When Ron was first released, he discovered that prison had made him observant, as if he’d been reminded there, by its sudden absence, of the world’s surfeit of objects, its gross overabundance of things to look at. Not beautiful things. It wasn’t a case of seeing the world’s wonders anew or anything like that; rather, it was the opposite. Observation didn’t sharpen his faculties, it stupefied them. He was dazed by the quantity and variety, the massive, compacted volume of it all; he noticed everything but had no idea what was worth his notice. People’s faces and brick walls, town gutters and plowed fields, church towers and shop fronts, all claimed his attention equally. He couldn’t discriminate, nor could he locate in himself a particular attitude to any of it beyond disorientation, sometimes mild alarm. He surveyed the burgeoning, seething material of other people’s lives and very little moved him.
After a while, his alarm grew. He began to think there must be some invisible force at work in the world, some unstoppable law of accretion that filled up every surface and corner with streets, office blocks, rivers, factories, houses. Only he seemed to see it, this chaotic, impossible density, all this hoarding and flowing over; was nobody else concerned? If it went on like this, someday the whole planet would clog up and there would not be enough room in the sky for all the crisscrossing exhaust trails of planes, or on the sea for the countless interweaving, frothy wakes of ships. Swirling lines of traffic would spill off the teeming highways. Already there was no such thing as an unfilled space; it was impossible to see nothing. However deserted or arbitrarily spacious, every inch of the world was a place taken up and touched in some way, claimed for one purpose or another, even if it was, as he found in Scotland, to be left bare so that people could see it empty. But there was no true emptiness, no real nothingness, no desert stillness, a phrase that came into his mind and he now wished were more than a phrase. Everywhere-crowded and disorderly, or deliberately pristine-was somewhere, laden with the paraphernalia and expectation of some human design, and in not one of these places was his presence relevant. He tried not to think about it. He tried not to panic, and to concentrate instead on tiny things, one at a time.
He practiced on people. In cafés and checkout queues he would study them, and take in only physical details: the curve of an ear, a ridged fingernail, the asymmetric lift of one eyebrow. Every feature was odd in some way, once he focused on it, not that this disappointed him at all, for he was not looking for perfection or hoping to find a special value in the unique. He simply noticed and remembered. He filed every detail in his mind disjointedly and without cross-reference, each alone for its isolated, particular, frangible self. He welcomed this dullness of perception in himself, for it would have been unbearable to dwell on anything more than how precious and how breakable were these vulnerable, separate, flawed parts of other people’s bodies. Sometimes he knew he was staring at a stranger too hard and should apologize, but he didn’t know what to be sorry for. For not knowing how his own mind worked? For not being sure he bore more than a trivial surface resemblance to other human beings anymore?
He would have liked someone to tell it all to. He called his sister. She told him it would be fine for him to come for a few days if it was up to her, but Derek wasn’t ready to see him.
“Listen, Ron, he accepts it was an accident,” she said. “So do I. But he’s just not ready, you know?”
Ron did know, but he said nothing.
“I mean, Ron, criminal negligence is, well, what it says. You know?”
“I know,” he said.
“And as Derek says, six children died. Plus the pregnant woman. Give us a few months.”
“I’ve been in prison over five years.”
“And then he says, it just makes us look at our two and think, you know? Anyway, the extension’s not finished.”
He left her another couple of messages. Then she sent him a big check with a note saying she trusted the enclosed would help him make a fresh start “somewhere new.” She’d be in touch, she wrote.
He called his former neighbor Jeff and thanked him for the card. It had meant a lot, he said, on his first Christmas in prison.
“That’d be Lynne,” Jeff said. “She sends cards to everybody.”
He left the words even you unspoken, but Ron heard them nonetheless.
“How’s Kathy? Has Lynne seen her?”
Jeff hesitated. “They’re in touch, yeah. Doing better. Knocks you sideways, divorce, never mind everything else she’s had to contend with.”
Ron said it would be good to meet up for a drink. They agreed on a day the following week. The next day Jeff sent a text message to say he couldn’t make it and he’d call soon, but he didn’t.
They’d found him a room for the first month, and a social worker, and he worked the night shift for a while in a bakery, standing on a line wrapping buns and cakes in a warm, yellow-lit factory that smelled of sugar icing and machine oil. His fellow workers were all women who spoke rapidly to one another in their own language and ignored him except to pass on commands about cellophane or cardboard boxes.
To get away from all of that he cashed his sister’s check, bought an old Land Rover, and reverted to his life’s previous pattern, the covering of distances. He knew how to measure a day or night in miles rather than in hours on a factory clock, and he found comfort in the old equation of roads traveled versus time spent equals a portion of his life somehow suspended in transit. As a boy he’d been fascinated by time zones, which he could hardly distinguish from time travel; if you went west crossing zone after zone, going always back in time, one day would you be a man of twenty-one in a high chair with a bib and a spoon? Or going always east and forward, would you find yourself stooped and white-haired and still ten years old? It couldn’t be so, of course, but he had concluded then that the secret was to keep moving. Forget about direction and destination, just keep moving, and surely your life would never be able to catch you up with restrictions and obstacles and all its weighty boredom.
Now, amused by a childish hope that was, if foolish, at least familiar, he took again to the road, sleeping most nights in the Land Rover, parking at the end of the day within reach of a pub and whenever possible near a fast-running stream or a river, whose sound in the night was perhaps a lulling echo of the flow of the daytime traffic. Occasionally he stayed in cheap places when he needed to shave and shower and wash clothes in a hand basin, and sometimes he halted for a week or two here or there and took casual jobs: kitchen portering, laboring, hauling timber, loading and moving, anything physical; it was surprising how often he got a few days’ work just by asking. But mainly he drove. As the first year passed, that was the task that kept him becalmed, though he had to get used to the absence of passengers. There could never be any more passengers.
There we were at breakfast in the Invermuir Lodge Hotel, on the last day when our distress was of a containable and ordinary kind. Colin was eating sausages at a table in the bay window, and I had gone to the sideboard for orange juice. The dining room was quiet, just us and a retired couple in hiking clothes, and a flat-footed teenage waitress going to and fro. I started to pour the juice, and suddenly the sugary scent of my shampoo as my hair fell over my face and the hot smell of the fried eggs the waitress was carrying past combined and attacked me, and I thought I was going to be sick. I had to put down the jug and steady myself with both hands and look away, and as I tried to swallow some air and breathe without drawing in more of the smell, I found myself concentrating on my reflection in the broad mirror fixed along the back of the sideboard. My face was not a good color, but it did not reveal any disturbance, never mind dread. The hiking couple were squabbling about distances over a map unfolded across their table and did not look up. The waitress was waiting to set down their plates. So much is invisible.
My focus in the mirror lengthened across the empty tables to the window and the moving silhouette of my husband feeding himself, his head as solid and bony as a calf’s, swaying down to the fork, his mouth opening and closing, working, emptying. I switched my gaze back to myself and saw all I expected to see: a nondescript woman over forty, her makeup slightly too determined and even a little clownish on a face sallow from sleep and perhaps also from some other cause, some new, active trouble. Then my attention flicked back as Col’s knife tipped off his plate, clattered on the table, and hit the floor. He picked it up, scrubbed at the cloth with his napkin, and then he licked his index finger and scrubbed some more, sighing and wincing as if it were all the fault of a vague, absent someone who had failed to materialize in time to prevent this latest blunder by an overgrown, undersupervised child. I looked at myself in the mirror in time to see the expression in my eyes turn thin and resigned. I was used to the idea that the someone was me.
I returned to my place as if nothing had happened, and maybe nothing had. We beamed at each other. Not even the briefest of dubious marriages foundered ultimately on a matter of dropped cutlery, did it? We smeared our toast from tiny unfolded packs of butter and miniature pots of jam, our faces puckered by the strain of being together on holiday at all, as well as in a worn-out hotel in mid-February. I’m sure we looked unremarkable, perhaps slightly formal, sitting up a little straighter than other couples about to enter a slow-moving middle age in a way that suggested they had never felt young, or led rapid, excited lives. The hiking pair folded their maps and got up to leave, wishing us a good day as they went.
As their boots creaked across the floor, I thought well, maybe it could still be a good day or at least, like other days in the past five months, a good enough one, a day whose course would offer up to us any number of chances to overlook the disenchantment of our late and incongruous marriage. I poured my husband more coffee. We had already learned to fill the place of love with an obscuring politeness; we observed the etiquette of keeping our disappointment quiet with upbeat conversations over practicalities, like optimistic gardeners keeping an unpromising surface raked and hoed in the hope that love might be growing underground. Above all, we extended to each other self-serving magnanimity in the granting of opportunities to spend time apart. On this off-season, budget break in Scotland (which we were not calling a honeymoon, it being as near as we would ever come to one yet nowhere near enough), we were keeping our voices bright, trading all the usual euphemisms to excuse ourselves from each other’s company: not wanting to “get in each other’s hair,” we were each “doing our own thing.” Col was doing “guys’ stuff,” I was “chilling out at my own pace.” On this particular day Col was going kayaking and I was driving myself in our rental car up to Inverness to window-shop and visit the museum. We were, in fact, on two quite different holidays.
The hotel was built at the top of an incline, and the bay window looked down over the beer garden, still dank under dawn shadows, for the sun was not fully risen. Rain and melting frost dripped from a black monkey puzzle tree onto the twiggy roof of a gazebo filled with stacks of empty bottle crates and drifts of dead leaves. Banks of chilly-looking cloud weighted the sky above the main road going north past the garden railings; beyond the road, the river flowed over rocks into glossy brown pools that bubbled and spun with curls of froth.
“I’m afraid it’ll rain on and off all day,” I said. “I hope the weather won’t spoil it for you.”
“A bit more rain won’t hurt,” he said. “If it rains, it rains.” He cleared his throat. “It might dry up in Inverness.”
“It might. I won’t mind,” I said, my eyes still on the river. “That current’s very fast. You wouldn’t want to capsize in that.”
“Well, if it’s raining, I’ll be wet anyway, won’t I?” he said. “That would be quite funny.”
I cast him too bright and grateful a smile, as if capsizing into rivers was some huge amusement I’d forgotten about. We went quiet again. Our table was crowded with white china and overlarge spoons and knives that made too much noise, beneath which our silence seemed delicate and even meaningful, which it was not. But nor was it desolate, I thought. Incongruous it certainly was, after a year of Internet romance via an online chat room for housebound caregivers, finally to meet and within six weeks get married, all in a rush. But was it such a mistake to be in a hurry to ignore the undertow of something missing, to prove ourselves still marriageable before the notion of being in love, fast receding, could vanish utterly? After all, no marriage was ever spontaneous and most between people over forty were arranged, somehow or other and for any number of fragile reasons, among them a fear of loneliness. That was by no means a small thing. Col’s parents had been dead for three years (he had kept up his membership in the caregivers’ chat room, out of familiarity) and he stayed on alone in their house in Huddersfield; my father had just died, leaving me with no reason to stay in Portsmouth. These seemed good reasons, not bad ones, to chain ourselves to the mediocre but likable real forms of each other that we encountered face-to-face, and put aside our hankering for the early, impossible, younger-seeming versions of ourselves we had come to know at our computer-aided distance.
His mobile phone burbled, and he took it out to read the message. “That’s them telling us to bring waterproofs,” he said. “We’re in for a soaking. Time I was going.”
“There’s something I should tell you,” I said, quickly. “I’m pregnant.”
“What?” He flinched, then looked away.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“Oh, God,” he said, blowing out his cheeks. He pushed himself back as far as he could get without moving out of his chair, and then, of course, the first thing that would spring to anyone’s mind sprang to his.
“God. I mean, but aren’t you-”
“I thought I was too old, too! It is a surprise. A mum at forty-two!”
“But you’re supposed to be getting a job in Huddersfield.”
“Well, and I will, when I can. Is that all you’re going to say?”
He looked at me hard, as if searching for something to admire. “You know we both need to work. It’s not my fault I don’t bring in enough.”
“Col, I know, but I can’t help it. It’s happened.”
“I don’t make enough for two, never mind three. You’re supposed to be looking for a job.” He gulped from his coffee cup and crossed his arms. “Anyway, I don’t want kids. I told you from the start. I told you, for God’s sake.”
“Yes,” I said, “but that was before. Ages ago, online. Before we’d even met.”
He tipped his head and gazed at the ceiling for a while. His face was just as it had been when he was rubbing at the tablecloth. Was this the same to him as a dropped, greasy knife: an accidental mess, not much to do with him? Another blunder?
“It is a shock, I didn’t expect it, either! But I didn’t do it on my own. Please don’t act as if I should say sorry or something!” I said, trying to sound light. “It must happen all the time. Other people manage it.”
“I said I didn’t want kids. I said so. I said so right from the start, when we were getting to know each other.”
But we didn’t get to know each other, I wanted to say. That wasn’t knowing each other. This is.
“We said lots of things then. We hadn’t really met, that was just online chatting. It was the Internet, it wasn’t real.”
“It was real!” he said. “It was real as far as I was concerned. I meant what I said. I don’t want kids. They ruin your lifestyle.”
“Lifestyle? Have we got a lifestyle?”
He glowered at me. “I don’t want kids.”
“But why not?”
“Why not? Because I don’t. For a start we can’t afford it. Anyway, it’s not why I don’t, it’s why all of a sudden I’ve got to want a kid just because you’ve changed your tune. Why should I change my mind just because you have?”
“Why? Because I’m having one! And because… well, because most people have them. They aren’t all miserable about it, are they? They manage!”
He shook his head from side to side and glanced out of the window.
“Okay, so, money. Have you got money?” He placed his fingertips on the edge of the table as if he were changing the subject.
“Money? For today? Oh, yes. I’ll be fine, I don’t need much, just enough for lunch and the museum. I’m not planning on buying anything. And there’s plenty of petrol.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean for this. I haven’t got the money and neither have you.”
“But it’ll be fine, we’ll manage! Because people do. You’ll see!”
“Even suppose you live off me for the next nine months, what about after? You haven’t got any money.”
“Babies don’t need all that much to begin with,” I said, arranging my ideas about it on the spot, allowing pictures from the back of my head to press forward. “People might give us things. I bet we can get good stuff secondhand. On eBay.” There was a silence. “I’ll knit!” I said, happily.
“The bit you got when your dad died. That’s gone, isn’t it?”
“More or less. But look, Col, please.”
I had less even than he thought I had. Back when I never dreamed it could matter, I’d told him I would inherit my father’s house when he died; it was the only thing I could say to the Internet Col, lest he think me a gold digger and vanish. I didn’t tell him until later that I’d remortgaged and remortgaged the house so my father and I could go on living in it. When it was sold, it had paid off the debt and left a little that I’d spent on getting married and small expenses since then. If I’d had even a little put by, I could surely have persuaded him it would be enough to see us through until the baby was born.
“Well, then. Even if you went back to work after, we’d be shelling out for the rest of our lives. Kids don’t live on air. I’m nearly fifty, I don’t want to work my backside off for the next twenty years. I can’t afford it.”
Why do we assume that ponderous, plain, clumsy people are more loving than everyone else, that what slows them down is a hidden burden of tenderness that does not encumber those who are quick and thin? I stared at him, this man who was now my husband, with his sullen voice and broad, shiny face and the bulky body I knew so well now. But I knew nothing, I realized, of these reserves of hostility, that they existed in him at all, never mind that they were so easily tapped, so available to be sent spilling into his dealings with me.
“Look, Col, it’s a shock, of course it is. But when you said you didn’t want kids, that must’ve been the idea of kids. Of course you didn’t want them when you were single, on your own. Now it’s different. Okay, we didn’t plan it, but it’s real, it’s actually happening. A real baby.” I couldn’t stop my face breaking out in a smile. “I thought you might have noticed something.”
He looked at me blankly.
“It’s for real,” I said, encouragingly. “This isn’t the Internet now.”
“Don’t I know it,” he said.
“I’ve been feeling pretty sick. But that’s normal.”
“Look. Are you really sure? It’s not like it shows,” he said.
Just then his phone burbled again. He read the new message and then stretched back and stabbed in a reply.
“They’re waiting for me,” he said, standing up and pocketing the phone. “So, how far gone are you?”
“Oh, there’s bags of time to get used to it,” I said. “It’s not due till the beginning of October.”
“No, I mean, how far gone?”
“Only about five weeks. Did you really not notice anything? I probably haven’t been all that much fun to be with!”
He shrugged.
“Don’t worry, it doesn’t last long, the sick stage. I’ll be right as rain in a few weeks,” I said.
He hesitated, his hands on the back of his chair, then he jammed it in under the table. “Listen. How many ways do I have to say it? I don’t want a kid. You can’t spring this on me. I’m not prepared to have a kid. So you’ll just have to do what you have to do. Deal with it.”
“Deal with it? What are you saying?”
“I’m saying if you want to make a go of it with me, fine, I’ll make a go of it with you. But not with a kid. A kid was never in the plan, there’s no way we can afford it. If you get rid of it, fine. If you keep it, also fine, but you’re on your own.”
“You’re telling me to get rid of a healthy baby? To have an abortion?”
“I’m telling you I don’t want a kid. I’m not telling you what to do, it’s up to you. I’m not forcing you.”
He left before I could say any more. A few moments after he had gone, the waitress padded forward to remove our breakfast dishes. “Take your time,” she said to me. “No rush.” I did take my time. For several minutes I stared out the window. The waitress returned and began wiping the sideboard. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again it was like arriving back in the room after an absence to find it bigger, or at least empty of something it had contained before. The yellow electric globe lights on the walls shone with an old, dusty warmth. The sun was rising higher, burning slightly above the horizon and casting streaks of silver light across the garden and in over the windowsill. The waitress set to work with a vacuum cleaner. I fancied she started at the farthest corner of the room from me so as to disturb me least; that was sweet of her. She smiled as she finished up and left, trailing the vacuum behind her on squeaky castors. Then a different waitress came with trays of glasses and cutlery wrapped in paper napkins and began to set tables for lunch.
I had no idea what I was going to do. When the sun was shining small and high and pale through a veil of rain above the river, I got up and walked away.
He missed the passengers, not for their company but for giving his journeys purpose. Alone, his traveling was just driving. That was why, summoning all his courage, he stopped outside Doncaster one rainy day in early September for two hitchhikers, Canadian students heading for Scotland. They were trying to get to Edinburgh in time for some festival whose name they couldn’t pronounce but which, they assured him, was an ancient Celtic celebration of the end of summer.
“The end of summer, in like an agrarian society, it’s pivotal, right? But it’s her that really wants to go. She’s like really into folklore, aren’t you, sweetheart?” the boy said adoringly, and wrote down the name of their festival-Samhraidhreadh-on the back of his bespectacled girlfriend’s hand while she laughed because the pen was tickly. He pulled her wrist forward to show Ron, and Ron had never heard of it and couldn’t pronounce it, either. But something about their journey touched him-its pilgrim zeal, its pointlessness-and in a demonstration of goodwill that he did not really feel he took them all the way to Edinburgh, thinking that to perform, however disinterestedly, an act of kindness might bring flooding back a former true impulse to be kind, the way he might swing a numbed limb to and fro hoping that movement would restore sensation.
