by Morag Joss
After two weeks, no next of kin had come forward. On its front page, under the headline ‘Police Appeal to Family of Mystery Victims’, the Inverness Herald printed a photograph of the man’s neck chain and the half-perished remains of a toy giraffe. It also reported that DNA tests showed that the bodies were overwhelmingly likely to be a father and child. Ron brought the paper with him that evening as well as a can of diesel for the generator, a tub of leftover coleslaw and a bottle of whisky. Silva was once again at her devotions. He showed the front page to Annabel, who was peeling potatoes at the table. These days she sat down to do such tasks.
“Oh, God, no,” she said. “Don’t let her see it. Oh, God, what are we to do?”
“She has to see it,” Ron said. “She’s bound to see it sometime. It’s better if we’re the ones to show her.”
“Why?” Annabel said. “What good will it do?”
Ron was taken aback. “If it’s not Stefan and Anna, think how relieved she’ll be,” he said simply.
“But it is them…I’m sure it is. She won’t be able to bear it.”
“If it is, she has to know. She’ll have to know sooner or later.”
Annabel gazed at the door to Silva’s room, her face suddenly white. “She’ll have to know sooner or later,” she repeated stupidly. She turned to Ron. “Don’t leave tonight. Stay. Don’t leave me alone with her.”
Silva’s door opened, and she wandered in, casting a severe little smile at Ron. Her eyes were over-bright and her hair, as it always was these days, was pulled back under an exuberant purple plastic chrysanthemum that looked doubly absurd above her pinched face. She glanced at the pan of potatoes and slumped into a chair at the table.
“Not hungry,” she said. Then she caught sight of the paper lying under Annabel’s hand, and snatched it up.
“Silva, wait. Don’t. Silva!” Annabel said, getting to her feet.
Silva cried out, once, and in the next moment she was at the door. She flung the paper down and was off and running, sobbing, stumbling over the rocks to the jetty, her screams sounding back across the wet stones of the shore.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Thirty-Nine
She was simply trying to get to them. I do not believe a thought of her own death was in her head. I still think it was blind need that drove her to the water, to be where they were, where they had died, and that was all. It was not an actual intent to kill herself.
Ron dashed after her, ahead of me, but he wasn’t quick enough. I came out of the cabin just in time to see her throw herself forwards off the jetty. The strange thing was that from the moment she surfaced, everything was very quiet. She had stopped screaming. There was no kicking and flailing of arms, no splashing or wailing. Perhaps it was the shock of the cold water that stilled her. Then her head sank. The purple flower in her hair bobbed for a second and disappeared, and the back of her pink cardigan floated up behind her and for a moment billowed across the surface of the river before its own waterlogged weight pulled it under and around her submerged shoulders. By then Ron was in the water, and I ran down to the jetty as he dived under and seized her by the jaw and struggled to drag her face up to the air. If she’d fought him harder and got a few feet farther out and into the current, she would have been swept away, but the strength went out of her. She surrendered. He brought her to the side of the jetty and dragged her out of the water. She collapsed against him as if all her limbs were broken.
I got her out of her wet clothes and dressed her in a thick dry shirt and pyjama trousers. Ron heated whisky with sugar in it and made her drink a lot of it. She sat for a while by the stove until her shivering and sobbing subsided, and then I put her to bed, leaving her candles burning and her door open. She fell asleep, and Ron and I sat up for a long time, wondering how she would be when she woke and what we might do for her. I stopped him wondering aloud about Stefan and Anna and how they had come to be in the car. For shame, I could not tell him my part in it. “Don’t go on about it,” I told him. “It makes no difference. It won’t bring them back. We’ll probably never know.”
My back had begun to ache, and Ron said I looked tired and should go to bed. He kissed me on the forehead and once, gently, on the lips, and he settled himself on the sofa bed in the main room so as to be nearby if Silva needed us in the night.
