggle that required too much fortitude; gardening was reduced to short bursts, confined to the raised bed that Antonello had installed so that she could sit on a small wooden stool to tend the plants.
Her granddaughters had helped her plant herbs, basil and parsley, and bulbs — tulips, irises, and jonquils. The bulbs were a gift. ‘Secret plants,’ her youngest granddaughter called them. ‘We can plant them and not tell Nonno. They’ll be a surprise.’ Antonello’s reputation as the sort of gardener who didn’t have time for flowers was the butt of many family jokes. The girls called the garden ‘Nonno’s farm’.
Antonello pounded the wooden stakes with a hammer until they sank into the ground, and he tested each one by rocking it back and forth. The first time she’d seen him garden, he was planting two red rose bushes in the small bed under the bungalow windows. The roses were her choice. ‘We’ll lie in bed with coffee, look out the window, and see the roses,’ she told him. It was before the bridge collapse, in those romantic first months of their marriage. A Sunday, she guessed; the memory carried with it a sense of the day stretching into tranquility. A grey morning, the sky cloaked in dark and ponderous clouds. Drifting from the open kitchen window of her parents’ house was the wistful tones of a Calabrian folk singer, her mother’s favourite, the song a lament to a lost lover and a lost country. She remembered making a joke about her parents’ poor musical tastes as she inched towards him, as she ran her fingers along his arm. Antonello dropped the spade, wrapped his arms around her waist, and talked about the rain, urging her back into the bungalow. Even though they were married and living in their first home, the prefabricated bungalow in her parents’ backyard, they felt like teenagers playing house. That day they giggled as they pulled the blinds down and hung Zia Lina’s sign, Non Disturbare, on the door.
The sign, cross-stitched in bright reds and blues, the text surrounded by a garland of daisies, had been a kitchen tea gift. ‘You’re young. If you want to be alone, put this on the door. That way your mother’ — Lina elbowed her sister — ‘eh, sorella? She won’t come in with her plate of cotolette or biscotti when you want to be alone.’ Both Paolina and her mother blushed, but across the room, which was overflowing with female cousins and aunts, with future sisters-in-law, a future mother-in-law, girlfriends, there were giggles and laughter.
‘We can’t use that,’ Antonello said when he first saw the sign. ‘It’s like we are putting a notice on the door, letting your parents know we are having sex now.’ But they did hang the sign on the door, because in those early days they were impatient, their longing for each other was urgent. Paolina’s body, even in its battered current state, remembered, and the memory, along with the sight of Antonello in the garden, resulted in an unexpected feverish desire. She wouldn’t act on it — her body didn’t have the strength — but its presence was delicious and sweet.
Recently, while sorting and clearing, Paolina had discovered the cross-stitched sign among the handmade linen she had inherited from her mother, which she’d never used but couldn’t bear to discard. Her zia’s work was fine, the letters constructed from a series of perfect, tiny stitches. She was surprised, though, when she turned the piece over, to find that on the back of the sign there was another embroidered message, in English: Don’t forget to laugh, marriage is funny. Paolina would’ve sworn the second message hadn’t been there when Zia Lina first gave her the gift. That it hadn’t been there all those times she hung the sign on the bungalow door. Lina’s English was better than Paolina’s mother’s, but not so good; she must’ve recruited a translator.
On that same day, Paolina rang Lina’s oldest daughter, Rosa, and they reminisced. They remembered their mothers, and the way the two sisters — the oldest and the youngest, bookending the family of eight — were inseparable.
‘They fought so much,’ Rosa said. ‘Remember?’
‘Yes.’
‘About everything. About recipes. About childhood memories. About how to make the sauce, the sausages. God, remember once, your mother grabbed the salt shaker that my mother had in her hands and threw it across the room to stop her putting more salt on the sausages?’
‘My mother used to say your mother was born with no tastebuds,’ Paolina said with a laugh.
‘Once, I said to my mother, “Why do we have to do everything with Zia Pina? All you do is fight.” She slapped me. Tu sei una cretina, she yelled at me. È mia sorrella.’
After they hung up, Paolina sewed a small tag, ‘This is for Rosa’, on the Non Disturbare sign before she put it back in the drawer.
Outside, Antonello lined up his three rows of ten stakes. As the tomato plants grew, he would train them up the stakes and they’d bear fruit — enough tomatoes to share with his children, Alex and Nicki, and their families; with the neighbours; with friends. This year Paolina might not be the one to pick them. She might not be the one to put them in paper bags and distribute them. Although the cancer had slowed, it hadn’t stopped. Death was as sly and as agile as the black cat skulking in the bushes, its eye on the birds blinded by the lure of Antonello’s garden. Her children and her grandchildren would mourn her and move on with their lives, but Antonello would be alone. Alone in the garden. Alone in the house. She couldn’t shake the feeling of guilt and sorrow, the sense that she was abandoning him.
Paolina made a cup of tea and sat at the kitchen table. In front of her was that morning’s Herald Sun. She unfolded it and turned the pages, reading the headlines. The image of the temporary suicide fence on the West Gate Bridge caught her attention; she knew it would’ve caught Antonello’s. The photograph was taken at peak hour, early morning. The traffic heading towards the city was heavy: several lanes of cars and trucks bumper to bumper.
‘Four times the number the bridge was made to hold,’ Antonello repeated often. The bridge collapsing again was an ongoing possibility. And the falling dreams persisted, though neither mentioned them — what was there left to say? It had been almost forty years now, and she was used to being woken by his cries, by his legs hitting hard against the mattress.
In the months after the collapse, she’d been adamant they should move away, but Antonello refused. In hindsight, she understood he was suffering from post-traumatic stress, but none of the survivors went to counselling. The doctors treated their physical injuries and gave them sleeping tablets.