by Morag Joss
The only paper I could find was a colouring book of Anna’s, and I carefully removed a page she had already scrawled over and wrote on the back of it.
Dear Silva,
Thank you for the food and accommodation and for looking after me when I was unwell. Your hospitality was very welcome at a time when I needed it, and I valued your company very much.
I apologize for telling you I didn’t have enough money on me for a hotel when I first arrived. It wasn’t true, but for complicated reasons I had to say it. It is a long story how I came to turn up at your place. I enclose herewith a sum to reimburse you for expenses incurred during my stay and also as a token of my gratitude. I hope it will be useful to you in the future, whatever it may bring.
I regret I was unable to let you know in advance that I was leaving today. I hope your husband and daughter are now back safe and sound.
Yours,
Annabel
I knew my letter was formal in a way that was odd in the circumstances, but I didn’t know how else to do it. It took me much longer to compose than I thought it would. I had deliberately let my mobile phone run out of charge, so I could not know the time exactly, but I had reckoned it was the middle of the afternoon when I began the letter. By the time I had finished and folded fifteen hundred pounds into the single sheet of paper, I could hardly see to write. Daylight was fading and the sky was lowering with waiting ice. Maybe it was later than I had thought, after all, and I remember thinking that this was a good thing. It shortened the interval until Silva’s return, when the trailer would be unattended with the money inside, lying on the table. But when I closed the door and went down the steps onto the shore, I saw at once that I couldn’t leave.
Downstream, between where I stood and the wrecked bridge end, two small fires at the river’s edge were burning through the blurry dusk. It was not difficult to gauge their distance from me; the nearer of the two had been set on a jutting-out part of the bank where three or four felled tree trunks lay on the ground. I had wandered down there several times in the past few days; it was a tricky walk over slippery rocks and around ponds of mud, and possible only at low tide, but it took no more than ten minutes. If the tramps displaced from the waste ground had encroached as far as that already, they could easily come farther. The trailer was set well back and under trees, and could not be seen from their bonfire, but if any of them wandered along and found the trailer empty, of course they could easily steal the money and take the trailer over for the night. And for all nights to come. I might trust to the coming darkness to keep them from exploring any further today, but I would have to stay outside on the lookout in case they did. And I was going to be very cold. I couldn’t risk drawing their attention by lighting a fire for myself.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Twenty-Three
Vi was sitting at the stove with a shawl round her shoulders and a tumbler of red wine in her hand when Ron returned to the shop. She looked up from a magazine spread over the counter. Her eyes were sour and watery, and her mouth was puckered and stained dark with wine, like a patch of decay starting on a small, bruised piece of fruit.
“Cold out there,” Ron said.
“You’ll have to be quick, I’m closing early.”
“Where’s Silva?”
Vi pushed herself up a little in her chair. “Silva!” she yelled, then slumped back. “You come from the river?” she asked, swinging her glass towards the darkness on the other side of the window.
“You could say that.”
“Terrible thing.”
Ron wandered farther into the shop, looking at the shelves, sniffing gently as if he found the air, laden with paraffin and wine, too heavy to breathe.
“It’s self-service,” Vi said. “Take a basket. Aye, terrible thing, that bridge.”
She gulped some of her drink and returned to her magazine. Ron brought a packet of biscuits back to the counter.
“Drowning your sorrows, then,” he said, placing a five-pound note on the counter.
“Keeps the cold out,” Vi said, but she stood up and placed her glass out of sight under the counter. She put the note in the till and started pulling coins out for the change, counting aloud, but her voice slowed. She stared at the money in her hand, dumped it all back and started again.
“Can’t add up the day,” she said, trying to smile. She made another mistake, turned the coins from hand to hand, counted them into her open palm, and dropped them. They fell rattling over the counter and cascaded onto the floor. Swearing, she ducked to pick them up and almost knocked over the stove as they rolled away. As she resurfaced, she swayed forwards and gripped the back of her chair, but it screeched away from her and she nearly fell.