So began a habit of stopping for hitchhikers and offering to take them wherever they were heading, since the direction or distance didn’t affect him much. That winter, drifting farther north on the main tourist routes, he came across more of them than he expected, and once or twice in bad weather he slowed down and offered lifts when none was being asked for, until he realized how that might look. He told himself it was a way of meeting people-people distinct in his mind from fellow prisoners-though it was really only practice at being in proximity to them again.
Their company was easy because, he soon discovered, young people were curious only about themselves. He just had to keep quiet, as he was anyway inclined to do, and within minutes his passenger would launch into an account of himself that kept him chirping on for miles, as if Ron had demanded some justification for his being where he was at that precise point in his life. Unless the journey was very short, Ron would soon know pretty much all there was to know about whole extended families: the birthday parties, the funerals, the divorces, the day the dog had puppies. A hundred personal philosophies were explained to him in all their complexity and variation, he learned of ambitious and intricate life plans based on a faith in something or other or on recovery from the loss of it, and all of it was offered to him, he sensed, as barter, a diligent trading of autobiography for transportation. Not that that made them real passengers, certainly not. It was a symbolic reckoning only, a token proffered for safe passage. So he listened quietly, intending his silence to convey that his side of the bargain was that he would not trouble his companions to pretend they were in the least interested in him. For the most part they honored the transaction, measuring out their disclosures like shining coins counted from palm to palm and expecting none in return.
But on the rare occasions anyone asked, he was always ready to say that he was just taking time out, he liked Scotland, and it suited him not to stay in one place for long. Sometimes he was tempted to volunteer a remark or two about himself beyond that, just to hear his own words cross the air between himself and his passenger, to test the link between that person’s life and his own. But when he rehearsed in his mind what those words would have to be, the temptation vanished.
I used to be a bus driver. Seven summers ago I took a party of schoolchildren to Portugal. We were late for the ferry going back, and during the ninth hour of driving, in torrential rain, I must have fallen asleep. We came off the motorway. Six children and a teacher, who was pregnant, were killed. I went to prison.
What link could there possibly be, after that, between him and, say, a happy young Canadian couple who were, like, really into folklore?
During the evenings, and when he woke in the night, his passengers’ words would come back to him as intermittent phrases in a dozen accents, the sounds fragmenting in his head like the scrapbook of images of the small physical details he recalled: the back of a hand sore from an insect bite, a damp space where a tooth was missing, an earlobe punctured decoratively in three places. He would remember the smells they brought into the car, of the ferny, rain-soaked hills and their sour sneakers and wet nylon clothes, and he’d recall how secretly and greedily he had inhaled, once they got talking, their cigarette and bubble-gum-scented breath. And as he lay awake, it made him gasp, the fear he had felt for them at journey’s end, setting them down blithe and undefended to fare again for themselves in this world crowded with dangers. He had no interpretation for any of these things.
Toward the end of the second winter, he noticed that most days he thought about stopping. He was still in the north, mainly because nothing was drawing him in any other direction, but he was running out of places to go. The landscape was beautiful, he could see that, but he had had his fill of the more or less stultifying succession of glimpses taken from the road, the amassing of the same mental snapshots over and over. On the night of his fiftieth birthday, he washed and shaved in the gents’ of a pub called The Highlander’s Rest, ate the mixed grill and chips alone in the bar, and slept parked in a turnout. He woke tired. He wanted a spell of quiet away from the engine drone and diesel warmth of the Land Rover, to be in one place for a while. He had no idea where or how it was to be found, but he longed for somewhere to stay.
Silva, the geese are back, you said as you stepped into the trailer. Hundreds of them. You can see their shapes but not their colors yet, it’s too misty. They’re downstream over on the far side of the river on that long black rock you can see at low tide, just down from that old ruin you like, the cabin with the little jetty.
You left the door open. It was still early, and you let in the cold.
They must have found a whole family of fish down there, you said, waving your hands. All around the rock where the water’s glassy, they’re feasting. You should see them, they’re landing and diving and dipping their necks and sending ripples all the way across, beautiful slow ripples lapping all the way over onto our side. You can hear them. Listen, can you hear the water?
I whispered to you to shut the door. Anna had kicked her covers off, and I was afraid the chill on her legs might wake her up. Then I listened and shook my head.
No, Stefan, I don’t hear anything.
Well, of course you don’t, not with the door shut, you said, coming over and sitting down. But it’s a nice noise when you’re outside. Want to come out, lazybones?
I hushed you with a finger placed on your lips.
What’s the time? I whispered. She’s still asleep. We’ve got a little time, haven’t we?
You glanced over at Anna and back at me, pretending to be puzzled. You’re awake, I’m awake, why would we want Anna to stay asleep? Then you rose and quietly drew the blanket back over Anna’s curled little body and tucked her giraffe in beside her. You came toward me, smiling. I still remember precisely how the mattress tilted as you clambered onto it. We didn’t have a lot of time. When you entered me, I wanted to cry out, but I trapped the sound in my throat and pressed my mouth against your neck.
Not long afterward it was Anna who broke the silence with her creaky, waking-up noise that was not exactly crying but a test of her voice, a call of emergence. Although she was nearly two, when she fell asleep it really was still a fall, a sheer drop into that fathomless well of baby sleep; it turned her body solid, so her chest hardly rose and fell and her eyelids did not even flicker. It seems fantastic to me now that I could watch her like that without feeling panic at how far away from me she went in her sleep. I loved her waking-up noises; to me they sounded like the snuffling of a small creature returning from the lost, clambering back up through undergrowth from a foray a little too far from the nest. The real crying would start a few moments later, when she was awake enough to know she was hungry.
You tried to ease yourself away from me, but I caught hold of the chain around your neck and pulled you back for a kiss.
Oh, you’ve got me on the end of a chain, you said. Haven’t you? A chain that I’ll never take off.
Good. That’s why I gave it to you, I said, as I let you go.
You stepped back into your jeans and went to her, laughing softly. You lifted her up high and crooned-oh, Anna, Anna, Anna-and the crying stopped at once. You carried her outside, sending me a single look over her head that signaled you were giving me some time, a moment or two to shake off the thought of any more of you for now, to get out of bed and dressed and ready to balance myself against the day. I sat up and watched you through the trailer window. You put her down on her feet in front of you and walked her along, holding both her hands. Her arms were raised and outstretched, and you were edging her along on her wobbly, sleepy legs, her bare feet curling on the cold stones. You were asking too much of her. Sometimes you did that, forgetting she was so little. You wanted to show her the geese, but she had other ideas, she wanted her breakfast.
Look, Anna, look, you said, lifting her up again and pointing across the water. You made the wark wark noise of the geese against her cheek, and she laughed and twisted away, patting the stubble on your chin with both hands. I pulled on clothes and walked down to the end of the trailer and set out bowls and cereal and milk on the table. I put a pan of water on to heat for coffee. I got out spoons, juice, cups. I stood in the trailer doorway for a few minutes longer, watching you before I called you in.
You never knew I did this. Every day I watched you together, keeping myself apart while you were absorbed in each other and busy with this or that little thing around the place. I liked to study you, your resemblance to each other, with that identical tangle of dark hair, so different from mine. I liked that simple evidence of how much you belonged to each other, the everyday fact of it. The mother is blond and the father dark, the child inherited her father’s coloring-it’s the kind of remark that gets made about families. It helped me pretend our life was like other people’s, easy and regular.
I tried to keep them all in my mind, these pictures I made of you then. You feeding Anna, carrying her about talking nonsense, drawing pictures and singing songs. She gazing so seriously with her giraffe in her mouth and then chuckling back, reaching for your hands, tugging your hair. She left the wet trails of her kisses all over your face. Each of these pictures had to stand for something, had to be a sign that our life would go on being possible, so I could say to myself, look at this life we have, so natural and loving. We are not defeated, we are not despairing.
That day I watched you. You dipped her hand in the river and waggled her wrist, sprinkling water drops from her fingers all over your face. You spluttered and screwed up your eyes; she laughed and laughed. You turned her hand and sprinkled her own face, too. I memorized you both for later that day, to bring you to mind when I was at work at Vi’s general store over the bridge on the other side of the river. I needed to save you up like this; it was the only way I could spend the day away from you.
When I had put my hair in a ponytail and brushed my teeth, I still had some time before I had to set off to get the bus.
Silva, come on out, you called.
Anna was sitting on the ground with an old spoon in her hand, digging into tufts of grass that sprang up between the sand and pebbles of the shoreline. You led me a little farther down so I could see the geese bobbing on the river. The sun was up by then and still bright through a mist of cloud. I had to shade my eyes to see. On the far side, the old wooden cabin looked silvery gray, as if it were made out of water rather than from pine trees like the ones that grew steeply all around it. It shimmered like something wet, scooped out of the current and set up on the bank, solid but made of water all the same, shining in the sun just like the sheeny membrane of the gliding river. The white rowing boat moored at the little jetty sat as it had always sat. It hadn’t moved in all the time we’d been here.
Stefan, see? That cabin, it’s still empty. Nobody’s even been there in over a year, that boat never moves. It’s deserted. We could find the way down to it through the trees on the other side. Why don’t we? It would be great to live there. At least for the summer.
You tugged on my hair. And then what? you asked. You think next winter we’ll be better off there? First storm that comes, the roof blows off, then what? We’ll have nowhere at all.
But the trailer leaks anyway. And the roof doesn’t look so bad, it looks okay. We could do repairs. It’s bigger than the trailer.
Don’t keep going on about it, you said, tugging again on my ponytail. You can’t even tell if there’s glass in the windows. And it’s not that much bigger.
I caught hold of your hand and pulled your arm around my neck, wrapping myself within a circle of you. You curled your other arm around my waist, and we stood swaying together, gazing across the river. Behind us Anna was talking to herself in a singsong and scrabbling with her spoon in the pebbles.
Anyway, you said in my ear, it must belong to somebody. Any day they could just show up. We’d go to jail.
I know, I said. Worse. They’d send us back.
Then what about Anna?
Oh, I know. Don’t talk about it.
I raised your hand to my mouth and kissed it, then I nipped at your fingertips. I didn’t want you to start on again about borrowing money to get us out of our trouble. We’d been over and over it. You drew away, cupped your hands around your mouth, and hallooed, and the call rolled across the water and startled the geese off the rock in the river, all in a flurry. This was our way. We kept ourselves restless on purpose, distracting each other with these innocuous forms of disturbance: making love, sudden bursts of song and silly games, scaring geese into the sky. Anything that kept us from talking about it too often, about living in a leaking trailer hidden from the road, never having enough money to change anything. Being illegal in a foreign country, such a beautiful country but one that yet could give us no resting point; one we occupied like flies on the surface of a painting.
The geese were gliding back down to the rock. I clapped my hands and they rose up again, flapping their wings.
Silva, I’ve had an idea, about the car.
I wouldn’t let you speak. I shook my head and clapped and hollered across the river, and then I walked over to Anna and picked her up. I didn’t want to hear it again. No jobs for illegals that pay enough, you kept saying, we should get a car, run a cab, you knew guys who’d lend cash and do false papers, you’d work nights. You’d pay the loan back, we’d get a proper place to live. And I kept saying, the kind of people we’d have to borrow from, the amount they charge, you don’t get out of trouble that way. I kept saying we had to be patient and save up the proper way, owing nothing, we already had just over three thousand, I’d remind you, and then you’d lose your temper and tell me that way it would take ten years to get enough. We never got anywhere, did we?
So we would chuck pebbles and call across the river to the birds, we’d make childish jokes, make love, pull on each other’s hair, play clap-hands with our daughter. Sometimes I was afraid our whole life was getting to be like a silly guessing game we were both secretly sick of. But still I hoped it could last. We needed it to keep going long enough for an answer to come.
The bus will be along soon, I said. Give me your phone. Here’s mine.
Just another of our little survival rituals, swapping phones so I could plug each of them in, every few days, under the counter at Vi’s, and that morning also a way back from the dangerous subject of how to go on living.
You walked me up the track to the road and a bit of the way along, until Anna got heavy. After you turned back, I watched you for a while, walking away. The noise of the road and the bridge traffic was too loud for me to shout out to you, and so I turned, too, and set off to the bus stop at the service station.
We’d got another day started, I thought. And if in ten hours or so I stepped off the bus and walked back along the road and down the track, my long shadow cast behind me, carrying a bag of past-sell-by groceries from Vi’s, and if I heard your voices as the rumble of evening traffic on the bridge died away, I would be able to count this one as another day that had let us stay together. Another day done and it still hadn’t all come to an end, a day that would let the same day, with luck, come again tomorrow. A good day was one when nothing got worse.
I didn’t go as far as Inverness.
The road from the hotel followed the river for several miles. I switched on the car radio and drove, singing along raucously with one song after another, refusing to cry, trying to drown out Col’s words in my head. From time to time rain fell, not in spiky drips like English town rain but in milky currents that wet the air with cold, gusting sprays. Between showers, and seeming more liquid than the rain, sunlight poured down through gaps in the clouds onto the rocks and larch and pine trees across the steel-bright river. When my throat was so tired I could hardly make a sound, I turned the radio off and kept driving. Just as, when my father was dying, I used to absorb trivial details while waiting for bad news-every stem and leaf on the wallpaper in the doctor’s office, every stain on the floor by his hospital bed-I concentrated now on the sunlight, how it spilled over the landscape into refracting pools of sharp, unfiltered silvers and russets and greens. This was not my country, and I was glad I could numb myself with touristic gawping; I felt no tug of ancestral pride, found nothing revelatory or significant in its beauty. I traveled with the lulling detachment I might have felt thumbing through racks of postcards.
There were dozens of places to pull the rental car off the road and admire the views, and I stopped often. In some of them there were souvenir vans festooned with tartan flags and pennants, blaring out disheartening bagpipe music over the roofs of parked cars and caravans and food stalls. Sometimes I loitered, reading billboard warnings about forest fires and litter and threats to wildlife, watching people come and go, all of them in pairs or groups, never alone. I saw a family of seven disgorge themselves from a camper van and claim a damp picnic table; the mother and grandma spread plastic bags over the benches, the dog crawled underneath and lay down. The last of the four lanky children ran back to the van for a soccer ball, and a loud, hazardous game began at the side of the car park. The father got in the queue at the burger van and began a long relay of shouts to the others. He brought an armful of boxes back to the table, and the children darted into place, mauling the packaging, snapping open cans of explosive drinks, pushing torn-off lumps of pizza and burgers into their mouths, feeding the dog with their fingers. I made my way back to the car. I wanted to get away from them, from my envy of their messy, uncomplicated pleasure, and from the shame they aroused in me. I had married a man who shunned the very idea of that noisy, easygoing acceptance within families; surely I must be at heart the same kind of person. I was at the very least someone who would consider aborting a child rather than be abandoned by its father.
But I have no choice, I said to myself, as if the family at their picnic were challenging me. I have to stay married to him. He is all I have.
After that I stopped only in deserted places. I would turn the car onto shoulders choked with scrubby thickets of undergrowth and into roadsides filled with sagging piles of gravel and sand heaped there for highway repairs. I parked and wandered for a while in the rubble-strewn forecourt of a boarded-up and derelict service station until from an outbuilding came a hissing, spiteful-looking cat and two scraggy kittens.
Still some way before Inverness, I felt sick again and pulled over. I got out of the car to feel the rain on my face and breathe in its cold-water scent; there on the roadside, at the top of a bank of fields sloping down to the river, the air was mixed with a sharp, shelly, salt wind blowing in from the coast. Below me, the estuary flowed along, white-flecked and bright under a sudden patch of clear sky. To the east about a mile downriver, a bridge arched across from the city to the north shore, black and permanent against the smoky, distant blues and grays of the horizon where water and sky melded at the start of open sea.
The nausea passed, and to stop myself thinking about the baby, I unfolded the road atlas over the trunk of the car and began to trace the contours and place names dotted along the route I had followed, incredulous that the mountains and swaths of forest, the concrete and steel bridge and the river running beneath it could have transmuted from the actual, touchable, physical vastnesses before me into printed lines and shapes on a map. I stared at the page now softening under spattering drops of rain and felt, strangely, that it should have been the other way round, that really their first existence must have been as scribbles and marks in ink on paper, and only then, abstracted and set down, had the land risen up and taken form out of nothing more than the idea of itself, to amass and flow and come alive with air and light, and sprout crops and trees and bridges, and teem with creatures. And I longed to apply the same sense of impossibility to the surely still notional little lump of ectoplasm generating inside my body; if I disallowed any connection between that act of cellular multiplication and a real baby, maybe it wouldn’t become one, a terrifying, wondrous, real one. Maybe an abortion wouldn’t be necessary, maybe I wouldn’t have to make a decision at all. Maybe by the simple force of its mother’s incredulity, a putative human being could be so belittled and denied as to be fatally discouraged from coming into existence. Suddenly I was filled with horror that this might be so.
I folded the map up and got back in the car. I waited for a while, observing time flickering along by the numbers on the dashboard clock and wondering how long I could stay like this, enclosed and contained, halted. I wanted to arrest any further forward momentum in time or space; although stranded on the edge of a road with traffic thundering by and looking down on a river flowing fast and deep toward the sea, I was, however improbably, in the only place of safety and stillness I had. As long as I remained there, I could put off my next move, which, whenever it came and wherever it led, would take me nearer to my decision, whatever that was to be. For the future must have its location; if I refused it that, if I just didn’t turn the key in the ignition and go forward, if with every thought and breath I reduced the baby inside me to less than baby, to mereness, to nothing, perhaps I could will it not to be. I wanted its end to be painless and unknowing and without violence, and afterward I wanted to be left quiet and unnoticed. I wanted to be left alone to carry on living as before. How could it be that I would afterward suffer the loss of something I had never quite had?
But I gazed at the bridge and saw in the span of it over the water an inevitability, as if the points on each opposing bank had cried out to be joined, as if the flow of the river beneath the bridge depended upon each side’s throwing out its great black steel arch to connect across it. Events must reach forward to meet their consequences, consequences must throw backward in time bridges linking themselves to causes; where else is the meaning of all the things that happen in the world to come from, if not from connection with what happened before and what will happen next? How unbearable otherwise, if human activity were no more than a succession of haphazard little incidents exploding at random all the time over the planet, arising from and leading to nothing. The commission of even a single action surely sets in motion somewhere a yearning, distant and reluctant maybe, for its outcome eventually to have a point. However oblique or delusory the link with past or future, the connection must be attempted, for one thing must be seen to lead from or to another; we prefer a rickety and unreliable bridge between events, if that is all we can have, to none at all. I started the engine and drove on. Even after all that has happened, I do not believe anyone can behold a bridge and not feel a compulsion to find out what lies on the other side of it.
Yet I would not go across. I parked at a service station a short distance farther on, just before a large roundabout where one road led off left to the bridge approach and another went straight on toward the outer edge of Inverness. I went into the café and sat there for a long time under the swimmy canned music, sipping water, pushing my finger into a little mound of crumbs on my opened biscuit wrapper and pressing them onto my tongue. It was quiet, the flow of customers sporadic: one or two truck drivers with deliveries for the city, I supposed, and a few people in suits, slightly self-important, traveling on business. Occasionally families came in; usually the men paid for fuel while the women hauled little children to the bathrooms. Between customers, two waitresses in striped, conical hats conversed in a clipped, private lexicon of phrases and low murmurs, and exchanged looks full of knowing. They could have been telling each other secrets, or complaining about the boss, or speculating about me.
