by Morag Joss
He took the giraffe and waggled it at her, then thrust its head at her and cuddled it into her neck so it tickled. She tried to grab it, giggling and squealing.
“OK, OK, Anna,” he said, letting it go and looking at her, and then at me. “OK, so what. I’m Stefan.”
Whatever it was that had caused him to be so tense, his daughter released him from it as if she had let go of a bird trapped in her hands. She was sucking again on the fronded tail of the giraffe, and staring at her father. She already knew something about adoration, but she didn’t have an inkling of her power. She didn’t understand that just the sight of her fingers flexing and pointing at a stranger’s face and her voice experimenting with a stranger’s name could do this. She made him believe that nothing else mattered, that he could handle anything. He sank down on the seat on the other side of the trailer, leaning gingerly on the table.
“You hurt your arm,” I said. “Let me see.”
When I asked him to make a circle with his wrist, he hissed with pain.
“Can you move your fingers?” I asked. “Can you bend your elbow?” He could, but when he tried to turn his forearm, the pain shot up and down between elbow and wrist. The redness of his hands had got worse since we came inside the trailer, and they were now mottled with blue, and he was shivering. He might have been quite ill; at the very least he was frozen, and probably shocked by the fall.
“You need a hot drink,” I said.
He wiped his uninjured hand across his face and didn’t reply. I got up and moved to the other end of the trailer, where there was a double gas burner. I filled a small saucepan with water from a plastic canister, lit the burner using a box of matches from a shelf, and set the pan on it. I opened cupboards and found grassy-smelling herbal tea bags of some kind. I decided that he needed sugar but there didn’t seem to be any, so when the water was poured I stirred some honey into it. As he drank, the trailer filled with balmy, hay-scented steam, like when the sun warms leaves and wild flowers after rain. The fumes reminded me of the kind of summer day almost impossible to imagine looking at his sore, pinched hands, while a few feet away outside the trailer the air splintered with cold and the river ran past swollen by the wintery, dark flow of melted ice.
He saw me glance past him through the window. As if remembering what I was there for, he pushed his cup aside and looked at his watch.
He said, “There isn’t much time. Come outside. Anna, stay here a minute and be a good girl.”
He stepped down from the trailer; I followed. He was in a hurry now, but Anna scrambled after us to the door and wailed to be lifted down and kept near him. He got her boots on again and buttoned her into her coat.
We walked all around the car. He kicked at the tyres and peered in the windows, and he tried all the doors and inspected the boot. When he asked to see the engine we had to fish out the manual and look up how to release the catch under the bonnet. I could tell he knew no more about car engines than I did.
When he’d finished looking, he said, quietly and without surprise, “Rental car. You steal it? You come to sell me a car that’s not yours?”
“I need some money, that’s all. You said no questions.” I turned away, pretending to cough, so he wouldn’t know that my voice trembled and my eyes were filling with tears.
“OK, you didn’t steal it. You rent it. And this,” – he tapped with his foot on the licence plate – “this is the real number?”
“Yes.”
He blew out his cheeks. “OK,” he said. “So. If you sell, you have to tell them car was stolen. Because you are a thief.”
“No. Yes. I know.”
“So if I buy, I need to change the plates, maybe change the colour. So I pay less for car.”
“I need three thousand,” I said, without thinking. I was guessing; it sounded like enough to ask, enough to change Col’s mind about the baby.
“Maybe. Maybe not so much. It drives good? I need to drive it. If it drives good, I pay. No receipt, no documents.”
“How much?” I asked. “How do I know you’ve even got any money?”
He glanced at Anna, who was absorbed, digging a pebble out of the tread of one of the tyres. Turning from her, he produced an envelope from inside his jacket. He drew out just enough for me to see the top edge of a wad of banknotes.
