She rocked the pram that held her youngest child. Paolina squeezed her sister-in-law’s arm. Luck was fickle; she didn’t want to depend on it.
‘He wasn’t supposed to be on site. He took the morning off to go to the bank with your father. He went in early to meet Sam and Slav for lunch.’
Was that bad luck?
The baby began to cry and Carmela picked him up. He had brown eyes and olive skin. His head was covered in spiky black hair, as dark as Antonello’s. Paolina wanted children, but they’d decided to wait until they saved a house deposit. Now Paolina wished she was already pregnant and Antonello’s child was in her belly. What if something happened to him? What if he were dead? She might’ve lost him and their future, the family they were going to have together.
She’d foreseen the bridge falling. It fell in her nightmares, collapsing over and over again. It fell on those days when he was late home, when the wind turned into a gust. He told her she worried too much, that the bridge was safe, he was safe. She closed her eyes. Nello, please be alive.
One hour and then a second hour passed, and with it Paolina’s anxiety rose. One old woman howled as her son limped towards her. A younger woman knelt by the body of her brother. ‘I can’t go home and tell Mum you’re dead,’ she cried. ‘I can’t.’ A woman dressed in a Salvation Army uniform gathered the sister in her arms. ‘My mother loved him best,’ the girl wailed.
They waited. Some paced. Others leant against fences and cars, talked in soft whispers to the strangers they found themselves next to. The road transformed into a large waiting room, each person praying that their son, husband, father, brother would be the lucky one, the one who defied the odds and survived.
Paolina closed her eyes to stop herself crying and recalled sitting with Antonello on the banks of the Yarra, watching him draw the bridge. Witnessing the pleasure drawing gave him. He found pleasure so easily. She knew what trauma could do to a man: her father suffered from depression, a result of his experiences as a prisoner of war in Russia. He sulked for weeks, even months, at a time. Her mother coped by keeping the house quiet and dark and still. Blinds rolled down. Doors closed. Television and radios off or barely audible. It was as if the sunlight were scalding, all sound deafening. She and Giacomo spent their childhoods orchestrating outings to escape, to find places out of their parents’ reach where they could play with abandon. Now Giacomo had returned from Vietnam, withdrawn and depressed, all joy leached from his life. Antonello was content and uncomplicated. Not boisterous, just quiet and warm and full of a naïve delight. She loved how he surrendered to life, whether it was dancing at the San Remo Ballroom, going to the movies at La Scala, or taking the train and the tram all the way to St Kilda for a picnic lunch under the large palms.
‘Paolina.’ Bob’s wife, Sandy, tapped her on the shoulder and she opened her eyes. They embraced. Paolina sank into Sandy’s shoulder and they both wept.
The last time the two women had seen each other was at Paolina and Antonello’s wedding. Sandy had danced all night. She was vivacious and funny. While all the other women her age were dressed as Queen Elizabeth lookalikes in their pastel two-piece suits with matching box hats, Sandy wore a flowing purple kaftan, and Paolina recalled the swirl of her dress as Bob spun her around the dance floor.
Sandy’s face was red and blotchy, and even in her flowing skirt, even with her silver bangles and large shell earrings, she looked old. ‘Any news on Nello?’ she asked, hooking her arm under Paolina’s.
‘No. Any news about Bob?’
‘No, no news, but I know… I can already feel he’s gone.’
‘We can’t give up hope, Sandy.’
‘He’s been good at staying out of trouble, but not this time,’ Sandy whispered. ‘He’ll have done everything he could for the crew, especially Antonello…’
There was nothing more to say, and they both fell silent. Nothing to do but wait.
Chapter 2
The air was dense, black, and brittle, and Antonello coughed and coughed, but he couldn’t clear his throat. His lips were dry and swollen, his hands and face coated in a coarse grit and sticky brown mud. His leg throbbed; his eyes were scratchy and difficult to open. He was stunned. There was a persistent ringing in his ears. It muffled but didn’t block other sounds: gas exploding and fuel igniting into flames, the spit and spark of the fires, the rivets popping and the cries and screams of men calling for help, calling out names, groaning in pain. He stretched his arms out in front of him, but the air swallowed them whole. Trembling, he pulled them back. The world was a thick fog, more dense than the winter fogs that descended on his childhood village, cloaking each house in its own mist. As a child, he stood on the balcony during those fogs, imagining he was the last living person in the world, alone, king of the new world. But the fantasies were short-lived. Anxiety crept over him, beginning in his belly, rising like bile, until he was choking. He raced back inside, searching for his brothers, for his sisters, for his mother, calling out their names, relief coming slowly when he heard their voices, soothing him, and felt their touch, his mother ruffling his hair or his brother Vince swinging him around until he was dizzy.
As his eyes adjusted, he could make out the shape of the devastation. It reminded him of those images of wartime European cities in history textbooks. The aftermath of battles lost. The ground was mud and slush, shards of glass, crushed concrete, twisted steel, and men half buried and motionless, men crawling out of the mud and from under the debris. They stumbled out, dazed and disorientated, trembling and unsteady, from behind cranes and forklifts. These ghost walkers were being drawn towards the fallen span, towards the voices of their trapped mates. He could see that his bridge, smashed and mangled, everything in its way ground to ash and powder, had finally stopped falling. It was a wreck; a ruined battleship, sinking into the sludge.
He thought about Paolina, about his parents. They’d be in a panic, and he knew he should let them know he was alive. But he could not leave the site — first he had to find the others. ‘A crew is like an army platoon,’ he heard Bob’s voice echoing in his head. ‘You never leave one of your men behind.’ He moved closer to the wreckage. There was work to be done. Men to be rescued. He heard his name, Nello, Nello… but between him and the trapped man there were several fires, their angry flames, the heat, and the bellowing towers of dense black smoke blocking his path.
Please, please let them be alive. The prayer was a chant, a wish, a hope. Not Bob, not Sam, not Slav.
Like the other men who escaped injury, Antonello didn’t go home. He joined firemen and police, and men from neighbouring factories who raced down to the bridge to help. Armed with shovels and crowbars, and sledgehammers, they were digging through rocks and rumble, cutting through steel beams with oxyacetylene torches, trying to untangle the mess. They were in dinghies searching the river. They dived under the fallen concrete and steel. The mud clung to them, coating their skin, weighing them down, making it difficult for them to breathe, to keep their eyes open, to find the bodies of their mates and pull them out of the river.
It might’ve been hours since the collapse, his legs were so heavy and tired, his arms aching. But if someone told him it was only minutes ago, he would’ve believed them too. He avoided talking, communicating with others in gestures, as they struggled to dislodge concrete and steel. Some of the trapped men caught sight of their mates through the dusty fog, recognising them, calling their names, but it was hard, frustrating work and not all the trapped men could be reached — not until the fires were put out, until steel was hauled away, until the emergency workers stabilised the bridge. Bodies accumulated on the roadside in a long line, silent and still. Ten, twelve, then twenty, then twenty-five…