Across the Bridge

by Morag Joss

  Soon after that a family came in. They’d been to the Netherloch Falls. There was a sulky girl chewing on a leaflet from there, and their feet were muddy. I didn’t like them. It was a weekday, so the children should have been in school. I made the man go outside with his cigarette even though it was only in his mouth and not lit. The woman asked if we had Internet access, and I told her no because I’d seen her wiping her nose with her hands. She said what’s that then, pointing at the sign outside, and I said it wasn’t working. For all I knew it wasn’t. Nobody had logged on for a couple of weeks. Then she shook out a rail of tartan scarves and tried them all on, even though there was no mirror and they were only scarves. After that she took a basket and went up and down the shelves helping herself, digging in the deep-freeze and handing ice creams to her children before she’d paid for them. I told them there was no eating in the shop, so they hung around staring at me and sucking and tugging at their ice-cream wrappers and fingering the chocolate bars and playing with the key rings in the ‘Under £3’ tray. I’m sure they took some. The eldest one kept whining to her mother about why wasn’t there a toilet and when could she get on Facebook.

  After they’d gone, I sent you another message and told you what they were like, but you were still out of range.

  Then it was quiet again for a while. A man came in, someone I remembered seeing before. He came in now and then, always in outdoor clothes like the men who ran the angling weekends or worked in the forest, but he was always by himself and he was older than most of them. Not that I could really guess his age. He had cropped hair that I thought would be silvery-grey if it were longer. When he brought his things to the till he smiled as if he knew me. I noticed the colour of his eyes again, a bluish-grey like the colour of water in winter, and there was a brightness in them, almost a flashing, as if he had just caught sight of something startling, not in me but in the air surrounding me. But he was friendly. I remember thinking he was the first person I’d seen smiling since Anna waved me goodbye that morning, and my face felt a little unaccustomed to smiling back. I forgot how it showed, worrying all the time. He said something I didn’t hear. “Sorry, what did you say?”

  “Nothing, doesn’t matter. You were miles away,” he said, still smiling. I laughed and started to ring up his shopping. “Yes, I was. Sorry.”

  “Good place to be, sometimes. I think so, anyway.” The radio was on as usual, and I also remember there had just been a commercial break and a time check. That was how I was sure exactly when it happened. Two forty-five. He’d bought milk, a can of beans, cheese and tomatoes and bread, I remember that as well. “You’re not Polish, are you?” he asked. “Where are you from, then?”

  “Me? I’m from miles away,” I said, and rang the till.

  “Well, that’s two of us,” he said, and we laughed in the way people laugh when they want to show something doesn’t matter, but it does. Then the first sound of it came. It rolled at us like a shape, a dark colour, a giant boulder. Other sounds were squashed under it: the radio, the ting of the register, my voice counting out change. I stopped trying to count, and we stood staring at each other, then I began to feel the noise as well as hear it; it came from underground and rumbled up through my legs and into my throat, and rattled the words I was trying to say against my teeth as if my mouth was full of buttons. The man was trying to speak too, but his lips just opened and closed.

  Then this underground roaring rose and grew into a jagged crashing and breaking over our heads. Vi came hurrying in from the house, through the back of the shop and heading straight for the doors.

  “Oh, Jesus!” she was shouting. “Jesus, what is it? Is it a plane? Jesus, it’s a plane crashed at Inverness!”

  We all went outside, our faces raised to the sky.

  It wasn’t a plane, but the noise was coming from the direction of Inverness. Faraway sirens started to wail. A couple of cars stopped dead on their way up the road, and people got out of them shouting, and two or three of them ran back, eastwards, towards the noise. A moment later a car coming down the other side from Netherloch braked suddenly and swerved in at the side of the road just past the turn-off and our parking area; two bikes on the roof shuddered and slipped forwards onto the bonnet. The door swung open, and the driver stumbled in our direction with his phone at his ear.

  “Oh, my God! The bridge? The bridge, fuck! It’s going down, the bridge is going down!” His voice was squealing and jerky. “Oh, my God! Are you OK, are you OK? Yes, yes all right. Oh, my God! You stay there. You stay where you are. Don’t move, OK? Oh, my God!” He ended the call and for a moment stood rooted, staring at the phone and pulling his hair. More cars were stopping, more people were swarming on the road. He came towards us, waving his arms. “The bridge! Hey, it’s the bridge! Something’s happened to the bridge! It’s going down!”

  His voice pulled other people in a circle around him. “It’s the bridge! She saw it! My wife, she saw it! She’s in her office, they’re on the twelfth floor, riverside, they all saw it! It’s gone down, the bridge is down, they can’t leave the building. It could be a bomb!”

