by Morag Joss
“See you then, Vi,” I said. “Take care.”
Just at that moment I had an idea. I reached under the counter and picked up the bag of stuff I’d kept for the man who hadn’t come back. We’d manage through the weekend all right. Probably you would want to get us some fish as well. Those times we were down to nothing, you always tried fishing. Hours and hours you spent at it, without the proper lines or anything, and usually you got nothing. Mainly you did it because you liked it—not the fishing itself, the trying. But I’d stop you this time. I couldn’t eat fish from the river now.
I turned and walked out into the night air. Cars trickled past me, their headlamps shining in a silvery curve out of the trees bordering the road, sparkling ahead into blackness. The night was damp and cold. Suddenly I felt I was down there at the bottom of the dark river with the fish, their thick, flat, muscular sides quivering past me, swimming right past those poor drowned people and flicking their dead faces, sending pulses of dark water into their open mouths and pulling silky fins through their waving, frondy hair.
On the day the bridge collapsed he’d been standing in a shop, a dingy roadside place called the Highland Bounty Mini-Mart, where he’d stopped a number of times before. It was run by a pathetic old drunk and a skinny blond woman, foreign, who as far as he could see did all the work. He wasn’t good at small talk, but he’d found out gradually he was better at it than the blond woman, and she seemed always sad, and that made him want to speak to her. He would have liked to cheer her up a little. He was taking his change when the roaring and crashing began and they rushed outside and a moment later someone was shouting about the bridge, and without wanting to be, he was swept along in a group of people all racing up through the forest to the head of Netherloch Falls.
Long before they got there his heart was hammering in his chest, partly from the noise and shock and the physical exertion of climbing up the dark, rooty path between the trees, but partly also from a rush of excitement. Here he was, talking away to people unknown to him, all of them struggling through the forest together, helping one another, listening to breathless theories and speculations about causes and casualties. The others seemed to assume he was somebody just like them. Even in the wake of a catastrophe, perhaps because of it, they accepted him without question.
At the top, the ground opened onto a flat patch of smooth rocks and clumps of bracken and heather, and the group halted by a low wall at the tourists’ lookout point. Conversation dropped away to silence as they gazed at the stark, fractured bridge ends, already sparkling with emergency lights and divided now by the torrent of the river. For a long time nobody moved; a kind of an impotent acceptance, a subdued awe at the sight of the wreckage, weighed upon them all. Then two or three who stood close by Ron began to cry quietly. The rest moved to and fro, talking softly again or just looking; some took photographs, some gathered round a man who was picking up live news on his mobile phone. Slowly, most drifted away. Ron stood apart and wept, his whole body shaking. His companions, if they were taken aback by his sobbing, did not show it, and one of the women squeezed his arm as she turned to go.
He lingered for a long time after everyone else had left, sitting on a low rock and watching the white sky deepen to gray. Down at the bridge, the lights sharpened and winked brightly through the dusk, and as he watched he became calmer. It sank into his mind slowly that the blame for this was not his to bear. This was greater destruction even than that he had caused seven years ago, and although the enormity of that would never lessen, before his eyes those seven and a fraction deaths were multiplying. He felt grievously helpless, but out of his distress was arising a gratitude that he was not, he really was not to blame for this suffering, too. He was innocent, and for that he was both relieved and ashamed of his relief.
And it filled him with an urge to do something to help, as if he were being granted permission at last to make amends, to involve himself somehow in the righting of this calamity as a way of uncoupling himself from the dragging guilt of the last one. There must be work he could do that would bring about some little good; he could volunteer. They would be setting up assistance for casualties and families, there would be people down there now, stranded and needing help. He would go and make himself available to do whatever was needed. There would be, at the very least, people wanting rides home.
While there was still enough light to see by, he made his way down through the forest path and back across to the Highland Bounty Mini-Mart. When he saw that the place was dark and closed up he remembered about his bag of shopping, but he didn’t care about that now. Outside the shop the road was now choked with barely moving traffic in both directions. There would be chaos at the bridge; in the Land Rover he would not get even near it. He would have to forget about driving anywhere tonight and see what he might do in other ways. He thought for a moment about waiting until morning, but the urge to act at once was too strong. He set off, walking toward the bridge against an oncoming line of vehicles. It was the nearest to happy he had felt for seven years.
When I got back to the Invermuir Lodge, it was that dead time of afternoon in small hotels, after lunch and before the bar opens, when all the staff disappear. I went straight upstairs and lay down to rest, and when I closed my eyes, pictures from the day loomed at me, a day of brightness and darkness, and of distant views of the wilderness of the forest seen from the city side of the river.