I hadn’t until that moment felt conspicuous, but I realized then how intently I must look as if I were waiting for something, perhaps for a purpose either to stay or to leave. A person with nowhere to go could go anywhere, of course, but this was not the freedom I might have supposed. I still had to be somewhere, and this seemed to bring with it an obligation either to explain my remaining where I was or to keep moving. Apologetically, I bought a cup of tea from the smirking waitresses and took it back to my table.
The fact was I did not have to sit here in this way as if under some vague suspicion, wondering where to go. There was a place on this earth where someone would be waiting for me this evening. Albeit on his terms, after his fashion, my husband wanted me. Not everybody had that. I had waited for so long for it, and I need not lose it. Why should I lose him, for the sake of a child that I had never thought I would have and that he, to be fair to him, had never led me to imagine he would want? If we had money, it would be different, but we didn’t. Col was just being honest and probably more realistic than I was. And since I hadn’t been expecting to have a baby, if I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t be continuing without anything I had been hoping for.
But I had set out in married life hoping to stay married, and if I did not, I could not shrink back into my old life. When I sold the house near Portsmouth and moved to Huddersfield, I disposed of every trace of it-not a difficult thing to do, in fact, with a life so small as to have gone almost undetected. In any case, I had grown so tired of it, tired of myself, tired of getting on my own nerves, tired of the thoughtless, overlapping, blurred accretion of years going nowhere; I had been desperate for greater distance from it, in any direction, even toward a mirage. If a mirage was what marrying Col turned out to be, it was still the first attempt I’d ever made to escape the person I had let myself become.
And escape her I had, so successfully that, except as Col’s wife, I no longer really existed. My dutiful care of my father (though I loved him) had arisen not from goodness but from a lack of vitality and imagination about myself; I stayed at home because I was diffident and unadventurous. I had not, as I had told Col, sacrificed a promising career in local government. I had been fired at twenty-five from a dull administrative job in Traffic and Highways in a restructuring simultaneous with my father’s first stroke, while three colleagues, including my fiancé Barry, were kept on and retrained. Within six months Barry was my exfiancé and engaged to somebody in Payroll. I may then have “devoted” myself to my father for sixteen years, denying myself the chance to meet someone else, but for most of that time I had been too isolated and easily discouraged to imagine any such thing, anyway. I did not, as I had also told Col, “enjoy my life,” and if he left me I would spend the rest of it mourning the expense of my error and trying not to think too much about what it had displaced. It would be incalculable.
I would have to get rid of the baby. I could make arrangements as soon as I got back. A month from now, it would be over. Immediately I thought this I felt sick and suddenly wanted my tea sweet, though I didn’t usually. I reached into the sugar bowl and noticed a folded slip of paper, crammed among the packets. It read, in handwritten letters,
Cash for 4 door sedan in good condition. Private Text CAR to 07883 684512 Discretion guaranteed
I glanced over at the next table, and there was a slip of paper in the bowl of sugar packets there, too, and at the table in front of me. Every bowl on every table I could see had one.
I drank my tea. I fingered the piece of paper, turning it over and over. Practicalities flooded into my mind: all the reasons why this was an outrageous thing to contemplate. What its consequences would be in the next hour, the next twelve hours, in a day’s time. I thought of a month from now, a year, ten years. I thought how simple the next step would be. Merely texting one word to a telephone number, such an insignificant thing to do. How could a thing so small affect very much? I thought of my baby and the decision I had just reached. I thought of the need to make this effort to survive. I could settle the matter quickly. I drained my cup and went outside.
I texted the word CAR to the number. My telephone rang, and a man’s voice, foreign, harsh, and breathless, asked me where I was calling from. When I told him, he demanded I call him back in exactly half an hour. I hung around shivering, and then I did so, and when he began to interrogate me, my voice shook. I realized I didn’t know anything about the rental car except that it was a Vauxhall. I read him the license number written on the key tab.
“I don’t know the exact model or the mileage. It’s pretty new, I think,” I told him. There was a silence. “It’s silver,” I added.
“Yes, I see it’s silver,” he said. “You sell or not? You waste my time?”
I stared round at the car park, the fuel pumps, the café windows, the scrub and farmland beyond, but I couldn’t see anyone.
“You sell or not?”
“It’s just, the car… I don’t know if you… if you…,” I said. “I mean, I haven’t done this before. The thing is, I need money. The car doesn’t actually-”
“Don’t give me details. That’s none of my business. You need money, I need car. You got a car, if I want it, I pay you cash. No papers. That’s it. Okay?”
“Okay. But I don’t even know who-”
“No names! No documents, you understand? No papers. That way it’s all private, okay?”
“Yes, but how much-”
“Listen. You come back here tomorrow. Just you. You understand?”
Just then I heard the cry of a young child in the background. “Wait,” he said. He spoke a few words in another language. A pause, then I heard him speak in English. “Ssh, hey, hey, Anna? It’s all right, wait just a minute, Papa’s busy…”
I caught my breath. His voice had grown musical and soft.
There were some noises of movement and murmuring from the child and then, “Good girl, Anna. Papa’s baby…”
He would think me insane if I began to cry.
“Okay, listen,” he said to me. “So you come back tomorrow. Exactly same place. Then you call me again, same time, I tell you where you bring me the car. If car okay, we agree price, I pay, you get cash, we both get discretion. We don’t say to nobody.”
His voice was changed, young and rounded and cadenced. I was certain this gentler, slightly shy voice belonged to the person he really was.
“I’ll be here tomorrow,” I said.
Since last year, a certain mood would come over me at nightfall. When night masked the trees around the trailer and turned the river water to ink and the far bank was a steep black hulk against the softer dark of the sky, I couldn’t tell what country this was, or what season or century. It was night and it was anywhere and any year, that was all. The moon made me feel smaller and safer than the sun. If it was a fine evening, I would go outside alone. I liked to walk with my head thrown back, following the moon. I could go in any direction I chose along the shore, and often I missed my footing and nearly fell, but somehow I would still always be following the moon. Wherever it led I followed, until my neck felt stiff or I finally stumbled. I must have looked so silly. Then I would do it all over again but imagine this time the moon was following me, and it always did. Dreamy and drunk on moonlight, I needed a while afterward to steady myself and get used to being back on the river shore by the trailer, for it really did feel as if I’d been a long way away. Moonbathing was how I thought of it.
I didn’t speak of it to you; I knew you would have found the idea of it amusing. You’d have snatched it away and held it out of my reach while you scrutinized it, you would have tossed it around for fun and handed it back to me, a little spoiled. Though you never meant to be unkind.
And though it was funny, I didn’t do it for amusement. Though I was soothed by it, it wasn’t for relaxation. It was surrender. I gave myself up to it long, long before it was dark. Even when Vi wasn’t being difficult, I would be looking forward to the day at work being over. Part of me would yearn all day long for the coming reward, to be absorbed and lost in the moon. You knew that much, I think. You would gather wood while it was still light and stack it around the circle of rocks we’d built on the ground between the trailer and the riverbank, and you would bring out chairs for us and a blanket for when the evening got colder. You’d light the fire while I was settling Anna in bed, so I would be guided down to you by the orange glow and the crackle of burning sticks. At night the noise of traffic passing on the bridge far away downriver settled to the occasional whirring rise and fall, as cars in twos and threes approached and crossed over. That was soothing, too.
I liked it best when you found silvery fallen tree branches for the fire, which burned with the baking smell of old, sun-parched timber. Sometimes we had to burn scrap wood that people had dumped along the edge of the road at the top of the track: bits of old furniture, broken doors-once, nearly the whole side of a garden shed-and then the fumes would be harsh and chemical and the fire would flare with blistering paint and melting glue.
That night the flames were different, a sulky, wavering yellow giving off greenish clouds of smoke with a sharp, rotten smell.
These sticks are damp. They must have been lying in the water, I said, poking at one with my foot. Did you pick them out of the water? The smoke smells of weeds. And dead fish.
You grunted. It’s all I could get, I didn’t have time to go getting dry stuff. We’ve used up all there is round here; the only dry stuff’s a mile down the shore. Anna was too tired.
You didn’t have time? What else did you do today?
Nothing much. Went up to the service station to fill the water cans. Anna ate nearly a whole muffin.
That’s a long walk for her. No wonder she was tired.
Well anyway, after that I didn’t want to take her along the shore. I can’t carry her and drag wood back all this way. It’s enough just getting the water.
You need to get something to fetch it in. Maybe you could make something. You could get some old wheels from somewhere, make a little cart. You could give her rides in it, she’d love it. She’d look so cute! You could pretend-
I saw your face and stopped speaking. You glared into the fire, then you got up and kicked a sticking-out branch farther into the flames.
Little rides for Anna? Little rides in a little cart? Yeah, let’s pretend. Let’s make Stefan play fucking games all day. But we won’t let him do any proper work, will we? Not for money.
Stefan, don’t. You can’t-
You turned and stood away, out of the circle of warmth.
You treat me like a kid! he said. I should be making proper money so we can get out of here. But you don’t want that, do you? You want things as they are, you want me wasting my time making little fucking carts!
Of course I don’t. You know I hate us being like this.
No, you like it. You like us right here, living like this. Well, I don’t, I’ve had enough. I’m going to change things.
Don’t be stupid! Somebody’s got to look after Anna. Okay, I’m the one with the job, is that my fault? Tell me what I’m supposed to do. Give up a job to let you borrow money we’ll never pay back? So you can drive people around all day in a cab that’ll never belong to you?
I’ll get a cab some other way.
What other way is there? Everybody needs a loan to get started, and we are not borrowing money from those bastards. We’d never get away from them. I’m not stopping you from making things better, I’m stopping you from being stupid, I’m stopping you from walking into trouble.
I have to get a car! Can’t you see? As soon as I’m getting fares, we can pay rent, get a proper place, and we’re out of here!
Stefan, if you borrow from the kind of people who’d lend to you, the car will never, ever be yours. You can’t own your own car in this country. You don’t even exist in this country.
Loads of people do it! Tell me how else we get out of here?
You haven’t been talking to them, have you? Is that where you were today, in the city? You haven’t talked to them, have you? Stefan!
Listen, in two years, maybe three, we’d have good money. We’d owe nobody.
But suppose it goes wrong? Suppose you’re on somebody else’s patch or the car’s stolen? Suppose there isn’t enough business? Those bastards, you think they’re going to say, Oh, Stefan, you’re a nice guy, that’s okay? They’ll burn the car, that’s the least they’ll do. They could burn it with you in it.
Oh, come on, those are fucking scare stories!
No, Stefan, they’re not. And you know what else? They take the woman and sell her to get back at him, they sell her to other men. Children, too, even children.
Okay, what do you want me to do? You want my balls on a fucking plate?
Stefan, stop it. You’ll wake up Anna.
No, go on, tell me what to do! We can’t go back home, we don’t exist here, we can’t go anywhere else. So what’s the big plan, Silva? We go to your magic fucking cabin across the water, live in a fairy story, is that it? Is that the big plan?
You strode down to the river edge and started chucking stones into the water. We’d had this fight so many times, I knew enough to leave you for a while. I shivered inside the blanket and stared up at the stars. There were many sounds: the hiss of damp wood burning and the scrape of your feet on the shore, the plock of stones going into the river and the burr of traffic under the sky. I said your name, but you didn’t come back. I called out again, into the dark.
Stefan? Maybe I can get an extra job. Get more hours. We’d save that way. I might find something where I could take Anna, and then you could work, too. And anyway when the season starts you can work in the bar again, like last year, at the White Hart.
The noise of stones hitting the water stopped. You trudged back to me and sat down by the fire.
You can’t do any more hours. If we got the car, I could work every night. There’s loads of cabs in Inverness without licenses, they never check. I’d work the airport, clubs.
We were silent for a while, imagining it.
The weekends, guys coming off the rigs, they drink hard, they always need cabs. It’s good money. You could stay with Anna instead of working for that cow.
Oh, Vi’s all right. When she’s sober.
Your voice was very quiet, as it was when you were either really angry or lost in a dream. I knew it very well, the way you withdrew into yourself. You had begun to shrink a little, rubbing your face and sighing as though the rage in your brain was rising from the surface of your skin like a sort of dangerous, flammable vapor that had to be wiped away and expelled in slow, careful gusts. I took your hand and started to say something. I didn’t think you were really listening, so I stopped speaking, but you didn’t snatch your hand away. We sat like that in silence for a long time, moving only to put more wood on the fire. From time to time you looked at me as if you wanted to speak.
Suddenly you sat up very straight. Sssh, you said, and you stared through the darkness toward the river, cupping your free hand to your ear. Listen!
What? I squeezed your fingers tight. What is it? What’s wrong?
My heart started to bump. We’d heard about them, homeless vagrants wandering out from the shelters they’d made under the bridge, high on drugs, in gangs. We were at least a mile away, and there was no easy way along the riverbank, but it had happened a couple of times about three years ago, a couple of old caravans in a field near the service station had been set on fire. That was why you wouldn’t leave Anna and me alone at night last summer. You’d stayed on working in the bar, refused when they offered you the night porter job. If anyone found the track down from the road, we’d be okay, you always said, because you’d be there. We’d hear anyone in plenty of time to get away and hide. They wouldn’t know the riverbank as we did, and they’d be too stoned to think of staying quiet. We’d be okay.
But what if you were wrong? What if they’d been watching for hours from the darkness beyond the fire? I clutched at you. I was trying not to scream.
Stefan! Somebody’s there! Get Anna! Oh, God, Stefan, get Anna!
No, no, just listen. Anna’s fine. Listen to the geese, Silva, you whispered. Can you hear them? The geese?
I listened hard, waiting for any sound, the slightest sound, coming off the water. My eyes were watering from the smoke. All I could hear was the sounds of the fire and the traffic on the bridge.
The geese? No. I can’t hear anything.
Well now, you said in my ear, pulling me closer to you. Well now… That’ll be because they’re all fast asleep. As you should be, silly girl.
I pushed away from you, bashing at your shoulders, and you grabbed my hands and kissed them and started gnawing on my fingers, growling and mumbling. Just then there was a wail from the trailer. You looked round, but I got up instantly, pulling the blanket with me.
I’ll go. Don’t stay out long.
I left you poking a long branch into the fire. I was glad Anna had woken up, and to the sound of laughter. In a moment you’d come into the trailer to see that she was settling again, and the sight of her, asleep or not, would be almost the last stage of your restoration to yourself, and to me. At such moments I would often see tears on your face. That night, your love for her flooded your eyes.
The very last stage came later, after she was asleep again. It came like this. In the way I might casually happen to be first to reach a door and open it for both of us, I told you that I was sorry. It didn’t matter to me at all that I didn’t believe anything I’d said was untrue or that I didn’t think I had anything to apologize for. The assumption of blame wasn’t important, that wasn’t the purpose of it. It was a way of saying I knew that you wanted to forgive me but, much more, to forgive yourself, for the way we were forced to live. It was a way of letting you do both. Because then you took me in your arms and wrapped me in close against you, and with no more words we made love, fitting ourselves to each other’s bodies for each other’s consolation and for the glad familiarity of it, our slow, deep rocking together in the dark.
I was having a bath when Col returned from his kayaking, and he shouted through the door that he would wait for me in the bar. When I came down, he offered me a drink and declared with a little bravado that he would “join me” and ordered the same for himself, tonic without the gin, though usually he drank beer. He meant it as a kind of compliment, symbolically rejecting the notion of our incompatibility by rejecting a different drink, but the gesture was slightly too big for him. He sat and sipped his tonic, cowed by the formality between us. We had to be so careful. We exchanged tight remarks and little smiles, until I ordered him a pint, which he drank as if released from some sort of test. I watched him, not sure what I loved. But whatever it was in me he wanted, I did not want him to stop wanting it.
We ate early. Over dinner he drank a bottle of wine, which helped him, and we talked a little about his day on the river and about mine, supposedly in Inverness. We pared our stories down to safe generalities. I barely had to lie; I said I’d had an interesting time and had enjoyed seeing new places, and he didn’t ask any more of me than that. His lack of interest in my day was a courtesy, an offer to me to talk freely in the knowledge I would not really be listened to, so it was easy to reel off inane remarks about a day of vague impressions without being specific about locations or-the courtesy reciprocated-endanger him by bringing him anywhere near the orbit of my real thoughts. In return, when I asked him about the kayaking, I showed satisfaction with answers that were neither engaged nor precise. We ate in small mouthfuls, and every one was taken slowly, as an opportunity to push a little more of the evening behind us. But still, when we had finished, I was appalled at how much time was left to fill. Our bedroom, smelling of carpet cleaner and hot electric light, lay above us at the end of a musty hotel corridor. I had imagined, all through dinner, the hours of the coming night cramming themselves into its emptiness, lying in wait.
I suggested we have coffee in the lounge. The couple from the morning were already there, drinking whiskey and yawning over the papers. The waitress brought in our tray and made her exit, saying she hoped we would enjoy the rest of our evening.
But there was so much of it. While Col glowered over a book of aerial photographs, I browsed the bookcases on the other side of the room and wandered around studying the prints on the walls of stags and mountains, Highland crofts and cattle. I sat down again on the sofa and examined the china minutely, as if I might discover in it something about cups and saucers that had so far eluded me. The couple got up to leave and invited us to join them in the bar when we had finished. Col looked longingly after them. I took up the newspaper they had left behind and completed a couple of crossword clues, then folded the paper back up as neatly as I had found it. Col drank his coffee. I drank my herb tea.
“Col, if it’s about money, if there wasn’t a problem about money, do you think-”
“There’s no point discussing it,” he said. “We haven’t got the money. I’m not discussing it.”
“But suppose we had, suppose-”
“Stop. Just-stop,” he said. “There is nothing to say.”
I got up again and studied a rack of leaflets and maps. It was no good. No task took long enough. I found myself looking at a pamphlet about salmon fishing, wondering how long I would be able to keep this up, listening to my life pass along in thudding little ticks of my heart. I was forty-two years old, and I knew it was finite, this bright, regular tapping in my chest, but I also knew that, for every few seconds I aged, the baby grew a little; it became a larger, livelier thing to kill.
I wanted to blurt out my feelings; I feared my impatience for the next day would somehow break out of me and declare itself. I returned to the sofa.
“By the way, I’m going kayaking again tomorrow,” Col said. “You’ll be all right, will you?”
“Yes, I’ll be fine,” I lied.
I couldn’t think of anything else to say. The air of the lounge grew dense with our hoarded silence; the clock ticked and ticked with a sound like seconds snapping off in small splinters, only to re-form maliciously behind us, ready to come round again. The hours yet to come thronged around us with all their awful availability for no other purpose than to keep a vigil against marital disintegration. Eventually a drift of laughter came from the bar. My husband raised his head.
“I’m tired,” I told him. “You go on and enjoy yourself. I think I’ll have an early night.”
The rain fell all night, clattering on the roof and cascading off into the ground around the trailer as if it was being poured from a jug. The place would be a mud bath in the morning. I would have to fish out Anna’s boots from the storage space under the mattress. Would they still fit her? As I lay thinking in the dark, working out that if she needed new boots I wouldn’t be able to get them before Friday, the day Vi usually paid me, I heard a different dripping noise. It was inside. It was coming from over near the door. I slipped out of bed, and immediately I knew that we were unsheltered. I felt a chill on my skin as if nothing protected us properly anymore. Either the door was open or the roof was leaking. Rain or night air had entered the trailer. Anything could enter. In a couple of steps I had reached the door. It was shut and locked, but my feet were wet. I touched the wall. It was running with water, seeping in through the join between the trailer’s side and the roof. Reaching up, I discovered that it was dripping from farther along, where the seam turned at a right angle. From there it was plocking down on the shelf where I had left bread for our breakfast in a paper bag, now soaking wet.
