by Morag Joss
Rhona stepped forwards. As this was the final bridge talk, she said, she was sure the group would want to take this opportunity to join her in thanking Mr Sturrock. A thin, clacking round of applause rose and died. One by one the three shook Rhona’s and Mr Sturrock’s hands and then one another’s, and they drifted away, pulling off their hard hats and depositing them on the ground at Rhona’s feet. Colin lingered. It was four weeks since his tribute to the victims and his dead wife. Since then, he had been quieter than ever. He looked as if he might have wanted to speak, but instead nodded to Ron and turned away.
Rhona was applying something glittery to her lips and shaking out her hair. She grinned at Ron, who knew what was about to happen; she’d let him in on it two weeks ago, apologizing that she couldn’t include him, too.
“And now, John,” she said playfully, turning to Mr Sturrock. “I am spiriting you away. I’m taking you for lunch at the Royal Highland Hotel. I hope you’re hungry?”
“What? Steady on, now. Lunch? The Royal Highland?” Sturrock said.
“It’s on us. Just a wee thank-you from Forward Voice PR.” She beamed. “As I shall put in my evaluation, your talks have helped us deliver a key campaign objective, rolling out the message to our community stakeholders.”
He stared at her. “Fuck me. I can’t just go off having lunch. I need to get back over the other side.” He turned to Ron. “You need to get back over yourself, eh?”
“I’ll be here when you’re ready,” Ron said, smiling.
“It’s all arranged,” Rhona said. “Our managing director Malcolm’s going to join us, and so is Mrs Sturrock, so there you go. Table’s booked. See you later, Ron. Thanks a lot for waiting.”
Mr Sturrock was now pleasantly bewildered. “Christ, you in on it, too?” he said to Ron. “Well, thanks a bunch, son.”
After they left, Ron picked up the hats and packed them in the boat, then walked over to get his own lunch at the service station. There were at least two hours to kill, and when he caught sight of Colin there, hunched at the same table as last time, for a moment he considered slipping away. But Colin looked up and saw him, so he bought sandwiches and tea and joined him at the table. From Colin’s face, it was obvious there was no right thing Ron could say, but it wasn’t possible to say nothing at all.
“So. That’s the last of the bridge walks. That’s it, now,” he offered, hoping Colin would pick up on the idea of their finality. What else could the man do? It was the last; there was nothing more to be said or done. Ron knew he was being lazy about Colin’s suffering, but he couldn’t enter into it. He didn’t really like him. While Colin certainly had ample cause to suffer, Ron suspected he was in any case inclined to self-pity.
“If you’re about to say something about moving on, don’t bother,” Colin said. He pulled his pudgy fingers across his face before he spoke again. “That woman with her fucking photos.”
Ron shrugged. “Yeah, sorry, mate. It’s still tough going, is it?”
“Her, everybody. People at work. The number of people that say it. Moving on. They say maybe it’s a blessing I didn’t know her that long, like that makes it better.”
“Aren’t they just trying to help?”
“They think I should be getting over it. Some people tell me I’m lucky, I should be glad I wasn’t in the car with her.”
He blew his nose into a rag of used paper handkerchief with an embarrassing, piteous honk that blasted little wisps of tissue across his chin and cheeks.
“So, anyway, that’s the last of the bridge walks,” Ron said. “No more trailing up and down from Huddersfield. You’ll be getting your weekends back, a bit of time to yourself. Any plans?”
Colin glared at him. “I’ll still be coming. Why would I not still come? She’s still here.”
“Oh. OK. Sorry, I didn’t mean – ”
“You know the worst thing people say? They say I should be glad we weren’t married long enough to have kids. Because imagine what that’d be like, they’d have lost their mother and I’d be left to cope on my own.”
Ron knew how this line of thinking went: grief for loss of what you did have, beside grief for loss of what you did not but might have had, is a lesser grief. He also knew this thinking for what it was, the well-meaning, ill-contrived and fatuous condolence of outsiders, people uninitiated in loss.