She slept until daybreak. It must have been the click of the door that woke me as she left the cabin; as soon as I discovered her bed empty I hurried to follow her, leaving Ron asleep. But this time she hadn’t gone to the jetty. She was standing on the shore some yards from the water, mirror-smooth under the early light. She’d picked up some pebbles and was studying them or counting them in her hand. I started to go to her and nearly called out, but stopped myself and drew back to the doorway. She didn’t move. Her head in cameo stillness against the silver-and-lemon sheen of the sun on the water was bowed and sorrowing. I was helpless – worse than that, culpable.
All of a sudden she looked up and flung the pebbles from her hand, and they landed scattershot, wrinkling the water with hundreds of colliding circles. She watched until the water was smooth again, and then, her lips working and her arms wrapped tight around herself, she turned and wandered down the riverbank. Now and then she lifted her head and paused, looking at the river and all the time talking to herself. Or maybe she was talking to Stefan, to Anna, to a God who let such things happen. Who could tell?
I couldn’t go back to sleep. I went inside and wrapped myself up warmly and found some shoes, and then I left the cabin, intending to follow her at a distance to make sure she was safe. But by the time I came out of the cabin again and had got down to the river edge, she had already turned and was walking slowly back. She looked up and must have seen me, but she walked past me as if I weren’t there, still mouthing words nobody could hear. When she reached the cabin she went straight to her room. I heard her lie down, and then, at last, she let out a low, desperate moan and her weeping began.
Ron was awake and had to leave; it was one of the Saturdays for the bridge walk. I went down with him to the jetty and made him promise to come back as soon as he could and to tell no one about Stefan and Anna. He looked puzzled for a moment, I think because the idea of doing otherwise had never crossed his mind. I didn’t want him to leave, but I couldn’t say if that was from a desire to be with him or because I was afraid of coping with Silva alone. Two weeks ago we had made love, he and I, but not since, nor had we talked about what happened. So we were not lovers, exactly, but what were we? The question was tangential now; Silva was our only concern. Maybe it didn’t matter at all. He promised to return in the afternoon.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Forty
In the boat going over, Mr Sturrock, huddled in his waterproof jacket, said, “Did you see that, the wean’s giraffe? In the paper?” He wiped a fleck of rain from his cheek. “Wee soul.”
Ron nodded. He wanted to tell Mr Sturrock about Silva, bereft and weeping. He wanted to tell anyone who would listen how she was suffering. It grieved him that Stefan and Anna were to be unclaimed and dispossessed in death as they had been in life, the small history of the family as erasable, finally, as a drawing in an exercise book.
“The poor mother,” he said.
“Aye, whoever she is,” Mr Sturrock replied.
Rhona was waiting under a lime-green umbrella. She had pacified the irate customers from the last tour with lunch vouchers for the service station and had also cut the bookings back down. The small gathering now with her stood with the sombre decorum of the previous groups; despite their garish wet-weather clothes, they looked like people at a funeral. The big, reticent widower from Huddersfield was there again, aloof in his sadness.
Summer was already in decline. The early morning sun had vanished, and there was a spit of rain in the chill wind that blew up the estuary, raising short white combs of spray off the water. The tree shadows cast on the river margins had grown longer, and in the forest a single stand of larc
h trees was turning from green to bronze.
Mr Sturrock introduced himself and began his talk, counting the same points off on his fingers, inserting the same statistics, breathing in the same places. Ron stood at the back with Rhona, who was absorbed in sending text messages. The audience stood lulled, reassured, a little bored. Following Mr Sturrock, they tramped with a scraping of feet between lines of hazard cones along the bridge approach to the farthest point of the old, ripped-up roadbed. At the barrier a few dozen feet from where the jagged edge of the tarmac dipped down towards the river, they halted and gathered in a semicircle. Collars and hoods went up; out here, squalls from the river blew hard around their heads and down their necks. Calling above the wind, Mr Sturrock launched into his lecture on the nature of estuaries and the design options for the estuary bridge designer.
