Mandy wanted to scream. Anger and rage caught in her throat: that girl, that girl. She pushed against the wall behind her to stop herself from falling. She couldn’t look at the police officers. She stared at her bare feet, her small and pale and cold feet. Both officers were wearing heavy walking boots, like the ones her father used to wear when he worked in the foundry.
‘You need to go to the hospital.’
She didn’t want to see Jo. She thought she might never want to see Jo again.
‘I can’t… I don’t have a car.’
‘We can drive you to the hospital.’
It was cramped with the three of them standing in the narrow hallway, and Mandy longed for them to go. ‘I’m not dressed.’
‘We can wait.’
But she didn’t move.
‘I know it’s difficult, Mrs Neilson, but Jo needs you.’
She longed to tell them to go away, to fuck off, to leave her alone. What if she didn’t want to see Jo? How could she go and see Jo when Ashleigh was dead? ‘Ashleigh, poor Ashleigh. And her parents — and Jane. Jane is so young.’
‘Yes,’ Constable Lumina said, ‘it’s hard for everyone. Your daughter too. Please, Mrs Nielson, get dressed, and we’ll take you to the hospital.’
As she was dressing, Mandy thought about what she hadn’t said to Jo and Ashleigh. You’ve been drinking, don’t drive, take a taxi. She should’ve stopped Jo driving. She should’ve tried. She was a coward, avoiding conflict, instead of being a proper mother; a proper mother would’ve stopped them.
When she emerged dressed, Constable Lumina led her out of the house, ready to take her by the arm. Mandy shifted away again. She avoided looking up at the street, at the neighbourhood, at the tanks and the bridge.
In the back seat of the police car, as they drove down Hyde Street, Mandy thought about Ashleigh’s parents, and Jane, and the police knocking on their door, and the fact that they were grieving for their daughter, their sister, who was gone… forever.
The officers drove to the hospital. Mandy wanted to tell them how beautiful Ashleigh had looked in her blue top, how she was all smiles and laughter. About Jo and Ashleigh with their arms around each other, posing for photographs, and of her jealousy — jealous of their youth, of their lives. And now Ashleigh was dead, and it was all Jo’s fault. And if it was Jo’s fault, then it was Mandy’s fault too. She’d let it happen.
‘She was so alive, a few hours ago,’ she said, in an attempt to convince the two police officers, and herself, that it was a mistake. It was impossible, she wanted to yell at them, shake them. This wasn’t how death happened. She’d watched both her parents die — months of decline, of hospitals, of waiting, of suffering and pain, until they stopped praying for life, for recovery, until all hope abandoned them, until they were praying for death.
The police officers didn’t respond.
Bad mother. She was a bad mother. Good mothers knew what to do. They knew how to behave. A good mother wouldn’t have let her drunk daughter take the car. A good mother would’ve stopped them, and Ashleigh, beautiful Ashleigh, would be alive. Mandy’s anger flared. In the past, whenever Jo had done something wrong, she’d defended, excused, compensated. But there was no excuse for driving drunk. No defence. No compensating for Ashleigh’s death. Mandy didn’t want to see Jo. That moment in the back seat of the police car, she experienced a sensation of falling, of falling out of love with her daughter. Like falling in love with Jo, it would, in her memory, seem instantaneous. When Jo was born, Mandy bonded with her immediately. Jo was an easy baby. The nurses said she was lucky. It was only years later, when other women friends had their babies, and she witnessed first-baby blues and anxieties, postnatal depression, and colicky infants that refused to sleep, that she realised how lucky she’d been. Her love for Jo was unconditional — it rose out of her in waves, and even during the recent difficult teenage years, even as Jo rejected her, even as she no longer knew what her daughter thought about, dreamed about, even as she asked questions and Jo was rude and distant, she hadn’t doubted her love. It was the one love that would endure anything, survive anything. She had promised Jo that. When David left, Mandy said, ‘Your father and I can’t live together, we don’t love each other anymore, but we’ll always love you.’ She promised the three- and four- and five-year-old Jo over and over again.
Her love for Jo had been her driving force. On days when the world seemed impossible to negotiate, it kept her going. In its absence, she was left feeling hollow, weighed down by weariness. Leaning against the window in the back of the police car, she had no idea how they’d live through this, past it. Did people manage to live? To move on? Did Jo deserve to? Did either of them?
‘Will she go to prison?’ Mandy asked the police officers.
Constable Lumina turned to face Mandy. ‘She’ll be charged, and when she’s released from the hospital she’ll have to make a statement. And go to court. It’ll be up to the courts.’
‘But it’s likely?’
‘Yes, it’s likely.’
Chapter 9
Antonello woke in a sweat, his hands gripping the bed post. In his dream the bridge, cut loose from the piers, was a swinging pendulum. He was balancing on a tightrope between the two halves. But the span on the west side cracked, the concrete crumbled, he was falling… He reached out for the tissues on the bedside table and wiped his face. Took a deep breath to calm himself and checked the clock. It was 4.00 am.
‘Occupational hazard,’ Bob said the first time Antonello told him about his falling dreams, not long after they’d started to work on the bridge. ‘Whenever you do height work, the falling comes back. Sandy says that some nights the whole bed shakes, and that isn’t because I’m such a stud.’ He winked at Antonello.
Many times standing on the half-finished bridge, Antonello had imagined diving off: the flight, the lift, the floating, the soaring, and the final descent into the water. Like all the men, he’d felt the bridge sway, especially on windy days, when the end span shook. The movement, a tremor, travelled along the bridge and through his body in tiny rolling waves; he’d imagine his own falling.
After the collapse, the occasional falling dream turned into a reoccurring nightmare, and each time it catapulted him into the past and left him adrift, as if the present were an alien world he’d landed in by mistake.
To anchor himself, he shifted his body closer to Paolina, until he felt her breath on his face. She’d thrown the covers off her shoulders; both arms were raised above her head. He resisted the urge to reach out, to run his hand over the soft folds of her skin.
‘It’s not a remission,’ the doctor warned them. ‘We can’t call it that, not yet, but for now the tumor has stopped growing.’
Life without Paolina was unimaginable. It was a cliché and a lie, he knew that. It was what people said when their loved ones were dying. Then, of course, most people went on living. But there were all kinds of living, and some were closer to death than life.
Antonello was certain that without Paolina, he’d shrivel and shrink, until he was like those pickled men in a jar they sold at the craft markets Paolina loved going to on Sunday mornings. The men were made from recycled pantyhose, the surprisingly young craftswoman had told him, standing behind rows and rows of men in jars. She wore a green lace dress and a small box hat with feathers.
‘Everything’s recycled,’ Antonello remembered saying to Paolina. ‘Why don’t they say old?’
Paolina hung her pantyhose in the bathroom to dry. They were so delicate that if his hand accidentally brushed across them, the threads snagged easily on his fingernails, on the rough patches of his skin.