Personal Narrative-Blood Brothers

Trapped men seeing their mates through the dusty fog, recognizing them, their hopes rose: their mates wouldn’t let them die. But many couldn’t be reached until the fires had been put out, until steel had been cut away, until the emergency workers could stabilize the slab. They screamed and cried for what seemed like hours but even after they stopped the survivors kept hearing them.
Most of the men who survived the collapse, who were not injured didn’t go home, instead they joined fireman and police, and men from neighbouring factories who’d raced down to the Bridge to help. Picking up shovels and crowbars, and sledgehammers, digging through rocks and rumble, cutting through steel beams with oxygen torches, they tried to untangle the mess. They went out on the police dinghies to search the river. They dived under the fallen concrete and iron. The sludge and 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.
And then they carried the bodies onto the road, and the Salvos covered them in white sheets. On the site, commotion and noise, on the roa the bodies in a long line, silent and still.
Antonello lost all

sense of time. It might have been days since the Bridge collapsed, his legs were heavy and tired, and his arms ached. If someone told him it was only seconds ago, he would’ve believed them too, his ears were ringing, still ringing with the sound of the crash, with the screams of the falling men.
When Antonello saw Sam, he was sitting in the gutter, his arm in a sling, a Salvo was handing him a drink. Sam is alive. The relief choked the breath out of him. Sam was alive. But behind Sam, the broken Bridge loomed and Antonello did not move.
‘Nello!’ Sam yelled as soon as he caught sight of him. He was caked in mud and dust, but he rose and stumbled towards Antonello. Muddy water dripped from his hair, from his clothes, from his eyes. He was crying. Antonello had never seen Sam cry. They were best mates. They played together. They fished together. They drank together. They went out dancing together. Once they’d even taken two girls they’d picked up to a hotel, booked the one room, fucked in the same bed, at the same time. They’d been drunk. It was before Alice. Before Paolina. They sometimes remembered that night and their brashness. Slav had been pissed off with them for leaving him behind. He said they were supposed to be the Rat Pack together, trouble was, Slav said, that they were Dean and Frank, inseparable and he was not sure who he was …Peter or Sammy Jr, or Joey. Where was Slav now? They promised him, next time, they wouldn’t leave him behind.
Sam put his good arm around his friend’s shoulder and pulled him close. ‘I thought I was a goner.’
‘Me too,’ Antonello replied drawing away.
‘Any sign of Slav? Bob?’
Antonello shook his head. ‘I’m going to help look for them,’ and he walked towards the slab leaving Sam standing alone. He’d search for them. He’d shift and carry concrete and steel until he found them. He didn’t want to think about what he’d seen, the columns collapsing and the slab cracked in half, as the men fell to their deaths. He didn’t want to think about Bob, standing on the slab with the engineers. He didn’t want to think about Bob or Slav, about them falling and then the full weight of the slab coming down on top of them. Sam had been up there too. Sam was alive. There was still hope.

When a cop tapped him on the shoulder, and asked him his name, and if he’d contacted his family, he noticed for the first time the people standing on the road, behind the police barriers and remembered Paolina and his parents. Reluctantly, he moved towards the crowd. He heard his mother call out his name before he saw her, and then there was Paolina and his sister Carmela and his father and his brothers and other people and they were holding him and hugging him and wanting him to go home with them. Sandy was there too, and she asked him, as he knew she would, if he’d seen Bob. He shook his head.
‘I saw Sam,’ she told him, ‘he said Bob was up the top. Arguing with the bosses about the bolts. I know he’s gone.’ She began sobbing and holding his hand. ‘They tell me not to give up hope. But there is no hope..’
‘We won’t stop looking until we find him,’ Antonello said.
‘Lucky you’re okay,’ she said, raising her other hand and patting Antonello on the cheek. Her hand was ice against his skin, hot and flushed and gritty.
‘I’m glad to see you. Bob told me, he said he was worried about the Bridge, a couple of days ago, I’d never heard him talk bad about that bloody b=Bridge before, he said, he wouldn’t forgive himself if something happened to you, to the other guys, but especially to you. He has a soft spot for you...like the...like a son,’ she whispered the last three words.
‘I know.

I know. I have to go back, Sandy.’ He pulled away and she let go of his hand. As he made his way back towards the wreckage, he passed a crushed helmet and next to it a mangled red lunch box, one of those bright plastic things like the ones the school kids carried earlier that day, too small to hold lunch for a grown man working at a hard physical job. He imagined a little girl, like Molly, helping her mother to pack her father’s lunch, ‘Daddy’s lunch box is like mine’. Antonello kicked the lunch box out of his way, but it only moved a couple of inches. The ground was rubble and mud and oil and blood, the emergency workers were carrying in sacks of sand to cover the ground but there wouldn’t ever be enough

sand.
Men were everywhere now - the survivors, the rescuers, ambos, cops. But the initial frenzy passed, as the sun set, hope dissipated. And even those trying to deny it knew there was no more chance of finding anyone alive. Exhausted Antonello joined a group gathered around a makeshift campfire in a metal box. One of the Salvos, an older man handed him a cup of tea. It was bitter, but it was hot and soothing and Antonello drank it.
‘It went like a pack of cards,’ he heard someone say. No, he thought, not like a pack of cards. No, that was not how it went.
‘Why am I here? Why am I alive while Jack is dead?’ asked Johno. He was sitting on a piece of concrete, bent over, his eyes staring at the liquid in his cup. He’d been in Bob’s crew and Antonello thought about asking him if he’d seen Bob, but he couldn’t speak. Words seemed completely impossible to him. Where did words come from? How did they make it from his throat out into the world?
‘He was doing the timesheets and scheduling for next week’s shifts. I called in to tell him I was going to take a week off to go fishing with my son. He’s back, my son Tommy’s back from Vietnam. I was telling Jack, about how my son is a mess. Jack said that if I wanted, I could borrow his boat, take Tom out on the bay. We talked about trout and salmon, and the best bait – we argued about the bait –,friendly like – he said he’d bet me anything that if I used prawn I’d catch …I promised to bring him back a fish. I left the hut, just in time, I heard a screeching sound, and then what I thought was a series of gun shots. I felt the flakes of peeling steel, it felt like rain… I looked up and I saw the fucking thing falling, the whole fucking thing, I ran out of the way, but it crushed the hut. I should’ve done something, called Jack, but there was no time, it was so quick.