“I got money.” He stood watching my face as I tried to control another wave of tears. I had begun to tremble. I was horrified at myself, bartering a car that wasn’t mine for money to keep a baby. How flimsy it was proving to be, the border between the kind of person I was before this, whose life had never strayed off the path of the conventionally law-abiding, and the kind of person I was turning into; it was terrifying to learn how irresistible, how effortless was my descent. Could I have offered in mitigation of my wrongdoing the plea that I had no choice? Of course I had a choice. Having taken it upon myself to judge that the legal destruction of my baby was the greater and truly unacceptable wrong, I was choosing to break the law. But I was not acting out of principle in pursuit of a finer moral good. My reasons, circumstantial, quite possibly hormonal, were a clumsy, misshapen clump of love, need, fear and, in the end, self-interest. I was going about getting what I wanted.
“OK, listen. You’re selling me rental car, you need money that bad. I need a car. For my wife. For a surprise, big surprise for her, big difference for her life.” He gave me a hard grin. “So, smart lady? You need the money, you owe it somebody?”
“I just need it.”
“OK, right. No questions. We go now to drive car around. If car OK, we agree price, I pay.”
I shivered. “OK.”
He went back inside the trailer and brought out a heap of bedding. He arranged it in a mound on the back seat, then lifted Anna on top of it and began to fiddle with the seat belt.
“That’s not very safe,” I said. “Small children are supposed to have those proper car seats when they go in cars.”
He clicked the seat belt in place and straightened. “Do I ask you for help? What can I do about it right now?”
Anna started to wail. “Jee-raff! Papa, Jee-raff!” she said and burst into tears. Stefan returned to the trailer and brought back her giraffe.
“You will get her a car seat, won’t you?” I didn’t care that I was making him angry. “You’ve got to get her a car seat so she’ll be safe.”
“You drive it back up the track,” he said, getting in on the passenger side. “Any damage then you don’t blame me.”
I drove very carefully up the track and stopped at the top, and we swapped places. He turned the car towards Inverness, nudging it back onto the road nervously, unused to having the controls on the right and possibly to driving at all. Anna dropped her giraffe and began to bounce and squirm on top of her heap of bedding in the back seat, and he spoke to her sharply, in their own language. I retrieved the giraffe for her, and she pushed it into her mouth; her eyes began to close. In silence Stefan drove us past the service station and on to the roundabout as if to turn left across the bridge, then reconsidered and swerved round to go straight ahead, to the outskirts of Inverness. The traffic grew heavier, and it unnerved him. A couple of miles farther, cursing under his breath, he made a complete circuit at another roundabout and headed back the way we had come. At the bridge roundabout, he took us back onto the Inverness road, where he picked up speed. Then he turned back in the same place as before.
“Car OK?” I asked, and he nodded.
“I go back to service station now,” he said.
But when he pulled in, he shook his head and inched past the rows of parked cars. “Too many cars, too many people,” he said. “I don’t stop here.”
At the far end of the car park, just at the start of the slip road back up to the road, a disused track jutted off to the left towards the derelict ground near the bridge, the wrecked and abandoned place I’d seen from the window of the café.
“More quiet here,” he said, turning the wheel. The track crossed an empty
field and then opened out onto a vast stretch of cracked concrete where factories or warehouses had once stood. He stopped the car. We got out into a terrain of piled-up rubbish: lumps of masonry, rusted metal spars and guttering and old window frames, warped board sheeting, buckled machinery, shattered glass and heaps of what looked like sodden old clothes. In the distance a man shuffled out from a broken shed clasping a piece of carpet around his shoulders like a cloak. Without seeing us, he wandered away in the direction of three or four plumes of smoke rising from behind a half-demolished wall.
“Bad place. Junkies,” Stefan said, glancing in at Anna asleep on the back seat. “Hurry up. Bad place.”
“Do you want it or not? If you want the car, you have to pay me. Now.”
“First I need promise. I need favour,” he said. “No, not a favour. For both of us.” His eyes were anxious. “I have to change licence plates. It’s OK, I can do, there’s a guy I know. So you don’t tell police the car is stolen straight away. You report the car later, OK? Wait till I got new plates. Wait till six o’clock.” He looked at his watch, then pointed back to the service station. “Up there you can get the bus. You go in bus to Netherloch, you say you left the car in Netherloch. The bus comes there soon, fifteen minutes.”