Ron looked over his shoulder. Silva was walking down from the back store with her bag on her shoulder, wrapping her scarf round her neck, smiling.
“That’ll be four pounds, twenty-five pence I’m owed,” he said, turning back to Vi.
“Well, it’s on the bloody floor. You’ll need to come back for it.”
“I’d like my change, please.”
Vi slammed the till shut. “You’ll have to come back the morn. We’re closed.”
“Come on, Vi, I’ll do it,” Silva said, moving behind the counter to open the till. Vi shoved her away. “Don’t you touch my bloody money! We’re closed!”
Silva looked at her for a moment, then pulled her purse from her bag and counted out four pounds, twenty-five pence.
“Here, take it,” she said to Ron. “It’s better not to argue with her. It’s all right, I got paid today. I’ll get it back tomorrow.”
“Sure? Well, thanks.” Ron took the coins and picked up his packet of biscuits. Vi was now back in her chair with her glass in her hand.
“Are you locking up, Vi? Want me to do it?”
“I’ll do it myself. In my own good time,” Vi said. She lifted her glass and swigged. “Go on, fuck off home.”
“Bye, Vi. Don’t fall asleep there, now.”
Vi didn’t hear. She was bending into the shelf under the counter, looking for her bottle.
Outside, Ron lit a cigarette while Silva picked up the sandwich-board sign and took it inside. When she came back, he nodded towards the Land Rover and Silva clambered up into the passenger seat. As they drove off, Vi was staring out at them across the window display of faded boxes and dusty bars of fudge with her drink in one hand, waving with the slow, clawed fingers of the other. Ron pulled onto the road and turned left towards the bridge.
“Stop, what are you doing? This is the wrong way!” Silva said. “We can’t go over the bridge, we have to go to Netherloch. To the little bridge.”
Ron shook his head. “There’s a bottleneck at Netherloch. If we go that way it’ll be over two hours. This way you’ll be across in less than twenty minutes. You won’t even get your feet wet.” He smiled. “Don’t worry, I won’t make you row. Trust me.”
“Row? We are going in a boat? I can’t! I can’t go in a boat!”
“Why not? You want to swim?”
“I can’t swim!”
“Well, you’ll be better off in the boat then, won’t you?” Ron laughed, rolled down the window and threw out his cigarette end.
“I can’t go in a boat!”
The sudden rush of air from the window felt white and clear, a beam of cold light. Silva was aware he had half-turned and was looking at her and at the same time was somehow, almost magically, keeping his attention on the road. He had careful, strange eyes, and he put them to work like a camera; they travelled out and over her as she sat there, dissolving the shadows around her so that she might be unconcealed to him, fixed and memorized. She felt she was being recorded as a specimen, categorized; she was an example of something or other, but she had no idea what.
“You can go in a boat.” He spoke matter-of-factly, winding the window up. “You’ll be fine.”
For a while Silva stared ahead at the road until she felt safe enough, in the dark of the cab, t
o look at Ron again. She could see that his face was grainy with white stubble, and his square, shaved head sat on his shoulders like a boulder on a ridge. Why had she agreed to this? She had no reason to trust him. The back of the Land Rover was dark but obviously not empty: every bump and curve in the road brought dull clunking noises from the uneven mass of vague, heavy shapes behind. There could be guns in there. Knives. Chains. Rope. Even with just a pickaxe and spade he could kill her and nobody would ever know. Or out there on the river, in the pitch dark, he could push her overboard. She turned back and gazed through the window. Her body might be buried among the trees or under the dark hills or lost at the bottom of the river, and Stefan would never know where she was. Would Anna, growing up, explain her mother’s absence to other people with three words: she went missing? It came to her suddenly that disappearance was worse even than death. Where were they?
“You’re not from round here,” Ron said.
“No.”
“But you’re not a tourist. Are you a student?”
“No.”
“Your husband. What sort of work was it you said he was looking for, again?”
“I didn’t say.”
He gave a short laugh and lifted his hands from the wheel for a moment, in mock fear. His eyes rested on her again.