You were asleep. I fumbled my way back to Anna’s bed. She was asleep, too, but her covers were pushed up against the wall and they were already damp. I lifted her up gently out of her nest, hoping the sudden cold breath of air wouldn’t wake her, and clasped her against me, willing my arms and the palms of my hands to project all my body’s warmth into her through her back. Without waking, she curled her legs and arms around me and pushed her head in under my jaw, snuffling against my neck. I settled her in against you and got back into bed. I wouldn’t be able to sleep perched on the narrow edge of the bed that was left now, but I could lie calmly enough, knowing she was warm. I dreaded the morning, so I spent the rest of the night waiting for it, trying to figure out what to do.
First thing, you would climb onto the top of the trailer, which would be slippery, and wonder how to repair it this time. You’d sealed it before, which only worked for a while; if you could get hold of some plastic sheeting or tarpaulin you could cover the roof and weight it with rocks from the shore. That might work for a bit longer. Then we’d have to dry the trailer out, but if it kept on raining, that would take days. The ground would be soaked, and the mud and damp would cling to us; we’d bring it into the trailer and make matters worse. Anna couldn’t be left outside, so she would have to be kept in the trailer, and she hated that, and the floor would be filthy. You would have to get a fire lit somehow to dry out our clothes and bedding, never mind washing off the mud, and I didn’t know how you were going to manage that if the rain poured down all day, and with only soaked wood to burn. There was the propane heater to keep Anna a bit warmer, but it cost so much, and the cartridge was low and I wouldn’t be able to get back with a new one until the evening. How would you manage? You’d need hot food. It took nearly an hour to get up to the service station for hot chocolate and muffins, soup maybe, and nearly an hour back, probably longer if it was muddy, and you’d get so wet coming and going it might not be worth it.
I was glad you were asleep.
I did manage to doze off toward dawn. When I woke again, a soft, pale light was replacing the gray inside the trailer. I was aware of an absence but for a moment couldn’t work out what it was. You and Anna were still beside me; Anna had a few strands of my hair clutched in her hand and had pulled them into her mouth, and you were just beginning to wake but in that eyes-shut way of yours, convincing yourself you were still asleep. You turned and draped your arm across me. I started to prepare in my mind how I would tell you about the weather and the leaking trailer and the horrible day ahead. That was when I realized what was missing. It was quiet because the rain had stopped. All I could hear was the traffic on the bridge. I drew my hair gently out of Anna’s grip and raised myself on my elbows. The trailer was set too far back from the bank of the river for me to see to the horizon at the end of the estuary, but from that direction, over from the east, a few fringes of sunlight were beginning to sparkle on the pewtery, dark reaches of the water. That meant there was about to be a proper, unclouded sunrise, and if the sun shone bright for even a few hours today, we’d have a chance.
You would be awake in a minute, and soon you’d be outside clapping your hands at the geese and laughing at me for worrying. You’d fix the trailer, you always managed to fix it. By tonight we would be all right again. Maybe if the mini-mart wasn’t too busy or I got a minute when Vi went to lunch or dozed off, I might be able to raid the freezer and bring back some steaks for us. I’d seen some lying in the bottom nobody would want to buy anyway. I could lift a bag of charcoal from round the back on my way home, and if the rain stayed off, we could cook on the old barbecue you picked up that time from the roadside at the top of the track.
But when we were awake and up and dressed, you didn’t say anything to that suggestion. You swore a few times and stared at the trailer and then didn’t seem to care about it anymore. You set your mouth in a grim, thin line, and I didn’t get a happy word or a smile from you before I had to leave for work. You had been that way before, impatient to make it all different, angry about things you couldn’t change, furious with yourself for not giving us a regular life. But you had been getting angry more and more often, and for longer, and it was harder each time to bring you round. I didn’t really see that that was because what made you angry had changed. By then it was me you were angry with.
That day you wouldn’t walk me even part of the way up to the bus. You didn’t take Anna to say good morning to the geese, though they were lovely with the sun on their wings, and they landed so beautifully on the black rock in the river, hooting that low, rounded noise over and over like a thousand wheezy old organs in a fairground, so funny and also so sad a sound it was, like home, and sweet and faraway.
I slept badly and got up long before Col was awake. I didn’t want to speak to him, about the baby or anything else, so I left quietly and drove east from the hotel, as I had done the day before. That early in the morning there was frost on the ground and the grip of ice in the air, as if during the night winter had crept down from the mountains, pushing back the spring. A white fog obscured the hills and shoreline of the north bank of the river. I drove into swirls of it ahead of me on the road, and on either side it hung in freezing clouds under the bare trees and along the hedges.
I had meant to take a different route, striking north at Netherloch across the river at the small stone bridge there and continuing eastward up into the mountains above Netherloch Falls. I had been studying my map and had worked out a route following the road down through the forest on the north bank of the estuary, eventually crossing back to its south side over the City Bridge and entering Inverness. After a couple of hours wandering about in the city, it would not take me long to drive back westward to the service station.
But I didn’t cross the river. Overcome with weariness and nausea and fear, I stopped in a small car park on the south side of Netherloch, just before the stone bridge. I had got up far too early, trying, I suppose, to bring the day’s transaction nearer, because although I was a little shocked by how swiftly my mind had worked out all the details of what I was going to do, I was still very afraid. I was anxious to have it over with, one way or another, both dreading and hoping that it would all come to nothing. Maybe the man wouldn’t answer the phone. Maybe he wouldn’t show up, or I could take fright myself and reconsider the whole idea. Or I might not have to go through with it at all; my telephone could ring at any moment and it would be Col saying he was sorry, he’d made a terrible mistake. Please come back, he might say. Come back right this minute, we’ll spend the whole day together. I’ll look after you.
That was when I began to cry. The car park was one of those places for tourists, with green areas planted up with bushes and dotted with picnic tables, and there was nobody there. I sat in the car weeping noisily, tears pouring down my cheeks. With the engine turned off, the air was soon stuffy with the peppery, acrylic smell of car upholstery, and to stop myself feeling any sicker, I wound the window down. Cold, foggy air rushed in, and still I could not stop crying. I sank my face into my hands and rested my head on the steering wheel and cried, and cried.
When I raised my head several minutes later, feeling a bit calmer, there was a man watching me. The fog was clearing under the trees, and he was sitting at one of the picnic tables a few yards away, looking at me. He didn’t avert his gaze when he saw I had noticed him. Instead he got slowly to his feet and, with a sympathetic nod of his head, walked away. I wanted to be angry, and I should have felt foolish, but all I felt was that I had been not watched, but watched over. I stared after him. I couldn’t have described his face except for his eyes, which even from a distance had conveyed something light and clear. His head was heavy and square and covered with graying stubble; he was powerfully built and dressed in jeans and a black sweater. He climbed into a Land Rover parked in a space on the far side of some bushes and drove away.
I wound the window up and got the car warm, then I tipped back the seat and slept.
Later, I drove on from Netherloch, staying on the south side, retracing exactly my path of the day before. As before, I kept pulling off the road and loitering along the river, for I had decided against going to Inverness at all. The stopping places were quiet, and because of the fog there was much less to see.
I went again to the café at the service station and sat at the window. Across some fields to the east, near where the squat concrete pillars of the bridge approach studded the ground toward the river, lay a patch of industrial wasteland. Beyond it I could see cold spangles of light on the water. There was a strong breeze blowing across it, and the breeze was also rocking the bushes and bracken in the fields and lifting the fog out from the trees.
I waited, staring at my phone, until after it was time. When it rang, I didn’t answer. It rang a second time, and on the third ring I picked up.
“You’re supposed to call, you got a problem? Listen, you want to sell the car you call me in next half hour, okay? That’s all the time you got. You don’t call me back, I got other clients, okay? I pay cash, remember, good deal. You call me back.”
I had expected that the man would tell me to drive into Inverness, but when I dialed the number, and once I had assured him I was alone, he gave me instructions to drive back toward Netherloch.
“Go west along the river road. There’s a rest area a mile on the right. Slow down when you see it. Go past it two hundred meters more and there’s a gap in the trees and a gate. On the right, the river side. Pull off the road and stop at the gate. Wait there.”
I did as he said. I followed the road until I saw the rest area. It was where I’d stopped the day before. I bumped the car to a halt over stones and deep ruts on the shoulder opposite the gate. I was glad he’d told me not to go any farther. The gate was rusted and skewed and off its hinges, and a track stretching behind it was barely a track at all, just a narrow scree of stones and crushed branches dipping sharply down through undergrowth in the direction of the river. I waited, my heart thumping, with all the doors locked. Traffic rushed past, buffeting the car. Then I noticed a movement, and from the undergrowth at the edge of the track a figure appeared, a young man in jeans and a short jacket. His arms were clasped around a well-wrapped and heavy-looking bundle: the child. He was wearing a hat but no gloves, and as he came up to the fence, I saw his hands were raw and red. With some difficulty he hoisted the bundle higher up on his shoulder and motioned at me to approach. I started to get out of the car, but he shook his head and waved me back. Then he put the child down at the side of the track and beckoned to me again, and I understood that he wanted me to bring the car forward. He freed the gate and hauled it back, keeping hold of the child’s hand. I started the engine and turned the car, and he waved me on past him. When he’d closed the gate, he gestured at me to keep going, and I did, slowly and carefully, but scraping the car sides against branches as I went, sinking into ruts, skidding on the stones. He followed with the child in his arms. I had no idea where the track led or how I might get back up it again, with the car or not. But I had glimpsed his face and I had seen how he held his child, and though those were hardly reasons enough to trust him, I kept going, edging the car forward at barely more than walking pace.
A long way down, the ground leveled out into an area of water pools and grimy rock and reeds strewn with jetsam and river debris. Ice lay in patches under fallen trees. The tide was out; the river ran along some distance away, and upriver, almost out of sight, was a disused jetty sticking up from a shining field of mud.
Set on a patch of cleared ground under some trees a long way from the river was an old trailer with plastic sheeting over its roof. Amid the encroaching dereliction, it was still clearly a home; it looked tidy and well kept. Laundry swayed on a washing line fixed between one corner of the trailer and a tree. A bucket and broom, a plastic bath and picnic chairs, some large plastic toys and water containers were stacked neatly along the side. Nearby was an ashy fire pit set inside a circle of rocks.
I got out of the car and waited in the freezing wind for him to make his way down. We were quite a long way from the road now and well below it, hidden by a thicket of frost-bound undergrowth. On the far side of the river, the thickly wooded land sloped steeply all the way to the shore. It was hard to tell how wide the river was until I saw a frail-looking wooden hut set into a curve in the bank and a white rowing boat moored to a little jetty nearby, both standing out brightly against the silvery whorls and eddies of the tide. All at once I understood what I was seeing on a human scale, and then I saw that the wind in the pinewoods around the hut was restless and quick; branches jerked and trembled with none of the dreamy enchantment of swaying trees seen from a distance. And I thought, if someone were to appear from the door and walk down the jetty to the boat, I would be close enough to call out, and she might look up and see me standing and waving, offering as clear and perfect a picture to her as she did to me. I looked downriver to the bridge, maybe a mile away, arching over from the city to the forest side. I walked a few yards down the shore. Now, closer, I could hear above the shirring of the water a stately, faint thrum from the traffic crossing over it, and carried by the breeze that blew across, there came an eerie, soft booming that I supposed had to do with the disturbance of air through the steel spans stretching up into the windy sky.
Suddenly there was a rattle of stones and a shout behind me. I turned in time to see the man struggling to keep his balance, sliding sideways on the slope of loose rocks and puddles. Falling, he let go of the child, pushing her away from him so as not to squash her under his weight as he toppled. I ran toward them. The child was a rolling bundle of unraveling clothes and wrappings, and I reached her just as she began to scream. The man tumbled several feet and landed heavily, letting out a long cry just as the child screamed again. She wasn’t hurt, but she was frightened and indignant, and when I picked her up, she was so puzzled she stopped crying abruptly to stare at my face. I saw her eyes register that she didn’t know me, and then she writhed in my arms and took a deep breath, ready to roar her head off. I jounced her up and down and smiled and chuckled, and turned her around so she could see her father getting to his feet.
“There, there, little one, there’s Papa, ooh, look, oops-a-daisy! Silly Papa! Look!” I crooned, and the child gave me another assessing look before she burst out wailing, stretching her arms out to her father. He came toward us breathless, unsmiling. I handed the child over, but he had hurt his arm or shoulder and winced under the weight of her.
“Oh, here, I’ll hold her for you,” I offered, and tried to draw her to me again, but she curled up crying into his chest and he took two long steps back. He spoke a few words to her in a foreign language I couldn’t identify, then cast me a pained look and nodded toward the trailer. “I can manage that far,” he said.
At the trailer door, the child scrambled down without a word, plonked herself on the bottom step, and lifted up first one foot and then the other to her father, holding on to her socks while he pulled off her boots. Inside, he unwrapped her from her layers while she craned round, staring at me. She clambered up onto the window seat and settled herself into a nest of soft toys, pulling a rubbery-looking giraffe onto her lap, and the end of its tail into her mouth. The wall above her head was covered with pictures in crayon, some wild, colored scribbles that had torn the paper, and some done by an adult for a child, of cats and houses, flowers and boats and birds. She kept watching me, no less suspiciously. She was beautifully and magically the image of her father: the same curly, slaty, blue-black hair, the intense gaze from strikingly clear blue eyes, long, fragile hands. The man, nursing his wrist, nodded to me to sit down, and as I took the place beside her, she raised her eyes and smiled at me. I looked away. She made me nervous, more nervous than he did. Her beauty was close to overwhelming, but it wasn’t so much her beauty as her physical, breathing existence that moved me. I was sitting close enough to reach and touch her hair, and a few hours ago I had been almost ready to rob myself of even that small gesture toward my own child.
“Hello,” I said, turning to her. “And what’s your name?”
“No names,” the man said. We both looked at him. “Better we have no names, okay?” he said, a little more gently.
The child poked one finger at her chest and said, “Anna.” She beamed at me and then pointed at her father. “Papa!”
There was a pause, and then Anna declared her name again, and then the man laughed and he shook his head. Anna and I laughed, too. I hesitated, and then I said, “And what’s Papa’s name?”
I saw at once I had made a mistake. There was another pause, tighter than before; the man looked suddenly terrified and angry enough to hit me. Then Anna stretched out her giraffe toward me and said carefully, “Jee-raff. Anna, Papa, Jee-raff…”
He took the giraffe and waggled it at her, then thrust its head at her and cuddled it into her neck so it tickled. She tried to grab it, giggling and squealing.
“Okay, okay, Anna,” he said, letting it go and looking at her, and then at me. “Okay, so what? I’m Stefan.”
Whatever it was that had caused him to be so tense, his daughter released him from it as if she had let go of a bird trapped in her hands. She was sucking again on the fronded tail of the giraffe and staring at her father. She already knew something about adoration, but she didn’t have an inkling of her power. She didn’t understand that just the sight of her fingers flexing and pointing at a stranger’s face and her voice experimenting with a stranger’s name could do this. She made him believe that nothing else mattered, that he could handle anything. He sank down on the seat on the other side of the trailer, leaning gingerly on the table.
“You hurt your arm,” I said. “Let me see.”
When I asked him to make a circle with his wrist, he hissed with pain.
“Can you move your fingers?” I asked. “Can you bend your elbow?” He could, but when he tried to turn his forearm, the pain shot up and down between elbow and wrist. The redness of his hands had got worse since we came inside the trailer, and they were now mottled with blue, and he was shivering. He might have been quite ill; at the very least he was frozen, and probably shocked by the fall.
“You need a hot drink,” I said.
He wiped his uninjured hand across his face and didn’t reply. I got up and moved to one end of the trailer where there was a double gas burner. I filled a small saucepan with water from a plastic canister, lit the burner using a box of matches on a shelf, and set the pan on it. I opened cupboards and found grassy-smelling herbal tea bags of some kind. I decided that he needed sugar but there didn’t seem to be any, so when the water was poured, I stirred in some honey. As he drank, the trailer filled with balmy, hay-scented steam, like when the sun warms leaves and wildflowers after rain. The fumes reminded me of the kind of summer day almost impossible to imagine looking at his sore, pinched hands while, a few feet away outside the trailer, the air splintered with cold and the river ran past swollen by the wintery, dark flow of melted ice.
He saw me glance past him through the window. As if remembering what I was there for, he pushed his cup aside and looked at his watch.
He said, “There isn’t much time. Come outside. Anna, stay here a minute and be a good girl.”
He stepped down from the trailer; I followed. He was in a hurry now, but Anna scrambled after us to the door and wailed to be lifted down and kept near him. He got her boots on again and buttoned her into her coat.
We walked all around the car. He kicked at the tires and peered in the windows, and he tried all the doors and inspected the trunk. When he asked to see the engine, we had to fish out the manual and look up how to release the catch under the hood. I could tell he knew no more about car engines than I did.
When he’d finished looking, he said, quietly and without surprise, “Rental car. You steal it? You come to sell me a car that’s not yours?”
“I need some money, that’s all. You said no questions.” I turned away, pretending to cough, so he wouldn’t know that my voice trembled and my eyes were filling with tears.
“Okay, you didn’t steal it. You rent it. And this-” he tapped with his foot on the license plate-“this is the real number?”
“Yes.”
He blew out his cheeks. “Okay,” he said. “So. If you sell, you have to tell them car was stolen. Because you are a thief.”
“No. Yes. I know.”
“So if I buy, I need to change the plates, maybe change the color. So I pay less for car.”
“I need three thousand,” I said, without thinking. I was guessing; it sounded like enough to ask, enough to change Col’s mind.
“Maybe. Maybe not so much. It drives good? I need to drive it. If it drives good, I pay. No receipt, no documents.”
“How much?” I asked. “How do I know you’ve even got any money?”
He glanced at Anna, who was absorbed, digging a pebble out of the tread of one of the tires. Turning from her, he produced an envelope from inside his jacket. He drew out just enough for me to see the top edge of a wad of banknotes.
“I got money.” He stood watching my face as I tried to control another wave of tears. I had begun to tremble. I was horrified at myself, bartering a car that wasn’t mine for money to keep a baby. How flimsy it was proving to be, the border between the kind of person I was before this, whose life had never strayed off the path of the conventionally law-abiding, and the kind of person I was turning into; it was terrifying to learn how irresistible, how effortless was my descent. Could I have offered in mitigation of my wrongdoing the plea that I had no choice? Of course I had a choice. Having taken it upon myself to judge that the legal destruction of my baby was the greater and truly unacceptable wrong, I was choosing to break the law. But I was not acting out of principle in pursuit of a finer moral good. My reasons, circumstantial, quite possibly hormonal, were a clumsy, misshapen clump of love, need, fear, and in the end, self-interest. I was going about getting what I wanted.
“Okay, listen. You’re selling me rental car, you need money that bad. I need a car. For my wife. For a surprise, big surprise for her, big difference for her life.” He gave me a hard grin. “So, smart lady? You need the money, you owe it somebody?”