  From here there was nothing to see but the road and the forest that grew right to its edges. From Vi’s place you had to cross the road and climb in through the pines and go right up to the head of the waterfall to get a sight of the other side, the town and the falls tumbling down and the river stretching away from the east corner of the loch, and on towards the bridge and beyond, Inverness docks and the ocean. There was a moment of disappointment while we all stood listening. The noises around us were changing. The roar lessened to a low rumble under the screams of more sirens. Everyone had turned in the direction of the city. Then a man in a checked shirt tugged at his wife’s arm. “Come on! Come on, then!” he said, and ran towards the trees. His wife glanced at us, then followed him.

  It was all the rest of them needed. The excitement returned. Of course they had to see for themselves. Suddenly it was all right to run after a glimpse of it. People headed for the trees. Cars were still pulling up and stopping, and soon there were ten or twelve banked up in both directions. Some drivers wanted to move on but the road was too narrow for them to get around the cars blocking them. They leaned on their horns and got out and stood with their hands on their hips or went striding up to the vehicles in front. Other people fished around in their cars for boots and cameras and followed the others making for the trees. One couple quickly unhitched their bikes from the back of their car and set off down the road, weaving through the line of stopped traffic. Even though she had no coat, Vi pitched forwards and joined the flow of people disappearing into the woods. She turned back once and shouted something at me, but I didn’t hear what. Probably something about minding the store, which she knew I would do anyway. When I looked round, the man had gone, too. He had left his bag of food on the bench outside.

  In the space of the next minute, everyone vanished. I sat down on the damp bench and tried to call you, but I couldn’t get through. Two miles farther up the river and on the south side, you were much nearer to what was happening than I was. I wanted to know that Anna wasn’t scared.

  I couldn’t always predict what Anna would understand, what would frighten or delight her. Sometimes she would stare at me for a long, long time and sometimes she looked away into such a far-off, sad place in her mind that I could believe she saw every sorrow there has been and is yet to come in this world. At other times, she was brave and bold. Do you remember one time when she was crawling, last summer, and you and I both thought the other one was watching her? It was only for a moment, but she set off on her hands and knees across those sharp stones towards the river, and I’ll never be sure she wouldn’t have kept on until the water was over her head if you hadn’t yelled and dashed down and scooped her away from the edge. You lifted her up high to show me she was fine, and she was laughing and kicking, her legs were dripping. She laughed as if it was funny I might think she was anything other than immortal. She was laughing at me for be
ing afraid she’d do anything as stupid as get herself drowned.

  I tried you again, but still I couldn’t get through. Then I felt guilty, remembering that phone signals get overloaded at such times with callers trying to find people they fear are caught up in the danger. There would be hundreds of people frantic for news, not just a little anxious, as I was, that a child might have seen something frightening from a distance. I thought of you coming down the trailer steps and hurrying to the water’s edge with Anna in your arms. You wouldn’t be able not to watch the bridge, but you’d make sure she wasn’t scared. You’d hold her tight, shield her eyes, comfort her. She might not even know what it meant, it might be simply exciting to her, a spectacle. She might be clapping her hands. I flicked through the photos I kept on my phone of the two of you. Shivering on the bench and with the sirens wailing far away but all around me, I sat smiling and looking at pictures.

  After another while the sirens faded, as if all the panic were somehow being placed at a distance. The cars on the road were empty. I decided I would go in and make some tea and see if I could fiddle with the radio dial and get the news. I picked up the man’s bag of groceries and took it inside to keep safe for him in case he came back.

  Soon afterwards Vi returned. She was sober now, and scorched-looking, as if what she’d seen had radiated a kind of blast that had burnt off the drink in her. Her sandy, dry hair had frizzed up in corkscrews, and her eyes were small and hot under her stiff eyebrows. She’d been up to the top of the falls, she told me, high enough to see down the estuary to the ruined bridge.

  “There’s a whole bit gone right out of the middle,” she said, talking fast, bringing her hands together and opening them wide again. “Disappeared. Torn right away and in the river. And there’s loads of cars went with it, they don’t know how many. Cars with folk still in them.”

  I had never heard her talk so much. Disaster had made her lively. The river was choked with wreckage: girders, concrete, tarmac. She had seen the roofs of cars and an upended truck in the water. She hadn’t seen any corpses, but people were dead, people were missing. The roads on both sides were closed. Up at the falls the man in the checked shirt had been getting news and police reports on his phone, and he’d told her that on this side of the river the police would be stopping all the traffic coming down from the north to Inverness and diverting it past the broken bridge. Everyone would have to come all the way along here on our little road, seven miles inland, and cross the river by the little stone bridge at Netherloch. Then from Netherloch the traffic would have to travel the seven miles back again, right down the riverbank on the other side to the end of the estuary at Inverness.

  “Oh, think of the people,” I said. I realized I was crying. “Those poor people.”