“OK. None of my business. Here we are, anyway,” he said, tapping on the steering wheel with straight, thick fingers, and turning off the road on to a gouged-out patch of land lit by a single orange light and bordered by a chain-link fence. He parked beside a security shed and got out, took a hard hat and a torch from the back of the Land Rover and spoke a few words to the man at the shed window. The man snorted and shrugged, then handed another hard hat out through the window, which Ron told Silva to put on. The man came out and unlocked the gate in the fence.
“‘Night, then, Ron. ‘Night, madam,” he said, assessing Silva as she walked through. “Mind how you go.”
“She’s just going across the river,” Ron said.
The man laughed. “Hard hats must be worn at all times!” he called after them.
Ron led the way down a track of deep tyre ruts, past giant machinery and stacked stone blocks and mounds of sand, still under a misty glow from the moon. Bright electric light and music and men’s voices from other sheds at the far edge of the site spilled over the darkness. When they reached the jetty, Ron handed Silva the torch and swung himself down a metal ladder into a motor launch bobbing in the inky water. Silva handed over her bag and the torch, and he helped her down and onto a long seat that ran around the sicie of the boat. He started the motor, and at once from somewhere among the sheds and piles of machinery the barking and howling of several dogs rose into the air. The engine stalled. The barking grew louder and more vicious; a man’s voice shouted. Silva turned to Ron.
“Security. They’re locked in. Don’t worry.”
At that moment the boat surged away from the jetty with a force that pushed her hard against the stern. Her hands found a rope, and she clung on. Icy spray flew up and soaked her face as the boat cut a way through the water into darkness and into a night wind that carried the scent of oil and seawater.
Out on the river it was impossible to speak above the noise of the engine and the wind. Ron took off his hard hat and motioned to Silva that she could do the same. Immediately her hair flew up in a tangle, and as she pulled at it and tried to gather it into a roll under the collar of her jacket, she heard him laugh. The pitch of the motor rose, and the boat rocked and raced on. In another two minutes they were more than halfway across, and Ron slowed down. The wind eased and the black water turned satiny under the light of the mooring they were heading for, the pontoon at the construction site near the bridge’s south end. But Silva could see that the bank was dotted here and there by tiny bonfires, glowing on the shingle between the river and the heavy dark shadow of the scrub that grew almost to the water’s edge. She strived to get her bearings in the dark. Beyond the last of the bonfires, the bank curved inwards, and set deep and hidden in that curve some way farther up was the trailer. The last fire couldn’t be all that far from it. Or were there more fires around the bend in the river, presently out of her sight line – or could there be one at the trailer? Could it be Stefan? Ron cut the engine, brought the boat to, jumped out and attached the rope. He helped Silva onto the jetty.
“That wasn’t so difficult, was it?” he said. “You made it safe and sound.”
Silva was peering anxiously upstream. “What are those fires?”
“Tramps, turned off their patch. Where they camped out, it’s the salvage site now,” Ron said. “They won’t be bothering you. Don’t worry.”
She fixed her attention on the lights of the service station up ahead, across the cleared waste ground, then glanced again at the bonfires receding into the dark of the riverbank. “Well. Well, thank you. I should go.”
But she stood where she was. How could she move from here, not knowing what the fires meant? She didn’t know whether to run towards or away from them.
“Where to?”
“I don’t know. I mean – ”
“Where do you live?”
“I – up there.” She nodded in the direction of the service station and the road. “Not far from there.”
“Come on, then. I’ll go with you.”
“Aren’t you going back across?”
“Don’t need to rush back. Come on.”
He steered her up from the jetty and across the ground that, just as on the opposite side, was now a site for the bridge salvage and rebuilding.
When they got to the service-station entrance he said, “You hungry? I am. Want some coffee?”
Silva shook her head. “I need to go.”
“You always look frightened. Are you in trouble? Where are you going?”
She waved a hand vaguely down the road. “Not far.”
“How far? You can’t just head off into the dark on your own on a busy road.”
“It’s really not far. I’ll be fine. My friend will be waiting for me.”
