by Morag Joss
“Och, go on, then, we’ll take you over the once,” he told Colin. “Only the once, mind. Compassionate reasons, OK? And you’ll need to get yourself back by Netherloch.”
They chugged over through the blustery wind saying nothing, the tang of diesel mixing with the smell of cold rain. When they reached the other shore, Sturrock hurried away to the site office to pick up his car keys. Colin stepped off the jetty and followed Ron’s directions to a new walkway. The garden, Ron said, was going to be on the bank on the far side of the bridge, a short way downriver. He watched Colin go, trudging through the mud, his eyes on the ground and his big shoulders stooped under the rain. Then Ron cast off again to go upriver to the cabin. He really couldn’t do any more.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Forty-One
If Silva slept at all, she would often wake distraught and wander about the cabin with rage in her eyes, pulling at her hair and clothes. She would not be held or comforted. Other times she would lie helpless and weep for hours until the skin on her cheeks was raw from her tears. Sometimes I found her, as I had the first morning, staring at the water and unable to move. Every couple of days, I think to get away from me, she would wander off farther downriver and come back hours later, exhausted. She hadn’t the strength to go far. I tried to judge when to leave her be and when to talk. I kept her warm, covering her when she fell asleep, and I cooked her tiny meals of eggs or pasta and coaxed her to eat, not that I managed to get her to take much, often she’d only accept tea. Her grief terrified me, and all the time I looked after her I hardly spoke. When I did, something about her made me whisper.
I cared for her on my own, until Ron came in the evenings. I looked forward all day to seeing him, and by the time he arrived was desperate for his company. With Silva he was circumspect and solemn, hardly less reticent than I, and I was pleased if she went to bed after supper and I could have him to myself. I was delighted when he noticed how much bigger I was getting and fussed over me a little. Now each night he would lie with me for a while, sometimes shyly stroking my belly and sometimes not, but always peacefully, without intensity. I was grateful. When I was nearly asleep, he would go back out to the main room and bed down next to the stove.
Silva began to sleep longer and more deeply, and slowly she began to eat a little more. After several more days she was almost alert again and more talkative, but she was also restless and weepy, and she tired so easily. She hadn’t been to work for weeks. We had sent Vi a text message when Silva first missed work saying she was ill and would be back when she was better. There had been no reply. One evening Ron suggested she might try going back.
“Routine,” he said. “Good thing, routine.”
I didn’t think it was such a good idea. I was afraid Silva wouldn’t be able to stand up to Vi in one of her difficult moods. And there was still some money left; we didn’t need to worry yet.
“It’s a bit soon,” I said. “Why not wait a little longer?”
Silva listened as if none of it had anything to do with her, and I took her calm as a sign she was getting better.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Forty-Two
You are not gone. I am full of pictures of you that spill through my head in an unending stream, and I have your voices all around me. You are not gone, because what I see and hear are not memories. I am not remembering the sight of you both, your sounds and your words, I am not bringing you to mind as you once were. It is you I see and hear. But there is no comfort in it, because I know you are dead. I have not gone mad. You are dead, and how can there ever be any comfort from that? I no longer have you, though I see and hear you. It just means that nothing in this world is as real as you are. You will never be gone, but no more will you ever come back to me. You are both dead.
I remember the first few days only as a time when I thought my throat was blocked with stones and I wanted my heart to stop. Every beat of it hurt me. I tried to stop breathing. I wanted my lungs to choke, I wanted to sink to the bottom of the river and be with you, not that that made sense, even to me. Of course I knew you were no longer there, for they had lifted you, poor drowned souls, out of the water.
Yet the river is, for me, where you were and will now always be, down under the water, your faces calm and your skin as clean and white as shell. You do not perish. Slowly, patiently, you blink your eyes, and your dark, curling hair still grows, and all day long the river current plays with it, spinning it in wafts around your shoulders. You let the water turn you this way and that, and your hands rise and fall, your fingers open and close. You are waiting for me now, just as I, since the day you disappeared, waited for you. This is why I will not go far from the river.
Other people are waiting, too, official people. They are waiting for someone to come and tell them who you are, and to bury you. And I can’t, because the official people have got rules. They are holding behind their backs all the rules they have for people like us, and as soon as they knew I didn’t belong here, they wouldn’t let me near you. There are laws, they will say. They wouldn’t let me bury you, and they’d send me back, and then I would be farther away from you than ever.
So, soon they will have to bury you without your names, and I won’t know where. But at least you – no, not you, only the discarded shells of you they brought to the shore – will lie together, and not far away. I will stay nearby and go on talking to you every day, and every day I will watch the river for a runnel in the tide, a flicker of light, a wave feathering the surface that will tell me you are waiting.
I have heard them since I was a child, but I never felt before now the truth of them, those fairy tales of mortal people who step off dry land leaving not a single footprint, drawn to the sea or a lake or river for love of a lost one who has been taken and transformed into an underwater spirit. But the oldest stories turn out to be true, at least in this: the vanishing from sight, the yearning of the one left waiting for the beloved who is never coming back. An old story, my love, is what we are now, and all we have.
