She could have gone straight back to the bridge from the hospital, but she didn’t. It was impossible to explain why, even to herself, because she would never know for sure what she would have done if that boy hadn’t pulled her down. Would she have taken a step forward or back? So every day after that she tried to understand the difference between herself and the man who had jumped. That drove her to choose a profession, a career, a whole life. She became a psychologist. The people who came to her were the ones who were in so much pain that it felt like they were standing on a railing with one foot over the edge, and she sat in her chair opposite them with eyes that said: I’ve been here before. I know a better way down.
Of course sometimes she couldn’t help thinking about the reasons why she had wanted to jump, all the things she thought were missing from her reflection. Her loneliness at the dinner table. But she found ways to cope, to tunnel her way out of herself, to climb down. Some people accept that they will never be free of their anxiety, they just learn to carry it. She tried to be one of them. She told herself that was why you should always be nice to other people, even idiots, because you never know how heavy their burden is. Over time she realized that deep down almost everyone asks themselves the same sort of questions: Am I good? Do I make anyone proud? Am I useful to society? Am I good at my job? Generous and considerate? A decent shag? Does anyone want me to be their friend? Have I been a good parent? Am I a good person?
People want to be good. Deep down. Kind. The problem of course is that it isn’t always possible to be kind to idiots, because they’re idiots. That’s become a lifelong project for Nadia to grapple with, as it is for all of us.
* * *
She never met the boy from the bridge again. Sometimes she honestly believes that she made him up. An angel, maybe. Jack never saw Nadia again, either. He never went back to the bridge. But that was the day his plan to become a police officer became unshakable, when he realized that he could be the difference.
Ten years later Nadia will move back to the town, after training to become a psychologist. She will acquire a patient named Zara. Zara will go to an apartment viewing and get caught up in a hostage drama. Jack and his dad, Jim, will interview all the witnesses. The apartment where it happened has a balcony, from which you can see all the way to the bridge. That’s why Zara is there. Ten years ago she found a letter on her doormat, written by a man who jumped. His name was written neatly on the back of the envelope, she remembered their meeting, and even though the newspapers never published the name of the person the police found in the water, the town was too small for her not to know.
* * *
Zara still carries the letter around with her in her handbag, every day. She’s only been down to the bridge once, the week after he climbed onto the railing, she saw a girl climb up onto the same railing, and a boy who rescued her. Zara didn’t even move, she just stood hidden in the darkness, shaking. She was still standing there when the ambulance arrived and took the girl to the hospital. The boy vanished. Zara walked out onto the bridge and found the girl’s wallet and ID card with her name on it. Nadia.
Zara has spent ten years following Nadia’s life and education and the start of her career in secret, from a distance, because she’s never dared approach her. She has spent ten years looking at the bridge, also from a distance, from the balconies of apartments that are for sale. For the same reason. Because she’s afraid that if she goes down to the bridge again, maybe someone else will jump, and if she seeks out Nadia and discovers the truth about herself, perhaps it will be Zara who does it. Because Zara is human enough to want to hear what the difference is between that man and Nadia, even though she realizes that she doesn’t really want to know. That she bears the guilt. That she’s the bad person. Maybe everyone says they’d like to know that about themselves, but no one does really. So Zara still hasn’t opened the envelope.
* * *
The whole thing is a complicated, unlikely story. Perhaps that’s because what we think stories are about often isn’t what they’re about at all. This, for instance, might not actually be the story of a bank robbery, or an apartment viewing, or a hostage drama. Perhaps it isn’t even a story about idiots.
* * *
Perhaps this is a story about a bridge.
28
The truth? The truth is that that damn real estate agent was a damn poor real estate agent, and the apartment viewing was a disaster right from the start. If the prospective buyers couldn’t agree about anything else, they could at least agree on that, because nothing unites a group of strangers more effectively than the opportunity to come together and sigh at a hopeless case.
The advertisement, or whatever you want to call it, was a poorly spelled disaster, with pictures so blurred that the photographer seemed to believe that a “panoramic shot” was something you achieved by throwing your camera across the room. “The HOUSE TRICKS Estate Agency! HOW’S TRICKS?” it said above the date, and who on earth would get it into their head to hold an apartment viewing the day before New Year’s Eve? There were scented candles in the bathroom, and a bowl of limes on the coffee table, a brave effort by someone who seemed to have heard about apartment viewings but had never actually been to one, but the closet was stuffed with clothes, and there was a pair of slippers in the bathroom that looked like they belonged to someone who had spent the past fifty years shuffling around without ever lifting their feet. The bookcase was packed, and not even color-coordinated, and there were even more books piled up on the windowsills and the kitchen table. The fridge was covered with yellowing drawings produced by the owner’s grandchildren. Zara had been to enough viewings by this point to be able to spot an amateur: a viewing should make it look as if no one lives in the apartment, because otherwise only a serial killer would want to move in. A viewing should make it look as if anyone could potentially live there. People don’t want to buy a picture, they want to buy a frame. They can handle books in a bookcase, but not on the kitchen table. Perhaps Zara could have gone up to the real estate agent and pointed that out, if only the real estate agent hadn’t been a human being, and if only Zara hadn’t hated human beings. Especially when they spoke.
