by Morag Joss
I tipped out the clothes water from the basin on the ground and refilled it from the enamel bath.
“If Stefan comes I’ll make sure he doesn’t see you. I’m only offering. Of course you don’t have to.”
She managed to smile. “I’d love to get clean.”
“You’ll be OK,” I said. “There’s nobody here but us.” I pushed the ashes of the fire with the end of my foot into the ground. “Wait till I’ve done this and then you can get in.”
When I’d rinsed and wrung out your things and pegged them up, she pulled off her hat and ruffled her hair. It was thick and dyed reddish, and dark at the roots. She got up and dipped a hand in the water. “Have you got any shampoo?”
“I’ll get it. You need to undress quick and get straight in. It cools down fast.”
When I came back she was stepping into the bath and I saw I was right about her age. She was at least forty, maybe even old enough to be my mother. As she stooped and curled modestly into herself, her waist folded into a line just above her belly button, like a crease in a roll of dough, and the skin on her haunches looked dusty and neglected. She crouched and soaped herself, splashing water over her shoulders for the warmth, and her skin was wet and shining and bright-white.
“Come on,” I said. “You have to be quick. My husband will be back soon.”
She stood up again and took the jug while I waited with the shampoo.
“Keep your mouth closed,” I said. “It’s not drinking water.”
She filled the jug and lifted it high in both hands to wet her hair, and as she raised her arms, her breasts swelled out, surprisingly firm and large and high. Her belly was rounded, as it would be at her age, but it looked hard, not soft. She tipped back her head and closed her eyes, and the water poured down, soaking her hair and face and neck. I watched it run in tiny, branching trickles down her breasts, I saw beads form and hang and drop from her nipples, which stuck out like little carvings in polished red stone, the way they do. She was pregnant.
I handed her the shampoo and took the jug. She stood with her hands folded protectively over her stomach, and I rinsed the suds from her head with jugful after jugful of water, until it began to go tepid. By then she was starting to shiver, so I made her step into the towel I had brought, and I sent her inside to get dry. And just as I did every time after Anna’s bath, I tipped out the water, picked up the jug and soap and shampoo and the pile of clothes, and followed wet footprints across the stones to the trailer. The poor woman needed looking after.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Nineteen
Another day passed before Ron returned to the bridge.
Very early the first morning, he’d awakened in the cabin exhausted and cold, his mind stunned and somehow also stale from the shock of all that had happened. He knew he would barely be able to talk that day, let alone convince anyone he was strong and fit for work, and the floor was dirtier than he’d judged it to be in the dark; his clothes were heavy with damp and grime. He needed to steady himself and also get good and clean, he decided, before he went asking for work. So he made his way back along the river’s edge and struck up the steep slope into the forest; across the patch of cleared ground he was now able to make out on the far side the remains of a track that took him, after another climb, up to the road. No traffic passed him, but the roadside was crowded with vehicles parked in all directions, abandoned the night before. From the Highland Bounty Mini-Mart he set off in the Land Rover, travelling inland.
By eight o’clock he had driven nearly forty miles, far enough from the bridge, he hoped, for the usual tourist places to be unaffected by scores of stranded people seeking rooms. In a village called Aberarder he knocked on the door of a bungalow with a ‘Vacancies’ board swinging from the sign that read ‘Glendarroch Bed and Breakfast’, and explained to the landlady that his plans had been disrupted, he’d been turned back from going farther north and had been on the road nearly all night. He even managed to make a joke of asking, if it could be managed, for breakfast and bed, in that order. She was sympathetic; she’d been up half the night herself, watching the news. He ate ravenously, showered, and fell asleep in an overheated, immaculately floral bedroom. In the afternoon he went out and found a camping and outdoor-supplies shop, where he bought new jeans and work shirts, T-shirts and socks, a jacket and boots. He ate early in a pub and returned to the Glendarroch, where he watched football on the tiny wall-mounted television, lying naked on the glassy, nylon lilac quilt. Before he fell asleep he realized that his face was tired and tight, because he had been smiling.