Annabel and Ron try to take my mind off all this. They think it is not good for me to spend my time wandering between my bed and the river. They think I talk to myself. Ron thinks I should go back and work for Vi again, Annabel doesn’t, but she doesn’t know what I should do instead. I don’t want them to worry so much, especially not Annabel. I want her to think I am beginning to recover.
Meanwhile she is very kind, and Ron would do anything in his power to make me comfortable, and it is calming to know I am not wholly alone. I am grateful for them. If they were not here, there would be no reason not to go mad. Annabel herself is growing heavier and slower by the day, and there is a certain calm in that for me, too. She is stupidly content. She does not know I am waiting for her baby just as much as she is. She does not know her baby is my reason to stay alive a little longer.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Forty-Three
I wasn’t so out of touch with reality as to want to give birth in the cabin, without help. I knew I would have to see a doctor eventually. I wanted to be the one to choose when, that was all. I would go when I felt ready. For months I’d imagined it as if I were watching myself in a film, enacting the scene where I present myself to a jovial doctor with some story about being new in the area, and my bump would be routinely examined and we’d make arrangements about the delivery. Well done, mum, you’re doing fine, we’ll expect you at the hospital when baby decides to put in an appearance!
Now I could see it might be more difficult than that. I needed time to prepare myself, but there was no hurry. By the middle of August the northern summer had begun to give way to autumn, but still I had no proper sense of time passing. Across the river on dry days now the combines were at work in the fields, raising clouds of pale dust in long straight rows. I went for walks under rainy skies, grateful for a new sharpness in the wind off the water, utterly content. I don’t know where my complacency came from unless from pregnancy itself – some merciful, hormo
nal muffling of the very idea of risk – but I was sure everything was fine. The baby was growing and kicking, and didn’t thousands of women gave birth every day? There was nothing to worry about. There were times when I was tempted to give up on the idea of the doctor and just let nature take its course. I had ages to go.
It was worth putting up with Silva nagging me about it, and about everything else, to hear her talking again, or so I thought. At least she had come far enough out of her torpor to care about something. Besides, nothing upset me much. I felt safer than I had ever felt in my life, attuned to my body’s growing weight, its rhythms, even to its small lapses and betrayals; I swelled and sweated, I gasped with heartburn, the veins on my legs bulged like coiled worms. I had to pee a dozen times a day, and I could no longer lie flat on my back. But I accepted everything that was happening to me. I marvelled at the willing, aching vessel my body had become for the child, whose size was now quite terrific, and I gave myself up easily to its nightlong pummelling under my ribs. I was happy.
But unlike me, and although there was no reason for it, Silva was edgy all the time. At the cabin she watched me constantly, and although she cared about the baby, she wasn’t kind to me. Her attention was scrupulous but disapproving, as if the baby needed her guardianship because it was being born to a mother too hapless to deserve it. And she was full of opinions, all of them superstitious and most of them closer to witchcraft than to midwifery: I mustn’t stand for more than half an hour (as if I wanted to), because I’d draw blood from the baby’s brain; I shouldn’t cut my hair because the baby would then be born with weak hair. I suppose I was touched, but nonetheless her scrutiny was wearing, and if I objected mildly to any of it or took a shade too lightly some silly piece of advice, she got angry. I learned to overcome the urge to laugh her concerns away. There was some respite when she went off on her wanderings along the river, but when she returned she would be more dogmatic still, with plans for more unpleasant, punitive little rituals that I would have to undergo. I lay with my feet pointing to the ceiling, I inhaled bitter, steaming concoctions of boiled leaves for lung strength. All, of course, for the baby’s good. Often the cabin seemed unbearably small, yet when Ron came there would always somehow be more room, not less.
The worst days were the ones when I got ridiculously hungry. I could eat half a loaf of bread in minutes, impatient with the time it took me to spread the butter and jam, folding each oozing slice over and shoving it in my mouth, chewing as I spread the next. This put Silva in such a rage I would have to wait and gorge in secret when she was busy getting firewood or washing her hair outside in the tub, or had gone walking along the river. I could not explain to her the need to fill myself up in this way, the strength and pleasure it gave me, the floppy collapse in my mouth of bread slick with butter, the tingle of strawberry syrup on the tongue. Afterwards I would lie still and feel my stomach gurgling and squirting its juices and doing its work like the wondrous factory I now trusted it to be, transforming the heaps of food I had eaten into the bones, flesh, hair, fingernails of my baby. I thought of its face in the dark of my womb, blinking its wet eyes and smiling a sated, gummy smile.
Other times, I craved sugar. It would hit me suddenly, the need to crunch and suck on glassy grains of it, squeezing them through my teeth; some days I stole so much sugar I made my tongue sore with abrasions from working its sweet, scratchy crystals against the roof of my mouth. Then there were days when I needed sugar to slide around inside my mouth all smooth and golden and chewy, and I walked around salivating with a desire for soft lumps of toffee. Once I was so desperate I set about making some without a recipe, just melting and boiling up sugar with butter, and Silva lost her temper. She lifted the whole seething pan of it from the gas burner, carried it outside and tipped it all out on the ground, shouting at me that it was bad for me, bad for the baby, a waste of gas, a waste of sugar, I had ruined the pan. Not even then did I do more than protest I hadn’t meant any harm. Actually I had already made up my mind to get Ron to bring me as much toffee as I could ever want. Silva need never know.