“It’s too cold to wait for a bus. I’m not feeling well. Can’t you drive me to Netherloch?”
“No,” he said, looking back to his daughter. “You can get bus easy, plenty of time. Bus is warm. Listen, when you get to Netherloch, there is car park behind the school.”
I nodded.
“So cars get taken from there. Stay in town a while, you can get coffee, food. Wait till six, then I will have new plates. At six o’clock you go to car park, you call police, you say you left the car there all day. Tell them this morning you went to walk, you go along by the water and in the forest and then you get back and car is not there. OK? You got no car, you have to tell story, explain them something. It’s for both of us. You understand?”
“OK.”
He pulled out the envelope from his jacket. “Two thousand,” he said.
“Three,” I insisted, numbly. I had no idea what the car was worth, no idea what I was talking about.
“Two thousand five hundred,” he said, counting it through his fingertips, note by note, before I could argue.
“All right,” I said.
He handed it over, and pointed to the service station again. “Just up there.”
He smiled. He was anxious for me to go. But some natural courtesy – maybe even a little gratitude because I liked his daughter – prevented him from showing it.
“All right. Goodbye.”
In absolute misery, I zipped the money into an inside pocket of my shoulder bag. Just as I was turning to go, I glanced in at the child, lying aslant across the collapsed wad of bedding and beginning to stir from sleep. Seeing her father outside, she pulled herself up and patted on the window with the palms of both hands, about to cry. Stefan and I looked at each other; we both wanted to say something else, and we both started to speak at once. He tried to laugh.
“OK. What?”
“You will remember to get her a car seat, won’t you? Today?”
He smiled and reached out and gave my shoulder a little shake. “Sure, sure, lady. Today. I will.”
“What were you going to say?”
“Nothing,” he said. He pulled out his envelope again, just as Anna began to sob, pressing her face up to the glass. “Only, here. Three thousand. Here, take,” he said, pushing more bills into my hands. Then he turned quickly to the car and I started walking away, towards the service station. I heard him open the car door and speak gently, but I kept walking. I could not bear to see her hands outstretched for him as he lifted her into his arms.
I didn’t want to wait for the bus. It was too cold to stand in the shelter, and I wanted to get away and keep moving, putting distance between myself and what I had just done. I kept walking. Soon I had reached the bridge, and I could see that the pathway for pedestrians was a separate narrow carriageway, built lower than the steel deck that carried cars; once on it I would be almost invisible except to anyone I might meet walking across from the other side. I strode along fast with my collar up against the roar of traffic and the estuary wind. I liked the thought of being hidden. After a few minutes, the bus rumbled on past me.
Looking inland, I could see all the way to the point where the river emerged from the neck of the loch, and turning eastwards, I saw as far as it ran, past the docks and the city, and widened into the sea. As I walked, in each direction the views hit my eyes like old, stuttering film as the black spars of the bridge flickered past between me and the landscape.
At the first junction on the far side, where nearly all the traffic bore right to go north and up the coast, I turned left and followed a much narrower road that rose and curved inland. The signs pointed towards Netherloch Falls and Netherloch. The paved walkway from the bridge came to an end, and I continued along the side of the road, suspended in wintery afternoon darkness; the way was canopied by overhanging trees, through which blinding slashes of daylight cut until they stood too densely planted for light to penetrate. After a while I could only sense but not see the river, a long way beyond the trees and below me. One or two cars passed, leaving hollow echoes of engine noise. As the road rose ahead of me I could tell I was going higher; soon I heard a faraway rushing in the treetops and the air was cold with pine resin and raw mountain winds that carried none of the green, reedy damp of the river. I came upon the remains of a clearing where trees had been felled in an apparently disordered kind of order: straight rows of sawn stumps poked up between tractor ruts and receded back into the line of the forest. Everywhere the ground was scattered with shards and chips of torn wood and the scabs of stripped bark. Dozens of tree trunks lay stacked horizontally, and around them were stiff, feathery heaps of smaller pine cuttings alongside dried out branches and twigs, grey and tangled like wires.
