by Morag Joss
“Let me see! Oh, let me see! Is it all right?” she cries. “Let me see! Give it to me! What is it?”
“I have to wrap him up,” I tell her. “He’s shivering. It’s a boy.”
And to you I whisper – though there is no need to whisper, for she does not understand a word – that we have a son.
I pull a towel and a cardigan from her bag and wrap the baby up and lay him on the ground. She falls back, exhausted. I wait until the cord stops pulsating, and then I cut it using the string and scissors I brought. The child is now separate from her.
“Please. Please let me have him,” she croaks. But before I can answer she cries out and gasps. “Oh, God! Oh God, what’s happening? I’m bleeding! Help me, I’m bleeding! What’s happening?”
Sure enough, blood is pouring from her, along with ropes of steaming membrane.
“It’s the afterbirth,” I tell her. “Push.” She obeys, still moaning to be given the child, and eventually the flabby, dark, veined sac is delivered. She tries to wriggle away from it, leaving a heap of shining pulp and a slippery trail behind her on the stones. The air is thick with the smell of blood.
“Give him to me, please,” she weeps. She is shuddering with cold and shock. “Let me have him.”
I did not expect this to be the hardest part of all. I imagined myself with a lot to say. How jealous I was that she was carrying her child after mine was lost, that I didn’t know what I would do when it was born and she took it away, when she left me to be with Ron and the child for ever. That I dreamed of stealing it. That for a while stealing it was all I dreamed of.
Then how I was shown that it would not be stealing, but only taking what is mine. I thought I had those words ready, too. How I forgive you for the existence of this child, but I will never forgive her, how unthinkable it is that she should have it to love and keep for herself when she killed the child who was mine and yours. I was going to tell her how I promise every day to come back to you, that I have stayed alive just so that I can take this newborn baby with me out onto the black rock and wait there until the tide rises and carries us both back to you. I want to tell her that she is going to watch her child disappear under the river, and when she does she ought to remember that that is what she did to my Anna. She is going to know my sorrow.
My love, I know you are with Anna, waiting for me and the baby boy, and when the flow tide sweeps over the rock, we won’t struggle. I shall let it bear us down to the riverbed, and we shall all be together.
But when I try to say any of this, the words sheer off and crumble against my chattering teeth and I feel myself getting dizzy, falling and breaking apart. It’s like demolishing a wall and discovering I also am the wall. Every blow I inflict I also take. I’m made of it, I’m a part of it. I get to my feet and walk away towards the river with the little thing in my arms, taking Annabel’s bag with me. The screams that follow me now are more agonized and urgent even than the sounds she made when he was forcing her body to open and expel him, and now his fists beat the air and from his mouth come wave upon wave of a bleating cry that answers his mother’s.
All this while the river has been rising and the boat is now afloat. I wade in, place him on the bottom, and push off into the current. The rock is almost half under the water, so I will be able to climb onto it. But it will be difficult, as there is nowhere to attach the boat. I bring it alongside and wedge the prow in one of the rock’s jutting angles. But it won’t stay there long. I have to find a place where I can grab hold and get out of the boat and onto the rock. I will need both hands, so I sling the bag over my shoulder and pull the child in under my clothes, against my bare chest, and bind him to me using a sweater from Annabel’s bag, tying him close with the sleeves. From the shore she is screaming at me to come back. I want her to be watching, but knowing that she is makes me feel sick and empty.
I use one oar to steady the boat as best as I can in the current, then I count to three, drop the oar and throw myself at the rock. I land on all fours and hang on until I am able, carefully, to move one foot, then a hand, then the other foot. I crawl forwards. It’s slippery, and I struggle to keep hold but not cling too close, lest I crush the child. I crawl to the middle of the rock and lie on my back for several minutes before sitting up and unwrapping him.
His head drops back on his flimsy neck, his eyes are closed. I feel his face with the back of my hand. It’s cold. I cradle his head and wail. I intended to take him with me when I drown, but now he’s dead, and his death pierces me to the heart. I clasp him to me, and from the riverbank Annabel screams again. Then he stirs, and before I know what I am doing I am weeping, and laughing and covering the top of his head with kisses. The little thing was asleep! He fell asleep against my breast, his face bloody and gluey with birth slime stuck fast to my skin. I wrap him up warm again and hold him close, and rock him back and forth. His mouth turns to my nipple, and he latches on and sucks. After a moment he tugs himself away from me, his mouth opens again and he screams. I hear Annabel’s voice calling back to him. I have failed him, for of course my breast is dry. I do not understand why it distresses me that I have nothing to give him. Just then a high wave hits the edge of the rock and rolls like a cold wet cloth over it, soaking my legs. I do not understand why I lift him clear, taking care to keep him dry.
