Across the Bridge

by Morag Joss

  “Silva, wait. Just a minute,” I said. I smiled at the receptionist. “Sorry.”

  Silva pushed her face to the window. “She’ll come back another day. She has many weeks still, maybe eight, nine. It’s not urgent.”

  The receptionist ignored her and handed me several sheets of paper through the window. “If you want to see a doctor today you’ll need to wait till the end of surgery. First you need to fill in the new patient registration form, the patient questionnaire, and also the antenatal questionnaire. We’ll also need your medical card, passport or other photo ID, proof of address, and contact details of your previous medical practitioner.”

  She looked past me to the next person in the queue. “Yes?”

  Silva steered me out and strode off. She kept walking until we were several streets away and slowed only as we reached a park with paths and litter bins and a tatty children’s playground. She marched through the gates and sat down on a bench, and I followed, exhausted and sweating. She pulled the papers from my hands and sifted through them.

  “Questions, so many! For one baby! Why?”

  I pulled the papers back and began to read them. I could give a false name and address. I could make up a name for my previous doctor. I could say I had lost my medical card and leave my National Insurance number blank. They might not follow those up straight away.

  But the questions became more nosy, more dangerous. How would I rate my feelings about my pregnancy from one to five, extremely negative to highly positive? Did I live with a partner? How many adults, smokers and non-smokers, were living at my address, and were any unemployed? Were there domestic pets or other animals at the premises? I could give false answers to all of them, too, but if I turned up every Tuesday at an antenatal clinic, there would be more and more questions. Soon I would make a mistake or give something away. If I registered, but didn’t go to the clinic, they would make enquiries and find out I had lied. And once they knew I wasn’t Annabel, what else would they uncover? The newspapers had said nothing about the missing woman tourist being pregnant, but that didn’t mean Col hadn’t told the police that I was.

  Col. I had a sudden recollection of him as I had last seen him, his stricken face as he turned away from the wrecked bridge. But I could not undo what I had done.

  “They want to know everything,” I said. “If I don’t tell them they’ll find out anyway.”

  Silva’s face was white. “You shouldn’t go back there,” she said. “If you do, when the baby’s born they’ll take it away. It was a stupid idea to come.”

  “What am I supposed to do when I go into labour? I can’t have the baby all on my own. What if something goes wrong?”

  Silva stood up and started walking. “You just have to go to hospital. Ron will take us. It will be fine.”

  I was surprised at how relaxed she was about it.

  “You mean just turn up?” I said. “They’ll think that’s very odd, they’ll ask me all sorts of questions. They’ll interfere.”

  “So? Have you done a crime, to have a baby? No. They will look after you. Then afterwards we’ll leave with the baby, they can’t stop us.”

  “And you’ll come with me?”

  “Sure, of course! Ron will take us in the boat, then the Land Rover. Then after, he comes again to pick us up in the Land Rover. Four of us!”

  She looked almost happy.

  “Then everything can get back to normal,” I said. “Then we’ll decide what to do next.”

  On the way back she was silent. Just before we got off the bus, she turned to me and said, “I’m going to look after you.”

  ∨ Across the Bridge ∧

  Forty-Four

  There’s that rock in the river you used to watch, the one you only see at the ebb tide, a long, low, shining lump of black. The geese and gulls land and feed around it, but no bird nests there, because once a day the water swirls over and covers it again and the birds fly off. Between it and the forest bank of the river, there are other, smaller rocks in the water, some flat and some jagged, set in a loose tumble as if they landed there from a prehistoric avalanche. For all I know, they did. The water collects and turns all around them, and maybe it’s also because of the rocks that the river flows in strongly just there and has worn a curve in the bank. Or maybe it’s because the ground in that particular place is so soft to begin with, formed of nothing but disintegrating acid shreds of forest soil that are easily licked out from the pine roots by the tongue of the tide. Either way, the water has washed the soil away and borne it down to the riverbed, and it has hollowed out a tiny bay in the bank right into the base of the trees, leaving their roots under a thin mortar of salty dried mud. They look greyish and gappy, like old teeth. And other stones, dragged in from the sea on the high winter currents and dropped there, are daily pulled and rolled up the beach by the methodical tide into an arrangement of ridges, the boulders lodged farthest up, a scree of stones you can walk on, and little pebbles and broken seashells shirring to and fro at the water’s edge.

