by Morag Joss
I stared round at the car park, the fuel pumps, the café windows, the scrub and farmland beyond, but I couldn’t see anyone.
“You sell or not?”
“It’s just, the car…I don’t know if you…if you…” I said. “I mean, I haven’t done this before. The thing is, I need money. The car doesn’t actually – ”
“That’s none of my business. You need money, I need car. You got a car, if I want it, I pay you cash. No papers. That’s it. OK?”
“OK. But I don’t even know who – ”
“No names! No documents, you understand? No papers. That way it’s all private, OK?”
“Yes, but how much – ”
“Listen. You come back here tomorrow. Just you. You understand?”
Just then I heard the cry of a young child in the background. “Wait,” he said. He spoke a few words in another language. A pause, then I heard him speak in English. “Ssh, hey, hey, Anna? It’s all right, wait just a minute, Papa’s busy…”
I caught my breath. His voice had grown musical and soft.
There were some noises of movement and murmuring from the child and then, “Good girl, Anna. Papa’s baby…”
He would think me insane if I began to cry.
“OK, listen,” he said to me. “So you come back tomorrow. Exactly same place. Then you call me again, same time, I tell you where you bring me the car. If car OK, we agree price, I pay, you get cash, we both get discretion. We don’t say to nobody.”
His voice was changed, young and rounded and cadenced. I was certain this gentler, slightly shy voice belonged to the person he really was.
“I’ll be here tomorrow,” I said.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Five
Since last year, a certain mood would come over me at nightfall. When night masked the trees around the trailer and turned the river water to ink and the far bank was a steep black hulk against the softer dark of the sky, I couldn’t tell what country this was, or what season or century. Time and place were unnamed, it was night and it was anywhere and any year, and that was all. The moon made me feel smaller and safer than the sun. If it was a fine evening, I would go outside alone. I liked to walk with my head thrown back, following the moon. I could go in any direction I chose along the shore, and often I missed my footing and nearly fell, but somehow I would still always be following the moon. Wherever it led I followed, until my neck felt stiff or I finally stumbled. I must have looked so silly. Then I would do it all over again but imagine this time the moon was following me, and it always did. Dreamy and drunk on moonlight, I needed a while afterwards to steady myself and get used to being back on the river shore by the trailer, for it really did feel as if I’d been a long way away. Moonbathing was how I thought of it.
I didn’t speak of it to you. I knew you would have found it amusing. You’d have snatched it away and held it out of my reach while you scrutinized it, you would have tossed it around for fun and handed it back to me a little spoilt. Though you never meant to be unkind.
And though it was funny, I didn’t do it for amusement. Though I was soothed by it, it wasn’t for relaxation. It was surrender. I gave myself up to it long, long before it was dark. Even when Vi wasn’t being difficult, I would be looking forward to the day at work being over. Part of me would yearn all day long for the coming reward, to be absorbed and lost in the moon. You knew that much, I think. You would gather wood while it was still light and stack it around the circle of rocks we’d built on the ground between the trailer and the riverbank, and you would bring out chairs for us and a blanket for when the evening got colder. You’d light the fire while I was settling Anna in bed, so I would be guided down to you by the orange glow and the crackle of burning sticks. At night the noise of traffic passing on the bridge far away downriver settled to the occasional whirring rise and fall as cars in twos and threes approached and crossed over. That was soothing, too.
I liked it best when you found silvery, fallen tree branches for the fire, which burned with the baking smell of old, sun-parched timber. Sometimes we had to burn scrap wood that people had dumped along the verge at the top of the track: bits of old furniture, broken doors – once, nearly the whole side of a garden shed – and then the fumes would be harsh and toxic and the fire would flare with blistering paint and melting glue.
That night the flames were different, a sulky, wavering yellow giving off greenish clouds of smoke with a sharp, rotten smell.
These sticks are damp. They must have been lying in the water, I said, poking at one with my foot. Did you pick them out of the water? The smoke smells of weeds. And dead fish.
You grunted. It’s all I could get, I didn’t have time to go getting dry stuff. We’ve used up all there is round here, the only dry stuff’s a mile down the shore. Anna was too tired.
You didn’t have time? What else did you do today?
Nothing much. Went up to the service station to fill the water cans. Anna ate nearly a whole muffin.
That’s a long walk for her. No wonder she was tired.
Well anyway, after that I didn’t want to take her along the shore. I can’t carry her and drag wood back all this way. It’s enough just getting the water.
You need to get something to fetch it in. Maybe you could make something. You could get some old wheels from somewhere, make a little cart. You could give her rides in it, she’d love it. You could pretend –
I saw your face and stopped speaking. You glared into the fire, then you got up and kicked a sticking-out branch farther into the flames.
Little rides for Anna? Little rides in a little cart? Yeah, let’s pretend. Let’s make Stefan play fucking games all day. But we won’t let him do any proper work, will we? Not for money.
Stefan, don’t. You can’t –
You turned and stood away, out of the circle of warmth.
You treat me like a kid! he said. I should be making proper money so we can get out of here. But you don’t want that, do you? You want things as they are, you want me wasting my time making little fucking carts!
