by Morag Joss
I scanned the people in the background for Stefan and Anna. They must be there. He and Anna could not have died that way. What was the use of it, a love like that, unless it achieved at least the keeping alive of the beloved? I thought of them in the car together and of the money in my bag and why it was there, and I felt sick. Could it be that I had bought my own child’s life at the cost of theirs? I thought of my mother and the price she believed had been exacted from her, and paid, for her child. Did nothing change?
Another text message came.
Heard it on news re bridge. Weird u were there y’day! Raj ok? Call me when u get here. Don’t 4get trainers
The light from the television flickered across the leg of the dressing table and over one of Col’s trainers lying against it with the laces tied and a wad of dead leaves trapped in the sole. On the chair in the corner I could make out the outline of his heap of clothes, big overstitched things with copious pockets and zips and gadgety little clips and features to meet a couple of dozen Boy-Scoutishly anticipated variants of weather and carrying requirements. On his bedside table were a baseball cap, his phone charger and a book of word puzzles.
Tonight, sooner or later, he would come back here and look round and see that this room contained everything he needed. Sooner or later, maybe not until tomorrow if he collapsed in bed too drunk to find out where I was, he would learn that our rental car had been on the bridge. If I had died in the river, this room would still contain everything he needed. If I got up now and just left, this room would still contain everything he needed.
He would probably spend some time feeling numb, even sad. He would spend some time (to his private surprise, rather little) adjusting his expectations back to those of a single man, gaining a touch of celebrity among people who knew him for the improbably lurid bad luck of losing his bride in a freak accident. He would let them describe it as tragic. He would allow them to think he minded that there couldn’t be a proper funeral; he’d go along with a modest memorial service of some kind. He would never tell a soul that I had been pregnant, and soon he would not mention me at all. Within a few months he would look back on being married as a botched experiment in becoming somebody else. Relieved, mildly ashamed, he would go back to the chat room on the Internet, but he’d be careful never to get caught out that way again.
I straightened the bed so it looked untouched, emptied the kettle and switched off the television. I deleted all my text messages and voicemails and turned my phone off. I put it in the bag I had left the hotel with that morning and walked from the room. I slipped downstairs. Everyone was in the bar or the restaurant. I let myself out of the door into the garden and made my way towards the road.
I walked away, not just from Col but from my failure to become a wife he wanted to keep. I walked away from having to justify wanting my baby. And for my baby’s sake as well as mine, I walked away from the humiliation of counting out money to its father as if this or that sum were an opening offer in a haggle for its life. I wasn’t just walking away; I was also bearing my baby, hidden in the warm, fleshy pod of my body, to safety. I was saving both our lives, and we were together.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Twelve
Nearly a mile out from the collapsed bridge, men in fluorescent jackets milled around the ROAD CLOSED signs, directing cars back to the bridge at Netherloch. Ron moved quietly into the stricken, displaced little bands of people roaming around on the verges and among the trees, like mourners or refugees. A bright moon in a silky, deep-violet sky shone above the road, but in the distance arc lights lit the river ominously, as if illuminating a stage for more spectacle and greater violence; the limbs of the bridge, jagged and black against flashing orange and blue emergency lights, jutted out above the water. Helicopters roamed overhead, sending down vapoury cones of light, hovering low enough for gusts of air from the propellers to blow trembling circles of flecks across the impenetrable, mercury-dark river.
The drift of people carried Ron along into a denser crowd at the forest’s edge, where spectators stood facing a television crew, and a spotlight under which a journalist was shouting into a microphone. An exhausted-looking man in a safety helmet was led forwards to be interviewed. The crowd began solemnly to applaud him, and as he started to speak, Ron stepped away from the throng and slipped under the barrier tape. Expecting to be stopped at any moment, he passed quickly into the pines that covered the sloping land between the river and the road. So close to the forest edge, there was no path; keeping within the darkness of the trees, he scrambled down through a prickly mesh of branches until he was almost at the water.
When he emerged from the trees he saw that crowd barriers now separated the forest from the site of the collapse. He could have climbed them quite easily, but he remained outside, watching. There seemed surprisingly few people at work on the riverbank; about a dozen who looked like paramedics and rescue workers came and went around a tent that had been set up, as far as Ron could tell, as a first-aid station for casualties; he saw two men carry a stretcher from the tent and up the uneven bank towards a helicopter standing on the last strip of the bridge approach road. Ron had learnt first aid when he became a driver, but he did not dare go forwards and present himself. He would be ejected at once as unauthorized. There was no place here for simple willing hands; this was not a neighbourly effort. The operation was professional and, for all he knew, efficient. He drew farther back into the trees. Once he was more familiar with what was going on, once it was daylight again, he would find the courage to ask if he could help.