“I just need it. No questions.”
“Okay, right. No questions. We go now to drive car around. If car okay, we agree price, I pay.”
I shivered. “Okay.”
He went back inside the trailer and brought out a heap of bedding. He arranged it in a mound on the backseat, then lifted Anna on top of it and began to fiddle with the seat belt.
“That’s not very safe,” I said. “Small children are supposed to have those proper car seats when they go in cars.”
He clicked the seat belt in place and straightened. “Do I ask you for help? What can I do about it right now? You keep your mouth shut!”
Anna started to flail. “Jee-raff! Papa, Jee-raff!” she said and burst into tears. Stefan returned to the trailer and brought back her giraffe.
“You will get her a car seat, won’t you?” I didn’t care that I was making him angry. “You’ve got to get her a car seat so she’ll be safe.”
“You drive it back up the track,” he said, getting in on the passenger side. “Any damage then you don’t blame me.”
I drove very carefully up the track and stopped at the top, and we swapped places. He turned the car toward Inverness, nudging it back onto the road nervously, unused to having the controls on the right and possibly to driving at all. Anna dropped her giraffe and began to bounce and squirm on top of her heap of bedding in the backseat, and he spoke to her sharply, in their own language. I retrieved the giraffe for her, and she pushed it into her mouth; her eyes began to close. In silence Stefan drove us past the service station and onto the roundabout as if to turn left across the bridge, then reconsidered and swerved round to drive straight ahead, to the outskirts of Inverness. The traffic grew heavier, and it unnerved him. A couple of miles farther, cursing under his breath, he made a complete circuit at another roundabout and headed back the way we had come. At the bridge roundabout, he took us back onto the Inverness road, where he picked up speed. Then he turned back in the same place as before.
“Car okay?” I asked, and he nodded.
“I go back to service station now,” he said.
But when he pulled in, he shook his head and inched past the rows of parked cars. “Too many cars, too many people,” he said. “I don’t stop here.”
At the far end of the car park, just at the start of the entrance ramp back to the road, a disused track jutted off to the left toward the ground near the bridge, the wrecked and abandoned place I’d seen from the window of the café.
“More quiet here,” he said, turning the wheel. The track crossed an empty field and then opened out onto a vast stretch of cracked concrete where factories or warehouses had once stood. He stopped the car. We got out into a terrain of piled-up rubbish: lumps of masonry, rusted metal spars and gutters and old window frames, warped boards, buckled machinery, shattered glass, and heaps of what looked like sodden old clothes. In the distance a man shuffled out from a broken shed clasping what looked like a piece of carpet around his shoulders like a cloak. Without seeing us, he wandered away in the direction of three or four plumes of smoke rising from behind a half-demolished wall.
“Bad place. Junkies,” Stefan said, glancing in at Anna asleep on the backseat. “Hurry up. Bad place.”
“Do you want it or not? If you want the car, you have to pay me. Now.”
“First I need promise. I need favor,” he said. “No, not a favor. For both of us.” His eyes were anxious. “I have to change license plates. It’s okay, I can do, there’s a guy I know. So you don’t tell police the car is stolen straightaway. You report the car later, okay? Wait till I got new plates. Wait till six o’clock.” He looked at his watch, then pointed back to the service station. “Up there you can get the bus. You go in bus to Netherloch, you say you left the car in Netherloch. The bus comes there soon, fifteen minutes.”
“It’s too cold to wait for a bus. I’m not feeling well. Can’t you drive me to Netherloch?”
“No,” he said, looking back at his daughter. “You can get bus easy, plenty of time. Bus is warm. Listen-when you get to Netherloch. There is a car park behind the school.”
I nodded.
“So cars get taken from there. Stay in town awhile, you can get coffee, food. Wait till six, then I will have new plates. At six o’clock you go to car park, you call police, you say you left the car there all day. Tell them this morning you went to walk, you go along by the water and in the forest and then you get back and car is not there. Okay? You got no car, you have to tell story, explain them something. It’s for both of us. You understand?”
“Okay.”
He pulled out the envelope from his jacket. “Two thousand,” he said.
“Three,” I insisted, numbly. I had no idea what the car was worth, no idea what I was talking about.
“Two thousand five hundred,” he said, counting it through his fingertips, bill by bill, before I could argue.
“All right,” I said.
He handed it over and pointed to the service station again. “Just up there.”
He smiled. He was anxious for me to go. But some natural courtesy-maybe even a little gratitude because I liked his daughter-prevented him from showing it.
“All right. Goodbye.”
In absolute misery, I zipped the money into an inside pocket of my shoulder bag. Just as I was turning to go, I glanced in at the child, lying aslant across the collapsed wad of bedding and beginning to stir from sleep. Seeing her father outside, she pulled herself up and patted on the window with the palms of both hands, about to cry. Stefan and I looked at each other; we both wanted to say something else, and we both started to speak at once. He tried to laugh.
“Okay. What?”
“You will remember to get her a car seat, won’t you? Today?”
He smiled and reached out and gave my shoulder a little shake. “Sure, sure, lady. Today. I will.”
“What were you going to say?”
“Nothing,” he said. He pulled out his envelope again, just as Anna began to sob, pressing her face up to the glass. “Only, here. Three thousand. Here, take,” he said, pushing more bills into my hands. Then he turned quickly to the car, and I started walking away, toward the service station. I heard him open the car door and speak gently, but I kept walking. I could not bear to see her hands outstretched for him as he lifted her into his arms.
I didn’t want to wait for the bus. It was too cold to stand in the shelter, and I wanted to get away and keep moving, putting distance between myself and what I had just done. I kept walking. Soon I had reached the bridge, and I could see that the pathway for pedestrians was separate from the road, built lower than the steel deck that carried cars; once on it I would be almost invisible except to anyone I might meet walking across from the other side. I strode along fast with my collar up against the roar of traffic and the exhaust fumes and the estuary wind. I liked the thought of being hidden. After a few minutes, the bus rumbled on past me.
Looking inland, I could see all the way to the point where the river emerged from the neck of the loch, and turning eastward, I saw as far as it ran, past the docks and the city, and widened into the sea. As I walked, in each direction the views hit my eyes like old, stuttering film as the black spars of the bridge flickered past between me and the landscape.
At the first junction on the far side, where nearly all the traffic bore right to go north and up the coast, I turned left and followed a much narrower road that rose and curved inland. The signs pointed toward Netherloch Falls and Netherloch. The paved walkway from the bridge came to an end, and I continued along the side of the road, suspended in wintery afternoon darkness; the way was canopied by overhanging trees, through which blinding slashes of daylight cut until they stood too densely planted for light to penetrate. After a while I could only sense but not see the river, a long way beyond the trees and below me. One or two cars passed, leaving hollow echoes of engine noise. As the road rose ahead of me, I could tell I was going higher; soon I heard a faraway rushing in the treetops and the air was cold with pine resin and raw mountain winds that carried none of the green, reedy damp of the river. I came upon the remains of a clearing where trees had been felled in an apparently disordered kind of order: straight rows of sawn stumps poked up between tractor ruts that receded back into the line of the forest. Everywhere the ground was scattered with shards and chips of torn wood and the scabs of stripped bark. Dozens of tree trunks lay stacked parallel, and around them were stiff, feathery heaps of smaller pine cuttings alongside dried-out branches and twigs, gray and tangled like wires.
I had been walking for nearly an hour and had a stitch in my side, and I stopped to rest against a mound of logs, digging my foot into a mulchy carpet of pine needles and moss. I was scared and cold, and sick with disgust at myself; I stared into the darkness of the trees and wanted to escape into it. Just then I heard another bus. Without thinking, I ran back to the road and waved it down. I climbed on breathless and shivering and wondered if I was getting flu. By the time we reached Netherloch, I ached with tiredness and the afternoon had turned cloudy and raw. It was only a quarter past two. I knew I could not bear nearly four hours loitering in the streets, going from one café to another. I had to get into a quiet room and lie down, I had to sleep.
The sign on the front of the bus said WESTER MUIR/FORT AUGUSTUS, which I knew were some miles west beyond our hotel, so I clambered down to the driver and paid the extra to go on to Invermuir where, he told me, the bus stopped at the postbox on the far side of the village from the hotel. Col would not be back before six o’clock. I could hide in our room for at least two hours, and later I would get back somehow to Netherloch. If there wasn’t another bus I could get a taxi, and if I didn’t get there until after six it wouldn’t matter; in fact, it would help, it would give Stefan even more time. We would be safe. But I didn’t know what safe meant anymore. I opened my bag and flicked the money through my fingertips, powdery, soft paper amounting to three thousand pounds. Just paper, after all, but I was trusting to it to buy me my safety.
I stared through the bus window and tried to distract myself by identifying the plants along the road. Gorse, bracken, patches of rushes, and spongy, brownish pads of composting nettles and saturated moss. I was collecting observations that I could array before Col one by one, to fill our evening before I mentioned the baby and the money. Then I would tell him that I had solved the problem, that there was now plenty of money so there was no need to worry. He would love his child when it arrived, and anyway, I would take care of everything. Soon I found myself in a pitiful daydream in which kindness and remorse and enlightenment washed over his face, and henceforth we moved on together toward a sweetly melancholic, poetic future as Mummy and Daddy. I modified the daydream; at some later date, next year maybe, I would be pregnant again. If it happened at forty-two, it could surely happen at forty-three, and it would be different next time, because making the best of one accidental baby was one thing, having a second quite another, undertaken only by devoted and deliberate parents. By then I would, as a mother, be well acquainted with anxiety about the world at a level previously unimaginable, but I would be watchful and capable, too, and our happy children would-I whispered the very words-make our happiness complete. This was a manageable and familiar dream to me, set in a future in which I was altered, having blossomed in my husband’s eyes and acquired proper, wifely value as a person whose wisdom and clarity about life were necessary to him. I concentrated on it for the rest of the journey.
The store wasn’t busy; lunchtimes never are. A few campers from the Lochside Holiday Cabins were coming in at the weekends now but still hardly any during the week, and they usually stocked up early in the day. The bus stopped outside at two o’clock, on time. Nobody got off. Around the same time some fishermen came in to fill up their flasks from the vending machine. They told me again we should be selling soup and hot pies. Get a microwave and you could do it easy, you’d make a fortune this weather, they said.
I nodded over at Vi, who was sleeping behind the counter with dribble going on her cardigan.
Tell her, it’s her place, I said. She says she’s not running a bloody restaurant.
There was stuff from the Cash & Carry to price and put out, so when the fishermen left, I woke Vi up and told her I was going to the back room, not that she really heard. It was just cans and cotton wool and fire lighters and tinfoil, plus one of Vi’s impulse buys, a bag of soccer shirts, so there was no hurry. I took a sandwich past its sell-by from the chiller and made my tea, and when I’d had my lunch, I sent a message to you, but you didn’t answer; I thought you must be out of range, along the shore or getting water from the car-wash tap at the service station. Then I went back with a cup of tea for Vi and made her go across to the house. I told her to have a lie-down and I’d see her later, but I knew she’d have another bottle in there and I’d be locking up tonight. She wouldn’t go at first, she said the house would be cold. So I went over, and it was and also dirty, as always. I switched on the gas fires and her electric blanket and bedside light and then went back for her. I led her all the way to her bedroom door, and I promised her I’d look after everything. I hoped she’d fall asleep before she could start crying.
Soon after that a family came in. They’d been to the Netherloch Falls. There was a sulky girl chewing on a leaflet from there, and their feet were muddy. I didn’t like them. It was a weekday, so the children should have been in school. I made the man go outside with his cigarette even though it was only in his mouth and not lit. The woman asked if we had Internet access, and I told her no because I’d seen her wiping her nose with her hands. She said what’s that then, pointing at the sign outside, and I said it wasn’t working. For all I knew it wasn’t. Nobody had logged on for a couple of weeks. Then she shook out a rail of tartan scarves and tried them all on, even though there was no mirror and they were only scarves. After that she took a basket and went up and down the shelves helping herself, digging in the freezer and handing out ice creams to her children before she’d paid for them. I told them there was no eating in the shop, so they hung around staring at me and sucking and tugging at their ice cream wrappers and fingering the chocolate bars and playing with the key rings in the “Under £3” tray. I’m sure they took some. The eldest one kept whining to her mother about why there wasn’t a toilet and when could she get on Facebook.
After they’d gone, I sent you another message and told you what they were like, but you were still out of range.
Then it was quiet again for a while. A man came in, someone I remembered seeing before. He came in now and then, always in outdoor clothes like the men who ran the angling weekends or worked in the forest, but he was always by himself and he was older than most of them. Not that I could really guess his age. He had cropped hair that I thought would be silvery gray if it were longer. When he brought his things to the register, he smiled as if he knew me. I noticed the color of his eyes again, a bluish gray like the color of water in winter, and there was a brightness in them, almost a flashing, as if he had just caught sight of something startling, not in me but in the air surrounding me. But he was friendly. I remember thinking he was the first person I’d seen smiling since Anna waved me goodbye that morning, and my face felt a little unaccustomed to smiling back. I forgot how it showed, worrying all the time. He said something I didn’t hear.
“Sorry, what did you say?”
“Nothing, doesn’t matter. You were miles away,” he said, still smiling.
I laughed and started to ring up his purchases. “Yes, I was. Sorry.”
“Good place to be, sometimes. I think so, anyway.”
The radio was on as usual, and I also remember there had just been a commercial break and a time check. That was how I was sure exactly when it happened. Two forty-five. He’d bought milk, a can of beans, cheese and tomatoes and bread, I remember that as well.
“You’re not Polish, are you?” he asked. “Where are you from, then?”
“Me? I’m from miles away,” I said and rang the register.
“Well, that’s two of us,” he said, and we laughed in the way people laugh when they want to show something doesn’t matter but it does.
Then the first sound of it came. It rolled at us like a shape, a dark color, a giant boulder. Other sounds were squashed under it: the radio, the ting of the register, my voice counting out change. I stopped trying to count, and we stood staring at each other, then I began to feel the noise as well as hear it; it came from underground and rumbled up through my legs and into my throat, it was rattling the words I was trying to say against my teeth as if my mouth were full of buttons. The man was trying to speak, too, but his lips just opened and closed. Then this underground roaring rose and grew into a jagged crashing and breaking over our heads. Vi came hurrying in from the house, through the back of the shop and heading straight for the doors.
“Oh, Jesus!” she was shouting. “Jesus, what is it? Is it a plane? Jesus, it’s a plane crashed at Inverness!”
We all went outside, our three faces raised to the sky.
It wasn’t a plane, but the noise was coming from the direction of Inverness. Faraway sirens started to wail. A couple of cars stopped dead on their way up the road, and people got out of them shouting, and two or three of them ran back, eastward, toward the noise. A moment later a car coming up the other side from Netherloch braked suddenly and swerved in at the side of the road just past the turnoff and our parking area; two bikes on the roof shuddered and slipped forward onto the hood. The door swung open, and the driver stumbled in our direction with his phone at his ear.
“Oh, my God! The bridge? The bridge? Fuck! It’s going down, the bridge is going down!” His voice was squealing and jerky. “Oh, my God! Are you okay, are you okay? Yes, yes, all right. Oh, my God! You stay there. You stay where you are. Don’t move, okay? Oh my God!” He ended the call and for a moment stood rooted, staring at the phone and pulling his hair. More cars were stopping, more people were swarming on the road. He came toward us, waving his arms. “The bridge! Hey, it’s the bridge! Something’s happened to the bridge! It’s going down!”
His voice pulled other people in a circle around him. “It’s the bridge! She saw it! My wife, she saw it! She’s in her office, they’re on the twelfth floor, riverside, they all saw it! It’s gone down, the bridge is down, they can’t leave the building. It could be a bomb!”
From here there was nothing to see but the road and the forest that grew right to its edges. From Vi’s place you had to cross the road and climb in through the pines and go right up to the head of the waterfall to get a sight of the other side, the town and the falls tumbling down and the river stretching away from the east corner of the loch, and on toward the bridge and beyond that, Inverness docks and the ocean. There was a moment of disappointment while we all stood, listening. The noises around us were changing. The roar lessened to a low rumble under the screams of more sirens. Everyone had turned in the direction of the city. Then a man in a checked shirt tugged at his wife’s arm. “Come on! Come on, then!” he said, and ran toward the trees. The woman glanced at us and followed him.
It was all the rest of them needed. The excitement returned. Of course they had to see for themselves. Suddenly it was all right to run after a glimpse of it. People headed for the trees. Cars were still pulling up and stopping, and soon there were ten or twelve banked up in both directions. Some drivers wanted to move on, but the road was too narrow for them to get around the cars blocking them. They leaned on their horns and got out and stood with their hands on their hips or went striding up to the vehicles in front. Other people fished around in car trunks for boots and cameras and followed the others making for the trees. One couple quickly unhitched their bikes from the back of their car and set off down the road, weaving through the line of stopped traffic. Even though she had no coat, Vi pitched forward and joined the flow of people disappearing into the woods. She turned back once and shouted something at me, but I didn’t hear what. Probably something about minding the store, which she knew I would do anyway. When I looked round, the man had gone, too. He had left his bag of food on the bench outside.
In the space of the next minute, everyone vanished. I sat down on the damp bench and tried to call you, but I couldn’t get through. Two miles farther up the river and on the south side, you were much nearer to what was happening than I was. I wanted to know that Anna wasn’t scared.
I couldn’t always predict what Anna would understand, what would frighten or delight her. Sometimes she stared at me for a long, long time, and sometimes she looked away into such a far-off, sad place in her mind that I could believe she saw every sorrow there has been and is yet to come in this world. At other times, she was brave and bold. Do you remember one time when she was crawling, last summer, and you and I both thought the other one was watching her? It was only for a moment, but she set off on her hands and knees across those sharp stones toward the river, and I’ll never be sure she wouldn’t have kept on until the water was over her head if you hadn’t yelled and dashed down and scooped her away from the edge. You lifted her up high to show me she was fine, and she was laughing and kicking, her legs were dripping. She laughed as if it was funny I might think she was anything other than immortal. She was laughing at me for being afraid she’d do anything as stupid as get herself drowned.
I tried you again, but still I couldn’t get through. Then I felt guilty, remembering that phone signals get overloaded at such times with callers trying to find people they fear are caught up in the danger. There would be hundreds of people frantic for news, not just a little anxious, as I was, that a child might have seen something frightening from a distance. I thought of you coming down the trailer steps and hurrying to the water’s edge with Anna in your arms. You wouldn’t be able not to watch the bridge, but you’d make sure she wasn’t scared. You’d hold her tight, shield her eyes, comfort her. She might not even know what it meant, it might be simply exciting to her, a spectacle. She might be clapping her hands. I flicked through the photos I kept on my phone of the two of you. Shivering on the bench and with the sirens wailing far away but all around me, I sat smiling and looking at pictures.
After another while the sirens faded, as if all the panic were somehow being placed at a distance. The cars on the road were empty. I decided I would go in and make some tea and see if I could fiddle with the radio dial and get the news. I picked up the man’s bag of groceries and took it inside to keep safe for him in case he came back.
Soon afterward Vi returned. She was sober now, and scorched-looking, as if what she’d seen had radiated a kind of blast that had burned off the drink in her. Her sandy, dry hair had frizzed up in corkscrews, and her eyes were small and hot under her stiff straw eyebrows. She’d been up to the top of the falls, she told me, high enough to see down the estuary to the ruined bridge.