The next day he drove back up through Netherloch. He parked the Land Rover at the Highland Bounty Mini-Mart again, noticing and thinking it odd that the store was closed on a Saturday. As before, he walked the three miles to the bridge. The area around it was still crowded with spectators, and there were now several radio cars and two TV mobile-broadcast vans parked just beyond the barricades on the road. He could see that down by the bridge approach a pontoon holding winching gear now reached from the bank almost a quarter of the way across the river. Men were walking up and down on it, directing the lifting of twisted, dripping hunks of steel and concrete onto a salvage barge moored alongside. Some dinghies and a couple of boats were tied up at the pontoon, close to the bank. Farther out he saw two pairs of divers flipping into the water from two launches mid-stream, and he could see that work was underway across the river, too. A smaller pontoon had appeared and the industrial wasteland next to the opposite bridge approach was being razed by bulldozers. Engine noises from both banks rose into the air and met in a swirl of sound overhead.
Close to where he stood, link fencing was going up in place of the crowd barriers and police cordon tape, and he asked one of the men at work on it where he would find the office. He was directed to a mobile unit parked on the far side of the approach road. A man stood smoking at the entrance, and another man waiting inside turned and stared as Ron stepped in. The place was airless and muddy and smelled of sweat and warmed-up plastic. Two men in shirtsleeves sat behind a cluster of desks, one young and slight in a way that marked him out as the junior. Both had wads of paper in front of them, and the older one was arched back and swivelling in his chair, speaking on the telephone. On the wall by his desk was a board with a year planner and a postcard that read ‘A Man without a Woman Is Like a Neck without a Pain’. Ron stood at a respectful distance.
The man in front of him was talking in halting English to the younger man behind the desk; after a while he called in the second man from outside, wrote down some figures for him, and after protracted translation, both signed some papers and left. The young man now had his head down writing; the older one was gazing upwards with the telephone at his ear, listening with obvious exasperation.
Ron stepped forwards. “Excuse me, I’m looking – ”
The young man looked up. “Skills?”
“Construction. General building, labouring. Transport, mainly.”
“Transport? HGV? Excavators? Got rough-terrain experience?”
“LGV. And PCV Just…driving. I’ll do anything. Don’t mind heavy work.” Ron paused. “I just want to help.”
The man handed him an application form.
“Pens over there,” he said, and motioned him towards a narrow ledge at one side of the unit. “Answer all the questions, mind.”
Ron took his time, turning his back as he took the card of the Glendarroch Bed and Breakfast from his pocket and copied the details down under ‘Address’, and in brackets wrote ‘temporary’. He covered his prison years with a lie about working for a contractor in Spain, with names and places he’d long ago memorized for precisely that purpose. He handed the form back just as the older man finished his call and turned to his colleague, running his hands through his hair and groaning.
“Nae fucking use, Davey. There’s naebody else to try till Monday. They’ll have tae fucking swim.”
“It’s a difficult situation, Mr Sturrock.”
>
Mr Sturrock glanced over at Ron’s application, lying on the desk. “Transport? Can he drive a fucking boat?” he asked his colleague, sourly. He looked at Ron. “Eh? I’m a couple of guys short. I’ve eighteen men from Inverness starting this side eight o’clock tomorrow and I’ve naebody to get them over. Don’t suppose you can handle a thirty-foot boat with an outboard, son?”
The young man shook his head over Ron’s application. “Doesnae say so here, Mr Sturrock,” he said.
“I can, I’ve worked boats,” Ron said recklessly. “Never thought to put it down, it was a while ago. Fishing, harbour boats. A thirty-footer’s no problem.”
Mr Sturrock stared at him. “You kidding me?” He paused. “I’m no’ talking fucking barge holidays on the Norfolk Broads, mind. Have you got your ICC?”
“Doesn’t need an ICC,” the first man said. “He’s UK. Have you got your NPC?” He scanned the form. “No, well, you won’t, you’re fifty. Have you got NPC equivalent?”
“Not on me. But I could send for it,” Ron said. He could prevaricate over it for a while, if need be.
The two men looked at each other. “He has to be qualified, Mr Sturrock. NPC, or equivalent,” the first man said.