“It’s not like that,” he says.
“No,” Colin says, his voice faltering. “They don’t know how stupid it is. They don’t know how cruel.”
“They don’t mean to be cruel. Nobody understands what it’s like to lose somebody until it happens to them.”
“I don’t mean that,” Colin said. Then his face collapsed and his shoulders started to shudder. The used tissue went up to his eyes, but huge, splattery tears were already dropping on the front of his clothes. Ron watched them roll like raindrops down his barrel chest. “I mean don’t they think I’d be glad if there was a kid? Don’t they think I’d want to bring it up? I’d do it now if I could, I’d do it right, by both of them. I wish she knew that. I wish we’d had the kid. But we didn’t, and now it’s too late.”
“The kid?” Ron says. “You mean you lost one, you lost a baby? I’m really sorry. That’s really tough.”
Colin nodded and cried noisily into his hands. “I never thought I’d want them both so much. They’ve both gone and it’s my fault. Nobody knows. Nobody knows.”
“It’s not your fault, mate. Listen, it happens. Miscarriages happen. Nobody’s to blame.” Ron now wanted to offer comfort to this large, off-putting man, but his words were having no effect. “Here,” he said, pushing Colin’s mug towards him. “Here, go on, take a swig of that. You need to calm down.”
To his surprise, Colin meekly swallowed some tea, then took another mouthful.
“No point falling apart, is there,” Ron said. “Doesn’t get you anywhere.”
“Sorry. Gets to me, that’s all.” Colin drew a hand over his face.
“Nobody’s to blame,” Ron said again. “Miscarriages aren’t anybody’s fault.”
Colin drank more of his tea in silence. After a while, he said in a flat voice, “She was pregnant. I didn’t tell the police. Nobody knew but me.”
“Why not? Why make a secret of it?”
Colin let out a massive sigh. “I felt guilty. Ashamed. Too ashamed to say.”
Ron was confused. “I’m telling you, a miscarriage isn’t anybody’s fault, mate.”
Colin sighed again and took a deep breath. “I’m trying to tell you. There wasn’t a miscarriage. She was pregnant. What happened, see, I told her to get rid of it. The day before she died I told her she couldn’t have a kid and me as well, I said I’d leave.”
Ron stared at him. Colin’s face was pulpy and unwell-looking; his eyes had an off-centre, uneven way of blinking. It occurred to Ron that remorse was, literally, a sickness. Colin was so sick, so unbalanced by it, he looked in danger of falling apart.
“She was my wife. She was going to be the mother of my kid, and I said that to her. I can’t believe I said that to her,” Colin said. “And now there is not one single reason I don’t want that kid. I want them both, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Ron said quietly, “Do you have a photo of her?”
“No. To be honest, I can’t stand to see her face. Only had a few pictures, anyway.” Colin tapped his head. “She’s in my mind. I see her face in my mind. But only here, I only see her when I come here. She hated Huddersfield, she didn’t like the house. I didn’t really listen. I should’ve done a lot of things different.”
Ron let his breath out slowly. “We could all say that, mate.”
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Forty-Seven
I think a lot about Col, lying here. Not any more in the panicky, guilty way of a few months ago, but with a strand of regret I follow right back to the day I chose to disappear, a day I now perceive as marked as much by regret as by catastrophe. Not that Col will be feeling
that. I’m certain he is back sympathetically engrossed in the caregivers’ chat room, untroubled by ever having known me.
I think of our early days together, how to begin with I did not feel very much at all except embarrassment at living with a near stranger. But now I’m almost nostalgic for that early awkwardness: our misdirected attempts at endearments, my pursuit of some improved neatness in the arrangements of the house, his wordless, ritualized moves in bed. It touches me to remember the way every night he launched himself at me without speaking, his efforts to please, his mountainous heavings on and off. I forgive myself my mute acquiescence (I thought it sophisticated to have nothing to say at such times), which matched his lack of words. I can imagine the conversations we should have had, the conversations we lay so self-consciously not having afterwards, in the dark, but our silence strikes me now as more like generosity tongue-tied than disappointment throttling itself before it can cry out.