“Well, I’ll just make sure of that. I’ll walk you home.”
“It’s all right. I don’t need you to come.”
But she did, and Ron was already walking ahead. “Come on,” he said, turning back to her. “Damn, I forgot the biscuits,” he said, searching his pockets. “Never mind. Come on. It’s too bloody cold to hang about.”
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Twenty-Four
Some time after it was properly dark, one of the bonfires went out. Soon after that the other grew bigger, burning fiercely enough to send smoke high into the night air, where in the moonlight it drifted like a grey veil over the river. As the flames flew up I thought I caught the sound of faint voices raised in satisfaction, or triumph. Maybe some form of cooperation was at work and two groups had joined around one big fire, or maybe one group had overwhelmed the other. I couldn’t tell. I stayed outside wrapped in wads of bedding, listening for anyone who might be approaching in the dark along the shore. From time to time I dozed.
My first thought when I heard footsteps from the track and then Silva’s voice, followed by a man’s, was that she had found Stefan. But in an instant I knew it wasn’t him. The voice was older and deeper, and she was speaking as if to a stranger.
“I am here now, thank you.” The man said something I didn’t hear. I got to my feet and called out.
They came around the side of the trailer, and we all stood for a moment, trying to see one another in the dull moonlight. The man was solidly built, that was all I could make out. Then Silva gave a cry and rushed forwards to hug me. I felt my breath catch in my throat, and my eyes filled with tears, but over her shoulder I saw the man watching us steadily, as if trying to find something out. Would not a normal person have looked away at such a moment?
“They haven’t come up here, have they?” Silva asked, withdrawing from me and looking downstream. “Are you all right? They haven’t come this way?”<
br />
The man was gazing towards the fires.
“Thank God you’re back,” I managed to say.
“You’re so cold,” she said.
“I had to stay out to watch. I couldn’t light a fire. If I’d lit a fire they’d have come.”
“They might have done,” the man agreed.
“This is Ron,” Silva said. Her voice lifted when she spoke his name. “He brought me across the river. This is Annabel, my friend.”
He nodded at me. “You all right?” He spoke without smiling, though his words came through the dark as if he required an answer.
Silva said, “You’re so cold. Come on, get inside.”
We went in and lit candles. Silva used the gas ring to boil water and make tea. Ron and I watched her, and in between we watched each other. The trailer was cramped, and we settled onto seats and moved as little as possible, like tired roosting birds. We hardly spoke. It was too late – and our being all together too unexpected – for polite conversation among strangers. Besides, all the questions that came to mind (Why did you come here? Where do you live? Who are you? ) would, out loud, have sounded not curious but distrustful. And the remarkable thing was that although I knew I should be wary, because everything about his sudden appearance here with Silva begged such questions, I felt I could trust him.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Twenty-Five
Stefan, I wonder if you would have liked her. Over the three or four days we were together I had got used to her, but when I saw Ron staring at her by the candlelight in the trailer, I could see what he saw. It was not that she looked strange or remarkable, though she kept the shape of her body disguised in her clothes and had a lumbering, secretive walk that suggested neither woman nor man, adult nor child. There was nothing about her, apart from her clothes, that stayed the same long enough for me to be sure she looked a particular way and not another, that she was a person like this, not like that. Her face changed with every turn of her head, her eyes large and seeing, then hooded and looking away, her lips drawn in tightly, then spilling with words. Her skin would be white and soft and new-looking, then dry and unhealthy. Her hands were as heavy as clay in her lap until her fingers fluttered like pages falling from a book as she pushed her hair back off her face. And the tangled reddish hair on the top of her head reminded me of kemp on the back of some aged mountain animal, and then she pulled it around, and behind her ear it dropped on her neck in silky, baby-like coils the colour of charcoal. She looked neither happy nor sad, rich nor poor, old nor young. She had not an appearance at all so much as an atmosphere about her, of doubt and restlessness. It was as if, although present, she could, in her mind at least, leave and rejoin our company at will. In the close, glowing space we three shared that night in the trailer, she came and went like the ghosts of many people.