As the night wore on, the rescue settled into a regular rhythm, determined and unspectacular. Under the arc lights, boats and helicopters made their forays to the river in droning, dogged circles. Ron hunkered against a damp tree trunk and grew drowsy. He dozed until the cold woke him. Then he got up and moved back farther into the trees, where the wind did not cut so keenly. He didn’t want to spend the night in the open, but he was reluctant to walk all the way back to the Land Rover; without knowing where he was going, he slipped deeper still into the forest’s shelter. He was afraid of losing his way, and remembering that the road above him followed its path, he kept the river always in sight on his left, shining through the fringe of pine branches. He was still cold. After a while he came upon an area where trees had been felled, but not recently; years of hard weather on the rutted ground had left it almost impassable with dank troughs and exposed, torn-up roots. From here the bank rose steeply to his right; there was no clear path up to the road. So he made his way instead down to the gleaming river, and when he reached it he saw he must be almost a mile from the bridge. The sharp arc lights had softened to a glow in the night sky. That was when, almost at the water’s edge, he came across the derelict prefabricated cabin. The door on the river side was padlocked, but at the back he found a small, warped door, locked and jammed tight with damp. It was soft with rot and sagged against his shoulder when he pushed at it. After several heaves, the lower of its two hinges split from the frame, and he was able to squeeze through. The place was unfurnished and comfortless, cold and dirty, but it was a roof for the night and out of the wind. By the moonlight through the smeared windows he saw there was a stove and some fuel, but he had no matches. He curled up on the floor and lay listening to the sounds from the bridge; the motors and sirens had faded to remote purrs and squeals that mingled with the river flowing softly by outside. Yet the fright and injury of the day reached into him – or maybe he had brought it with him – and suddenly his heart, a berg of ice, seemed to shatter and burn within his chest. He began to shiver violently, and he curled tighter, trying to tell himself this was physical stress, nothing more. A fragment of his first-aid training came back to him: When people experience trauma, one of the first things to go is the ability to fend for themselves. It calmed him to realize that he was fending for himself, to a degree; at least he had found shelter. But why, he thought, was he steeling himself at all against the disintegration of his heart? Let it
burn, let it melt. Let it even break again, if only he might no longer be alone.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Thirteen
It was cold, so I hurried. In Invermuir village the main road was jammed with traffic bound for Netherloch and Inverness, but the other side, heading west to Fort Augustus, was choked, too. I don’t know why I set off in the direction of the bridge, but I walked eastwards along the roadside into the night, at a pace hardly slower than the crawling line of cars. There were emergency vehicles stationed here and there with their lights flashing and policemen standing in the middle of the traffic, attempting to keep it moving. Drivers were sounding their horns and turning around, manoeuvring back and forth in the road and sending up plumes of exhaust, headlamps looming and criss-crossing the darkness with restless beams of light.
I kept away from the glare as much as I could and moved on through the smoky drifts of petrol fumes, my head down. Knots of stranded people had gathered at the village bus stops and cars were stopping to give them lifts, but I couldn’t risk joining them, looking lost and in need of help. I had watched my car go into the river, I had seen myself die; I ought to be gone, invisible for evermore. Until I had had time to think and re-establish myself, somewhere and somehow, as another person, I had to learn how to have no presence at all, to move among people with the stealth of a ghost. I must be alive to no one.
Soon I no longer noticed the cold. I felt newly light and unhindered, exhilarated by having accomplished so conclusively and tidily the bringing to an end of my life with Col. But I also felt left behind, as if my true fate had gone forwards and was enacting itself in advance of me, somewhere up ahead. I had to rejoin my life, or rather meet up with myself again and make another life. This was another reason to hurry.
I took a pathway off the road that led down to a walkers’ trail along the river, where it was leafy and quiet. I had no torch, but the road ran parallel above and the lights of cars washed through the trees, showing me my way. From time to time the traffic thinned and the way cleared for wailing emergency vehicles. A few miles before Netherloch the riverside path fizzled out, so I joined the road again.
I walked on, still not knowing why I was going in the direction of the bridge, but walking with purpose. Was I seeking out the broken gate in the hedge that led down to Stefan’s trailer? Not consciously. I was keeping disconnected in my mind any daytime memory of the road and the murky, illogical contours of the night landscape.
But it was getting late. More and more cars drove on past me, and I grew tired. Netherloch was still some miles away, and I had to spend the night somewhere. I pulled my hat down over my ears, tucked my chin into my scarf and waited at the next bus stop I came to. Within a minute a car stopped. It was driven by a woman about my age who had two teenage girls with her. They were doing their best to get to Inverness, and I was welcome, she said, to go with them. I was looking a bit shocked, was I all right? And wasn’t it a terrible thing that had happened?
I thanked her and got in the back. I was just cold and tired, I assured her, and gave her some story about my car breaking down and leaving it at the roadside because I preferred to walk rather than wait for rescue with the roads so jammed, but I’d underestimated the distance to Netherloch. She told me I had no chance of getting a room there for the night, the radio said the town was heaving. I’d do better to go on to Inverness with her, however long it took. We crawled along; the two girls fell asleep, and to avoid conversation I pretended to also, turning my face to the window and keeping my eyes half-closed.
