by Morag Joss
By now the service station should have closed for the night, but it was staying open for the people who were stranded. Extra plastic chairs had appeared, and people were bedding down on car blankets and jackets and coats all over the floor. Some appeared to be sleeping, others were talking and drinking doggedly, doing puzzles or playing cards, trying to control children. From the games arcade came ceaseless zooming and firing sounds and the unfettered, giddy yelps of teenage boys. A woman dozed in a wheelchair near the door to the Ladies, half hidden by the fronds of a huge artificial fern. Every table in the cafeteria was full, although the serving counter was down to tea and coffee in polystyrene cups. In the shop, people were buying up the last of the chocolate and sweets and magazines, but the queues had lessened because there was nothing of much use left; untouched stands of Frisbees and celebrity autobiographies stood out among the emptied shelves and racks. Although the place was thronged, there was a pall of numb, anxious quiet that perhaps hangs over all refugees.
I was wondering what to do, hoping I might find a space on the floor somewhere away from others and out of the freezing gusts from the doors, when four police officers came in, two men and two women. They didn’t seem to have any particular task in mind; there was no disorder to bring under control. The manager and a younger sidekick joined them, and after a few minutes of talk, swinging on their heels and looking around, they drifted off, patrolling the mass of sprawling bodies. Several people went up to talk to them, with questions or complaints, I supposed. I watched all this from behind a bookrack in the shop. When it began to look as if the police were settled in for the night, I knew I couldn’t stay.
Outside, the temperature had dropped further. I needed to find shelter somewhere. I made my way around the back and followed the fence into the darkness at the far corner of the car park, where I found again the opening to the abandoned track I’d driven down with Stefan and Anna twelve hours before. Only twelve hours? It seemed – in a way it was – a lifetime ago. Ahead of me I could see the flames of several small fires burning among the wrecked buildings on the wasteland; to my right I could see the glow of arc lights over the bridge abutments and the flicker of helicopters in the sky. I walked past the first straggly piles of debris at the sides of the track towards the fires, on through broken glass and old cans, mounds of rubble and discarded tyres, piles of ripped roofing felt, wiring and perished cable. Parts of wrecked cars rose in heaps around me; broken office furniture and rotten carpet jutted up from buckled and vandalized skips. I was far enough from the traffic and the service station to catch the cold tang of the estuary, mixed with the smell of damp fields and rust and a sullen overlay of smoke. I reached the corner of a derelict brick shed and edged my way along the wall to the next corner until I could see a barren stretch of cracked concrete that must once have been the floor of a factory or warehouse. At its far edges I could make out the jagged remains of half-demolished walls. There burned several bonfires in whose cloudy yellow light the stooping silhouettes of people moved to and fro, passing bottles, lifting sticks into the flames, collecting from the ground anything that might make shelters for the night. Beyond them the black estuary glittered with the sweeping lights of the helicopters, the air thudded and shrieked with propeller noise and sirens. Under the gleaming sky there was a great, desperate agitation, but here the faraway wails were an unreal music, part of the rushing-by of a world miles from this encampment among the scrub and banks of litter, where human beings hunkered down to get through the night, staring into dying fires.
I crouched down and watched. About a dozen people squatted or lay in aloof, solitary hovels of cardboard and rags, arranged in a haphazard outer ring as close to the warmth and light as they could get, but several feet from one another and a safe distance from the elite little groupings of twos and threes nearest the fires. Among these, proprietorial squalls would break out over a swig from a bottle, a cigarette, a package of food. From time to time the air fell silent as if everyone had fallen asleep or retired to his own thoughts, and then there would be cries and scuffles again, sometimes the sound of breaking glass or a hallucinatory insult or misunderstanding, for sly demons came and went among these people. To some of them, the smoky sky was alive with spectres that could enter through the space between blinks of their eyes and whisper tormenting messages inside their skulls, goading them into outbreaks of itching or howling or whimpering fear. One man sat upright, staring round with crazed vigilance, batting away phantom attackers with his empty bottle.
I got up carefully and foraged at the margins of the firelight. No one turned from the flames to look at me. I found some plastic and cardboard in a heap against a ruined wall, and I dragged an armful across the concrete and set it down where I could feel a little warmth but would not be presumptuously close to the fire. The dark mounds around me shifted from time to time through the smoke, coughing, rearranging their coverings. I saw the smooth lifting of the burning dots of cigarettes, the red flares as they were inhaled. Nobody spoke. I went back, found some frayed sheets of bubble wrap, brought them to my place on the ground. I arranged a kind of sleeve of cardboard, and pulled the bubble wrap around myself. There I lay, my hand clasping the money in my pocket, my body wrapped as china is against the breakages that occur in transit through this world. I fell asleep. I dreamed of a man who was taking me in the silver car on a hazardous journey. We drove through puddles that turned into lakes, we splashed miraculously out of them again and lost the road under a blizzard of snow, but on we went, because our destination was a place where I was to give a performance of some kind in front of a lot of people. I allowed myself to be taken, keeping silent about the only thing I was sure of, which was that I had nothing to give the audience, nothing to merit their attention or applause. I walked to the centre of the stage and waited for their disappointment. Then I was standing under a tree and I had no excuse for my reticence to offer all the reproachful people walking by, save the one I spoke as they went past. I can’t give you anything, because I am going to have a baby, I said, and although they kept on walking, they knew this was the truth and they forgave me.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Fourteen
You weren’t at the trailer when I got there, but I knew you were coming back. You were stranded somewhere, like everyone else that night, and you must have lost your phone. You took perfect care of Anna, always. I knew you were coming back.