“There’s a whole bit gone right out of the middle,” she said, talking fast, bringing her hands together and opening them wide again. “Disappeared. Torn right away and in the river. And there’s loads of cars went with it, they don’t know how many. Cars with folk still in them.”
I had never heard her talk so much. Disaster had made her lively. The river was choked with wreckage: girders, concrete, tarmac. She had seen the roofs of cars and an upended truck. She hadn’t seen any corpses, but people were dead in the water, people were missing. The roads on both sides of the bridge were closed. Up at the falls the man in the checked shirt had been getting news and police reports on his phone, and he told her that on this side of the river the police would be stopping all the traffic coming down from the north to Inverness and diverting it past the broken bridge. Everything would have to come all the way along here on our little road, seven miles inland, and cross the river by the little stone bridge at Netherloch. Then from Netherloch, the traffic would have to travel the seven miles back again, right down the riverbank on the other side to the end of the estuary at Inverness.
“Oh, think of the people,” I said. I realized I was crying. “Those poor people.”
“It’ll be pandemonium,” Vi said. “Pandemonium. Detours from here to Inverness, it’ll add hours, you wait and see.” Her voice was greedy. She was thinking of all those cars crawling past outside, all those drivers, bored and hungry and thirsty. She was trying not to look pleased.
“I mean the people in the water,” I said. “The drowned people.”
“Aye, right enough, but now what? That wee bridge at Netherloch’ll never cope, it couldn’t even take two wee vans going past each other, never mind they great big trucks.”
I remembered the first time we went there. I remembered the little bridge, made of dark gray stone like the rest of Netherloch town. It had a shallow arch, and curved recesses on each side. For people to step out of the way of carts and horses, you told me. It must have been built hundreds of years ago. Or to stand fishing, I said. Or set up stalls, selling things. People set up markets on bridges, don’t they? It’s where you can wait and catch customers, while they’re going across. We stood there a little longer, but I don’t remember what we said after that. It was one of those conversations that did or didn’t have an ending, like seeing a puff of smoke in the sky that drifted away and you weren’t sure if you saw it go or just noticed later it had gone. It didn’t matter.
Just then more sirens started up, and we went to watch at the window. The sound came nearer. Three or four vehicles with blue flashing lights swept past in the direction of Netherloch.
“See?” Vi said. “That’s them going in to set up the detours. Pan-de-bloody-monium.”
It was getting dark, and soon from down the road another blue flashing light appeared and drew nearer, traveling slowly. Behind it, a pair of white headlamps followed, growing round and glaring. More headlamps flickered behind in a long, moving necklace of lights winding up from the Inverness bridge. Soon the traffic was juddering nose to tail all along the road outside. We waited.
“I might have kenned,” Vi sighed. “Nobody’s stopping. Once you’re in a queue like that, you stay in it. Nobody’s going to pull off just for sweeties and a drink and lose their place.”
She went over to the counter and rummaged underneath it. She poured out the dregs from her bottle and raised the glass toward the window. “Pandemonium. Break your bloody heart.” She tipped her drink down her throat and, swaying a little, turned to watch the traffic again. “It’ll be a different story in Netherloch. Folk pouring into a wee place like that, oh, they’ll do fine, ta very much. Mind you, it’ll bring in all sorts.”
“I like Netherloch,” I said.
Vi turned her gaze from the window. “Your lot don’t go to Netherloch. It’s for holiday folk.”
“I’ve been once or twice.”
“There’s nobody in Netherloch these days. It’s for holiday folk now,” she said firmly. “None of your lot there.” She made it sound as if Netherloch had escaped a pestilence. I felt my eyes fill with tears again and I moved away to the door, where all the tourist stuff was laid out, and began tidying up the shelf with the pottery Loch Ness monsters and bookmarks. Over my shoulder I could feel her thinking about what she’d said, wanting to balance it with something less unkind. I saw that in her, sometimes, and a look that told me she was sorry for the way she was.
“Well, anyway. Where is it you stay again? Over the other side, isn’t it? You’ll be a while getting back tonight,” she said. “All that traffic all the way up to the wee bridge and all back down the other side.”
“There’s still the stock at the back to put out,” I reminded her, and got the pricing gun and the order sheet from under the counter. Vi looked at the clock.
“No, on you go,” she said, taking them from me. “You get going. Walk up to Netherloch and there’ll be police there, they’ll help you out. There’ll be other folk needing lifts most likely. I doubt there’ll be a bus tonight.”
As I went to get my bag and jacket, I heard her open the cash register. When I came back, she was leaning over it, gripping the sides with her hands.
“There’ll be nobody in this weekend. I can’t be paying out to mind an empty shop.” She looked up. “Don’t come in till Monday, okay? You’d struggle to get here anyway, all that bloody big detour.”
She started thumbing through the few bills in the register drawer. It was Thursday. Maybe she’d forgotten she was due to pay me on Friday. I had less than five pounds in my bag. I didn’t know how we’d manage the weekend, never mind that I was supposed to work Sunday and now she didn’t want me in, so I’d lose that money as well.
“I could make it. I could get here,” I told her. I stood there for a while, hoping at least she’d pay me what I was owed.
“Not worth it. Could be we won’t get a summer season at all,” Vi said, banging the drawer shut again. Then she gave me a kind of wave and lurched back to her place by the kerosene stove. I think she meant it partly as an apology, but mainly she wanted rid of me.
“Come in Monday. I’ll pay you Monday,” she said and closed her eyes.
That made me feel a little better. If she wasn’t settling up now, it must mean she really did want me on Monday. She wasn’t telling me I hadn’t got a job anymore.
“See you then, Vi,” I said. “Take care.”
Just at that moment I had an idea. I reached under the counter and picked up the bag of stuff I’d kept for the man who hadn’t come back. We’d manage through the weekend all right. Probably you would want to get us some fish as well. Those times we were down to nothing, you always tried fishing. Hours and hours you spent at it, without the proper lines or anything, and usually you got nothing. Mainly you did it because you liked it-not the fishing itself, the trying. But I’d stop you this time. I couldn’t eat fish from the river now.
I turned and walked out into the night air. Cars trickled past me, their headlamps shining in a silvery curve out of the trees bordering the road, sparkling ahead into blackness. The night was damp and cold. Suddenly I felt I was down there at the bottom of the dark river with the fish, their thick, flat, muscular sides quivering past me, swimming right past those poor drowned people and flicking their dead faces, sending pulses of dark water into their open mouths and pulling silky fins through their waving, frondy hair.
On the day the bridge collapsed he’d been standing in a shop, a dingy roadside place called the Highland Bounty Mini-Mart, where he’d stopped a number of times before. It was run by a pathetic old drunk and a skinny blond woman, foreign, who as far as he could see did all the work. He wasn’t good at small talk, but he’d found out gradually he was better at it than the blond woman, and she seemed always sad, and that made him want to speak to her. He would have liked to cheer her up a little. He was taking his change when the roaring and crashing began and they rushed outside and a moment later someone was shouting about the bridge, and without wanting to be, he was swept along in a group of people all racing up through the forest to the head of Netherloch Falls.
Long before they got there his heart was hammering in his chest, partly from the noise and shock and the physical exertion of climbing up the dark, rooty path between the trees, but partly also from a rush of excitement. Here he was, talking away to people unknown to him, all of them struggling through the forest together, helping one another, listening to breathless theories and speculations about causes and casualties. The others seemed to assume he was somebody just like them. Even in the wake of a catastrophe, perhaps because of it, they accepted him without question.
At the top, the ground opened onto a flat patch of smooth rocks and clumps of bracken and heather, and the group halted by a low wall at the tourists’ lookout point. Conversation dropped away to silence as they gazed at the stark, fractured bridge ends, already sparkling with emergency lights and divided now by the torrent of the river. For a long time nobody moved; a kind of an impotent acceptance, a subdued awe at the sight of the wreckage, weighed upon them all. Then two or three who stood close by Ron began to cry quietly. The rest moved to and fro, talking softly again or just looking; some took photographs, some gathered round a man who was picking up live news on his mobile phone. Slowly, most drifted away. Ron stood apart and wept, his whole body shaking. His companions, if they were taken aback by his sobbing, did not show it, and one of the women squeezed his arm as she turned to go.
He lingered for a long time after everyone else had left, sitting on a low rock and watching the white sky deepen to gray. Down at the bridge, the lights sharpened and winked brightly through the dusk, and as he watched he became calmer. It sank into his mind slowly that the blame for this was not his to bear. This was greater destruction even than that he had caused seven years ago, and although the enormity of that would never lessen, before his eyes those seven and a fraction deaths were multiplying. He felt grievously helpless, but out of his distress was arising a gratitude that he was not, he really was not to blame for this suffering, too. He was innocent, and for that he was both relieved and ashamed of his relief.
And it filled him with an urge to do something to help, as if he were being granted permission at last to make amends, to involve himself somehow in the righting of this calamity as a way of uncoupling himself from the dragging guilt of the last one. There must be work he could do that would bring about some little good; he could volunteer. They would be setting up assistance for casualties and families, there would be people down there now, stranded and needing help. He would go and make himself available to do whatever was needed. There would be, at the very least, people wanting rides home.
While there was still enough light to see by, he made his way down through the forest path and back across to the Highland Bounty Mini-Mart. When he saw that the place was dark and closed up he remembered about his bag of shopping, but he didn’t care about that now. Outside the shop the road was now choked with barely moving traffic in both directions. There would be chaos at the bridge; in the Land Rover he would not get even near it. He would have to forget about driving anywhere tonight and see what he might do in other ways. He thought for a moment about waiting until morning, but the urge to act at once was too strong. He set off, walking toward the bridge against an oncoming line of vehicles. It was the nearest to happy he had felt for seven years.
When I got back to the Invermuir Lodge, it was that dead time of afternoon in small hotels, after lunch and before the bar opens, when all the staff disappear. I went straight upstairs and lay down to rest, and when I closed my eyes, pictures from the day loomed at me, a day of brightness and darkness, and of distant views of the wilderness of the forest seen from the city side of the river.
Soon I was wandering along a path of linked half-dreams where fog curled through unrecognizable trees and lifted across a mirrored loch and sunlight snapped between the spans of a bridge, and I stood within the imprisoning mesh of a forest, waiting for something. To be found, I thought, or maybe just to be seen; if by some magic twist I were able to be in two places at once, to be standing where I was and also seeing myself in the place I was looking toward, would I behold a less shabby me, transformed, reinvented, valid? It came to me, as I fell asleep, that that was what I was waiting for, and that I had always gone about my life in this way, looking with yearning across distances. I had reached out from my father’s sickness-bound house in Portsmouth toward a far-off, more authentic self as Col’s wife; now I was reaching from the flatness of our marriage for the distant picture of us as parents. I heard again the cry and the scrape of rocks as Stefan stumbled and fell, casting Anna away from him toward her safe, soft landing. I saw them as they had sat in the trailer, looking at each other, and when they turned to me, their faces wore frayed smiles, full of sadness because they knew I was incomplete in some way, lacking something specific, like money or an important fact, but something that they didn’t have a word for. And for all they could not say quite what it was, it was something definitive and tremendous, and they were regretful that by not having it I was excluded and set apart from them. I pulled a pillow across the bed and held it in my arms against my stomach. I watched the red numbers of the alarm clock at the bedside wink in the gloom, and I fell asleep again.
I was awakened by a text message from Col.
Soaking freezing. Going for drink their hotel F Aug. Back at 7.
I turned and stretched out on my back, relieved. I was still groggy, and the square of light from the window showed a sky silvery with cold and fading toward evening. Fort Augustus was twelve miles farther west of Invermuir. It was just after four o’clock. Now I could stay warm and rest for at least another hour, which would be time enough to get used to the thought of going out again.
I got up to make a cup of tea. Instead of switching on a lamp, I turned on the television, for its flickering light rather than the actual pictures, and I kept the volume off. It wasn’t until after I had filled the little kettle from the bathroom tap and come back to plug it in that I took any notice of what was happening on the screen.
I was watching trembly pictures of a man with a fishing rod standing by a river. He was showing off and smiling. He turned to the water to cast, concentrating for a moment or two, sideways from the camera. The picture swung up to the top of the rod and back down; the man grinned and cast again. It was an amateur video; it must have been one of those programs of supposedly hilarious home video clips and in a minute there would be a mishap: he’d fall in the river, a gull would land on his head, something like that. But in the instant before I turned away, the man’s body jolted and his knees buckled. He turned abruptly upriver and dropped the rod. When he spun round a second later to look at the camera, his face was frightened and bewildered. Then he was shouting and waving his arms, and he ran off out of the frame. The camera swung away; the picture tilted up, zigzagged, and hit darkness, and then it began to jerk irregularly and very fast, up and down. Black bars broke across the image; the person with the camera was running through trees. When the picture settled, it was trained on the water. It focused in, silently, on the distant bridge.
The bridge I had crossed that day was untying itself from the earth. Its taut steel curves were loosening, its angles unfolding and turning slack. Cables were swaying and bending out of the sky, curling down and inward and falling in cast-off tangles into the water. Around and underneath them, all across the river, cars careered off the tilting road and sent up white explosions of foam as they hit the surface. I turned up the sound; now the cries of the man with the fishing rod mingled with creaks and a hollow roaring from the bridge and the coming-and-going groan of the wind, or perhaps it was not the wind but the breathless rasps of effort from the man who kept hold of the shaking camera when all he must have wanted to do was turn his eyes away and weep. But he held on, and then came the high squealing and tearing of tons of breaking masonry and steel. The uprights supporting the bridge spans tottered stiffly toward and away from one another. With awful slowness they, too, crashed one by one into the river, and the road, tipping and sagging some more, in a slow, rolling twist, disappeared under the water.
Then the image froze. From the bridge’s severed end, girders hung suspended in space and in time, not yet lethally collapsed. A car arrested in a nosedive toward the water hovered in midair, its occupants not yet trapped and drowned. There was a digital whirring. For a second or two, the video ran backward and speeded up like some ludicrously cruel comic caper; the car reeled back from disaster and jumped up onto the road. Then the screen went blank except for numbers racing in one corner. There was a flicker, and there again was the man larking about with the fishing rod, his face untouched by what was about to happen. Again he twice cast his line, started, turned, dropped the rod, shouted, ran. Again the stumbling camera followed until it broke through the undergrowth and fixed on the collapsing giant of the bridge, the breaking concrete, the buckled spans, ripped lengths of roadway and falling cars, the river boiling with debris.
And again. Unable to move, I stood and watched with the kettle in my hand. There he was, a man about to cast a line on a riverbank in early spring. And again, what happened instead. What happened next. This time the footage came with commentary from a news anchor in the studio, but of course it didn’t alter anything; the fisherman started, turned, dropped the rod, shouted, ran. The juddering camera followed. Voices cried out, the wind howled, cables snapped, concrete and steel tore, and the bridge went down. But I was finding out what I suddenly realized I needed to know, because this time the commentary gave a chronology, minute by minute, of what happened. I dropped the kettle, scrabbled in my bag for a scrap of paper, and wrote down all the numbers I could. When the pictures stopped, suddenly the strength went out of my legs and I sank onto the bed. With my hand shaking, I checked the timings and worked out the arithmetic.
Right up until a quarter to three that afternoon, traffic had been flowing as normal in both directions over the bridge. I had left Stefan and Anna at the service station before one o’clock. Stefan hadn’t said so, but the man changing the license plates would be sure to be in Inverness. There was no reason for Stefan to have crossed the bridge. They would have been driving into the city within minutes of my leaving them. There was no cause for them to have been near the bridge at all.
I kept watching. The amateur cameraman was in the studio now. The young man and his father-in-law, after a pub lunch in Inverness, had crossed the bridge themselves at twelve minutes past two. They had parked and gone down to the riverbank on the north side to record the first tryout with the new rod, a birthday present. The bridge began to creak and lurch at two forty-five, as his father-in-law watched in terror, turned, dropped the fishing rod, shouted, and ran. The young man followed, and his camera was on it within thirty seconds. By two forty-eight, three of the central bridge spans and the stretch of road between them, measuring over two hundred and seventy feet and bearing, the young man estimated, about twenty vehicles, had collapsed into the water. He contacted the news channel straightaway, and his video, “probably the only eyewitness record of the disaster,” was broadcast for the first time at ten minutes past four. Then they asked him what he had felt as he watched it all happen, and the young man broke down in tears.
I found myself crying, too, with a strange sorrow that was both impersonal and personal, for I cried for the strangers who were lost but also with relief for Stefan and Anna. They would be safe. By now the new license plates would be on the car, and all I had to do was get back to Netherloch and pretend I had just discovered that it had been stolen from the car park behind the school. But would anyone care, now? A bridge had collapsed and people were dead and missing; it was impossible to believe that the lies I was going to tell about the car could be of any real importance. Yet I had to go. Stefan was relying on me.
But Netherloch was only about seven miles inland from the estuary bridge, and the narrow stone bridge in the town was the next crossing place over the river. There was bound to be disruption on the roads. For the next hour I kept the television on for traffic news. The video of the catastrophe was replayed endlessly. At a quarter to six, I had another text message:
In nothr bar! Going for curry. Eat without me ok sorry
I lay back on the bed in the dark room. Reflections from the screen danced in muzzy patterns over my hands, folded across my stomach. In the next half hour the video was run another four times, with slight variations in the commentary as a range of people gathered in the studio to give their viewpoints. Then live footage appeared. In the background rescue teams with boats and helicopters and ambulances scrambled around under emergency lighting. A reporter in an overcoat stood on a roadside clutching a microphone and said that the number of vehicles believed lost in the water continued to rise. It was feared that it might never be known for certain how many, for in such strong tides and deep water, cars and bodies could be swept out to sea and never found. But, on a more optimistic note, nobody was giving up hope, the reporter said. Some people had made it out of their cars and swum through the freezing water to the bank of the river, where they were being treated on the spot for shock, exposure, and injuries. There was severe road congestion, and police were urging people to keep away. Anyone concerned for a loved one should stay by the telephone and not attempt to come to the bridge.
Then the screen filled with different images, dark and grainy. I was looking at more video footage, which, said the news anchor, relieved to have something new to show, had just been made available. Another, more solemn, voice said that what was about to be shown captured the vital seconds before the collapse. It might provide evidence as to the cause, and help with identification of fatalities. Some viewers might find the images upsetting, and at this stage police were not confirming the identities of any of the vehicles shown. In silence the new pictures rolled, blurred and gray like old newspaper photographs suddenly animated, but lit by a kind of innocuous afternoon light. The vantage point was a fixed bird’s-eye view of a road whose broken white line in the tarmac stretched away through the center of the image. This was the vital footage, said the voice, from the speed camera at the top of one of the arches of the approach on the southern side, only a hundred meters from the start of the bridge. The back view of a blue car swelled into the picture and receded, leaving the road empty again. The commentator remarked that the time, midafternoon and midweek, meant that traffic on the bridge had been light. A van and another car appeared, slowed, moved beyond the reach of the camera. For a few moments there was silence again, and the empty road. Softly, the voice said viewers were witnessing the procession of the last vehicles known to have passed under the arch when the bridge was still standing. The timing of the footage and the recorded moment of the collapse meant that these cars could not have made it all the way across; seconds after these images were caught, they would have been on the bridge. Moments later, they must have been plunged into the river. Two more cars emerged into the picture, paused, and drove on. Then speckles of gray and white invaded the screen, it turned black, and the video wound back to the start, with the bird’s-eye view of the empty road.