Behind me there’s a scraping noise, and I turn just in time to see the tide nudge the prow of the little white boat clear of the rock. It clunks two or three times as it goes, then spins free and is borne away upriver. From the shore, Annabel pleads for her baby. Holding him tightly to me with one arm, I use my free hand to reach into my pocket for my phone. Another freezing wave slides over the rock, and he cries and cries for his mother while the wind cuts into my back.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Fifty-Five
Colin had called Ron and asked if they could meet up in the evening of the day the bridge reopened. He had something to show him. Something he was doing for his wife and the baby.
“What is it?” said Ron.
“Tell you when I see you,” Colin said. “It’s nothing spectacular. Just want to show somebody, if that’s OK.”
Ron agreed. He had no idea what, if anything, he might tell Colin about Annabel. I know a pregnant woman, that’s a coincidence, isn’t it? I know a pregnant woman, she turned up after the bridge fell down, maybe it’s your wife? Even supposing – supposing – Annabel was Colin’s wife, she must have good reasons to stay away from him. What right did Ron have to interfere? And what would be the point, when the body of Colin’s wife was probably a clean skeleton at the bottom of the river, the boneless embryo of Colin’s child long disintegrated? That was what Colin – and he – had to accept. There was nothing he could say about Annabel that would not do more harm than good.
He trudged down from the sleeper unit through the mud towards the jetty and the new walkway leading under the bridge. The construction site had been emptying for days and was now deserted and almost cleared; the casting sheds downriver had already been dismantled and removed, and massive criss-crossed ruts and divots of earth marked the departure of the heavy plant. Only a few huts remained, a dozen skips were filling up. The sleeper unit was due to be removed on Monday, and then Ron would be fending for himself again, bedding down in the back of the Land Rover, waiting for the baby’s birth. He was still needed for a while to run the boat, for inspectors checking the new sections of the bridge, and for journalists, but soon he would be gone himself. Where to, he had no idea. He could form no picture of a future for himself that did not include Annabel and the baby and, if necessary, he quite willingly supposed, Silva too.
The ground for the memorial garden, reached by the walkway under the bridge and stretching for an acre beyond it, had been pushed into a succession of improbable hollows and mounds and phoney undulations. In the moonlight, it lay bare, whimsical and miniaturized; stone walls only inches high curved around elliptical flower beds full of bark mulch, and a path of crazy paving
wound in and out, connecting places where the ground swelled randomly into small circles of cobbles. It ended in a large and still unpaved circle overlooking the river. Nothing was finished and nothing had been planted yet. The landscaping ended abruptly next to a padlocked and fenced enclosure full of upright saplings, their roots wrapped in sacking, and stacks of stone slabs and bags of sand. Ron turned and walked back the way he had come. He waited for Colin by the railings, where a flight of stone steps set into the wall led down to a small landing stage; it was intended that visitors would be able to travel to the garden by boat from Inverness.
The strobing headlamps of cars on the bridge above him hurt his eyes; below the railings, the night wind chopped the surface of the incoming tide. From this angle, almost under the bridge, he could barely see the service station across the river, but the place would be full. There was a reception going on there to mark the reopening. High sodium lights over its car park and petrol pumps cast an orange haze into the sky.
Colin appeared, hands in pockets, and greeted Ron without a smile. “Hiya. Something going on over there, all right. I thought there would’ve been people over here, too,” he said.
“Not much to see, yet,” Ron answered.
“No,” Colin said, looking round. “You can see it better on the website. Come on.”
Ron followed Colin back into the garden.
“Here,” Colin said. They were at one of the places where the path became a circle before leading out and away again around the curve of another artificial hillock. “Here’s where it’s going,” he said. “Right here. I’m getting a memorial bench. She’s going to have a memorial bench with her name on it. What about that?”
“That’s a great idea,” Ron said.