Of course I don’t. You know I hate us being like this.
No, you like it. You like us right here, living like this. Well, I don’t, I’ve had enough. I’m going to change things.
Don’t be stupid! Somebody’s got to look after Anna. OK, I’m the one with the job, is that my fault? Tell me what I’m supposed to do. Give up a job to let you borrow money we’ll never pay back? So you can drive people around all day in a cab that’ll never belong to you?
I’ll get a cab some other way.
What other way is there? Everybody needs a loan to get started, and we are not borrowing money from those bastards. We’d never get away from them. I’m not stopping you making things better, I’m stopping you being stupid, I’m stopping you walking into trouble.
I have to get a car! Can’t you see? As soon as I’m getting fares we can pay rent, get a proper place, and we’re out of here!
Stefan, if you borrow from the kind of people who’d lend to you, the car will never, ever be yours. You can’t own your own car in this country. You don’t even exist in this country.
Loads of people do it! Tell me how else we get out of here!
You haven’t been talking to them, have you? Is that where you were today, in the city? You haven’t talked to them, have you? Stefan!
Listen, in two years, maybe three, we’d have good money. We’d owe nobody.
Suppose it goes wrong? Suppose you’re on somebody else’s patch or the car’s stolen? Suppose there isn’t enough business? Those bastards, you think they’re going to say, Oh, Stefan, you’re a nice guy, that’s OK? They’ll burn the car, that’s the least they’ll do. They could burn it with you in it.
Oh, come on, those are fucking scare stories!
No, Stefan, they’re not. And you know what else? They take the woman and sell her to get back at him, they sell her to other men. Children, too, even children.
OK, what do you want me
to do? You want my balls on a fucking plate?
Stefan, stop it. You’ll wake up Anna.
No, go on, tell me what to do! We can’t go back home, we don’t exist here, we can’t go anywhere else. So what’s the big plan, Silva? We go to your magic fucking cabin across the water, live in a fairy story, is that it? Is that the big plan?
You strode down the shingle to the river edge and started chucking stones into the water. We’d had this fight so many times, I knew enough to leave you for a while. I shivered inside the blanket and stared up at the stars. There were many sounds: the hiss of damp wood burning and the scrape of your feet on the shore, the plock of stones going into the river and the burr of traffic under the sky. I said your name, but you didn’t come back. I called out again, into the dark.
Stefan? Maybe I can get an extra job. Get more hours. We’d save that way. I might find something where I could take Anna, and then you could work too. And anyway when the season starts you can work in the bar again, like last year, at the White Hart.
The noise of stones hitting the water stopped. You trudged back to me and sat down by the fire.
You can’t do any more hours. If we got the car, I could work every night. There’s loads of cabs in Inverness without licences, they never check. I’d work the airport, clubs.
We were silent for a while, imagining it.
The weekends, guys coming off the rigs, they drink hard, they always need cabs. It’s good money. You could stay with Anna instead of working for that cow.
Oh, Vi’s all right. When she’s sober.
Your voice was very quiet, as it was when you were either really angry, or lost in a dream. I knew it very well, the way you withdrew into yourself. You had begun to shrink a little, rubbing your face and sighing as though the rage in your brain was rising from the surface of your skin like a sort of dangerous, flammable vapour that had to be wiped away and expelled in slow, careful gusts. I took your hand and started to say something. I didn’t think you were really listening, so I stopped speaking, but you didn’t snatch your hand away. We sat like that in silence for a long time, moving only to put more wood on the fire. From time to time you looked at me as if you wanted to speak.
Suddenly you sat up very straight. Sssh, you said, and you stared through the darkness towards the river, cupping your free hand to your ear. Listen!
What? I squeezed your fingers tight. What is it? What’s wrong?
My heart started to bump. We’d heard about them, homeless vagrants wandering out from the shelters they’d made under the bridge, high on drugs, in gangs. We were at least a mile away and there was no easy path along the riverbank, but it had happened a couple of times about three years ago, a couple of old caravans in a field near the service station had been set on fire. That was why you wouldn’t leave Anna and me alone at night last summer. You’d stayed on working in the bar, refused when they offered you the night-porter job. If anyone found the track down from the road we’d be OK, you always said, because you’d be there. We’d hear anyone in plenty of time to get away and hide. They wouldn’t know the riverbank as we did and they’d be too stoned to think of staying quiet. We’d be OK.
But what if you were wrong? What if they’d been watching for hours from the darkness beyond the fire? I clutched at you. I was trying not to scream.
Stefan! Somebody’s there! Get Anna! Oh, God, Stefan, get Anna!
No, no, just listen. Anna’s fine. Listen to the geese, Silva, you whispered. Can you hear them? The geese?
I listened hard, waiting for any sound, the slightest sound, coming off the water. My eyes were watering from the smoke. All I could hear were the sounds of the fire and the traffic on the bridge.
The geese? No. I can’t hear anything.
Well now, you said in my ear, pulling me closer to you. Well now…That’ll be because they’re all fast asleep. As you should be, silly girl.