  “It’ll be pandemonium,” Vi said. “Pandemonium. Detours from here to Inverness, it’ll add hours, you wait and see.” Her voice was greedy. She was thinking of all those cars crawling past outside, all those drivers, bored and hungry and thirsty. She was trying not to look pleased.

  “I mean the people in the water,” I said. “The drowned people.”

  “Aye, right enough, but now what? That wee bridge at Netherloch’ll never cope, it couldn’t even take two wee vans going past each other, never mind thay great big trucks.”

  I remembered the first time we went there. I remembered the little bridge, made of dark-grey stone like the rest of Netherloch town. It had a shallow arch and curved recesses on each side. For people to step out of the way of carts and horses, you told me. It must have been built hundreds of years ago. Or to stand fishing, I said. Or set up stalls, selling things. People set up markets on bridges, don’t they? It’s where you can wait and catch customers, while they’re going across. We stood there a little longer but I don’t remember what we said after that. It was one of those conversations that did or didn’t have an ending, like seeing a puff of smoke in the sky that drifted away and you weren’t sure if you saw it go or just noticed later it had gone. It didn’t matter.

  Just then more sirens started up, and we went to watch at the window. The sound came nearer. Three or four police cars with blue flashing lights swept past in the direction of Netherloch.

  “See?” Vi said. “That’s them going in to set up the diversions. Pan-de-bloody-monium.”

  It was getting dark and soon from down the road another blue flashing light appeared and drew nearer, travelling slowly. Behind it a pair of white headlamps followed, growing round and glaring. More headlamps flickered behind in a long, moving necklace of lights winding up from the Inverness bridge. Soon the traffic was juddering nose to tail all along the road outside. We waited.

  “I might have kenned,” Vi sighed. “Nobody’s stopping. Once you’re in a queue like that, you stay in it. Nobody’s going to pull off just for sweeties and a drink and lose their place.”

  She went over to the counter and rummaged underneath it. She poured out the dregs from her bottle and raised the glass towards the window. “Pandemonium. Break your bloody heart.” She tipped her drink down her throat and swaying a little turned to watch the traffic again. “It’ll be a different story in Netherloch. Folk pouring into a wee place like that, oh, they’ll do fine, ta very much. Mind you, it’ll bring in all sorts.”

  “I like Netherloch,” I said.

  Vi turned her gaze from the window. “Your lot don’t go to Netherloch. It’s for holiday folk.”

  “I’ve been once or twice.”

  “There’s nobody in Netherloch these days. It’s for holiday folk now,” she said firmly. “None of your lot there.” She made it sound as if Netherloch had escaped a pestilence. I felt my eyes fill with tears again and I moved away to the door, where all the tourist stuff was laid out, and began tidying up the shelf with the pottery Loch Ness Monsters and bookmarks. Over my shoulder I could feel her thinking about what she’d said, wanting to balance it with something less unkind. I saw that in her, sometimes, and a look that told me she was sorry for the way she was.

  “Well, anyway. Where is it you stay again? Over the other side, isn’t it? You’ll be a while getting back tonight,” she said. “All that traffic all the way up to the wee bridge and all back down the other side.”

  “There’s still the stock at the back to put out,” I reminded her, and got the pricing gun and the order sheet from under the counter. Vi looked at the clock.

  “No, on you go,” she said, taking them from me. “You get going. Walk down to Netherloch and there’ll be police there, they’ll help you out. There’ll be other folk needing lifts most likely. I doubt there’ll be a bus tonight.”

  As I went to get my bag and jacket, I heard her ring the till open. When I came back she was leaning over it, gripping the sides with her hands.

  “There’ll be nobody in this weekend. I can’t be paying out to mind an empty shop.” She looked up. “Don’t come in till Monday, OK? You’d struggle to get here anyway, all that bloody big detour.”

  She started thumbing through the few notes in the till drawer. It was Thursday. Maybe she’d forgotten she was due to pay me on Friday. I had less than five pounds in my bag. I didn’t know how we’d manage the weekend, never mind that I was supposed to work Sunday and now she didn’t want me in, so I’d lose that money as well.

  “I could make it. I could get here,” I told her. I stood there for a while, hoping at least she’d pay me what I was owed.

  “Not worth it. Could be we won’t get a summer season at all,” Vi said, banging the drawer shut again. Then she gave me a kind of wave and lurched back to her place by the paraffin stove. I think she meant it partly as an apology, but mainly she wanted rid of me.

  “Come in Monday. I’ll pay you Monday,” she said and closed her eyes.

  That made me feel a little better. If she wasn’t settling up now, it must mean she really did want me on Monday. She wasn’t telling me I hadn’t got a job any more.

  “See you then, Vi,” I said. “Take care.”

  Just at th
at 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, their beams 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.

  ∨ Across the Bridge ∧

  Ten

  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 blonde 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 blonde 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.