Anyway, it will surely happen one day that I’ll be called upon to give some account to my child of its father, and by then words will have come to me and I shall have them waiting, as if written down and placed in an envelope, sealed and put by. I do not have them ready at present, but it will be years before I need them. When the time comes I will know what to say, surely.
Ron comes into the cabin scraping his feet, and dumps a heap of damp wood by the stove. This is what he does every evening; after he’s tied up the boat he collects an armful of logs from the pile by the sawhorse he’s set up between the jetty and the cabin and trudges up with it and adds it to our store. He’ll make several more trips over the evening; against the thin cabin wall, on either side of the stove, an inner wall of logs is building up. It is shoulder-high already and rising in an uneven wave, and Silva keeps telling him not to make it much higher as we can’t stand on chairs to get logs down every time we need to stoke the fire.
“How are you doing today?” he asks me routinely, as he starts to stack the new batch of logs.
Silva appears from the kitchen with a knife in her hand. “She got too tired,” she answers for me. It so happens she is wrong; I was out of doors and out of her sight for over an hour, that’s all that too tired means. But I don’t contradict her, I just smile.
“I’m fine,” I tell him. “I went for a nice long stroll. I sat down and rested every five minutes,” I add, before Silva can lecture me again about drawing blood away from the baby.
She gives a snort. “Look at the colour of her, she’s white like a sheet of paper. Ugh, don’t put that one on, it’s filthy. Don’t make it any higher there, the whole thing will fall over.” She returns to the kitchen, and Ron continues to stack.
When I’m resting here and watching him, I like to conjure animal faces out of the rings and whorls of the newly sawn log ends he puts in place: one looks like an owl, another is a baboon, yet another is a cat wearing spectacles. When this wall’s complete, Ron intends to start on the adjoining wall, and once that’s done he’ll replenish our stocks as they go down. Not only will we have good, dry fuel all the time, he says, but double wooden walls provide excellent insulation. It’s what they do in Norway, and there’s not much you can teach a Norwegian about insulation. I’m sure this is true, but of course as the wall goes up our room grows smaller. You might even say it’s closing in on us; it does smell blocked and earthy, with an end-of-year whiff that carries a note of decay. And the new wall is full of trapped, trembling insects. Whenever I lift a log to put on the stove, it comes away from the pile with a gauzy trail of tearing spider webs, gritty with rotting bark and mould and sawdust. Silva says mice will move in, and Ron laughs and says even mice need to live somewhere, and at least the wood will stay dry enough to burn.
“So you are all right?” he asks, as he’s putting the last logs in place.
“Yes, I’m fine. I’m so lazy, I’m too heavy to do anything much,” I say.
“He was there again today, that bloke from Huddersfield. Colin. The bloke whose wife died.”
I pick up my knitting from the floor and fiddle with it. “How is he? Did he speak to you?”
“He says he’s going to keep coming. Every weekend.”
“What’s the point in that now the walks are finished? He should stay away.”
“There’s a point in it for him. They still haven’t found her. Have you ever been to Huddersfield?”
“No, never.” I haul myself up till I’m sitting on the sofa bed, and I start on a row of knitting. “If I go for it, I think I could get this sleeve finished by bedtime.”
“Annabel, where is it you’re from?” Ron asks. He is breaking the rule. No matter that the rule is unstated, it has held us together for months. The rule is that the three of us ended up here by ways and means we don’t have to explain. Ron knows that.
“What does it matter?” I say. “I don’t ask you questions like that. I don’t have the right. There’s no need for me to know. And what about her?” I nod towards the kitchen, where the radio is blaring music. “Are you going to start asking her that kind of question? She’ll run a mile. You shouldn’t – ”
Just then Silva walks in again, carrying a plate of bread. She looks tired in a way only a much older person should look. I can’t be sure what she heard or didn’t hear. She waits for me to finish what I was saying.