It was only when I saw the lights of the service station up ahead that I realized I was returning to the trailer. All the hours I had been walking, I had been holding tight to myself a belief that Stefan and Anna were among the people who’d got out of the river alive. But I had to make sure they were safe. I had to talk to Stefan. He had lost the car that had cost him all the money he had, and I couldn’t alter that, but I had to divide the money with him. I would explain why I couldn’t part with all of it; as a father, he would understand. But I wanted to give him half of it back, to ease his loss. I made excuses to the woman about needing a bathroom, and got out at the service station.
I walked back to the broken gate and down the track. The trailer was dark and shut up. There was nothing strange about that, I told myself. They might not be back yet; they could be still in one of the temporary first-aid stations near the bridge. Or they might be in hospital, as a matter of routine. Of course they wouldn’t be here. I felt foolish, staring through the dark across the shingle at the closed door. I imagined it opening and Stefan appearing at the top of the steps, looking suspicious and puzzled until he recognized me, and then I realized what an odd sort of rescuer I must look. Sweat was running down my body and through my hair, and I was shivering. Nausea swept over me again, as it often did when I was hungry. But my hand thrust in my pocket was clutching the envelope with the money; pleasure was welling up inside me as if I had already seen the relief on Stefan’s face. Of course there couldn’t be anyone inside the trailer, but I walked carefully across the stones, up the steps and knocked on the door.
Nobody came. I waited, and the nausea grew worse. I tried the door handle. It opened into blackness and silence, and I was afraid, yet I wanted to go in. The night outside was suddenly no place to be; I needed walls and a roof, I needed shelter even if only this: precarious, thin, leaking. I stepped up into the doorway and peered inside. I could smell the soapy, vinyl smell from yesterday and also the bitter tang of cigarettes. Nothing moved, but in the darkness I knew there was something warm and alive. My heart was thumping like knuckles into the back of my ribs, bone against bone, and I took a breath to say something but I doubled over and retched. My mouth filled with bitter saliva. Without intending to, I spat on the floor, and as I was trying to stand up straight again, a torch snapped on. Instantly its beam lurched away and upwards, and I felt it come down hard on my head and shoulders, and then a hand was hauling me upright by the hair. A woman’s screaming filled the trailer, the torch fell with a clunk, and its beam played jaggedly on her kicking feet and jerked over the ceiling and walls. I was trapped. I couldn’t get out of the trailer or away from the screaming. Then the slapping and punching started.
I couldn’t speak. Even if I could have explained, or got any words out at all, she wouldn’t have heard. Fists and arms and feet were flying in a rolling beam of light, and through the screams she was spitting out words over and over, telling me to get out, go away, leave her alone. I held her off as best as I could until, shielding my head, I managed at last to stand up straight and face her. I was taller than she was. I stopped her next blow by grasping her wrists.
“Stop! Please stop! I didn’t mean any harm,” I said. “I’m sorry. It’s OK. Please! Please – ”
My voice cracked suddenly. The woman stopped screaming and stared at me, and then she burst into tears. I wanted to say more but I couldn’t. Keeping hold of one of her wrists, I scooped up the torch at my feet and shone it at her. In the shaking light, her face was colourless and stricken, the long blond hair sticky and matted to her scalp.
How could I comfort her? How could I dare offer comfort?
“Please, don’t. Please. I’m sorry,” I said.
We were stock-still for an instant. My grip on her wrist loosened. Suddenly she wrenched her arm free and backed away. The foldaway table and pull-out bed behind her, the blankets dragged to the floor, a heap of clothes, were now caught in the glow of the torch. She was alone. Part of the ceiling had curled away, exposing a web of saturated fibrous stuff from which water was seeping into a bucket on the floor.
“You tramp! You filthy tramp! Get out of here, get out now! Get out!”
She lunged forwards, shoving me towards the door so hard I stumbled and fell. Then she sank back into the dark mass of bedding and hid her face in another burst of weeping. I scrambled to my feet and ran from the trailer.
I climbed as fast as I could up the track, and when I
reached the top I collapsed on the ground, coughing and fighting for breath. After a while I managed to sit up, and I stayed there, trying to drag in a proper lungful of air and stop the shaking in my legs. I was exhausted and sick from lack of food. I had nowhere to spend the night. I had no name. Which terror should I face first: being hungry, pregnant, homeless, or nameless?
But the worst terror was that Stefan and his daughter hadn’t come back. They hadn’t come back, and the woman in the trailer didn’t know why, and I had not been able to tell her. I had sold him the car and now I had money to keep my child, but where was hers? I turned towards the lights of the service station.
It was thronged with people, but hunger forced me inside. I had to hope that although my face might appear in the papers and on television as one of the dead, it would be an old wedding photograph, the only pictures Col had of me. My hair had been curled and adorned with ludicrous turquoise feathers on the day I got married; now it was shorter and darker, and most of it was hidden under a flat woollen hat. Nobody would link a smiling photograph with this wretched woman, her face stung with cold, shuffling along in a cafeteria queue. I bought what was available, coffee and a muffin, and took them over to a table, which I had to share. There was a television suspended from the ceiling tuned soundlessly to the bridge news, and I ate and drank with my eyes raised to it, avoiding contact with the three other people at the table. I kept my cup up close to my face and let the coffee steam rise and warm my skin in between sips.