  Here is where I sit most often to think about you, close in by the trees in the deepest part of the curve and hidden from Ron or Annabel, who might just be (though seldom are) strolling along the river from the bridge or from the cabin. Here is where I began, without knowing that was what I was doing, to build.

  One day I saw two stones side by side not far from where I sat, and it so happened I noticed them in a spell of numbness when I was neither talking aloud to you, nor crying. In fact I was caught off guard, when I was not thinking of anything at all. Of these two stones, one was large and dark and squarish and had a ribbon of quartz running through it. The other was pale and much smaller, and its rounded surface sparkled with dots of mica. It was touching the other one in a way that made me think of a person whose forehead was resting against the chest of someone bigger. They leaned towards each other, joined and motionless, arrested in the moment just before they would embrace. That was the remarkable thing, that their absolute stillness held within it an intimation of a movement yet to happen. Father and child. I moved closer, my eyes travelling across every line and plane, gauging the shape of the empty space around them, measuring the distance between. And as I gazed at the point where the two stones tilted and met – the touching of forehead to chest – I felt the world shrink around me. This was surprising, because what I was looking at were, after all, lumps of stone.

  Yet I wanted them kept exactly this way, leaning together, and I wanted to be able to find them again the next time I came. So I got up and gathered together a lot of the biggest stones I could lift and I set them, one by one, in a wide circle around my stones (and they were certainly, after my concentrated attention to them, mine, as if I had sculpted every angle myself). Then I saw that one of the large stones I’d placed in the circle was crusted with dead strands of waterweed, blackened and brittle from the sun. This displeased me. I carried it down to the river and cleaned it and set it back in its place.

  Now inside their circle, my pair of stones looked diminished and without distinction. So I began clearing the space between them and the circle, lifting away pebbles and digging my stones in with my hands to fix them precisely, so elaborating, without changing it, their relationship to each other. My mind was absolutely clear about how these two figures should look. Yes, they were now figures. When I had finished, they stood proud on a flat bed of shingle within the low ring of stones.

  After that, every time I came there I set to work, adding a few more stones to the circle. To protect the figures, I told myself. I went up and down finding shards of slate and flat stones to keep the ring stable as it grew, then I added bulky stones again, for height. I made mistakes and learned as I went. As the circle rose up around the figures, there were collapses to deal with; I had to build, dismantle and rebuild. I needed to use smaller and smaller stones as it went higher, and I don’t know why I didn’t abandon the whole thing when it became irksome to go searching for just the right stone to keep going. Instead, feeling
very clever, I started to bring Ron’s hammers with me so I could break stones to the size I wanted. Nor did I know, when I loved the sight of my father-and-child stones, why I went on with a task that was going to conceal them from me. Because by then I had recognized that the ring of stones was a wall going up around my beloved ones.

  After a few weeks, and almost imperceptibly at first, the wall began to incline inwards upon itself. At last I could see what was happening. With much trial and error, and slow and careful chipping, I fashioned long pieces of stone and slate and devised a way of laying them so they overlapped and evolved, finally, into a dome-like roof over the figures underneath. I had built a tomb.

  I stayed away for a while after that, afraid that I would be too restless to let it alone, afraid I might take the whole thing down. But I drifted back, because now that you have a memorial, there are repairs to attend to, most days. I like to sit under the trees, to sit near you, the figures of you, invisible but close by and in the shadow of the trees. I like to be here at the time of the incoming current and watch the black rock disappear under the river until there is nothing to see except a patch of silver on the surface, strangely glassy and unrippled amid the running waters of the flood tide.

