The Bridge

by Stuart Prebble

  “The bystanders have been affected directly,” said Alison. Her reaction seemed to Michael to be more vehement than the situation justified. “Everyone they ever meet from this day onwards will have in the back of their minds the question why they didn’t act more quickly to stop what was happening. And despite what they’re saying right now, they’ll also be asking themselves every day of their lives whether they could have done more to prevent it. What happened today will affect them forever, and all because chance put them in the wrong place at the wrong time.” She turned towards Michael, apparently anxious that he should take on board what she was saying. “Do you see what I’m getting at?”

  “I do. I see that. In fact, as you pointed out, it could so easily have been us who found ourselves in precisely that situation.” He paused. “I don’t think I’ve seen a report of exactly what time all this happened, but we were not far from there this morning. Half an hour either way and we might have been witnesses ourselves.” The couple drove in silence before Michael spoke again. “I wonder if what the doctor said might be true—that Rose had been watching the news reports before we got there and was traumatized. I’ve never seen her like that. It was shocking.” He took his left hand from the wheel and covered hers. “I’m so sorry that you had that to deal with,” he said, “it wasn’t at all what I’d had in mind.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “That she would instantly fall in love with you and would quietly take you to one side and tell you what a great bloke I am and how lucky you are to have found me.”

  Alison smiled. “OK, yes, I see now why you were disappointed. You’d hoped for a scene out of All My Children, and what you got instead was more like something out of The Addams Family.”

  Alison squeezed his hand in return. The traffic was now even heavier and was at a standstill in both directions. Michael pointed out the bright-red faces of some of the people who had been all too keen to enjoy the first proper heat wave of the year. Alongside their Vauxhall, but traveling in the opposite direction, an open-topped bright-blue BMW contained a family of mum and dad in the front and two listless kids strapped into the rear seats. The driver was in his late thirties and clearly had been in the sun for too long. His thinning red hair was streaked across his pate and had done little to protect him, so that the skin covering his skull was pink and freckled. A heavily tattooed forearm decorated with elaborate patterns rested on the door and was so close that Michael could have touched it. Alison caught the other driver’s eye for an instant and saw his expression change from irritation to something like a leer. She looked away quickly before Michael might notice, but just at that moment her boyfriend turned his head and also caught the attention of the stranger.

  “They want to catch that lunatic and string him up from the fucking bridge,” said the man. “That’s what I’d do.”

  “Yeah, me too,” said Michael, but when both cars had moved on he turned to Alison. “I hate it when that happens. It’s like finding yourself having to agree with racist taxi drivers, because you don’t want to get into an argument, but you hate yourself afterwards for not disagreeing with a skinhead.”

  Alison smiled and nodded. It was the kind of remark which had attracted her to Michael in the first place, and as they drove along slowly and in silence, she thought about how she had been drawn to him from their very first meeting just two months earlier in a wine bar in Brighton.

  * * *

  Alison had been on a rare evening out with colleagues from the local travel agency where she had worked since her return from Australia; Michael had come down from London for a stag weekend with a few friends from the TV postproduction house where he was a runner. Her attention had first been drawn in his direction by the irritating noise of their partying, and one of the women from her own group had suggested that they should make a complaint, but Alison and Michael exchanged glances and both felt the same tug on an invisible string.

  He found a reason to break away from his friends, leaving them to continue their adventure into oblivion without him. There were similar knowing looks from Alison’s workmates as she peeled off to speak to Michael. The couple remained in the wine bar for a while, and when the noise became too loud to bear, they left together to continue talking and drinking in the saloon of the dismal seafront hotel where he was staying overnight. They did not speak of anything serious or significant on that evening, but seemed to hit it off from the start. She was twenty-six with curly shoulder-length blonde hair, soft brown eyes, and skin which had been dipped in the Australian sunshine. He was twenty, sandy haired, good-looking, and athletic. The attraction was instant and mutual, but any idea of consummation was rapidly put to flight by the boisterous return of the stag party, several of whom stood on the stairs making obscene gestures through the reinforced glass. Alison took this as her cue to say good night and insisted on leaving him at the hotel entrance when she hailed a taxi. Nevertheless she borrowed a ballpoint pen from the sleepy receptionist and scribbled a telephone number on the back of Michael’s hand. What might have been a kiss turned into a brush of cheeks as she turned her head at the last moment, but he went to bed that night thinking about her and awoke early the next day counting the minutes until he could persuade himself that it would be okay to call the number. He lasted until 8:30 and then irritated a couple of sleeping innocents before realizing that her 7s looked very much like 9s. She answered on the second ring, and they agreed to meet at the entrance to the pier.

  Alison wore only light makeup, and her hair, which had been so full last night, was tied back in a ponytail. Her skinny jeans showed off the slenderness of her hips. Michael thought she looked even more attractive this morning than he remembered, but at the same time wondered whether her apparent lack of effort meant that she felt little inclination to make herself of interest to him. Still, she had taken the trouble to turn out early on a Sunday morning, so that must count for something.

