‘Bonza. I’ll give you a go because Charlie’s a mate, a good bloke — best bricklayer this side of the planet — and you seem like an okay kid. But if you can’t do height work, you’ve got Buckley’s chance of bein’ a fucking rigger, remember that.’
It wasn’t until a month or so later that Antonello did his first real height job. They were working on a half-built office block. On the ground the crane driver was waiting to lift the next set of steel frames to the twelfth floor. Bob instructed the crew to make their way along the narrow steel beams to the edge of the building, where the crane driver was waiting for their signal. Antonello was on the right side of the building, following Bob. He was fine until he looked down at the ground and froze. He couldn’t move, or speak. He was hot and flushed, and his forehead was covered in sweat; drops ran down his face and into his eyes, but he dared not raise his arms to wipe it off. His body swayed and rocked, and he couldn’t make it stop.
‘Are you okay, Nello?’ Bob asked.
When Antonello didn’t respond, Bob went over to him. ‘Don’t fucking look down,’ he said.
Slowly and with care, he placed Antonello’s right hand on his shoulder. ‘Hold on to me. Breathe. Don’t hold your breath.’
‘I can’t move.’
‘You can move. I won’t let you fall. One step at a time, don’t go freaking out on me.’
Light-headed and nauseous, Antonello made it back onto the ground. His knees were trembling; his heart was thumping. He threw up his breakfast into a bin they used for wood scraps.
‘Bloody hell. Can’t be taking that home to Sandy for the fire.’
‘What’s up with you two?’ the crane driver called out. ‘Are we doing this or what?’
‘Let’s do it after lunch,’ Bob said.
‘Whatever. Thought you were in a fucking hurry.’
But Bob didn’t say anything to anybody, and thirty minutes later, he insisted Antonello go up again. ‘You got two fucking choices, mate: either you get over it or bloody give it away and find another job. Rigging is height work. It is fucking dangerous, that’s true, but there are plenty of old riggers around. We’re careful — one hand for the boss, one hand for yourself — and we keep an eye out for ourselves and our mates.’
‘Not sure if I can go back up there.’
‘You need to get back on the fucking bike. You’re a good kid. I’ve got used to you and I don’t want to break in some new guy.’
Antonello went back up.
By the time they were working on the bridge, Bob told everyone that Antonello was ‘not a bad rigger, not bad at all, built up some muscles, not too shabby’. Bob would wink at Antonello and they’d both remember the day on the steel scaffolding when he nearly quit.
‘Nello, Nello, are you okay?’ It was Sam, standing above him, his arm in a cast. Sam lowered himself to the ground. ‘Back’s a bit stiff.’ His voice was hoarse.
Before Antonello could respond, Sam continued, ‘I thought I might find you here. Paolina’s worried.’
‘She rang you?’
‘No, I dropped in to see you.’
‘They haven’t found Bob yet,’ Antonello said.
‘I know, mate, but you can’t sit here all day waiting. It’s almost lunchtime.’
‘Why not? If it was us, Bob’d be in there, digging.’
‘Some of us are going to mass this afternoon, a special mass at St Augustine’s. Come with us.’
‘No,’ Antonello said, shaking his head.
‘It might help,’ Sam said, reaching out to put his good arm around Antonello’s shoulder.
‘I don’t want to go to church. I don’t want to have anything to do with God.’ Antonello was surprised by his own words, but he knew as soon as he said them that they were true.
‘You don’t mean that, Antonello,’ Sam said.
‘I mean it.’
‘When the bridge started to shake and they couldn’t put the bolts back in, I knew the span was going to fall, and I started praying. I closed my eyes and I prayed. I could feel myself falling, but I kept my eyes closed and kept praying —’
‘Stop it, Sam. Stop it. I don’t want to hear it. So you’re grateful God saved you… but I bet every single man was praying in those last moments and it didn’t fucking do most of them any good. Think about Bernie; you couldn’t get more devout than Bernie. He would’ve been praying. And Slav too, bet even Bob… Do you think you or me — do you think God heard us and not them, not Slav or Bob, are we so special?’
Like most Sicilians, Antonello had invested a great deal of time and energy in God. Not just going to mass every week, not just the hours of his childhood spent as an altar boy, at Sunday school, lining up during Easter parades, and helping out at the local holy festivals for one of the three patron saints of his village, but the hours of prayer, and the whispered confessions, the pouring out of secret hopes and dreams. Blind faith, stupid blind faith, given over in a pious submission to a God who was supposed to be better than man, more loving and kind. But all this had been wasted. God was cruel.
‘It wasn’t God’s fault, Nello, you know that.’
Antonello imagined God as a monstrous man in full tantrum, bashing the bridge to the ground. Like a toddler with a construction set, the radio journalist had said. ‘No, I don’t know that. I don’t know.’ He shook Sam’s hand off his shoulder. ‘If he exists and he’s almighty and all-seeing, and fucking everywhere, why didn’t he stop it, and stop all the other awful things happening in the world? If he watches and does nothing, that makes him cruel and sadistic. I prefer to think he doesn’t exist at all. I’ve wasted enough time praying and going to church and giving him pennies I can’t afford to give.’
In the days that followed, the newspapers printed the first lists of the dead. The men’s names, their ages, the names of their streets and suburbs. They also listed the injured and their physical conditions, categorised as either satisfactory or serious, and in some cases explicated with will be operated on today, might go home tomorrow, improving — as if they were hospital staff giving updates to worried relatives. Not named were the missing, the unidentified, their wives and girlfriends, their fathers and mothers, their brothers and sisters, waiting in the hope their loved one will be the exception, the one found alive.
The front pages of the paper featured the survivors. The men who rode the bridge down holding on to a girder or bouncing in the internal cavity of the span, the ones who were able to outrun it — with the help of a gust of wind created by the collapse itself — the ones who caught the last or second-last lift down and made it to the ground, the ones who moved out of the lunch or first-aid hut just before the weight of the bridge crushed it to the ground, the ones who fell into the river and weren’t pounded by falling metal or concrete, the ones who were able to find shelter behind a crane or truck, and the ones who woke up in hospital with broken bones and deep scars, their eyes glued together with thick black oil and no memory beyond the initial collapse. Antonello was described as a twenty-two-year-old rigger, from Footscray. A Sicilian migrant with a pretty young wife. They printed a photograph of him and Paolina on their wedding day, which he found out later his mother had given the reporter. The caption read, Lucky escape for newlyweds.
Emilia wanted to give thanks to God: it was a miracle that Antonello was alive. On the day of the bridge collapse, waiting for the news, she had pledged offerings to San Giuseppe, to Sant’Antonio, and to the Madonna della Lettera, the patron saint of Messina. Afterwards, she insisted Franco drive her across the city to St Anthony’s Shrine Catholic Church in Hawthorn to light candles and make the promised donations. She went to her local church, St Augustine’s, and lit row after row of candles; she sent her mother money to give to the Madonna’s church in Messina. She understood that if God and the saints listened to your prayers, you had to pay your debts. Antonello was the lucky one, but luck couldn’t be taken for granted. And on the day the bridge fell, there were several hours when she thought his luck had run out.