by Morag Joss
“Where did you get that? You said you had nothing. You said you didn’t have enough money for one night in a hotel. Did you steal it?”
“No! I didn’t steal it. It’s mine. I mean, I want…It’s for both of us. The point is we’ve got it. So we could pay rent.”
“How much?”
“Three thousand.”
It sounded plenty. It was a lot, the amount we had saved and you had on you, minus whatever you needed to get by until you came back. But then I thought about it. Around here we would have to pay expensive holiday rents, even if there wouldn’t be so many tourists this year because of the bridge. The money would be fine for a while, but it wouldn’t last long. The summer would come and go. Soon there would be a time when she couldn’t work, and then what? I couldn’t go and live in a place I wouldn’t be able to keep. While I was thinking all this, looking at the money she was holding out, the notes began to shake in her hands. The sickness was coming over her again, and she was looking at me, scared, her eyes begging me to save her while her face and her lips were turning white and grey. She shoved the money into her jacket and stumbled outside. I waited for a few moments while she retched, and then I followed with a cup of water and a biscuit. She was leaning against the cabin wall sucking in huge, deep breaths. I pulled her over to the heap of mattresses on the ground and made her sit down. It kept surprising me how little she knew about taking care of herself.
“It’s a waste of money to pay rent,” I said. “This place is free.”
She drank down the cup of water. “It’s a wilderness.” She looked towards the steep bank of pines around the cabin. Beyond the trees that stood like guards three or four deep at its edge, the forest rose up into darkness in the shadow of the hill.
“How do we get out of here except by boat?” she said. “How far is it to the road? I can’t even see a path.”
“There must be a path. People got down here once, didn’t they? We’ll find a way up through the trees. It’s peaceful here. It’s safe.”
“But suppose I…what if one of us got ill? Suppose one of us needed something and we were stuck down here?”
“There would be two of us. And that’s only till Stefan comes. Everything will be all right when Stefan and…” My voice gave out. The single word of my daughter’s name was too much to say.
She turned away from me. “Yes, soon you’ll have your husband and your little girl,” she said. Was she scared I wouldn’t let her stay after that? But she sounded more sad than scared. Maybe she was jealous, but she would have her own baby soon.
“Yes. I’ll have Anna back,” I said, and tears rushed into my eyes. “Anyway, you won’t be ill much longer. It passes.”
She decided to ignore what I was really saying, and lay back on the mattress.
“This place makes me feel lazy,” she said. “I like the sound of the river. You can hear it now there’s no traffic on the bridge.” She sighed. “I’m so tired. I could fall asleep.”
I wasn’t tired at all. “So we should stay here. We shouldn’t waste that money on rent. If we went somewhere else and I lost my job, Stefan wouldn’t know where to find me. If I’m not at the Highland Bounty, he’ll think of here at once. He knows I’d come here. He knows I love it.”
She didn’t trust what I was saying, but she wouldn’t say so. I could tell she believed you’d left me and taken my baby away. She didn’t know you, and what it was like, the three of us together.
“Anyway, soon you’ll need your money for other things.”
“Well, but I’ll get a job, at some point.”
“You’ll need money for your baby.”
She sat upright. “Why do you say that? Could you tell? How could you tell?”
“Do you think I’m stupid? Of course I can tell. Where’s the father?”
She shook her head. “He’s got nothing to do with it. I’m not with him. I’m going to manage on my own.”
“It’s hard. You don’t know what it’s like.”
“I’ll manage. Plenty of single mothers manage.”
“You don’t know anything. You’re lucky you’ve got me.”
She didn’t argue with that.
“Listen,” I told her. “Tomorrow I have to get back to Vi’s. You can come with me as far as the road. We’ll find a way up, then you’ll see. Then you can come back and unpack some of our things. Sleep. You can have the little room at the front. Get us some firewood. There’s lots of firewood. You’ll be fine. I’m going to look after you.”
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Part Two
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Twenty-Eight
He rose at five o’clock in the morning, was always first up and clattering to the shower before anyone else, trying to make as little noise as possible because the men he shared with worked until late at night. Because of his hours he’d got a place in a mobile sleeper unit on the site, which he shared with other men who couldn’t get home between shifts. It was spartan – three narrow beds in cubicles, a small recreation area and a shower room – but it was an improvement on sleeping in the Land Rover. Another identical unit was stacked above his, and alongside stood a third. He saw little of the other men; they pitied him his early start, but he relished it, the quiet and space to himself before he would be caught up in the flow of another day filled with people. Much as he liked being no longer alone, he found it exhausting.
On the first day he’d been instructed to take the boat across and bring back the catering staff, but after he’d done that and made several more crossings for other work crews, they hadn’t known quite what to do with him. He’d driven up to the Highland Bounty Mini-Mart to buy stuff the guys in the sleeper unit wanted: tea, coffee, cereal. Then he’d done a few more boat runs and waited out the day until it was time to collect Silva. On the second day he’d been busier. By the third day, his work was acquiring a pattern.