  Alison showed the way towards a fifties-style café close to the esplanade called the Pelican and ordered cappuccino, which came in brown smoked-glass cups with an almond-flavored biscuit going mushy in the saucer. Michael was amused to see Alison using her biscuit to scoop the froth from the sides of the cup before popping it into her mouth.

  “Better not let my grandma see you do that,” he said, prompting her to smile and press him for more information. He continued, and was surprised to find himself speaking about aspects of his life which he usually kept private. “My grandma Rose brought me up after my mother left home when I was a baby. She’d had a mental breakdown soon after I was born and was unable to look after me. She walked out of the house one day, and we never saw her again. Rose’s husband, my grandfather, had also recently died of a heart attack, but despite all that she just stepped in and did what anyone else’s mother would have done for them. When I was little I just assumed that she was my mum, but she never wanted me to call her anything but Grandma. So that’s what she has always been to me—Grandma Rose.”

  “She sounds like a marvelous woman. Do you still live with her?”

  Michael had been doodling with the back of his spoon in the froth on top of his coffee and had unconsciously rearranged the chocolate sprinkles into the shape of an unhappy face. “I did, until a month ago. Unfortunately, last year she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and she and I stayed at home together for as long as I could manage, but eventually the doctors told me that it was too dangerous to leave her alone.”

  The decision had been hard to take, but followed a series of incidents which gave cause for concern. Once again Alison encouraged him to say more, and Michael recounted how one day he had come home from work a little later than usual to find their apartment empty. He knocked next door, but Elsie, who was about the same age as Rose, had neither seen nor heard anything for several hours and assumed that his grandmother was out. He telephoned the number of the mobile phone he had pleaded with Rose to carry everywhere and heard it ringing on the table next to her bed. He hurri
ed out into the street and across the ancient stone bridge over the Thames, scanning the heads of shoppers as he went. Eventually he was drawn towards a crowd of people surrounding a juggler performing in the main pedestrianized thoroughfare in front of the shopping mall. The man had picked someone out of the crowd to act as his assistant, and Michael was horrified to see his grandmother, dressed in her floral housecoat and slippers, carrying a dozen shiny silver rings over her left arm like a handbag, and a flaming torch in her outstretched hand. She seemed absorbed by the act and unaware of the intermittent gasps from the audience. Unsure of what to do, but anxious not to cause her any danger or embarrassment, Michael waited for a pause in the act before intervening to rescue her. Only when the crowd gave her a spontaneous round of applause did Rose seem to become aware of them, and she beamed a smile of untarnished pleasure. As he escorted her back over the bridge towards their apartment, Michael reflected on how horrified his usually discreet and shy grandma Rose would have been by such an incident had it occurred just a few weeks earlier.

  “But that’s enough about me and mine.” Michael had promised to rejoin his friends at Brighton railway station at 11:00 AM for the journey back to town. Now it was 10:40, and he felt no inclination whatever to say goodbye to Alison. “It’s your turn to tell me more about you. In the alcoholic blur of last night I can only remember you saying that you worked as a tour guide Down Under. How do you come to be on the other side of the world in sunny Brighton?”

  Their conversation the previous evening had scarcely touched on anything personal, but now that he had told her so much about himself and his family, it felt appropriate that she should reciprocate. She seemed to pause to consider whether or not she would take that next step, but eventually the question appeared to be resolved.

  “I’m not Australian, actually.” The sentence was delivered with an interrogative at the end, as if she were seeking confirmation from him that what she was saying was true. “I went to Oz eight years ago and have lived and worked there since then. That’s how I’ve picked up the accent. I know I have to try to get rid of it now that I’m back.”

  “Which part of Australia were you living in?”

  “Sydney?” Again it was not clear from her inflection if she was asking whether he had heard of Sydney or if he could confirm that she had lived there. He smiled and nodded. “Why are you smiling?” At last an actual question.

  “No reason. It’s just that you sound every bit as Australian as Crocodile Dundee.”

  “I’m not sure if that’s a compliment?”

  They walked eastwards with the sea on their right, along the length of the front and all the way to the marina. It was mid-February, and only the most hardy were braving the biting wind which blew off the Channel. The waves were gray and powerful, their huge weight crashing noisily onto the beach and rearranging the shingle like the pieces of an impossible jigsaw. When they turned around to come back she slipped her arm through his and tilted her head onto his shoulder. At the railway station he moved to kiss her, and this time she did not turn away. When he asked if she would come to London to spend a day with him the following weekend, she said that she thought she might.

  * * *

  On the train journey back to Victoria, thoughts and feelings about his meeting with Alison filled Michael’s mind. He watched the Sussex countryside through the window, her face imposing itself on the reflection in the glass, and already his brain was committing to memory the various images which would preoccupy him more or less continuously in the days ahead. They spoke on the telephone every evening for the next week, and when her train arrived at Victoria Station at 9:52 on the following Saturday morning, Michael was there on the platform to greet her. He pulled her to one side, away from the quickening crowd, and they kissed the kiss that he had imagined for the past six nights. It was every bit as exciting as he had hoped.