Instead Zara did a circuit of the apartment, trying to look interested, the way she had seen people who actually wanted to buy apartments look. That was quite a challenge for her, seeing as only someone on drugs who collected fingernail clippings could possibly be interested in living in this particular apartment. So when no one was looking in her direction, Zara went out onto the balcony, stood by the railing, and stared off toward the bridge until she started to shake uncontrollably. The same reaction as always, time after time for the past ten years. The letter she had never opened lay in her handbag. She had learned to cry almost without tears now, for practical reasons.
The balcony door was ajar and she could hear voices, not just in her head but from inside the apartment. Two married couples were wandering about, trying to ignore all the rather ugly furniture and instead visualize their own really ugly furniture in its place. The older couple had been married for a long time, but the younger couple seemed to have only gotten married recently. You can always tell by the way people who love each other argue: the longer they’ve been together, the fewer words they need to start a fight.
* * *
The older couple were called Anna-Lena and Roger. They’d been retired for a few years now, but clearly not long enough for them to have gotten used to it. They were always stressing about something, but without having anything they truly needed to hurry for. Anna-Lena was a woman with strong feelings, and Roger a man with strong opinions, and if you’ve ever wondered who writes all those too detailed, one-out-of-five-star reviews of household gadgets (or theater plays, or tape dispensers, or small glass ornaments) on the Internet, it’s Anna-Lena and Roger. Sometimes, of course, they hadn’t even tried out the gadgets in question, but they weren’t the sort of people to let that stop them from writing a scathing review. If you had to try things out an
d read things and find out the truth about things, then you’d never have time to have an opinion about anything. Anna-Lena was wearing a top in a color usually only seen on parquet floors, Roger was in jeans and a checkered shirt that had received a sulfurous one-out-of-five-stars review online because it “had shrunk several inches!” not long after Roger’s bathroom scale had received the damning judgment that it was “calibrated wrong!” Anna-Lena tugged at one of the curtains and said: “Green curtains? Who on earth has green curtains? Honestly, the things people do these days. But maybe they’re color-blind. Or Irish.” She didn’t say this to anyone in particular, she had just fallen into the habit of thinking out loud, seeing as that seemed appropriate for a woman who had gotten used to the fact that no one listened to her anyway.
Roger was kicking the baseboards and muttering: “This one’s loose,” and didn’t hear a word of what Anna-Lena said. The baseboard may possibly have been loose because Roger had spent ten minutes kicking it, but for a man like Roger a truth is a truth, regardless of its cause. From time to time Anna-Lena whispered to him about what she thought of the other prospective buyers in the apartment. Sadly Anna-Lena was about as good at whispering as she was at thinking quietly, so it was pretty much the sort of shouted whisper that’s the equivalent of a fart in an airplane that you think won’t be noticed if you let it out a little bit at a time. You never manage to be as discreet as you imagine.
“That woman on the balcony, Roger, what does she want with this apartment? She’s obviously too rich to want it, so what’s she doing here? And she’s still got her shoes on. Everyone knows you take your shoes off at an apartment viewing!” Roger didn’t answer. Anna-Lena glared at Zara through the balcony window as if Zara were the one who’d farted. Then Anna-Lena leaned even closer to Roger and whispered: “And those women in the hall, they really don’t look like they could afford to live here! Do they?”
At this Roger stopped kicking the baseboard, turned toward his wife, and looked her deep in the eye. Then he said four little words that he never said to any other woman on the planet. He said: “For God’s sake, darling.”
They never argue anymore, unless perhaps they argue all the time. When you’ve been stuck with each other long enough it can seem like there’s no difference between no longer arguing and no longer caring.
“For God’s sake, darling, remember to tell everyone you talk to that this place needs serious renovation! That way they won’t want to put in an offer,” Roger went on.
Anna-Lena looked confused: “But that’s good, isn’t it?”
Roger sighed. “For God’s sake, darling. Good for us, yes. Because we can do the renovations. But the others—you can tell from miles off that none of them knows a thing about renovation.”
Anna-Lena nodded, wrinkled her nose, and sniffed the air demonstratively. “There’s a definite smell of damp, isn’t there? Possibly even mold?” Because Roger had taught her always to ask the real estate agent that question, loudly, so that the other prospective buyers would hear and be worried.
Roger closed his eyes in frustration.
“For God’s sake, darling, you’re supposed to say that to the Realtor, not me.”
Wounded, Anna-Lena nodded, then thought out loud: “I was just practicing.”