  ∨ Across the Bridge ∧

  Forty-Five

  On the evening after the visit to the doctor in Inverness, Silva was full of a hard, snappy energy. Only six weeks to go, and was she the only one who was concerned? Six weeks! Her impatience, her air of unspoken superiority (what did either of them know about childbirth?) made Ron feel he had been lackadaisical in some way, while Annabel was simply worn out. While she dozed and half-listened, he watched, startled, as Silva talked, words flying from her mouth, about the new plans they now had to make. Though in fact she had made them already.

  Annabel handed over her mobile phone, not used since the first night she’d turned up at the trailer. The next day Ron went after work to Inverness and bought a new charger for it, and that evening when it was working again Silva entered her own and Ron’s numbers and explained once more how the system was going to work.

  “We have phones switched on all the time, all day, OK? You don’t go anywhere without phone, not even two minutes to the jetty,” she told Annabel. “You’re so heavy now, and what do you do if you fall? You take your phone in your pocket everywhere. Then, so, if I am along the river and there is a problem, if the pains come, straight away first you call me. Straight away, OK? Me first.”

  Annabel smiled and nodded from the sofa bed where she lay every evening now, her bare feet on two pillows. By the end of the day her ankles were swollen and her shoes tight.

  “Then, if the pains are coming, I call you,” Silva said to Ron. “So same for you, you keep your phone on. I call you and straight away you come to us here, straight in the boat. You bring her in the boat to the bridge, then we take her up to the Land Rover and we all go to hospital.”

  Ron nodded, too. Earlier that day, on Silva’s orders, he had warned Mr Sturrock he might need to take some hours off at short notice.

  “Or I might not, it depends,” he’d said, not sure what mood Mr Sturrock was in. “I’m on standby. To take a…someone to hospital. She’s having a baby soon.”

  “Fuck’s sake. You having a wean? Congratulations in order, eh?” Mr Sturrock had said.

  Immediately Ron not only corrected him but had an elaborate lie ready. No, he wasn’t the father, in fact he hardly knew her, she was the partner of a friend of his. She wasn’t due until the middle of October, but the friend was working on the rigs, putting in all the hours right through till the end of September, and they’d just moved and she had no family here. The friend could get off the rig in under three hours if the baby came early, but his partner was nervous. Ron was the backup to take her to hospital in case he was delayed. Almost certainly wouldn’t be. It was just for her peace of mind.

  Mr Sturrock had grumbled a little, then told him to inform the office if he had to go off-site and to keep his time sheet straight – oh, and be grateful he worked for a fool ready to let him away at the drop of a hat to be a fucking ambulance service.

  Afterwards Ron wondered why he had lied at all, never mind so extravagantly. There had been no need to pretend that the mother was almost a stranger, he could have said that she and the baby were close to him without going into the peculiarity of their arrangement. Why, when every part of him wished he could be the child’s father, was he so afraid that someone might suppose he was? Because he didn’t deserve to be, that was it. What he deserved was what he most dreaded, to be found out for what he was instead: a man who had killed children. If that happened, Mr Sturrock – everybody – would turn on him, outraged that he was trying to pass himself off as fit to take care of anyone ever again. What he deserved was to feel like a monster for the rest of his life.

  He and Annabel continued to bow under Silva’s dictatorship. It was the price they paid to have her reanimated and back with them. It was lovely, they said to each other privately, to see her looking forward so much to the baby. A new life is a healing thing.

  One day at low tide Silva untied the partly submerged white boat from the jetty and dragged it up onto the shore. Ron hadn’t looked at it in months, but now she wanted it fixed up.

  “Suppose the baby starts coming and we can’t get hold of you?” she said.

  She bailed out the rainwater and tipped the boat over, and Ron cleaned off enough of the clinging green weed to inspect the hull. It was sound, but the boat was barely eight feet long and made of a light plastic. A rowlock was hanging loose, and one of the oars was split at the handle end; although the paddle was in one piece, it would be difficult to use.

  “We can mend it. Or we’ll get another one,” Silva decreed.