“Aye, Davey, but we’re desperate here. If we give him a wee try-out now and he’s OK,” said Mr Sturrock, “that’ll get us by for tomorrow at least. Alan’s down at the boat now, he can give him a go and see how he handles it. See what I’m saying?”
“Mr Sturrock, he has to be qualified.”
“Come on, Davey, you want to spend the rest of the day trying to get somebody else frae fuck knows where?”
“I’m just trying to be thorough.”
“I’ve worked boats on and off since I was fifteen,” Ron said.
“But there’s the local knowledge,” the young man said, pulling a thick sheaf of papers from the desk and turning up the right page. “You’d need to familiarize yourself with ‘local seamarks, local traffic practices, mudbanks, shoal waters’,” he read. “You’d have to ‘demonstrate knowledge of heights of tides, neap and spring tides and tidal streams, and local safe landing places according to differing weather conditions.’”
Ron nodded. At least not every term he’d just heard was unfamiliar. “It would be a matter of learning the local conditions. And being always safety-aware,” he said. “I learn fast.”
“Aye, and nobody else we could get at this fucking notice is going to have local knowledge either, are they?” Mr Sturrock said. “And he’s qualified. Aren’t you, son? Mind you, I’ll take experience over a fucking certificate any day o’ the week,” he said, looking hard at Ron. “Paperwork to follow, eh? We just need a copy for the file here. You’ll get your paperwork in to Davey here right enough, won’t you?” He turned to his colleague. “I’m not paying eighteen men to stay idle for the sake of a wee bit of paper when I’ve got an experienced guy standing in front of me. Send him on down, and if Alan says he’s OK, put him on the day rate. Put ‘paperwork to follow’ and we’re covered.”
The younger man shrugged and Mr Sturrock smiled, and Ron signed.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Twenty
I slept and slept, and I fell into dreams like long perilous ruts, channels of movement that swept me along helter-skelter, not in pursuit or escape from anything I could name, but with some formless, looming jeopardy present all around and above me. I slept all that night and for spells the following day, and if when I woke I saw or heard Silva nearby, stepping into the trailer or fetching something outside, I felt as though she was permitting me these collapsed hours as kindly as if she had put me to bed herself and told me to close my eyes and rest. I would come to, and lie there, slowly calculating the passing of seconds against the beating of my heart (would my baby have a beating heart yet?), while my waking thoughts began to tick once more to the rhythm of the day – of which, thank God, a little less would remain. The shaking that had been going on inside me since I walked out of the Invermuir Lodge Hotel abated. As I began to feel steadier, my sickness eased somewhat.
But my mind was empty, as if it were choosing to turn away and live outside of what was happening to me. I slept through another night, and the next day I got up. But between sleeps, all I could do was sit outside wrapped in blankets, looking at the river. Silva watched me closely. I told her I had a nervous stomach, and she said she sometimes had one, too. The next time I felt sick she wouldn’t let me lie down or drink water. She tore a ragged triangle off the corner of a slice of bread, spread it with jam and made me eat it. I felt better at once.
She was taking me in hand in some way, and I was grateful, but she didn’t know I was pregnant, of course.
She was restless. In the middle of the afternoon she took two empty containers and walked up to the service station. She was gone nearly three hours. Her absence filled me with terror. Having had her company for just a day and a half left me in such agitation at the thought of being alone again that when she came back I asked her sharply why she had been away so long.
“I needed to fill up with drinking water. I wanted to see what was happening. I was finding things out,” she replied, dumping the full canisters on the kitchen counter. She told me the place was crowded with sightseers and journalists and drivers with trucks of supplies for the salvage work. There were also a lot of rough sleepers, turned off the wasteland behind the car park, and quite a few police. Not all the vehicles had been pulled out of the river yet, she said.
“There were thirteen survivors, and they found nine bodies in the river. There’s four cars still in there. They can’t get them out yet because of the weather, it’s the big spring tides or it’s too deep or it’s the winds or something. They know who they are, all the people still down there. There’s seven.”
“How can they know, if they can’t get to them?”
She looked surprised. “Because they’re missing. Seven are missing. They’ve got their names. Their photos are in the papers, everywhere. They’ve told the families.”