First I told myself you had taken her out for a bus ride somewhere and got stuck in the traffic. When it got past nine o’clock that evening I knew you would be trudging towards me along the road, cold and tired, with her asleep against your back, her hair tickling your neck. I didn’t like to leave the trailer, but I climbed up the track to meet you, going quietly so I would hear the scrape of your feet or the rattle of the gate, your voice calling from up ahead that you were home at last. I didn’t go as far as the road, just to where I could hear the cars and see their headlights splitting the dark. I stayed back in the trees and waited and waited.
The traffic was moving almost as slowly as before. It was four hours since I’d walked from the shop down to Netherloch and got a lift with an elderly couple trying to get back to Inverness. They’d been to see his sister in a nursing home in Fort Augustus. The man had said nothing and the woman had tried to be nice, but I pretended I couldn’t speak English because I couldn’t have told her much that was true about me and I didn’t want to lie. They weren’t big talkers anyway. In two and a half hours we travelled six miles in silence except for the radio news and their soft remarks of despair, about the tragedy and the inconvenience, equally. I got out at the service station and walked back so they wouldn’t see me set off down the track. It didn’t look like a suitable place for people to live.
I waited for you at the gate until I was so cold I either had to lie down where I was and burrow under leaves like an animal, or go back, and when I turned away and thought of the empty trailer I began to cry, and I couldn’t stop. When I got back
I threw myself onto the bed and lay sobbing, and after a while I lit a candle, as if it could make me feel less alone, and in a strange way it did. I think that’s why we light candles when we think of the people we really have lost, supposedly to God; we need to fill the emptiness of churches and the space their absence makes with small flames. By then I was warm again, and I managed to fall asleep. It must have been hours later I heard noises outside, feet on the stones and then on the trailer steps. I was up and nearly crying out for joy before I realized there was something wrong about it. If it had been you, you would have been calling to me long before you got to the trailer. For a moment I wondered if it was a deer. Then there was a knock on the door. My throat went dry. I tried to speak, but my voice wouldn’t work. Then the door opened. Everything it is possible to feel at once – rage that it was some dirty, crazy stranger and not you and Anna, terror that this person could just knock and walk in like that, relief that it was a woman and not a gang of men with knives – everything surged into hatred, and I attacked her.
I remember thinking in the seconds after I’d scared her off that she hadn’t really threatened me at all. She was pathetic, not dangerous. She must have wanted something, because she left behind an achy feeling about herself, some powerlessness. I felt almost guilty. I never saw her face clearly, but if I had seen her eyes I think they would have been saturated with want. But I thought these things only after enough time had passed for me to be sure she wasn’t coming back.
I felt calmer, even though I was weary and confused. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning and I was wide awake.
I found the number of the hospital in Inverness and called it again and again. When I got through I was given another number for enquiries about the bridge victims. I kept calling that number until finally somebody answered. I asked, quite calmly, because it was of course foolish to worry, if any buses had been on the bridge. No, the man said. Or, I asked, were there people killed or injured who had been crossing the bridge on foot? He asked for names, and although I was taking a risk I gave them your real ones, vowing to myself that I would never, ever tell you I did this. I had to wait a long time. Then he came back and said they did not have those names on any lists. I could hardly speak, I was crying so hard. But then, I thought, how stupid of me. Of course you would have given false names. So I asked was there any man of about twenty-five with a little girl – any man and child at all – injured or, I whispered, lost? He told me that three adult cyclists were in hospital and two had been killed, and all the other casualties had been in vehicles. So far. There were cars still unrecovered, he told me gently, and I should call back in the morning.
I didn’t sleep again. But before daybreak I knew even more certainly you were coming back. It was foolish to worry. Something had happened to keep you from getting home, but you hadn’t been on the bridge when it collapsed. You were safe, somewhere. You’d had to stay the night somewhere where there was no telephone signal, and you were coming back.
I went down to the river edge as soon as it was light, with half the bedding wrapped around me. From downstream, echoey metallic sounds dented the air above the water. In the distance, the arms of the bridge reached through the haze to each other, apart and still. I crouched down and picked up a handful of stones and started chucking them, sending them with short flicks of my wrist one by one into the river, and humming some old tuneless thing along with the rhythm of their little splashes.