“You shouldn’t stack the logs so high. Silva’s right.” I put the knitting aside and get up. “I need to stretch my legs,” I tell them, and leave.
It’s too cold to stay out without another sweater, and in fact I am too tired to walk far. I go down to the jetty and look back at the cabin, its windows glowing with firelight, squares of soft yellow in the grainy, grey dusk. The baby’s weight makes me breathless. All I want is to go back inside, all I want is to carry on living by the rules that have served us well enough, but what awaits me in the yellow light is altered now. The door opens and Ron steps out. I turn away and stare at the river, listening to his footsteps on the shingle coming nearer and then the hard clump as he walks along the jetty and stands next to me. I am too angry to say anything.
He sighs, lifts a hand and strokes my hair. He is crying.
“He wants you back” is all he says before he unties the boat and climbs in, starts the motor and moves off into the tide flowing down towards the bridge. I wait until I’m shivering before I go back to the cabin. Silva is coming out of the kitchen with three plates, and when I tell her Ron has left she thinks it is because she spoke sharply to him about the logs. She is peeved and difficult all evening. In truth she exhausts me. Later I go to bed, and although the baby kicks and kicks I fall asleep. I’m glad I’m too tired to dwell on the strange truth that now that Ron may know who I am, I feel more unknown than ever.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Forty-Eight
She lies there. She lies there breathing with her mouth open while the stove burns low and the knitting comes apart in her hands, because her hands feel nothing, not the metal knitting needles that are hot from the fire or the stitches slipping off past her fat finger ends or the unravelling wool settling over the creases at her wrist. The hands don’t move. The fingers look boneless, like stuffed tubes, her nails are sunk into the tips like flat baby buttons pushed into dough. She’s on her back like a sleeping sow, her breath whistling in her throat, eyelashes twitching on her pink face. Her chest moves up and down, her breasts lift and collapse over her bulging stomach. Her giant bare feet look too lumpy to walk on. They still bear semicircular ridges across the fronts where the swollen flesh has bulged from her over-tight shoes, which lie splayed and distorted on the floor beside her.
I watch her for more than an hour.
“I told you you were too tired,” I say in a loud voice, and I go to the table and make a noise clearing our plates and taking them to the kitchen. Her phone is also on the table and I clear that away to the kitchen, too. I have to do everything. Every evening I check that it’s charged and working. She can’t be trusted to.
When I come
back she is awake and sitting up with the knitting in her lap, trying to push her feet into her shoes.
“You’ll split them,” I tell her. “You can’t get them on any more. They don’t fit.”
“I know they don’t,” she says calmly. “But it’s not worth getting new ones now. They’ll fit me again as soon as the baby’s born.” She smoothes a hand over her belly and picks up the knitting, frowning at it.
“Oh dear, you shouldn’t have let me fall asleep,” she says, yawning, picking at the yarn with the needles. “Look at this mess.”
“Don’t blame me,” I say. “I told you you were too tired.”
She pauses with the knitting and looks at me, and then gets up, sighing. “I’m not blaming you, Silva. I’m going to bed.”
“I suppose I’ll clear up, then,” I say.
Another sigh. “I’m happy to do it in the morning, but I’m very tired now. Please leave everything. I’ll do it in the morning.”
“Leave everything dirty all night? No. That’s not how I am. You can go to bed if you like.”
“Just leave it, Silva, it won’t matter. I’ll do it in the morning. Good night.”
She shambles off without another word, bent over with her hands on the small of her back, her fat feet half out of her shoes. She doesn’t walk like that when Ron is here. I want to tell her I know about them. Does she think I’m stupid? I see their faces, I know they whisper away together. I heard them at it this evening, and when I appeared she pretended she was talking about the logs. I want to tell her Ron is as much mine for the taking as hers, I could have him if I chose to. Then it would be me he gives whatever I ask for on a plate, it would be me he’s ready to drop everything for, take anywhere I want. She has everything, and she deserves nothing.