  Ron laughed and chucked the broken oar on the ground. It would make a few sticks of kindling. “You can’t go out in a thing that size, not even with two oars,” he told her. “It’s going nowhere, not without an outboard. Look at it. It’d be just about all right on a duck pond.”

  “But someone here before us must have gone out in it. Fishing, maybe.”

  Ron shrugged. “Probably brought it down here and realized it was useless in more than a breath of wind. Anyway, look at your arms. You couldn’t row three feet with Annabel on board. You’d never make it down to the bridge.”

  “I can row a boat all right,” Silva said. “I want it ready, just in case.”

  He shook his head. “You wouldn’t be safe,” he said, and started back to the cabin, away from her objections. “There’s no need, anyway,” he said. “I’ll be straight up in the launch when the time comes. It’s all arranged.”

  In September, the weather suddenly turned colder. The cabin floors were damp all the time, and Ron began to wonder how he could put in a decent layer of insulation that wouldn’t involve hours of disruption and threaten Annabel’s calm. He thought carefully about her calm, and how to keep her cheerful. Lately, though she hadn’t the will to withstand Silva, she was often tetchy with her. She complained of being bossed about, and being uncomfortable and bored. Silva was, by turns, impatient and morose, and she was also constantly watchful, like an investor with a stake in a dumb but valuable animal. Ron was struck by the simplicity of his function in it all, which was to move between the two women as a force dedicated to both of them equally, no matter how wayward or unaccountable either of them became.

  Draughts whistled in through the windows and walls, and they had to keep the stove alight all day. He set to work on getting in a log supply for the months to come, but pine wood burned up fast, and he was having to go farther and farther into the forest to find dead trunks he could drag back for cutting. But it occurred to him over and over that secretly he was delighted all these obstacles had presented themselves, otherwise where else would he be now, what would he be doing?

  More and more was being required of him, and it was exhausting, but also exhilarating. He loved how the land was sodden and chill and how the sky low
ered; he hoped for a dramatic, freezing winter. All day long he walked around trying to keep his gratitude hidden.

  ∨ Across the Bridge ∧

  Forty-Six

  The cranes and concrete pourers were at work; dull cranking sounds vibrated around the small group assembled on the jetty. Even after several months, the bridge talk was still an ordeal in public speaking for Mr Sturrock. He could not look at even familiar faces as if he had seen them before; he stared over his audience’s heads for fear of making eye contact, and called above the noise.

  “As you can see, the last segment has been brought along the new roadbed and the crane will lift it into position within the next forty-eight hours. This represents” – a gull streaked past him, shrieking – “a significant achievement, and not a little way ahead of schedule. Thank you for your attention, ladies and gentlemen,” he added with a formal smile as he folded his speech back into his pocket.

  The tiny group nodded. They had been expecting all this, because they had been on several bridge walks already. This was the very last one, and numbers had tailed off to just three; the bridge would be reopening in a few weeks. Ron recognized every face, and so did Rhona and Mr Sturrock. Two of the three were a couple whose interest had become for some reason obsessive. Each time they made a day of it: after the tour they would drive up to Netherloch for lunch and in the afternoon walk through the forest to the top of the Netherloch Falls. There they would take photographs of the river snaking from the far end of the loch and widening into the distance as far as the bridge, and on the next bridge walk, after Mr Sturrock had finished, they would pass the new pictures around in a way that seemed to Ron strangely agitated and boastful, as if the gap between the broken bridge ends were being closed under their personal supervision. Today as usual the woman produced some new photographs, but apart from himself, Mr Sturrock and Rhona (who all saw the bridge every day), there was only Colin, the third member of the audience, to show them to. He took them reluctantly. The woman would not permit his indifference. She pointed out this and that detail, eager for him to show more pleasure. Not that she didn’t understand that the restored bridge was no compensation for his loss, of course not, but still, a new bridge. That was something positive, wasn’t it, something that would help everybody move on? Colin’s big face worked away with an expression of polite interest. Handing back the last of the photographs, he sighed.