After that she wrote down her rules for my diet. She made a timetable with my hours all set out, for domestic tasks, periods of rest, gentle exercise. I wanted to laugh. She was rationing my knitting to an hour a day because, she said, pregnant women who knitted too much could produce confused babies. I went along with it, more or less. My days were all now so much the same, so uneventful and poised for this last period of waiting, that I didn’t care what I did. It hardly mattered that Silva wanted to shift me along from one activity to the next according to her notion of what was good for the baby.
In fact, it suited me to let her do the thinking. While time was of course stretching forwards, I was basking in a dream that it stood still. Insofar as I bothered to grasp that everything was about to change, I was enjoying not knowing quite what to expect. I never once thought of pain, for instance. I had the dreamiest notions about breastfeeding. I trusted myself to deal with these things naturally, when the time came. It was as much as I could do, day by day, to heft around this massive body of mine and make sense of the idea that all it was, for the time being, was a vault for the round bulk of baby pushing harder and harder against its walls.
Still, eventually I said I should find a doctor and make arrangements. Silva was reluctant at first. I don’t think she wanted me to hear any advice that might compete with hers, or get the idea that anyone but she was managing my pregnancy. So, more for vigilance than support, she came with me.
I stood no chance of making it up the slope through the pine trees, so very early one morning Ron took us in the boat to the other side of the river where he picked up the catering crew. Silva and I walked to the service station and waited there for a bus. We were in the centre of Inverness before half-past six. It was a blowy, colourless morning, and the pavement at the bus station where we stepped off was dark and cold in the long, early shadow cast by high buildings; seagulls squabbled over discarded food wrappers blowing along the gutter. The air was brackish with the exhaust fumes of arriving and departing buses, and already the city was noisy with traffic. We hung around until the bus station coffee stall opened at seven o’clock, and we bought muffins and tea. There wasn’t a proper seat in the place, just a ledge, and the ground was littered with cigarette ends and was dark with the stains of drink and dropped food and urine. My back ached and I kept yawning. The tea was both weak and bitter, and I said I felt sick and wished I was still in bed.
Silva told me to shut up. It wasn’t unusual for her to say that kind of thing, but away from the cabin it sounded harsh and different, a way of being spoken to that I should not have had to get used to. Still, I didn’t let it bother me. I remember gazing at her profile as she swallowed her tea and thinking how thin her cheeks were, how much more in need of a doctor she looked than I did. I took her hand and whispered my thanks to her for bringing me. And then, although it hadn’t crossed my mind before, I told her that she would be the first to hold the baby. She turned with a gasp. Then she squeezed my hand and smiled, a shining smile full of delight that I had never seen on her face before and that revealed, perhaps, her delight in having me confirm something she had already decided.
We waited until nearly eight o’clock and then caught a bus to the surgery, which opened at half-past. Of course, we had had no idea how to find a doctor in Inverness, so Ron had done an Internet search for us and printed out details of the largest surgery in the city. It wasn’t in the centre, but it had ten doctors as well as nurses and mid-wives and other staff, and I hoped it would be busy and impersonal, too system-bound to probe into my circumstances. I didn’t want to be treated as a person, just as a container that might need technical help to empty it of its load of baby.
I was glad to see that the building was modern and low, an austere, small institution, its entrance doors plastered with notices. Inside, we joined the queue at the receptionist’s window. When my turn came, there were several people behind me and wit
hin earshot. Silva kept turning and glaring at them.
“Yes?”
I opened my mouth and stalled. The receptionist had begun writing and I didn’t like to speak to the top of her head.
“Hello, yes?” She looked up with a micro-smile, no more than a twitch of the mouth.
“Sorry, yes, hello…I’ve just moved here,” I said. “I wonder if I – ”
“You want to register,” she said, rolling herself a few feet back on her office chair and reaching into a filing cabinet. “Both of you?”
“No! Not me,” Silva said. “Only her.”
“Do you want the forms in English? We’ve got them in other languages,” she said, rolling back.
“I’m just having a baby,” I blurted. “I don’t need a doctor for anything else. I’m just having a baby.”
The receptionist sat up higher in her chair and looked at my belly, nodded, then swung herself over to another filing cabinet.
“You want Maternity Services. Here’s the antenatal questionnaire as well. We’ll need details of your previous GP. Once you’ve registered, we book you in for an assessment with the community midwife. Antenatal clinic’s Tuesday morning, you need to attend weekly from thirty-five weeks. Postcode?”
“Postcode? Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Sorry.”
“What’s your address? You have to be resident within the practice area.”
“Oh, yes. I mean, we’re just moving in. I don’t have it on me.”
I had thought up an address, but suddenly I didn’t dare give it. I felt certain this woman had an encyclopedic memory of Inverness and knew the sound of every doorbell in every street.
Silva pushed forwards and pulled at my arm. “Come on, we don’t need this!” she said fiercely. “Let’s go, come on!”