Soon I was wandering along a path of linked half-dreams where fog curled through unrecognizable trees and lifted across a mirrored loch and sunlight snapped between the spans of a bridge, and I stood within the imprisoning mesh of a forest, waiting for something. To be found, I thought, or maybe just to be seen; if by some magic twist I were able to be in two places at once, to be standing where I was and also seeing myself in the place I was looking toward, would I behold a less shabby me, transformed, reinvented, valid? It came to me, as I fell asleep, that that was what I was waiting for, and that I had always gone about my life in this way, looking with yearning across distances. I had reached out from my father’s sickness-bound house in Portsmouth toward a far-off, more authentic self as Col’s wife; now I was reaching from the flatness of our marriage for the distant picture of us as parents. I heard again the cry and the scrape of rocks as Stefan stumbled and fell, casting Anna away from him toward her safe, soft landing. I saw them as they had sat in the trailer, looking at each other, and when they turned to me, their faces wore frayed smiles, full of sadness because they knew I was incomplete in some way, lacking something specific, like money or an important fact, but something that they didn’t have a word for. And for all they could not say quite what it was, it was something definitive and tremendous, and they were regretful that by not having it I was excluded and set apart from them. I pulled a pillow across the bed and held it in my arms against my stomach. I watched the red numbers of the alarm clock at the bedside wink in the gloom, and I fell asleep again.
I was awakened by a text message from Col.
Soaking freezing. Going for drink their hotel F Aug. Back at 7.
I turned and stretched out on my back, relieved. I was still groggy, and the square of light from the window showed a sky silvery with cold and fading toward evening. Fort Augustus was twelve miles farther west of Invermuir. It was just after four o’clock. Now I could stay warm and rest for at least another hour, which would be time enough to get used to the thought of going out again.
I got up to make a cup of tea. Instead of switching on a lamp, I turned on the television, for its flickering light rather than the actual pictures, and I kept the volume off. It wasn’t until after I had filled the little kettle from the bathroom tap and come back to plug it in that I took any notice of what was happening on the screen.
I was watching trembly pictures of a man with a fishing rod standing by a river. He was showing off and smiling. He turned to the water to cast, concentrating for a moment or two, sideways from the camera. The picture swung up to the top of the rod and b
ack down; the man grinned and cast again. It was an amateur video; it must have been one of those programs of supposedly hilarious home video clips and in a minute there would be a mishap: he’d fall in the river, a gull would land on his head, something like that. But in the instant before I turned away, the man’s body jolted and his knees buckled. He turned abruptly upriver and dropped the rod. When he spun round a second later to look at the camera, his face was frightened and bewildered. Then he was shouting and waving his arms, and he ran off out of the frame. The camera swung away; the picture tilted up, zigzagged, and hit darkness, and then it began to jerk irregularly and very fast, up and down. Black bars broke across the image; the person with the camera was running through trees. When the picture settled, it was trained on the water. It focused in, silently, on the distant bridge.
The bridge I had crossed that day was untying itself from the earth. Its taut steel curves were loosening, its angles unfolding and turning slack. Cables were swaying and bending out of the sky, curling down and inward and falling in cast-off tangles into the water. Around and underneath them, all across the river, cars careered off the tilting road and sent up white explosions of foam as they hit the surface. I turned up the sound; now the cries of the man with the fishing rod mingled with creaks and a hollow roaring from the bridge and the coming-and-going groan of the wind, or perhaps it was not the wind but the breathless rasps of effort from the man who kept hold of the shaking camera when all he must have wanted to do was turn his eyes away and weep. But he held on, and then came the high squealing and tearing of tons of breaking masonry and steel. The uprights supporting the bridge spans tottered stiffly toward and away from one another. With awful slowness they, too, crashed one by one into the river, and the road, tipping and sagging some more, in a slow, rolling twist, disappeared under the water.
Then the image froze. From the bridge’s severed end, girders hung suspended in space and in time, not yet lethally collapsed. A car arrested in a nosedive toward the water hovered in midair, its occupants not yet trapped and drowned. There was a digital whirring. For a second or two, the video ran backward and speeded up like some ludicrously cruel comic caper; the car reeled back from disaster and jumped up onto the road. Then the screen went blank except for numbers racing in one corner. There was a flicker, and there again was the man larking about with the fishing rod, his face untouched by what was about to happen. Again he twice cast his line, started, turned, dropped the rod, shouted, ran. Again the stumbling camera followed until it broke through the undergrowth and fixed on the collapsing giant of the bridge, the breaking concrete, the buckled spans, ripped lengths of roadway and falling cars, the river boiling with debris.
And again. Unable to move, I stood and watched with the kettle in my hand. There he was, a man about to cast a line on a riverbank in early spring. And again, what happened instead. What happened next. This time the footage came with commentary from a news anchor in the studio, but of course it didn’t alter anything; the fisherman started, turned, dropped the rod, shouted, ran. The juddering camera followed. Voices cried out, the wind howled, cables snapped, concrete and steel tore, and the bridge went down. But I was finding out what I suddenly realized I needed to know, because this time the commentary gave a chronology, minute by minute, of what happened. I dropped the kettle, scrabbled in my bag for a scrap of paper, and wrote down all the numbers I could. When the pictures stopped, suddenly the strength went out of my legs and I sank onto the bed. With my hand shaking, I checked the timings and worked out the arithmetic.