By half-past five he would start the launch and set off to pick up the catering crew. Within half an hour they would be back, unloaded and preparing breakfast in the canteen unit, while he crossed the river again to bring over the first of the day’s relays of workers. In the course of the first week, the emergency teams faded away and were replaced by people recruited for salvage and urgent repair work. The boat held only twelve people; Ron would be busy for the next three hours or so, and then he would moor the boat and get a late breakfast at the canteen. At first he made do with tea and toast; by the fourth or fifth day Jackson, the massive, tattooed cook in charge, knew Ron’s schedule and kept some hot food for him. Ron tried to thank him.
“Plate’s hot, mind,” was all Jackson said, passing it over in huge hands etched with blue-black thorns and wine-red roses that entwined all the way up his forearms.
Around nine o’clock each day Ron presented himself at the site office, and now either the younger man or Mr Sturrock, neither of whom had mentioned Ron’s paperwork again, would assign him here or there to fill in for absentees or where an extra man was needed for unskilled labour. They would also give him a list of river crossings scheduled for that day; as well as contingents of workers there were police officers and accident investigators, engineers, contractors and dozens of officials whose role it was not Ron’s place to know.
Mid-afternoon, when the crew would be finishing with clearing after the lunch service and getting ready to return to the jetty for the trip back to the Inverness side, he would return to the canteen. That was how he found himself included in the distribution of the day’s leftovers to the staff; Jackson counted him in, he supposed, because he knew that the men who stayed on-site overnight had to microwave their own evening meals.
Small kindnesses such as these and the routine of work and sleep and waking up in the same place each day put Ron in a more even mood than he had known for years. He was friendly but remained a little reserved. He didn’t join in the daily, mainly obscene banter of the men; he never topped a dirty joke with one of his own. Nor did he care for the tauntin
g that went on among the work teams, for almost every man was singled out for something – having red hair, no hair, being good at darts, unable to whistle – and given a nickname and a greater or lesser amount of teasing about it. Though the banter was not at heart malicious and Ron himself escaped it, probably because he was the boatman and not part of any one team, it sapped his energy to withstand the relentless camaraderie, even as a witness. He dreaded being made conspicuous for any reason at all.
That must be why, he decided, he looked forward all day to the peaceful company of the two women. He carried pictures of them in his head, and he thought about them carefully. The older one, Annabel, was the softer-natured of the two and at times even seemed the younger. Silva didn’t order them about, exactly, but she was always first to be clear about domestic matters, and there was an edge in her way of asserting that things had to be done thus and not otherwise: how long to boil potatoes, how to get their towels dry, which wood burned best on the fires she lit to heat water for washing and where in the forest to find it (about which she was often wrong). Annabel never tried to assert control, and so neither did he. Annabel appeared, actually, to welcome Silva’s bossiness, meeting it always gently, and over the course of an evening Silva’s abruptness would subside a little and slowly she would become less brittle.
All around him at the bridge site there was pilfering going on, not on a big scale but in so matter-of-fact a manner it was clearly, up to a point, tolerated. So on his tasks around the place he was always on the lookout for things Annabel and Silva might need. Being discreet, and keeping his acquisitions modest, he took the small things: pallets for kindling sticks, canisters sloshing with the dregs of something useful – a good spoonful of lubricating oil, or bleach, or detergent – a handful of screws and nails, small amounts of sand and cement.
What tools he needed for work on the cabin he borrowed, returning them always to the same places. With one thing and another, there was never an evening when he turned up empty-handed.
Every time he went, there was daylight a little longer into the evening by which he could work on the repairs. He brought offcuts of timber and bitumen sheeting and sealant, and after he’d sawn back the tree roots that were forcing their way into the cabin’s back room, he replaced the split and rotten wood and secured the join between walls and floor. There was no glazing work going on at the bridge, so he took the window measurements and got one of the Inverness men he ferried across each day to have the glass cut there. If the man was curious about why the boatman needed a pane of glass, he didn’t say so.
As soon as the window was mended and the back room dried out after being leaky for so long, Silva, who had been sleeping in the main room while Annabel took the front room, moved her things in. She set out a mattress from the trailer on the floor and kept her own clothes in a couple of deep plastic tubs at the foot of it. Along one wall she arranged a bank of Anna’s and Stefan’s neatly folded clothes and shoes. Anna’s dolls and teddy bears perched atop the pile, staring into space.
On the first evening after she was installed there, while Annabel cooked, Silva wandered with Ron upriver. They were supposed to be collecting firewood, but she began to pick the sparse little wild flowers, really just flowering weeds, that grew in the narrow strip of soil and light between the forest and the bank of stones on the shore. Back at the cabin, she put them in a mug of water on the floor in one corner of her new room and surrounded it with photographs of her husband and daughter, propped up against the wall. Ron was surprised at the satisfaction this appeared to give her, arranging the mug on a clean white handkerchief like a votary at her altar.
“And look!” she said, when she brought him and Annabel in to admire, “See, there’s this as well.”