  They felt the need to do something together, and it transpired that Alison had never been on the London Eye, so they queued among the tourists for the 11:00 AM flight. He was far better informed about the history and geography of London than she was, and so Michael enjoyed pointing out the main landmarks, and he loved it when once again she took his arm and seemed to be genuinely impressed by his knowledge. They ate sushi in a Japanese restaurant next to the Royal Festival Hall, and she folded the corner of her napkin to remove the trickle of soy sauce from the side of his mouth. She could not stay overnight, she said, but later they took the suburban train for the half-hour ride to the apartment in Kingston which until recently he had shared with his grandmother. Though it seemed inconceivable that Rose would ever be able to return to her home, Michael would not take Alison to the double bed in her room, and they held each other tight between the cold sheets on his single, which he had had the foresight to put on fresh that morning.

  After they made love for the first time, and then for a second, Alison lay beneath the sheets and looked around the room which had been his since he was a small boy. His interest in Chelsea Football Club had evaporated some years ago, he explained, but the posters remained in place because to remove them risked leaving a mark on the wallpaper. The paperbacks which were stacked along a set of self-assembly shelving were a mix of the classics, studied for GCSEs and A levels at the local grammar school, and novels by authors such as Ian McEwan, Lee Child, and Iain Banks. By the side of his bed Alison found a copy of The Great Gatsby, a bookmark positioned two-thirds of the way through, and asked if it was any good. She was not, she explained, a great reader of novels.

  “I’ve always loved to read travel books,” she said, “especially by people who can take you on a journey to places you probably won’t ever get to yourself. There’s a great big world out there.”

  “Is that why you went to Australia? To see for yourself how much world there is?”

  At their first meeting in Brighton, Alison had spoken about her time in Australia and how she had loved her life there but eventually missed her home and decided after eight years to return to the UK. Now Michael was surprised to realize that while she had told him a little about her work and her friends, he had no idea whether his new lover had parents still living, or brothers, sisters, or cousins. She was six years older than him, and for all he knew she might even have been married and had children of her own.

  Suddenly the stuff that had seemed so irrelevant before felt important, and he wanted to know everything she was willing to tell him. Once again, however, as in Brighton a week ago, she seemed reluctant to speak about herself. When she did, she chose her words carefully, individually, as if she needed to test them to check that they expressed what she wanted to say.

  “I don’t have any parents,” she said, pausing just long enough for the thought to settle. “They died in a car accident when I was very young, eight years old, and I had no other close relatives, so I was brought up in a children’s home. It’s not like it’s a big secret, or anything I’m ashamed of, but you can probably see why I don’t necessarily bring up the subject unless I have to.” Michael experienced several emotions all at once. First among them was empathy from having grown up without parents himself, but hard on its heels was a realization that his situation had been nothing like hers. He did not know what to say, and he told her so. “That’s OK,” she said. “People seldom do. That’s another reason why I prefer to avoid the subject if I can. People get embarrassed, but it’s not as though it’s anyone’s fault. It’s just stuff that happens.”

  “But what about adoption, or fostering? Couldn’t the authorities find you a family to live with?”

  “I did stay with a few families for short periods when I was very young,” said Alison, “but for one reason or another, none of them worked out. And if no one has adopted you by the time you get to nine or ten, it’s sort of assumed that you must be a problem of some kind, and so people steer clear. Most couples who want to adopt are looking for cute babies. Anyway, by that time I was so used to living in an institution that I probably wasn’t sufficien
tly domesticated to fit into an ordinary family.”

  Michael was aware that perhaps he was asking too many questions all at once, but for the moment his curiosity was taking priority over his discretion. “So did you go to an ordinary school? How did that work out?”

  “Yes, I went to the local comprehensive, but I was never going to do all that well because every other kid in the school went home to their mums and dads and their food cooked and ready on the table. I had no parents to help me or encourage me with homework, and nowhere suitable to do it even if I’d been that way inclined. And to tell you the truth, I probably wasn’t going to be a brainbox anyway.” Alison’s tone had become sad, and her eyes turned down towards the floor.

  Michael knew that she had said as much as she wanted to about her personal history, but still there was one aspect he needed to know more about.

  “And what about boyfriends? I guess there must have been quite a few.”

  She smiled. “One or two.”

  “But no one special?” His raised eyebrows indicated the hope of confirmation.

  “No,” she said. “No one special.”

  “And no one now?”

  “No,” she replied, and for an instant he thought she was going to continue, but she did not.

  “Unless you count me?” he said.

  “Well, I suppose I’m hoping that as we’ve spent the last few hours making love, I can count you as a boyfriend, but maybe it’s a bit too soon to say whether you’re going to be someone special?” A flicker of concern crossed his mind before he recognized her teasing for what it was and shut her up with a kiss.

  It was half an hour before they spoke again, and by then it was dark outside and the only light was the yellow hue from streetlamps edging through a gap between the curtains. Both were happy to remain silent as they lay side by side, hand in hand, contemplating the ceiling and the delicious glow of a new relationship. She propped herself on her elbow to drink some water. “And so now you live here on your own, do you?” He was about to point out that she had not finished telling her own story, but she continued, “That’s very cool—hardly out of your teens and you have your own place.”