The footage ran again; cars came into view, moved across the screen and out. This time the video was stopped, trapping each vehicle for a moment in the center of the screen, in a fuzzy blizzard of static. The studio voice stressed that police were not releasing any details. Anyone concerned for a relative was urged to stay by the telephone. Emergency information lines would be operational soon. Slowly each car came forward, and each time the camera froze. And there, a few seconds after a black four-wheel drive and in front of a white van, was my car, the silver Vauxhall. It edged its way on and out of the picture.
My telephone blinked with another message:
Come if u want. Jewel of Raj in F. Aug. Feet soaked bring other sneakers ok?
I listened again to the voice from the television saying emergency lines would be open soon. Another message came through.
No transport back l8r unless u come with car.
I switched off the television and sat in the dark. I didn’t move at all. I didn’t dare move, for fear the least flutter of my hand or blink of an eye would alert someone to my continued presence in the world. I ought not to be here. It was through some error of fate I was still here; it was a mistake. Someone else instead of me had driven my car onto the breaking bridge and straight into the force that had twisted the road away from under its wheels and flung it into the river. I tried to control my shaking. It was essential I remain still. I ought not to be here.
I switched on the television again. In silence, the bridge camera video ran once more. The numbers for emergency information lines flashed on the screen between the cars crawling sporadically up the approach road. Again, my car passed under the arch and on toward the bridge. Along the flat lower edge of the muzzy rectangle of the back window, I saw the merest soft, dark curve: the dome of Anna’s head.
The next pictures were from a village hall on the north side of the bridge where a shelter had been set up for casualties. A pale, young, shivering face peered from the hood of a blanket and spoke to the camera.
“Suddenly there’s no road, there’s nothing in front of me and then I’m going down and I’m thinking this is it I’m going to die, but I got myself out I don’t know how, next thing I’m in the water, it’s cold it’s really freezing but I get to the surface and then I’m trying to swim and I’m just thinking keep going, keep going. I saw people in the water, there was all this wreckage and cars and stuff, then I couldn’t see them anymore. You just keep swimming and keep your head above water and hope for the best and I hope they made it.” His face crumpled; he looked five years old. “I’m lucky to be alive.”
I scanned the people in the background of a sight for Stefan. They must be there. He and Anna could not have died that way. What was the use of it, love like that, unless it achieved at least the keeping alive of the beloved? I thought of them in the car together and of the money in my bag and why it was there, and I felt sick. Could it be that I had bought my own child’s life at the cost of theirs? I thought of my mother and the price she believed had been extracted from her, and paid. Did nothing change?
Another text message came.
Heard it on news re bridge. Weird u were there y’day! Raj ok? Call me when u get here. Don’t 4get sneakers
The light from the television flickered across the leg of the dressing table and over one of Col’s sneakers lying against it with the laces tied and a wad of dead leaves trapped in the sole. On the chair in the corner I could make out the outline of his heap of clothes, big overstitched things with copious pockets and zippers and gadgety little clips and features to meet a couple of dozen Boy-Scoutishly anticipated variants of weather and carrying requirements. On his bedside table were a baseball cap, his phone charger, and a book of word puzzles.
Tonight, sooner or later, he would come back here and look around and see that this room contained everything he needed. Sooner or later, maybe not until tomorrow if he collapsed in bed too drunk to find out where I was, he would learn that our rental car had been on the bridge. If I had died in the river, this room would still contain everything he needed. If I got up now and just left, this room would still contain everything he needed.
He would probably spend some time feeling numb, even sad. He would spend some time (to his private surprise, rather little) adjusting his expectations back to those of a single man, gaining a touch of celebrity among people who knew him for the improbably lurid bad luck of losing his bride in a freak accident. He would let them describe it as tragic. He would allow them to think he minded that there couldn’t be a proper funeral; he’d go along with a modest memorial service of some kind. He would never tell a soul that I had been pregnant, and soon he would not mention me at all. Within a few months he would look back on being married as a botched experiment in becoming somebody else. Relieved, mildly ashamed, he would go back to the chat room on the Internet, but he’d be very careful never to get caught out that way again.
I straightened the bed so it looked untouched, emptied the kettle, and switched off the television. I deleted all my text messages and voice mails and turned my phone off. I put it in the shoulder bag I had left with that morning and walked from the room. I slipped downstairs. Everyone was in the bar or the restaurant. I let myself out by the door into the garden and made my way toward the road.
I walked away not just from Col but from my failure to become a wife he wanted to keep. I walked away from having to justify wanting my baby. And for my baby’s sake as well as mine, I walked away from the humiliation of counting out money to its father as if this or that sum were an opening offer in a haggle for its life. I wasn’t just walking away; I was also bearing my baby, hidden in the warm, fleshy pod of my body, to safety. I was saving both our lives, and we were together.
Nearly a mile out from the collapsed bridge, men in fluorescent jackets milled around the Road Closed signs, directing cars back to the bridge at Netherloch. Ron moved quietly among the stricken, displaced little bands of people roaming around on the sides of the road and among the trees, like mourners or refugees. A bright moon in a silky, deep violet sky shone above the road, but in the distance arc lights lit the river ominously, as if illuminating a stage for more spectacle and greater violence; the limbs of the bridge, jagged and black against flashing orange and blue emergency lights, jutted out above the water. Helicopters roamed overhead, sending down vapory cones of light, hovering low enough for gusts of air from the rotors to blow trembling circles of flecks across the impenetrable, mercury-dark river.
The drift of people carried Ron along into a denser crowd at the forest’s edge, where spectators stood facing a television crew and a spotlight under which a reporter was shouting into a microphone. An exhausted-looking man in a safety helmet was led forward to be interviewed. The crowd began solemnly to applaud him, and as he started to speak, Ron stepped away from the throng and slipped under the barrier tape. Expecting to be stopped at any moment, he passed quickly into the pines that covered the sloping land between the river and the road. There was no path so close to the forest edge; keeping within the darkness of the trees, he scrambled down through a prickly mesh of branches until he was almost at the water.
When he emerged from the trees, he saw that crowd barriers now separated the forest from the site of the collapse. He could have climbed them quite easily, but he remained outside, watching. There seemed surprisingly few people at work on the riverbank; about a dozen who looked like paramedics and rescue workers came and went around a tent that had been set up, as far as Ron could tell, as a first aid station for casualties; he saw two men carry a stretcher from the tent and up the uneven bank toward a helicopter standing on the last strip of the bridge approach road. Ron had learned first aid when he became a driver, but he did not dare go forward and present himself. He would be ejected at once as unauthorized. There was no place here for simple willing hands; this was not a neighborly effort. The operation was professional and, for all he knew, efficient. He drew farther back into the trees. Once he was more familiar with what was going on, once it was daylight again, he would find the courage to ask if he could help.
As the night wore on, the rescue settled into a regular rhythm, determined and unspectacular. Under the arc lights, boats and helicopters made their forays to the river in droning, dogged circles. Ron hunkered against a damp tree trunk and grew drowsy. He dozed until the cold woke him. Then he got up and moved back farther into the trees, where the wind did not cut so keenly. He didn’t want to spend the night in the open, but he was reluctant to walk the seven miles back to the Land Rover; without knowing where he was going, he slipped deeper still into the forest’s shelter. He was afraid of losing his way, and remembering that the road above him followed its path, he kept the river always in sight on his left, shining through the fringe of pine branches. He was cold. After a while he came upon an area where trees had been felled, but not recently; years of hard weather on the rutted ground had left it almost impassable with dank troughs and exposed, torn-up roots. From here the bank rose steeply to his right; there was no clear route up to the road. So he made his way instead down to the gleaming river, and when he reached it he saw he must be almost a mile from the bridge. The sharp arc lights had softened to a glow in the night sky. That was when, almost at the water’s edge, he came across the derelict prefabricated cabin. The door on the river side was padlocked, but at the back he found a small, warped door, locked and jammed tight with damp. It was soft with rot and sagged against his shoulder when he pushed it. After several heaves, the lower of its two hinges split from the frame and he was able to squeeze through. The place was unfurnished and comfortless, cold and dirty, but it was a roof for the night and out of the wind. By the moonlight through the smeared windows he saw there was a stove and some fuel, but he had no matches. He curled up on the floor and lay listening to the sounds from the bridge; the motors and sirens had faded to remote purrs and squeals that mingled with the river flowing close by outside. Yet the fright and injury of the day reached into him, or maybe he had brought it with him, and suddenly his heart, a berg of ice, seemed to shatter and burn within his chest. He began to shiver violently, and he curled tighter, trying to tell himself this was physical stress, nothing more. A fragment of his first aid training came back to him: When people experience trauma, one of the first things to go is the ability to fend for themselves. It calmed him to realize that he was fending for himself, to a degree; at least he had found shelter. But why, he thought, was he steeling himself at all against the disintegration of his heart? Let it burn, let it melt. Let it even break again, if only he might no longer be alone.
It was cold, so I hurried. In Invermuir village, the main road was jammed with traffic bound for Netherloch and Inverness, but the other side, heading west to Fort Augustus, was choked, too. I don’t know why I set off in the direction of the bridge, but I walked eastward along the roadside into the night, at a pace hardly slower than the crawling line of cars. There were emergency vehicles stationed here and there with their lights flashing and policemen standing in the middle of the traffic, attempting to keep it moving. Drivers were sounding their horns and turning around, maneuvering back and forth and sending up plumes of exhaust, headlamps looming and crisscrossing the darkness with restless beams of light.
I kept away from the glare as much as I could and moved on through the smoky drifts of petrol fumes, my head down. Knots of stranded people had gathered at the village bus stops and cars were stopping to give them lifts, but I couldn’t risk joining them, looking lost and in need of help. I had watched my car go into the river, I had seen myself die; I ought to be gone, invisible forevermore. Until I had time to think and reestablish myself, somewhere and somehow, as another person, I had to learn how to have no presence at all, to move among people with the stealth of a ghost. I must be alive to no one.
Soon I no longer noticed the cold. I felt newly light and unhindered, exhilarated by having accomplished so conclusively and tidily the bringing to an end of my life with Col. But I also felt left behind, as if my true fate had gone forward and was enacting itself in advance of me, somewhere up ahead. I had to rejoin my life, or rather meet up with myself again and make another life. This was another reason to hurry.
I took a pathway off the road that led down to a walkers’ trail along the river, where the air was leafy and quiet. I had no flashlight, but the road ran parallel above and the lights of cars washed through the trees, showing me my way. From time to time the traffic thinned and the way cleared for wailing emergency vehicles. A few miles before Netherloch, the riverside path fizzled out, so I joined the road again.
I walked on, still not knowing why I was going in the direction of the bridge, but walking with purpose. Was I seeking out the broken gate in the hedge that led down to Stefan’s trailer? Not consciously. I was keeping disconnected in my mind any daytime memory of the road and the murky, illogical contours of the night landscape.
But it was getting late. More and more cars drove on past me, and I grew tired. Netherloch was still miles away, and I had to spend the night somewhere. I pulled my hat down over my ears, tucked my chin into my scarf, and waited at the next bus stop I came to. Within a minute a car stopped. It was driven by a woman about my age who had two teenage girls with her. They were doing their best to get to Inverness, and I was welcome, she said, to go with them. I was looking a bit shocked, was I all right? And wasn’t it a terrible thing that had happened?
I thanked her and got in the back. I was just cold and tired, I assured her, and gave her some story about my car breaking down and leaving it at the roadside because I preferred to walk rather than wait for rescue with the roads so jammed, but I’d underestimated the distance to Netherloch. She told me I had no chance of getting a room there for the night, the radio said the town was packed out. I’d do better going on to Inverness with her, however long it took. We crawled along; the two girls fell asleep, and to avoid conversation I pretended to as well, turning my face to the window and keeping my eyes half-closed.
It was only when I saw the lights of the service station up ahead that I realized I was returning to the trailer. All the hours I had been walking, I had been holding tight to myself a belief that Stefan and Anna were among the people who’d got out of the river alive. But I had to make sure they were safe. I had to talk to Stefan. He had lost the car that had cost him all the money he had, and I couldn’t alter that, but I had to divide the money with him. I would explain why I couldn’t part with all of it; as a father, he would understand. But I wanted to give him half of it back, to ease his loss. I made excuses to the woman about needing a bathroom and got out at the service station.
I walked back to the broken gate and down the track. The trailer was dark and shut up. There was nothing strange about that, I told myself. They might not be back yet; they could be still in one of the temporary first aid stations near the bridge. Or they might be in hospital, as a matter of routine. Of course they wouldn’t be here. I felt foolish, staring through the dark at the closed door. I imagined it opening and Stefan appearing at the top of the steps, looking suspicious and puzzled until he recognized me, and then I realized what an odd sort of rescuer I must look. Sweat was running down my body and through my hair, and I was shivering. Nausea swept over me again, as it often did when I was hungry. But my hand thrust in my pocket was clutching the envelope with the money; pleasure was welling up inside me as if I had already seen the relief on Stefan’s face. Of course there couldn’t be anyone inside the trailer, but I walked carefully across the stones, up the steps, and knocked on the door.
Nobody came. I waited, and the nausea grew worse. I tried the door handle. It opened into blackness and silence, and I was afraid, yet I wanted to go in. The night outside was suddenly no place to be; I needed walls and a roof, I needed shelter even if only this: precarious, thin, leaking. I stepped up into the doorway and peered inside. I could smell the soapy, vinyl smell from yesterday and also the bitter tang of cigarettes. Nothing moved, but in the darkness I knew there was something warm and alive. My heart was thumping like knuckles against the back of my ribs, bone against bone, and I took a breath to say something, but I doubled over instead, and retched. My mouth filled with saliva and bile. I spat on the floor, and as I was trying to stand up straight again, a flashlight snapped on. Instantly its beam lurched away and upward, and I felt it come down hard on my head and shoulders, and then a hand was hauling me upright by the hair. A woman’s screams filled the trailer, the flashlight fell with a clunk, and its beam played jaggedly on her kicking feet and jerked over the ceiling and walls. I was trapped. I couldn’t get out of the trailer or away from the screaming. Then the slapping and punching started.
I couldn’t speak. Even if I could have explained, or got any words out at all, she wouldn’t have heard. Fists and arms and feet were flying in a rolling beam of light, and through the screams she was spitting out words over and over, telling me to get out, go away, leave her alone. I held her off as best I could until, shielding my head, I managed at last to stand up straight and face her. I was taller than she was. I stopped her next blow by grasping her wrists.
“Stop! Please stop! I didn’t mean any harm,” I said. “I’m sorry. It’s okay. Please! Please-”
My voice cracked suddenly. The woman stopped screaming and stared at me, and then she burst into tears. I wanted to say more, but I couldn’t. Keeping hold of one of her wrists, I scooped up the flashlight at my feet and shone it at her. In the shaking light, her face was colorless and stricken, the long blond hair sticky and matted to her scalp.
How could I comfort her? How could I dare offer comfort? “Please, don’t. Please. I’m sorry,” I said.
We were stock-still for an instant. My grip on her wrist loosened. She wrenched her arm free and backed away. The foldaway table and pullout bed behind her, the blankets dragged to the floor, a heap of clothes, were now caught in the glow of the flashlight. She was alone. Part of the ceiling had curled away, exposing a web of saturated fibrous stuff from which water was seeping into a bucket on the floor.
“You tramp! You filthy tramp! Get out of here, get out now! Get out!”
She lunged forward, shoving me toward the door so hard I stumbled and fell. Then she sank back into the dark mass of bedding and hid her face in another burst of weeping. I scrambled to my feet and ran from the trailer.
I climbed as fast as I could up the track, and when I reached the top I collapsed on the ground, coughing bile and fighting for breath. After a while I managed to sit up, and I stayed there, trying to drag in a proper lungful of air and stop the shaking in my legs. I was exhausted and sick from lack of food. I had nowhere to spend the night. I had no name. Which terror should I face first: being hungry, pregnant, homeless, or nameless?
But the worst terror was that Stefan and his daughter hadn’t come back. They hadn’t come back and the woman in the trailer didn’t know why, and I had not been able to tell her. I had sold him the car and now I had money to keep my child, but where was hers? I turned toward the lights of the service station.
It was thronged with people, but hunger forced me inside. I had to hope that although my face might appear in the papers and on television as one of the dead, it would be a wedding photograph, the only pictures Col had of me. I was surely unrecognizable now as the person who’d smiled into the camera that day. My face was grim under the wreckage of makeup and stinging from cold and the blows and scratches of the struggle in the trailer. My hair had been curled and adorned with ludicrous turquoise feathers on the day I got married; now it was shorter and darker, and most of it was hidden under a flat woolen hat. Nobody would link a smiling photograph with this wretched woman shuffling along in a cafeteria queue. I bought what was available, coffee and a muffin, and took them over to a table, which I had to share. There was a television suspended from the ceiling tuned soundlessly to the bridge news, and I ate and drank with my eyes raised to it, avoiding contact with the three other people at the table. I kept my cup up close to my face and let the coffee steam rise and warm my skin in between sips.
By now the service station should have closed for the night, but it was staying open for the people who were stranded. Extra plastic chairs had appeared, and people were bedding down on car blankets and jackets and coats all over the floor. Some appeared to be sleeping; others were talking and drinking doggedly, doing puzzles or playing cards, trying to control children. From the games arcade came ceaseless zooming and firing sounds and the unfettered, giddy yelps of teenage boys. A woman dozed in a wheelchair near the door to the ladies’, half-hidden by the fronds of a huge artificial fern. Every table in the cafeteria was full, although the serving counter had been stripped of everything except tea and coffee in foam cups. In the shop, people were buying up the last of the chocolate and sweets and magazines, but the queues had lessened because there was nothing of much use left; untouched piles of Frisbees and celebrity memoirs stood out among the emptied shelves and racks. Although the place was thronged, there was a pall of numb, anxious quiet that perhaps hangs over all refugees.
I was wondering what to do, hoping I might find a space on the floor somewhere away from others and out of the freezing gusts from the doors, when four police officers came in, two men and two women. They didn’t seem to have any particular job to do; there was no disorder to bring under control. The manager and a younger sidekick joined them, and after a few minutes of talk, swinging on their heels and looking around, they drifted off, patrolling the mass of sprawling bodies. Several people went up to talk to them, with questions or complaints, I supposed. I watched all this from behind a book rack in the shop. When it began to look as if the police were settled in for the night, I knew I couldn’t stay.