It was a drawing in crayon on a scrap of paper, childish but not done by a child. It showed a wobbly little house surrounded by trees. A mummy, a daddy and a little girl stood smiling in front of it. Water flowed past their feet in snaking horizontal blue lines.
“Oh! That was on the wall in the trailer,” Annabel said. “I’m glad you brought it. You see?” she said to Ron. “It’s the cabin. It’s where we are now.”
“Stefan drew it for me,” Silva told them. “From across on the other side. It was a joke, then. Now it’s important. It doesn’t matter what guides him here. As long as something does, like this. This will bring them here.”
She propped the drawing up at the back of her shrine. The paper was flimsy and it curled over and slid down the wall. The others watched while Silva fiddled with it until she just about managed to make it stay. Ron could see that with the least draught across the floor it would fold in upon itself again and float away.
“I could you make a frame for it, if you like,” he said.
Silva turned and thanked him, her eyes shining with such piteous gratitude he could think of nothing more to say except that it was nice for a picture to have a frame.
Most nights after supper they sat outside for a time, since Silva kept up her old habit of lighting a campfire. They watched the river and listened to the creaks and rustles of the wind in the trees and the furtive scrabbling of animals, most likely squirrels and badgers, Ron said, or deer. The noises from the bridge had lessened, or perhaps they had got used to them. For the first few days they saw on the far bank the trailer doors open and a fire lit nearby, and then one night there was no sign of life at all. Annabel told them she’d watched that morning from inside the cabin as the tramps had been escorted off the riverbank by policemen with dogs.
“Dumped back in Inverness, probably,” Ron said. He’d heard the men talk about it, too.
None of them said a word about returning to the trailer.
Each day Ron and Silva had bits of overheard news and gossip about the bridge, to which Annabel listened with patient interest, but she never craved information. They would sit at times in silence, and even when talk ranged more widely, they asked one another very few questions. Silva said nothing about Annabel’s luggage, supposedly still being kept for her by kind people in a house in Inverness. Nobody asked Silva about the country she was from, not even idle enquiries about language or food or customs. Ron once referred vaguely to losing touch with his family, and neither Annabel nor Silva followed it up. They all avoided speculation about when Stefan and Anna would return.
It was courtesy, not indifference, that kept each of them from probing into the others’ lives, a delicacy that prohibited the seeking of answers that might make it necessary for them to lie to one another. Even sincere answers would surely be imperfect and unreliable, anyway. Perhaps they could assume that for all of them it had been a long haul to get from the past all the way to here, and their friendship (if it was that – friendship was another word they didn’t use) was not rooted in curiosity about what that past had been. Soon conversation would return to practical concerns: how to fix the rattle on the door, how deep the water was around the jetty. Would the matches stay dry longer in tin or in plastic, would it rain again before morning.
Ron liked to watch the two women together across the failing light and the smoke from the fire, saving up the images for when he was alone again. Later, as they walked him down to the jetty, he would always manage to mention what tasks he could do next, what he would load into the boat that night: borrowed tools, water containers for refilling, rubbish for disposal, to be sure they were expecting him back. And as he turned to wave to them standing there, he liked not knowing which of them he found more touching and beautiful, nor whose approval gave him more pleasure, nor of which of them he was growing fonder.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Twenty-Nine
Within a few weeks of being at the cabin, my sickness vanished and I noticed a firming and swelling of my stomach. The weight of my fear began to drop away, like a stone somehow melting, and a different, pleasing heaviness gradually took its place. My breasts acquired a high, proud outline. I wondered every day about Col, testing over and over in my mind the possibility
of going back and trying to explain what I had done and asking him to forgive me, leaving aside any thought that he might need to be forgiven for anything himself. Any affront I might have suffered for the apparent misdemeanour of carrying his child did not enter the equation; I assumed that even a notional reconciliation would be on his terms only. In my head, I heard myself plead with him to understand that I could not give up my baby; I begged him to let us become a family. And that was where I always stalled, for no reply came. I could not conjure up his voice speaking any words of acceptance.
I realized I had to allow Col his silence. I resolved to let him become a distant regret, to turn my concern for him into a conviction that he was better off without me. It was not that difficult. I needed only to recall what he had said that day at breakfast to be convinced again that by staying away I was saving him from the sight of a child he didn’t want growing in the body of a wife he didn’t love.
His loss, I told myself, although it was some time before I really believed it. Several times a day I would run my hand over my body, slipping it under my clothes to touch my naked skin. I was touching myself and also my child. Col didn’t love either of us, and so I would have to, and I did. I loved us both.
With that love came elation, and amazement, too, for I had never associated love, certainly not self-love or love of the unborn, with happiness. Yet it took me only a short while to trust in it. And as must be common enough in pregnant women, I grew reflective of my own mother, and myself as a child. I had been a teary, clingy little girl, always scared by my mother’s brisk, dutiful care of me. The patting-on of talcum powder after my bath, the tying of hair ribbons, the cutting of birthday cakes – all were guiltily rushed along and done with before there was time for me to experience pleasure small or great or, indeed, to cling. (And as must also be common, I made whispered little vows to my baby that we would do all these things differently.)