Why did this shock me? Of course the victims would be counted and named; that anyone should die randomly and also remain anonymous would be an unbearably compounded sadness, and people are inquisitive about the deaths of others, even strangers on a list of lost and missing. The papers would keep a tally and reveal names and faces and describe good lives cut short and families bereft, it being one of the obligations of tragedy to ponder urgent reversals in the lives of those left behind, to bow gently in the direction of other people’s grief.
“So who are they?” I said. “Did you get a paper?”
“I saw them on the news in the cafeteria. There was a van with a father and his son and another man, they cleaned carpets. A woman tourist in a rental car, and a man and his secretary on business. Oh, yes, and a retired man coming back from golf. That’s the seven. So there you are.” Silva’s voice was newly fresh and relaxed, and her eyes shone. “You see? Nobody else.”
“You actually saw them? These people’s faces?”
She nodded. “They’re clearing that dump down near the river. I saw trucks going in, same thing on the other side. There were people there just watching. I saw a man I know,” she said. “He was in the shop that day, I was talking to him the moment it happened. He asked if I was all right. I said it’s those poor people and their families I’m sorry for.”
I didn’t speak. I was picturing Col and trying the word families up against him, and it didn’t suit him. I couldn’t think of just the two of us as a family, and that was a relief. He would not suffer long or deeply for loss of me. He might remember things about me: my face, some words stored somewhere in his mind. I might even for a while warm his heart with an idea of love, now forever abstracted and beyond test, kept perfect by my absence. Then he would forget me, probably. I hoped he would.
“This man I was talking to, he said they might never get them out.”
“What does he know about it?”
“Oh, he knows. He’s something
to do with boats. He’s working for the contractors, running crews across. He took some divers out to the middle, where the cars were sunk, and they said they might not ever get to them,” Silva said. “They might get washed out to sea and break up and the bodies would just disappear.”
For a few hours after that she moved lightly about the place preparing for Stefan and Anna, setting little circles of order around herself, folding clothes, lining up shoes, separating cutlery and mugs. She began to ask me about myself.
I told her I used to live in England and I had lost my job and I had no house any more because it belonged to the mortgage company after my father died. That wasn’t so far from the truth. But what also seemed quite true to me was that I was not and never had been the woman tourist probably trapped in a rental car in the middle of the river. Nor did I feel I was really tricking either of us to imagine that this had happened to some other woman tourist; watching Silva dart around cleaning and tidying for them, I told myself that her certainty of Stefan’s and Anna’s safety was more to be relied upon than an assumption that they had been in the car. Suppose just after I left them Stefan had taken Anna to the service station for lunch? Then the car might have been stolen from the roadside. Or the man who had changed the plates that afternoon might have been driving it. Silva knew her husband best. Sharing her faith in him to stay alive was the only way I could spare myself the distress of believing them lost. It was also the only way I could help her.
And she was helping me. She asked me more and more, and I began to talk more easily, building my new history bit by bit as from her questions came my answers, like little blocks appearing in my hands that I could turn and consider to see where they fit, and set in place, one by one. After I lost my house I had spent three months in a hostel trying to get a job, until I had to leave. Then I had taken the coach all the way up to Inverness because I had two spinster cousins there. We hadn’t been in close touch, but I’d met them a few times when I was younger. They would be elderly by now, maybe frail and glad of my help in the house; I’d been thinking I could even move in with them. At least they wouldn’t turn me away while I got settled. As I told it, the story gained credibility for me; even though before I said all this the idea had never existed, it did now. I wanted Silva to think it brave and commendable of me, making a fresh start in the north of Scotland, closer to family. I did not want her to think me desperate or degraded. But then, I told her, despising the rise in my voice, it turned out I’d been sending the cousins Christmas cards for years and all for nothing (though I had to admit I hadn’t had one from them for some time). When I got to their address, they had long ago moved away. Nobody had even heard of them. The young couple living in the house now were very nice to me and had agreed to keep my luggage in their garage until I got myself organized. I’d been looking around Netherloch for shop or bar work and a roof over my head when the bridge went down. I’d got stranded without enough money on me for a hotel, and then I had got sick.