It was very cold, but I kept sitting there, hugging the blankets around myself and humming and tossing stones and remembering what the man in the hospital had told me about the casualties. I was also keeping a tight grip on something else I knew. You had never taken Anna near the bridge, not once. It was over a mile along the busy road from here to the start of it, too far for her to walk, and anyway, yesterday had been much too cold. Oh, you did get sudden ideas, but even if you’d had the thought of taking her along the bridge to stand and look at the river and out to the sea, you would have been turning it into a plan for a summer day. You would have come to me with your eyes shining, and the whole thing worked out. We would wait for fine weather and get the bus as far as the southern end of the bridge. We could walk all the way across because Anna would be a few months older and a bit more able to manage. It would be windy whatever the time of year, but never mind. We would find a way down through the pine trees on the opposite bank and have a picnic at the water’s edge, almost under the bridge. We’d be able to see our trailer way over on the other side! You would fish, and Anna would splash in the water and I would doze in the sun. I chucked more and more stones in the river and thought of this, and as I gazed, the bridge ends began to soften and float against a watery yellow sky and the far bank wavered and sparkled with light. I could see us, little figures in summer clothes clambering down through the dark pine trees to the shore, our shoulders skinny and bare and warmed by the sun. I could hear Anna playing in the water and squealing, our voices calling out to her. I could hardly tell if I was imagining it or remembering a day we’d actually spent. But we certainly would spend a day like that, I decided, when the summer came. I smiled, thinking that such a day was now my idea, not yours.
There was a sudden sound behind me, a low, human bellowing. I turned and saw the mad woman from last night throwing up on the ground, staggering away from the trailer. By the time I reached her, her stomach was empty and she was gasping, watching me through scared eyes. Her hat had slipped off, and she was using it to clean vomit out of her hair and wipe her steaming mouth. The poor thing looked terrified and half out of her mind, staring and dribbling and moaning apologies. I couldn’t make out what she was trying to say. I didn’t know what she wanted. Maybe she had people to find, too.
“Are you looking for somebody?” I said. “Have you lost somebody?”
She shook her head, then she nodded. “I think so.”
She didn’t say any more, because the nodding of her head had started up a violent shuddering in her whole body. I thought she was going to fall, so I took hold of her by the elbow. Her hand clutched my forearm and sent a shiver through me. Her fingers were hard and fleshless. She raised her other hand towards the trailer and tried to speak again, but all she could manage was I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
I understood. She was saying sorry for last night. Maybe she had needed somewhere to take shelter and thought the trailer was empty. But she hadn’t come back just to say sorry. She still needed a place to stay. Whatever had happened to her, she was in a worse state than I was. If I scared her off again, she’d never make it back to the road.
“Are you lost? Have you nowhere to go?”
She swallowed and gulped and looked me in the face, and nodded. She had sweet, frightened eyes. Suddenly I didn’t want to watch her go. I didn’t want to be left here alone again, maybe into another night. You would come back soon, you could come back at any moment, but until then we’d be safer together, this wretched woman and me. She looked too weak and ill to do me any harm, and by now I could see she didn’t mean me any. My mind began to work properly at last. She was English, and she was surely a nice person underneath all that roughness. In a few hours, when she felt better, she’d be able to talk to the police for me. She could find things out without me taking the risk of being caught. If you weren’t already back – and you could come back at any moment – she would help me find you. If I helped her now, she would owe me that much.
“You’re sick. You can stay and rest here for a while, if you want.”
Her eyes darted over to the trailer.
“You can stay here for a while,” I said. “I’m Silva.”
She clutched my arm tighter. “Thank you.”
“What’s your name?”
I pulled the blanket away from my own shoulders and drew it around hers as well, and led her to the trailer.
“I’m…My name is Annabel.”
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Fifteen
The next day dragged me to
its surface early, pricking my eyes open with a rush of chill air and making them water. The sky was white with dense, icy cloud, and full of noises; the sirens had stopped, but the drumming and clanking of engines and heavy machinery had started up at the bridge, and the road was already loud with traffic. It hadn’t rained in the night, but the ground was damp and my clothes were sodden. I checked I still had my money, then I peeled the cardboard back and unwound myself from the plastic. Instantly the night’s sweat froze on my body, and I felt the wind slipping between my bones as if there were nothing under my skin but cold, flowing air. All my joints and limbs hurt, and I started to shiver. The fires had died out but for a reed of smoke rising from one or two. A man was peeing into the scrub over at the far edge of the concrete, but nobody else had stirred. My stomach felt empty yet queasy; I had to get my body moving and I had to get warm.
I retraced my steps to the service station. Traffic was moving past on the road again, but the car park was still full. I saw no police vehicles and, when I paused at the entrance to look around, no police officers. Inside, the concourse dormitory was waking up to serene piped music and the smell of frying. People dazed with sleep were moving slowly here and there among those still sleeping, and cleaners quietly mopped floors and pushed trolleys and wiped surfaces, trancelike in the warm, stale air. The washroom was a mess, out of soap and paper and towels, but I managed to run some hot water in a basin, and I splashed some on my face, which warmed it without getting it much cleaner. When I came out, the café was open. I was relieved to see there had been a changeover of staff, and once I was quite sure I couldn’t see anybody who had been there yesterday, I joined the others already lining up for food. New supplies had been found from somewhere. I ate a big plateful of sausages and beans, and I drank my tea so fast I scalded my mouth. Almost as soon as I’d finished I felt sick, and went outside to get some air. People were leaving in a steady stream now; I watched them as they walked past me, talking into phones, getting in their cars and driving away. They were all expected home.