I pushed away from you, bashing at your shoulders, and you grabbed my hands and kissed them and started gnawing on my fingers, growling and mumbling. Just then there was a wail from the trailer. You looked round but I got up at once, pulling the blanket with me.
I’ll go. Don’t stay out long.
I left you poking a long branch into the fire. I was glad she’d woken up, and to the sound of laughter. In a moment you’d come into the trailer to see that she was settling again and the sight of her, asleep or not, would be almost the last stage of your restoration to yourself, and to me. At such moments I would often see tears on your face. That night, your love for her flooded your eyes.
The very last stage came later, after she was asleep again. It came like this. In the way I might casually happen to be first to reach a door and open it for both of us, I told you that I was sorry. It didn’t matter to me at all that I didn’t believe anything I’d said was untrue or that I didn’t think I had anything to apologize for. The assumption of blame wasn’t important, that wasn’t the purpose of it. It was a way of saying I knew that you wanted to forgive me, but much more to forgive yourself, for the way we were forced to live. It was a way of letting you do both. Because then you took me in your arms and wrapped me in close against you, and with no more words we made love, fitting ourselves to each other’s bodies for each other’s consolation and for the glad familiarity of it, our slow, deep rocking together in the dark.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Six
I was having a bath when Col returned from his kayaking, and he shouted through the door that he would wait for me in the bar. When I came down, he offered me a drink and declared with a little bravado that he would ‘join me’ and ordered the same for himself, tonic without the gin, though usually he drank beer. He meant it as a kind of compliment, symbolically rejecting the notion of our incompatibility by rejecting a different drink, but the gesture was slightly too big for him. He sat and sipped his tonic, cowed by the formality between us. We had to be so careful. We exchanged tight remarks and little smiles, until I ordered him a pint, which he drank as if released from some test or other. I watched him, not sure what I loved. But whatever it was in me he wanted, I did not want him to stop wanting it.
We ate early. Over dinner he drank a bottle of wine, which helped him, and we talked a little about his day on the river and about mine, supposedly in Inverness. We pared our stories down to safe generalities. I barely had to lie; I said I’d had an interesting time and had enjoyed seeing new places, and he didn’t ask any more of me than that. His lack of interest in my day was a courtesy, an offer to me to talk free in the knowledge I would not really be listened to, so it was easy to reel off inane remarks about a day of vague impressions without being specific about locations or – the courtesy reciprocated – endanger him by bringing him anywhere near the orbit of my real thoughts. In return, when I asked him about the kayaking, I showed satisfaction with answers that were neither engaged nor precise. We ate in small mouthfuls, and every one was taken slowly, as an opportunity to push a little more of the evening behind us. But still, when we had finished I was appalled at how much time was left. Our bedroom, smelling of carpet cleaner and hot electric light, lay above us at the end of a musty hotel corridor. I had imagined, all through dinner, the hours of the coming night, cramming themselves into its emptiness, lying in wait.
I suggested we have coffee in the lounge. The couple from the morning were already there, drinking whisky and yawning over the papers. The waitress brought in our tray and made her exit, saying she hoped we would enjoy the rest of our evening.
But there was so much of it. While Col glowered over a book of aerial photographs, I browsed the bookcases on the other side of the room and wandered around studying the prints on the walls, of stags and mountains, Highland crofts and cattle. I sat down again on the sofa and examined the china minutely, as if I might discover in it something about cups and saucers that had so far eluded me. The couple got up to leave, and invited us to join them in the bar when we had finished. Col looked longingly after them. I too
k up the newspaper they had left behind and completed a couple of crossword clues, then folded the paper back up as neatly as I had found it. Col drank his coffee. I drank my herb tea.
“Col, if it’s about money, if there wasn’t a problem about money, do you think – ”
“There’s no point discussing it,” he said. “We haven’t got the money. I’m not discussing it.”
“But suppose we had, suppose – ”
“Stop. Just – stop,” he said. “There is nothing to say.”
I got up again and studied a rack of leaflets and maps. It was no good. No task took long enough. I found myself looking at a pamphlet about salmon-fishing, wondering how long I would be able to keep this up, listening to my life pass along in thudding little ticks of my heart. I was forty-two years old and I knew it was finite, this bright, regular tapping in my chest, but I also knew that for every few seconds I aged, the baby grew a little; it became a larger, livelier thing to kill. I wanted to blurt out my feelings; I feared my impatience for the next day would somehow break out of me and declare itself. I returned to the sofa.
“By the way, I’m going kayaking again tomorrow,” Col said. “You’ll be all right, will you?”
“Yes, I’ll be fine,” I lied.
I couldn’t think of anything else to say. The air of the lounge grew dense with our hoarded silence; the clock ticked and ticked with a sound like seconds snapping off in small splinters, only to reassemble maliciously behind us, ready to come round again. The hours yet to come thronged around us with all their awful availability for no other purpose than to keep a vigil against marital disintegration. Eventually a drift of laughter came from the bar. My husband raised his head.
“I’m tired,” I told him. “You go on and enjoy yourself. I think I’ll have an early night.”
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Seven