I had been walking for nearly an hour and had a stitch in my side, and I stopped to rest against a mound of logs, digging my foot into a mulchy carpet of pine needles and moss. I was scared and cold, and sick with disgust at myself; I stared into the darkness of the trees and wanted to escape into it. Just then I heard another bus. Without thinking, I ran back to the road and waved it down. I climbed on breathless and shivering and wondered if I was getting flu. By the time we reached Netherloch I ached with tiredness and the afternoon had turned cloudy and raw. It was only a quarter past two. I knew I could not bear nearly four hours loitering in the streets, going from one café to another. I had to get into a quiet room and lie down, I had to sleep.
The sign on the front of the bus said Wester Muir/Fort Augustus, which I knew were some miles west, beyond our hotel, so I clambered down to the driver and paid the extra to go on to Invermuir where, he told me, the bus stopped at the postbox on the far side of the village from the hotel. Col would not be back before six o’clock. I could hide in our room for at least two hours, and later I would get back somehow to Netherloch. If there wasn’t another bus I could get a taxi, and if I didn’t get there until after six it wouldn’t matter; in fact it would help, it would give Stefan even more time. We would be safe. But I didn’t know what safe meant any more. I opened my bag and flicked the money through my fingertips, powdery soft paper amounting to three thousand pounds. Just paper, after all, but I was trusting to it to buy me my safety.
I stared through the bus window and tried to distract myself by identifying the plants along the road. Gorse, bracken, patches of rushes, and spongy, brownish pads of decaying nettles and saturated moss. I was collecting observations that I could array before Col one by one, to fill our evening before I mentioned the baby and the money. Then I would tell him that I had solved the problem, that there was now plenty of money, so there was no need to worry. He would love his child when it arrived, and anyway, I would take care of everything. Soon I found myself in a pitiful daydream in which kindness a
nd remorse and enlightenment washed over his face, and henceforth we moved on together towards a sweetly melancholic, poetic future as Mummy and Daddy. I modified the daydream; at some later date, next year maybe, I would be pregnant again. If it happened at forty-two, it could surely happen at forty-three, and it would be different next time, because making the best of one accidental baby was one thing, having a second quite another, undertaken only by devoted and deliberate parents. By then I would, as a mother, be well acquainted with anxiety about the world at a level previously unimaginable, but I would be watchful and capable, too, and our happy children would – I whispered the very words – make our happiness complete. This was a manageable and familiar dream to me, set in a future in which I was altered, having blossomed in my husband’s eyes and acquired proper, wifely value as a person whose wisdom and clarity about life were necessary to him. I concentrated on it for the rest of the journey.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Nine
The store wasn’t busy; lunchtimes never are. A few campers from the Lochside Holiday Cabins were coming in at the weekends now, but still hardly any during the week, and they usually stocked up early in the day. The bus stopped outside at two o’clock, on time. Nobody got off. Around the same time some fishermen came in to fill up their flasks from the vending machine. They told me again we should be selling soup and hot pies. Get a microwave and you could do it easy, you’d make a fortune this weather, they said.
I nodded over at Vi, who was sleeping behind the counter with dribble going on her cardigan.
Tell her, it’s her place, I said. She says she’s not running a bloody restaurant.
There was stuff from the Cash & Carry to price and put out, so when the fishermen left, I woke Vi up and told her I was going to the back room, not that she really heard. It was just cans and cotton wool and firelighters and tinfoil, plus one of Vi’s impulse buys, a bag of soccer shirts, so there was no hurry. I took a sandwich past its sell-by from the chiller and made my tea, and when I’d had my lunch, I sent a message to you, but you didn’t answer. I thought you must be out of range, along the shore or getting water from the car-wash tap at the service station. Then I went back with a cup of tea for Vi and made her go across to the house. I told her to have a lie-down and I’d see her later, but I knew she’d have another bottle in there and I’d be locking up tonight. She wouldn’t go at first, she said the house would be cold. So I went over, and it was and also dirty, as always. I switched on the gas fires and her electric blanket and bedside light and then went back for her. I led her all the way to her bedroom door, and I promised her I’d look after everything. I hoped she’d fall asleep before she could start crying.