“…here you can see that each tendon contains twenty-seven strands of steel and each strand has seven wires. The post-tensioning counteracts sagging and adds strength to the spans.”
This was the point at which he invited people forward to see the new concrete and steel segments, and warned them about slippery surfaces and going too close to the edge. One by one people broke from the group and went to look. But the big man hung back, staring at the ground, and paid no attention when Rhona touched his arm.
“You OK, Colin?” she asked.
Colin looked up, pulled his arm away and walked to the barrier. When he reached the edge, he turned to the others and raised a hand.
“Ladies and gentlemen, just for today, if I may have a minute of your time.” He opened and closed his fists as he spoke, and his voice and big body were full of confused, flashing energy. “I have something I want to say.”
Rhona froze. Mr Sturrock took a few steps towards him.
“You’re all right, son,” he said. “Remember where you are, now.”
Colin threw out an arm to hold him at bay. “There’s something I need to say!” He paused, expecting to be stopped. “I want to…well, anyway…here…” He reached in his inside pocket and brought out a small toy dog with floppy ears and huge, mawkish eyes. A red felt tongue lolled out of its mouth. From the other pocket he fished out a posy of artificial flowers set within a ruff of plastic lace and tied with a ribbon.
“My name’s Colin. I wanted…It’s just a gesture,” he said, reddening and unfolding a piece of paper. Aloud he read, “For the two victims.”
Ron strained to hear the words above the sighing of the wind. Colin threw the posy and toy dog into the water, and took from his pocket a red rose, a rigid, dry-looking thing on a long stem.
“My wife…This is for my wife. She also died here. And I just want to say to her, not that she can hear me now…you don’t know what you’ve got till you lose it. It’s no good wishing for a second chance, but if I could make it up to you, I would.” He sucked in a huge breath to steady himself. “I didn’t give you flowers when you were alive, and I should’ve. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
He let go of the rose and a current of air caught it and blew it high into the sharp wind. It all but disappeared against the grimy rain and river spray and lowering clouds, until it finally came to land on the water too far away to look at all like a rose any more. It floated there diminished and misplaced, a dark, untidy twig. Rhona stood open-mouthed. Gradually people fanned out past Colin to the barrier to watch his offerings bob on the waves and begin to sink.
One man turned back. “Well said, there, sir,” he said.
Someone else said, “So say all of us,” and began to applaud, and the others joined in. Colin broke away and walked off fast, back up the ruined road. Rhona hurried over to Ron.
“Christ, what next? I can’t take this! I so can’t take another drama. Could you go after him for me? Get him a coffee or something, see he’s all right? I have to stay with the group.”
Ron followed the man up across the site and into the service-station café. At the counter he caught up with him.
“I’ll get this, mate,” he said. “Go and find us a seat, OK?”
He bought coffee for himself and hot chocolate for Colin, remembering something vague about sugar and stress. When he brought it to the table, Colin was sitting with his hands over his face.
“Here you go, Colin.”
Colin lowered his hands and nodded thanks. His eyes were red-rimmed. “Was it OK? Me coming out with all that?” he asked in a shaky voice.
Before Ron could speak, Colin waved his answer away. “I had to say it. Needed saying. Even if nobody was interested.”
“I’m very sorry about your wife. It’s a terrible way to lose somebody.”
“Yeah.” Colin’s eyes filled with tears. He wiped them away, lowered his head almost to the table and took a slurp of his hot chocolate. “Well, there you go.”
“People say the worst part is the waiting, don’t they?” ventured Ron. “The not knowing. I can believe that.”
“Five months I was waiting. Then when they brought that car up and she wasn’t in it, the police were straight round. I thought they’d come to tell me she could still be alive. Still hoping, see? Stupid, but I was. Only they acted like I’d killed her. Took the place apart, went through the whole thing over and over again.”
“Bloody hell. Must’ve made it even worse.”