Right up until a quarter to three that afternoon, traffic had been flowing as normal in both directions over the bridge. I had left Stefan and Anna at the service station before one o’clock. Stefan hadn’t said so, but the man changing the license plates would be sure to be in Inverness. There was no reason for Stefan to have crossed the bridge. They would have been driving into the city within minutes of my leaving them. There was no cause for them to have been near the bridge at all.
I kept watching. The amateur cameraman was in the studio now. The young man and his father-in-law, after a pub lunch in Inverness, had crossed the bridge themselves at twelve minutes past two. They had parked and gone down to the riverbank on the north side to record the first tryout with the new rod, a birthday present. The bridge began to creak and lurch at two forty-five, as his father-in-law watched in terror, turned, dropped the fishing rod, shouted, and ran. The young man followed, and his camera was on it within thirty seconds. By two forty-eight, three of the central bridge spans and the stretch of road between them, measuring over two hundred and seventy feet and bearing, the young man estimated, about twenty vehicles, had collapsed into the water. He contacted the news channel straightaway, and his video, “probably the only eyewitness record of the disaster,” was broadcast for the first time at ten minutes past four. Then they asked him what he had felt as he watched it all happen, and the young man broke down in tears.
I found myself crying, too, with a strange sorrow that was both impersonal and personal, for I cried for the strangers who were lost but also with relief for Stefan and Anna. They would be safe. By now the new license plates would be on the car, and all I had to do was get back to Netherloch and pretend I had just discovered that it had been stolen from the car park behind the school. But would anyone care, now? A bridge had collapsed and people were dead and missing; it was impossible to believe that the lies I was going to tell about the car could be of any real importance. Yet I had to go. Stefan was relying on me.
But Netherloch was only about seven miles inland from the estuary bridge, and the narrow stone bridge in the town was the next crossing place over the river. There was bound to be disruption on the roads. For the next hour I kept the television on for traffic news. The video of the catastrophe was replayed endlessly. At a quarter to six, I had another text message:
In nothr bar! Going for curry. Eat without me ok sorry
I lay back on the bed in the dark room. Reflections from the screen danced in muzzy patterns over my hands, folded across my stomach. In the next half hour the video was run another four times, with slight variations in the commentary as a range of people gathered in the studio to give their viewpoints. Then live footage appeared. In the background rescue teams with boats and helicopters and ambulances scrambled around under emergency lighting. A reporter in an overcoat stood on a roadside clutching a microphone and said that the number of vehicles believed lost in the water continued to rise. It was feared that it might never be known for certain how many, for in such strong tides and deep water, cars and bodies could be swept out to sea and never found. But, on a more optimistic note, nobody was giving up hope, the reporter said. Some people had made it out of their cars and swum through the freezing water to the bank of the river, where they were being treated on the spot for shock, exposure, and injuries. There was severe road congestion, and police were urging people to keep away. Anyone concerned for a loved one should stay by the telephone and not attempt to come to the bridge.
Then the screen filled with different images, dark and grainy. I was looking at more video footage, which, said the news anchor, relieved to have something new to show, had just been made available. Another, more solemn, voice said that what was about to be shown captured the vital seconds before the collapse. It might provide evidence as to the cause, and help with identification of fatalities. Some viewers might find the images upsetting, and at this stage police were not confirming the identities of any of the vehicles shown. In silence the new pictures rolled, blurred and gray like old newspaper photographs suddenly animated, but lit by a kind of innocuous afternoon light. The vantage point was a fixed bird’s-eye view of a road whose broken white line in the tarmac stretched away through the center of the image. This was the vital footage, said the voice, from the speed camera at the top of one of the arches of the approach on the southern side, only a hundred meters from the start of the bridge. The back view of a blue car swelled into the picture and receded, leavi
ng the road empty again. The commentator remarked that the time, midafternoon and midweek, meant that traffic on the bridge had been light. A van and another car appeared, slowed, moved beyond the reach of the camera. For a few moments there was silence again, and the empty road. Softly, the voice said viewers were witnessing the procession of the last vehicles known to have passed under the arch when the bridge was still standing. The timing of the footage and the recorded moment of the collapse meant that these cars could not have made it all the way across; seconds after these images were caught, they would have been on the bridge. Moments later, they must have been plunged into the river. Two more cars emerged into the picture, paused, and drove on. Then speckles of gray and white invaded the screen, it turned black, and the video wound back to the start, with the bird’s-eye view of the empty road.
The footage ran again; cars came into view, moved across the screen and out. This time the video was stopped, trapping each vehicle for a moment in the center of the screen, in a fuzzy blizzard of static. The studio voice stressed that police were not releasing any details. Anyone concerned for a relative was urged to stay by the telephone. Emergency information lines would be operational soon. Slowly each car came forward, and each time the camera froze. And there, a few seconds after a black four-wheel drive and in front of a white van, was my car, the silver Vauxhall. It edged its way on and out of the picture.
My telephone blinked with another message:
Come if u want. Jewel of Raj in F. Aug. Feet soaked bring other sneakers ok?
I listened again to the voice from the television saying emergency lines would be open soon. Another message came through.