“Sustainable hardwood, three hundred pounds,” Colin said proudly. “Expensive item. They bolt them to the ground. Fifty for the plaque. And I’m sponsoring a rosebush for the baby, that’s another forty. Then fifty pounds a year after that for four years. All proceeds will go towards the upkeep of the garden.”
“And you’ll be able to come in the summer and sit here.”
“Yeah. Won’t bring them back, though.”
“But it’s a nice thing to do.”
There seemed little else to say after that. The sounds of the bridge reached them as a rushing noise, like approaching weather; the bare, unplanted earth and the briny estuary smelled of winter. They wandered back to the river and leaned on the railing. Ron wanted to get away, and he wanted to get Colin away, too. A vandal-proof bench surrounded by a furze of low-maintenance municipal shrubs; even with a wife’s name on it, just how was that ‘a nice thing to do’?
“Your wife. Suppose she, if she – ” Ron began, then hesitated. He nodded back towards the garden. “Never mind. It’s a very nice thing to do.”
Colin blinked and sucked in a deep breath. “Thanks, mate. Fancy a pint, if you’re not too busy?” he asked, with so much hope that Ron couldn’t refuse. They were on their way up to the Land Rover when Ron’s phone rang. It hadn’t rung for days.
“Silva? What’s the matter?” He listened for a moment. “Christ, no. Oh, Christ! Silva!” He ended the call and began running back down towards the jetty.
“Come on! Hurry up!” he shouted to Colin over his shoulder. “Come on!”
When they got to the boat, Ron set Colin at the prow with a torch. Then he turned the launch upriver towards the cabin, straight into the flow of the still incoming tide.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Fifty-Six
When I try to move, blood gushes from me. It’s hot and thick, and there is far, far too much of it. My eyes are streaming with tears, so I can hardly see her, but she’s sitting on the rock with my baby bundled to her, and she’s got her head tipped towards the sky as if she’s looking up at the bridge. Lights streak across it, white in one direction, red in the other. My throat is raw with screaming. I can see the white rowing boat out on the water bright in the moonlight, a little silver thing rocking in the black and silver river. Then I see a wave wash it loose from the rock, and now it is spinning away with the rising tide. Now my child is trapped. My child is screaming for me, but when I try to raise myself to stand up, my head swims and I fall back. My heart thumps all through my body, and there is another gush of blood. I scream again and roll myself over, and crawl down to the shore. The blood pours. Though I’m almost down on the ground, it tilts up, turns black, and hits my face.
I open my eyes and manage to raise my head and spit some of the freezing grit out of my mouth. I hear a boat, a boat coming nearer and nearer, with the tide. There’s a darting light on the water. I know the sound of Ron’s boat. I hear his voice and want to call back, but with every breath I feel dizzy, and he wouldn’t hear me above the engine noise. He’s shouting to Silva. The river is swirling under me now as I lie on the shore. Somehow I drag myself to my feet and try to take a step forwards. I scream and fall again, into deeper water.
The stinging cold steadies me, and I scream out again. Ron’s boat is on the far side of the rock now, and I can’t see it, but he is on the rock, crouching down to her. She’s sitting in a flow of water, and he is taking the bundle from her arms. Another wave breaks over the rock and pushes at them. Silva slides away. I can’t see Ron clearly any more. The boat’s engine surges wildly. I struggle to my feet again, ankle-deep in water now, but I slip in the mud and can’t get up. I scream out again, and there comes another surge of the engine, almost out of control, and then the boat appears from around the rock, making for the shore. Ron is standing on the rock, and he has got Silva to her feet somehow and is holding on to her. The boat’s engine stalls. Then it stops.
In the sudden silence, the light on the boat turns a giddy half circle as the tide catches the prow and spins the boat upriver. I watch it drift away from me, the light bobbing and fading. I glance back at the bare rock. A wave washes over it. Ron and Silva have gone. With the next wave, the rock will vanish under the tide.
Then the engine coughs and roars, and the boat makes a crazy turn into a heavy wave. The light beam sways across the river and onto the shore. I close my eyes. For several moments, everything is quiet but for the chug of the boat and the running river. Blood warms the water lapping between my legs. The boat engine stops. I can’t scream, and I can’t open my eyes. I do not believe I shall open them again. I hear the splash of slow, wading steps coming towards me. I hear my baby’s cry, and I hear Col’s voice, calling out my name in the dark.
EOF
Table of Contents
Front
Table of Contents