‘Of course I’m sure,’ she said with a laugh as he slipped the gold ring on her finger. ‘You’re the most handsome man I know.’
‘More handsome that Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita?’ he teased. They had seen the movie at La Scala in Footscray, with Sam and his fiancée Alice, and the two women had declared Mastroianni a heartthrob.
That Paolina chose him was a miracle. He still said thank-you prayers at night before he slid into their bed. Bellissima e molto buona. Would Paolina one day regret marrying him — a labourer with no education?
‘Come on, let’s go,’ Paolina said. ‘It smells like dead fish and burnt oil here.’
Antonello raised his head and sniffed the air. ‘You have a better sense of smell than me. Working down here, I’ve stopped noticing it.’ Before he closed his notebook, he gazed at the completed sketch: the bridge, half-made, reaching across the river from both sides. A promise not yet fulfilled.
But they were close to finishing. In a few more months, the bridge would be whole, and when they relinquished it to the city, they’d make history. A bunch of working blokes would forever be part of Melbourne.
Chapter 1
It was late Thursday morning during Paolina’s third week with her Grade 3 class. This was her fourth appointment as a replacement teacher, her second at the same school. Agnes Hunt, the permanent teacher who was now on maternity leave, had warned her that there were several mischief-makers who needed constant surveillance, and they’d already made themselves known: Marisa Percelli had twisted her ankle doing back flips between the desks, the Papageorgiou triplets had brought matches to school and set the bins on fire, and Gary Dyson spat hand-rolled paper missiles across the room whenever she wasn’t looking. But more concerning to Paolina were the students who were struggling and found every activity a challenge.
Terri, whose turn it was to read, was short and shy, with pale skin and green eyes that she hid behind a long fringe. She stood up as one of the Papageorgiou boys — Paolina hadn’t got as far as telling them apart — passed her the book. She was trembling and already her face was turning red.
‘Oh no, not her, we’ll be here all day,’ yelled out Willie, the class talker, from the back of the room, where he was supposed to be facing the wall with his hands on his head in an enforced five-minute silence. Giggles rippled along the desks.
Paolina ignored him and focused on Terri. The girl’s tongue flapped about, her lips opened and closed, she alternately sucked and bloated her cheeks, but nothing came out. It was as if the words were glue in her mouth. When she finally found her voice, some words came out in a rush of spit, while others were stretched beyond recognition as she painstakingly sounded out each letter. Around the room students were twitching and fiddling, and some were sniggering. Paolina was thinking about how to help the girl, how to spare her any further embarrassment, when she noticed Jimmy, a smallish boy she’d caught fighting the day before, scribbling in his book. She tiptoed across the room and stood by his desk. In the margins of the novel, there were pencil sketches of birds — not the stick-birds other children his age drew, but fully formed sparrows, and seagulls, and a half-drawn heron, its long sharp beak protruding from a small head with, as yet, no body. She hesitated for a moment, then snatched the pencil out of Jimmy’s hand. Startled, he knocked his book and it tumbled to the floor. Around him, the students laughed. Terri continued stuttering and stammering through her allotted page. Paolina gave the class the stern look she’d been practising since her lecturer at Melbourne Teachers’ College told her she needed to be more serious when disciplining her students. Firm but fair.
A few streets away, Emilia washed the coffee cups and put away the single remaining piece of lemon cake. Both her son Antonello and his father, Franco, had been too nervous to eat their breakfast before their meeting at the bank. But of course they were famished afterwards.
‘Asking for a loan feels like begging,’ Franco had said days earlier, trying to convince Emilia to come with him to the bank.
‘Wait until we save the money,’ she insisted.
But Franco refused to postpone buying a new car. ‘I earn the money, and I’ll buy a car if I want to.’
Franco was a firecracker, too easy to ignite. When they disagreed, they could argue for days. Emilia knew that Antonello hated his father’s inability to control his temper, and the ease with which she goaded him, so to put an end to the ongoing battle he’d volunteered to take the morning off and go to the bank with Franco.
The bank manager, a benign middle-aged man in a grey suit who apparently thought getting his message across to a migrant required long pauses between every word, happily agreed to the loan, and now Franco was working in the garden and, Emilia assumed, dreaming about his new car as if it weren’t going to cost them a small fortune, with the interest and bank fees.
Emilia stirred the pasta sauce simmering on the back burner. Garlic and onions, basil and chilli, homemade pork sausage and tomato passata, a pinch of sugar and a splash of their own wine — well, more than a splash, but she wouldn’t tell her daughter, Carmela, who, since the maternal and child health nurse at the council told her even one drop of alcohol could damage a child’s brain, had been on a constant campaign to stop Emilia using wine in her cooking. Carmela was trying to be more Australiana, and as a result, she had eliminated wine, and garlic (bad breath) and chilli (too spicy), from her diet. Carmela’s food was bland and boring (though Emilia couldn’t blame Australia; her oldest daughter was a terrible cook), so most days Carmela came for lunch, with her children and her husband, before Marco’s afternoon shift at the foundry. Emilia didn’t mind: all her married life in Italy, she’d shared the cooking with her mother-in-law and youngest sister-in-law, and even though they had their own kitchens in their own separate sections of the three-storey house, all three households ate together.
When Emilia had suggested to Antonello that he and Paolina might move in with them, at least until they had saved enough for their own house, he’d laughed.
‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ he said finally when she asked him what was so funny. ‘You’re too bossy.’
She’d thrown her tea towel at him, but she knew he was right. It was nostalgia. She was grateful to no longer share her kitchen.
As she set the table, the sun streamed in through the louvre windows, creating soft, warm stripes across the room. It was 15 October, her mother’s eighty-fourth birthday. She’d sent her money and later, after dinner, she’d call. Her mother’s hearing had deteriorated and Emilia would have to shout. The thin phone line was an inadequate channel for the weight of their emotions.
Emilia checked the sauce once more. It was spicier than, and not as sweet as, her mother’s. The memory rolled in: she a short ten-year-old, standing on a stool so she could look into the pot. ‘Attenzione a non troppo peperoncino, basta, basta!’ Her mother pinching her arm to stop her adding the extra chilli.
Just after 11.40 am, Antonello arrived on site and made his way to the lift, where he’d arranged to meet Slav and Sam. Even though drinking before a shift was against company policy, almost everyone had a liquid lunch on payday. To avoid problems, the workers went to the Vic and the Commercial, leaving the Railway to the engineers. Most of the workers from the local factories and refineries were paid on Thursdays, so all three bars would be crowded until the clock hit one, when the men downed their pints and rushed back to work.