* * *
Zara could hear them from where she was standing looking out over the railing on the balcony. The same swirling panic inside her, the same nausea, the same quivering fingertips every time she saw the bridge. Maybe she was fooling herself by thinking that one day it would feel better, or perhaps worse, so unbearable that she herself went and jumped. She looked down from the balcony but wasn’t sure it was high enough. That’s the only thing someone who definitely wants to live and someone who definitely wants to die have in common: if you’re going to jump off something, you need to be pretty damn sure of the height. Zara just wasn’t sure which of those she was: just because you don’t much like life doesn’t necessarily mean you want the alternative. So she had spent a decade seeking out and attending these apartment viewings, standing on balconies and staring at the bridge, balancing right in the middle of all that was worst inside her.
* * *
She heard new voices from inside the apartment. It was the other couple, the younger pair, Julia and Ro. One of them was a blonde, the other had black hair, and they were squabbling noisily the way you do when you’re young and think that every feeling fluttering about in all your hormones is completely unique. Julia was the one who was pregnant, and Ro was the one who was irritated. One was dressed in clothes that looked like she’d made them herself out of capes she’d stolen from murdered magicians, the other as if she sold drugs outside a bowling alley. Ro (that was a nickname, of course, but the sort that had stuck to her for so long that even she used it to introduce herself, which was just one of the many reasons Zara found her irritating) was walking around and holding her phone up toward the ceiling, repeating: “There’s, like, no signal at all in here!” while Julia snapped back: “Well, that’s terrible, because then we might actually have to talk to each other if we lived here! Stop trying to change the subject the whole time, we need to make a decision about the birds!”
They very rarely agreed about anything, but in Ro’s defense she didn’t always know that. Fairly often when Ro asked Julia “Are you upset?” Julia would reply “NO!” and Ro would shrug, as carefree as a family in an advertisement for cleaning products, which obviously only made Julia even more upset, because it was perfectly obvious that she was upset. But this time even Ro was aware that they were arguing, because they were arguing about the birds. Ro had had birds when she and Julia got together, not as lunch but as pets. “Is she a pirate?” Julia’s mom had asked the first time it was mentioned, but Julia put up with the birds because she was in love and because she couldn’t help wondering how long birds could actually live.
A very long time, as it turned out. When Julia eventually realized this and tried to deal with the situation in an adult way by sneaking out of bed one night and letting them out of a window, one of the wretched creatures fell all the way to the street and died. A bird! Julia had to invite some of the neighbors’ children in for a soda the next day when Ro was at work so she could blame one of them when Ro found the cage open. And the other birds? They were still sitting in the cage. What sort of insult to evolution was it that creatures like that managed to stay alive?
“I’m not going to have them put down, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Ro said, sounding hurt and looking around the apartment with her hands deep in the pockets of her dress. Her dress had pockets because she appreciated looking nice, but still liked to have somewhere to put her hands.
“Okay, okay. So what do you think of the apartment, then? I think we should take it!” Julia said breathlessly, because the elevator was broken and every time Ro said, “We’re pregnant,” to family and friends as if it were a team sport, Julia felt like pouring molten wax in her ears when she was asleep. Not that Julia didn’t love Ro, because she did, so much that it was almost unbearable, but they had looked at more than twenty apartments in the past two weeks and Ro always found something wrong with every single one of them. It was as if she didn’t actually want to move. But Julia woke up every night in their current apartment to play every pregnant woman’s favorite game, “kick or gas?” and then she couldn’t get back to sleep because both Ro and the birds snored, so she was more than ready to move anywhere right now, as long as it had more than one bedroom.
“No signal,” Ro repeated morosely.
“Who cares? Let’s take it!” Julia persisted.
“Well, I’m not sure. I need to check the hobby room,” Ro said.
“That’s a walk-in closet,” Julia corrected.
“Or a hobby room! I’m just going to get the tape measure!” Ro nodded cheerfully, because one of her most charming and simultaneously most infuriating characteristics was that no matter what they’d just been arguing about, she could be in a wonde
rful mood in the blink of an eye if she thought about cheese.
“You know perfectly well that you’re not going to be allowed to store cheese in my walk-in closet,” Julia declared sternly, seeing as their current apartment had a storeroom in the basement that Julia referred to as the Museum of Abandoned Hobbies. Every third month Ro would become obsessed with something, 1950s dresses or bouillabaisse or antique coffee services or CrossFit or bonsai trees or a podcast about the Second World War, then she would spend three months studying the subject in question with unstinting devotion on Internet forums populated by people who clearly shouldn’t be allowed Wi-Fi in whatever padded cell they were locked up in, and then she would suddenly get fed up and immediately find a new obsession. The only hobby that had remained constant since they got together was that Ro collected shoes, and nothing could sum up a person more clearly than the fact that she owned two hundred pairs of shoes, yet always managed to have the wrong ones on when it was raining or snowing.
Anxious People: A Novel Page 10