“Had to rule out foul play, they said.”
“Were you married a long time?”
Colin screwed up his face and shook his head. “You married?”
“Was once,” Ron said. “Long time ago, now.”
“Got kids?”
“No.”
Colin shrugged as if he’d lost interest. He picked up his mug and stirred his drink hard and began feeding it into his mouth with his teaspoon. Ron watched him, wondering if he was too upset to talk any more or if he was a person who didn’t mind long silences. He thought it likely to be the second, and a few months ago would have accommodated it easily, being then that kind of person himself. He could leave now and tell Rhona that Colin was all right. But he said, “So you come up from England, is that right? I’ve seen you at every walk. Where are you from?”
He didn’t in the least care where Colin was from, but it was necessary to pull words, on neat and neutral subjects, into the empty space between them.
“Huddersfield,” Colin said dully. “Know it?”
“Passed through a couple of times. Nice place to live, is it?”
The silence returned. Just as Ron was about to give up – he couldn’t keep this going all on his own – Colin said, “My wife didn’t like it. People don’t unless they’re from there.”
“Where was she from?”
“Way down south. Near Portsmouth.”
There was another silence.
Colin said, “She would’ve got used to it. She was only there a few months.”
“Is her family in Portsmouth still?”
“No. There was just her dad, and he died last year. Nobody left now.” Colin squeezed his eyes tight. “There’s nobody to talk to about her. I went down there, found her old address, saw where she grew up. Spent two days just walking about. How stupid is that? Same again?”
He was already on his feet and on his way to the counter, and Ron could not find the heart to say no. When he came back he tried harder, since Colin had mentioned not being able to talk about his dead wife and seemed to want to, insofar as he wanted to talk about anything.
How had they met? What did she do? What were her hobbies? Colin answered with a handful of words or skirted the questions altogether. It struck Ron that the more he said, the more distraught he became. Colin wanted to tell someone things about her, but not these things; Ron was asking the wrong questions and had no idea what the right ones might be. He sneaked a look at his watch.
“Sorry, mate, you don’t want to hear me going on. A total stranger,” Colin said.
Ron felt terrible, because it was true. “No, no, it’s just I need to watch the time. I have to get Sturrock back across the rive
r. Talk all you want. If it helps.”
“Nah, I’m no good at talking. That was part of the problem, maybe. But thanks, mate. Maybe it helps a bit.”
“Any time. Anything else I can do for you, feel free.”
Colin stood up and shifted on his feet. Shyly, he held out his hand. “Thanks. Appreciate it.”
Ron got up and accepted the handshake. “Well, I’d better be getting back to the boat,” he said. “Take care, now.”
“Actually there is something,” Colin said abruptly. “But maybe…No, you probably can’t help.”
“What is it?”
Colin looked at him directly for the first time. Behind the thick socket bones and pouches of his fleshy face, his eyes were small, bewildered dots.
“Over the other side, is that where you’re going?” he asked.
“That’s right. The forest side.”
“Well, it’s just…I’ve never been there. Never thought of it. Then when I did I couldn’t face it, but I could now, I kind of want to. I mean, that’s where she was trying to get to, across the bridge.” He raised his arms and let them drop against his sides. “Never made it, did she? And they’re doing a memorial garden over there, aren’t they? For all the victims. Putting up a proper memorial. If I went over in the boat with you, I could, well, you know, have a look round.”
Ron had heard something about the garden. “It’s not planted yet. They’ve only just decided where it’s going. Don’t think there’s much to see.”
Colin shrugged. “Never mind, doesn’t matter.” He turned away. “Just thought I’d ask. See you around.”
“No, no, wait,” Ron said. “It’s just, it’s not up to me. Depends on Sturrock. We can ask.”
Mr Sturrock turned out to have a view of his own. Colin’s gesture at the barrier was a lovely wee tribute, he said. As if the wean’s giraffe in the paper wasn’t enough.