Outside, the temperature had dropped further. I needed to find shelter somewhere. I made my way around the back and followed the fence into the darkness at the far corner of the car park, where I found again the opening to the abandoned track I’d driven down with Stefan and Anna twelve hours before. Only twelve hours? It seemed-in a way it was-a lifetime ago. Ahead of me I could see the flames of several small fires burning among the wrecked buildings on the wasteland; to my right, I could see the glow of arc lights over the bridge abutments and the flicker of helicopters in the sky. I walked past the first straggly piles of debris at the sides of the track toward the fires, on through broken glass and old cans, mounds of rubble and discarded tires, piles of ripped roofing felt, wiring, and cable. Parts of wrecked cars rose in heaps around me; broken office furniture and rotten carpet jutted up from buckled and vandalized dumpsters. I was far enough from the traffic and the service station to catch the cold tang of the estuary, mixed with the smell of damp fields and rust and a sullen overlay of smoke. I reached the corner of a derelict brick shed and edged my way along the wall to the next corner until I could see a barren stretch of cracked concrete that must once have been the floor of a factory or warehouse. At its far edges I could make out the jagged remains of half-demolished walls. There several bonfires burned, and in their cloudy, yellow light the stooping silhouettes of people moved to and fro, passing bottles, lifting sticks into the flames, collecting from the ground anything that might make shelters for the night. Beyond them the black estuary glittered with the sweeping lights of helicopters, the air thudded and shrieked with propeller noise and sirens. Under the gleaming sky, a great, desperate agitation was in progress, but here the faraway wails were an unreal music, part of the rushing-by of a world miles from this encampment among the scrub and banks of litter where human beings hunkered down to get through the night, staring into dying fires.
I crouched down and watched. About a dozen people squatted or lay in aloof, solitary hovels of cardboard and rags, arranged in a haphazard outer ring as close to the warmth and light as they could get, but several feet from one another and a safe distance from the elite little groupings of twos and threes nearest the fires. Among these, proprietorial squalls would break out over a swig from a bottle, a cigarette, a package of food. From time to time the air fell silent, as if everyone had fallen asleep or retired to his own thoughts, and then there would be cries and scuffles again, sometimes the sound of breaking glass or a hallucinatory insult or misunderstanding, for sly demons came and went among these people. To some of them, the smoky sky was alive with specters that could enter through the space between blinks of their eyes and whisper tormenting messages inside their skulls, goading them into outbreaks of itching or howling or whimpering fear. One man sat upright, staring round with crazed vigilance and batting away phantom attackers with his empty bottle.
I got up carefully and foraged at the farthest edges of the light. No one turned from the flames to look at me. I found some plastic and cardboard in a heap against a ruined wall, and I dragged an armful across the concrete and set it down where I could feel a little warmth but would not be presumptuously close to the fire. The dark mounds around me shifted from time to time through the smoke, coughing, rearranging their coverings. I saw the smooth lifting of the burning dots of cigarettes, the red flares as they were inhaled. Nobody spoke. I went back, found some frayed sheets of bubble wrap and brought them to my place on the ground. I arranged a kind of sleeve of cardboard, and pulled the bubble wrap around myself. There I lay, my hand clasping the money in my pocket and my body wrapped as china is against the breakages that occur in transit through this world. I fell asleep.
I dreamed of a man who was taking me in the silver car on a hazardous journey. We drove through puddles that turned into lakes, we splashed miraculously out of them again and lost the road under a blizzard of snow, but on we went, because our destination was a place where I was to give a performance of some kind in front of a lot of people. I allowed myself to be taken, keeping silent about the only thing I was sure of, which was that I had nothing to give the audience, nothing to merit their attention or applause. I walked to the center of the stage and waited for their disappointment. Then I was standing under a tree and I had no excuse for my reticence to offer all the reproachful people walking by, save the one I spoke as they went past. I can’t give you anything because I am going to have a baby, I said, and although they kept on walking, they knew this was the truth and they forgave me.
You weren’t at the trailer when I got there, but I knew you were coming back. You were stranded somewhere, like everyone else that night, and you must have lost your phone. You took perfect care of Anna, always. I knew you were coming back.
First I told myself you had taken her out for a bus ride somewhere and got stuck in the traffic. When it got past nine o’clock that evening I knew you would be trudging toward me along the road, cold and tired, with her asleep against your back, her hair tickling your neck. I didn’t like to leave the trailer, but I climbed up the track to meet you, going quietly so I would hear the scrape of your feet or the rattle of the gate, your voice calling from up ahead that you were home at last. I didn’t go as far as the road, just to where I could hear the cars and see their headlights splitting the dark. I stayed back in the trees and waited and waited.
The traffic was moving almost as slowly as before. It was four hours since I’d walked from the shop down to Netherloch and got a lift with an elderly couple trying to get back to Inverness. They’d been to see his sister in a nursing home in Fort Augustus. The man had said nothing and the woman had tried to be nice, but I pretended I couldn’t speak English because I couldn’t have told her much that was true about me and I didn’t want to lie. They weren’t big talkers anyway. In two and a half hours we traveled six miles in silence except for the radio news and their soft remarks of despair, about the tragedy and the inconvenience equally. I got out at the service station and walked back so they wouldn’t see me set off down the track. It didn’t look like a suitable place for people to live.
I waited for you at the gate until I was so cold I either had to lie down where I was and burrow under leaves like an animal, or go back, and when I turned away and thought of the empty trailer I began to cry, and I couldn’t stop. When I got back, I threw myself onto the bed and lay sobbing, and after a while I lit a candle, as if it could make me feel less alone, and in a strange way it did. I think that’s why we light candles when we think of the people we really have lost, supposedly to God; we need to fill the emptiness of churches and the space their absence makes with small flames. By then I was warm again and I managed to fall asleep. It must have been hours later when I heard noises outside, feet on the stones and then on the trailer steps. I was up and nearly crying out for joy before I realized there was something wrong about it. If it had been you, you would have been calling to me long before you got to the trailer. For a moment I wondered if it was a deer. Then there was a knock on the door. My throat went solid. I tried to speak but my voice wouldn’t work. Then the door opened. Everything it is possible to feel at once-rage that it was some dirty, crazy stranger and not you and Anna, terror that she could just knock and walk in like that, relief that it was a woman and not a gang of men with knives-everything surged into hatred and I attacked her.
I remember thinking in the seconds after I’d scared her off that she hadn’t really threatened me at all. She was pathetic, not dangerous. She must have wanted something, because she left behind an achy feeling about herself, some powerlessness. I felt almost guilty. I never saw her face clearly, but if I had seen her eyes, I think they would have been saturated with want. But I thought these things only after enough time had passed for me to be sure she wasn’t coming back. I felt calmer, even though I was weary and confused. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning, and I was wide awake.
I found the number of the hospital in Inverness and called it again and again. When I got through, I was given another number for inquiries about the bridge victims. I kept calling that number until finally somebody answered. I asked, quite calmly, because it was of course foolish to worry, if any buses had been on the bridge. No, the man said. Or, I asked, were there people killed or injured who had been crossing the bridge on foot? He asked for names, and although I was taking a risk I gave them, your real ones, vowing to myself that I would never, ever tell you I did this. I had to wait a long time. Then he came back and said they did not have those names on any lists. I could hardly speak, I was crying so hard. But then, I thought, how stupid of me. Of course you would have given false names. So I asked was there any man of about twenty-five with a little girl-any man and child at all-injured or, I whispered, lost? He told me that three adult cyclists were in hospital and two had been killed, and all the other casualties had been in vehicles. So far. There were cars still unrecovered, he told me, gently, and I should call back in the morning.
I didn’t sleep again. But before daybreak I knew even more certainly you were coming back. It was foolish to worry. Something had happened to keep you from getting home, but you hadn’t been on the bridge when it collapsed. You were safe, somewhere. You’d had to stay the night somewhere where there was no telephone signal, and you were coming back.
I went down to the river edge as soon as it was light, with half the bedding wrapped around me. From downstream, echoey metallic sounds dented the air above the water. In the distance the arms of the bridge reached through the haze toward each other, apart and still. I hunkered down and picked up a handful of stones and started chucking them, sending them with short flicks of my wrist one by one into the river and humming some old tuneless thing along with the rhythm of their little splashes.
It was very cold but I kept sitting there, hugging the blankets and humming and tossing stones and remembering what the man in the hospital had told me about the casualties. I was also keeping a tight grip on something else I knew. You had never taken Anna near the bridge, not ever. It was over a mile along the busy road from here to the start of it, too far for her to walk, and anyway, yesterday had been much too cold. Oh, you did get sudden ideas, but even if you’d had the thought of taking her along the bridge to stand and look at the river and out to the sea, you would have been turning it into a plan for a summer day. You would have come to me with your eyes shining and the whole thing worked out. We would wait for fine weather and get the bus as far as the southern end of the bridge. We could walk all the way across because Anna would be a few months older and a bit more able to manage. It would be windy whatever the time of year, but never mind. We would find a way down through the pine trees on the opposite bank and have a picnic at the water’s edge, almost under the bridge. We’d be able to see our trailer way over on the other side! You would fish, and Anna would splash in the water, and I would doze in the sun. I chucked more and more stones in the river and thought of this, and as I gazed, the bridge ends began to soften and float against a watery yellow sky and the far bank wavered and sparkled with light. I could see us, little figures in summer clothes clambering down through the dark pine trees to the shore, our shoulders skinny and bare and warmed by the sun. I could hear Anna playing in the water and squealing, our voices calling out to her. I could hardly tell if I was imagining it or remembering a day we’d actually spent. But we certainly would spend a day like that, I decided, when the summer came. I smiled, thinking that such a day was now my idea, not yours.
There was a sudden sound behind me, a low, human bellowing. I turned and saw the mad woman from last night throwing up on the ground, staggering away from the trailer. By the time I reached her, her stomach was empty and she was gasping, watching me through scared eyes. Her hat had slipped off, and she was using it to clean vomit out of her hair and wipe her steaming mouth. The poor thing looked terrified and half out of her mind, staring and dribbling and moaning apologies. I couldn’t make out what she was trying to say. I didn’t know what she wanted. Maybe she had people to find, too.
“Are you looking for somebody?” I said. “Have you lost somebody?”
She shook her head, then she nodded. “I think so…”
She didn’t say any more because the nodding of her head had started up a violent shuddering in her whole body. I thought she was going to fall, so I took hold of her by the elbow. Her hand clutched my forearm and sent a shiver through me. Her fingers were hard and fleshless. She raised her other hand toward the trailer and tried to speak again, but all she could manage was I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
I understood. She was saying sorry for last night. Maybe she had needed somewhere to take shelter and thought the trailer was empty. But she hadn’t come back just to say sorry. She still needed a place to stay. Whatever had happened to her, she was in a worse state than I was. If I scared her off again, she’d never make it back to the road.
“Are you lost? Have you nowhere to go?”
She swallowed and gulped and looked me in the face, and nodded. She had sweet, frightened eyes. Suddenly I didn’t want to watch her go. I didn’t want to be left here alone again, maybe into another night. You would come back soon, you could come back at any moment, but until then we’d be safer together, this wretched woman and me. She looked too weak and ill to do me any harm, and by now I could see she didn’t mean me any. My mind began to work properly at last. She was English, and she was surely a nice person underneath all that roughness. In a few hours, when she felt better, she’d be able to talk to the police for me. She could find things out without me taking the risk of being caught. If you weren’t already back-and you could come back at any moment-she would help me find you. If I helped her now, she would owe me that much.
“You’re sick. You can stay and rest here for a while, if you want.”
Her eyes darted over to the trailer.
“You can stay here for a while,” I repeated. “I’m Silva.”
She clutched my arm tighter. “Thank you.”
“What’s your name?”
I pulled the blanket away from my own shoulders and drew it around hers as well, and led her to the trailer.
“I’m… My name is Annabel.”
The next day dragged me to its surface early, pricking my eyes open with a rush of chill air and making them water. The sky was white with dense, icy cloud, and full of noises; the sirens had stopped, but the drumming and clanking of engines and heavy machinery had started up at the bridge and the road was already loud with traffic. It hadn’t rained in the night but the ground was damp and my clothes were sodden. I checked I still had my money, then I peeled the cardboard back and unwound myself from the plastic. Instantly the night’s sweat froze on my body, and I felt the wind slipping between my bones as if there were nothing under my skin but cold flowing air. All my joints and limbs hurt, and I started to shiver. The fires had died out but for a reed of smoke rising from one or two. A man was peeing into the scrub over at the far edge of the concrete, but nobody else had stirred. My stomach felt empty yet queasy; I had to get my body moving and I had to get warm.
I retraced my steps to the service station. Traffic was moving past on the road again, but the car park was still full. I saw no police vehicles and, when I paused at the entrance to look around, no police officers. Inside, the concourse dormitory was waking up to serene piped music and the smell of frying. People dazed from sleep were moving slowly here and there among those still sleeping, and cleaners quietly mopped floors and pushed trolleys and wiped surfaces, trancelike in the warm, stale air. The washroom was a mess, out of soap and paper and towels, but I managed to run some hot water in a basin, and I splashed some on my face, which warmed it without getting it much cleaner. When I came out, the café was open. I was relieved to see there had been a changeover of staff, and once I was quite sure I couldn’t see anybody who had been there yesterday, I joined the others already lining up for food. New supplies had been found from somewhere. I ate a big plateful of sausages and beans, and I drank my tea so fast I scalded my mouth. Almost as soon as I’d finished I felt sick, and went outside to get some air. People were leaving in a steady stream now; I watched them as they walked past me, talking into phones, getting in their cars and driving away. They were all expected home.
I was not like them anymore; the “I” I had been could never again be expected home, or call anyone to say how late she’d be. That woman was dead. Not one single person, not even the most primitive, empty shelter on the planet, waited in anticipation of her presence. Nowhere in the world was there a cupboard or a shelf holding a single object of beauty or practicality belonging to her that she would ever see or use again. Even last night’s cardboard, if it had dried out enough by nightfall, would tonight be drawn around another body or tipped onto the fire.
In Portsmouth there had been a man I sometimes saw in a particular spot in the shopping center car park, a stinking recess near the doors to the stairwell on Level C. Most days he was there hunched in a heap of rags, drinking or asleep; sometimes I saw him heaving himself up or down the stairways. He never begged, but I used to drop him a coin as I went past. I suppose he was chased away from his refuge from time to time; he would disappear for a month or two, then drift back. And always, lying in his filthy nest or shuffling around the place, he would be guarding four dirty shopping bags. Always four. I suppose he replaced them as they wore out, but he always had four, clutched in both hands in a tangle of strings. What could be in them that was so precious, I used to wonder: spare shoes, a quarter bottle of booze, a lucky rabbit’s foot? Now I thought I understood why he haunted the place and why he guarded his bags as if they contained gold bullion. He wasn’t just afraid they would be stolen. In a life eked out on a patch of concrete, he was holding off the final shame of destitution, an existence that carried no trace of who he was; for as long as he occupied the same patch of concrete, and was custodian of four bagfuls of the talismans and gadgetry and keepsakes that made that life his, he was a person, not a feral animal. Though he no longer had his own roof or so much as a bed or a chair, he still had his place and his “things.” He still owned a few of those nuggets of significance or usefulness or whimsy that accrue in even the poorest of lives.
But I no longer had even the poorest of lives. I had no life that I could lay claim to. In less than a day, I had discovered what perhaps should have been obvious: in ceasing to be the person I was, I had lost more than my life as Col’s wife. I had lost something even more crucial than her home to go to, an enclosing place to be at night, her belongings: I had lost the possibility of journey’s end. However meager it might have been, the life I had discarded had been the nearest I had to a compass, a fixed point recognizable as mine that I could travel from or toward. All that lay ahead of me now was a wearying and arbitrary moving on, in perpetuity. Being no one, I had no reason to be anywhere, and I had not expected such a falling off of purpose.
Had it not been for the baby I would have despaired, and for the baby’s sake as well as my own I had to decide what the hell I thought I was doing. Twelve hours ago I had walked away from my life, yet I was still less than ten miles from it. What was wrong with me that I felt anchored here? Something had been overlooked, something had me in shackles. I was behaving as if I still had hopes of having the baby with Colin, as if nothing he had said was real enough to have a bearing on what would happen now. I had to get away before I started to consider asking him to forgive me. I had to start believing that, after what I had done yesterday, I even deserved my baby.
I watched her sleeping. I knew her exhaustion was real as soon as we were inside the trailer because the first thing she did was pull off her boots. Nobody who’s planning to attack and rob you would do that. She crawled onto the bed, and her eyes were closing even before she had shrunk herself away into the covers. Soon her shivering stopped, but she lay for a long time with her eyes closed before she fell asleep. So I watched her sleeping out of wariness that I knew there was no real need for, but wariness was a habit with me.
She wasn’t clean, but I also knew about that. I knew the hopeless filth of people accustomed to months without hot water and soap and a proper, safe space to be undressed and attend to themselves. I’d seen plenty of that on the journey to here, and after a while that loss of pride doesn’t wash off at all. It wasn’t the same as the swift, dismaying layer of dirt on someone like her, unable to wash for a single day and a night.
And in fact there’s a third way homeless people go, and that’s the labored cleanliness of people like me, encamped in run-down places, condemned buildings, damp trailers, people who will lug buckets and light fires to heat water and scrape their skin raw and wear their clothes out with scrubbing. We’re the ones who are terrified that the dirt and shame that encroach on illegal lives might touch ours. She wasn’t like that, either. She was used to keeping clean easily and had never thought that having the means to do so might be a luxury. She was stained by sudden and brief deprivation, and as I watched her sleeping, I wondered why.
My name isn’t Annabel. But at that moment I needed a new name and I hadn’t until that instant thought what it would be. I still wasn’t thinking when I blurted out Anna. My mouth opened in a panic and produced a sound almost involuntarily, and it was a natural pair of syllables to utter in those circumstances, I do believe that. I didn’t choose to say it. But it was the obvious association to make, stumbling toward the trailer with Anna’s mother’s arm around my shoulder, her kind, sad face looking at me like that. And although it was also unthinking-and not a piece of deliberate and hasty disguise-to add the -bel, it was also necessary, for the time being, to conceal that I knew anything about her daughter and Stefan. I would have to go into it all later, but I knew I was about to collapse. I had to get inside and lie down, and I couldn’t start to explain it then. But of course there was more to it than that.
My mother died of a particular sorrow, which was that she took the life of a child. In a drawer in our house there was a photograph of the child, a baby girl. In the picture were also the child’s mother, Marjorie Porter, holding a cup and saucer, and my mother, Irene, with her teacup on her lap and one hand on the crucifix in the hollow of her throat. At the time Irene was forty-one, a year younger than I am, come to think of it. The women were in deck chairs on a patch of grass in a back garden; the ground around them was studded with floppy clumps of lettuce and lined by long fringes of carrot tops. In the background through a fence you could see the next-door garden sprouting the same rows of vegetables, the same pointed towers of bean plants climbing up bamboo frames; these were clearly the gardens of neighbors who shared packets of seed and swapped cuttings. A curl of smoke rose from a cigarette that rested in an ashtray on a kitchen chair beside the women. Next to the chair stood a man in suspenders holding a garden sieve up to his face and laughing through the mesh into the camera. His face couldn’t be seen very well, but he was certainly my father.
What was also certain was that they were in the Porters’ garden and not ours, for there on a rug in front of Marjorie was five-month-old Annabel, all baby jowls and bandy baby legs and puffy baby feet, wearing ballooning, frilly pants and a sundress and bonnet. Marjorie’s face as she looked down at her child was weary, eternal, transparent; motherly love had opened her out, and had also laden her forever with its ballast of implications: responsibility, fertility, continuity, and all their warm, perplexing weight, their proud, dull glow. Even knowing what was about to befall her, I envied her that. (At the time I still had the photograph to look at, I believed I would never have a child myself.) The picture had captured her in new motherhood, before all this knowledge had reduced her to mereness, to that dumpy, overlooked category of numberless, undifferentiated mums. Actually, on that day, in her sleeveless dress and lacquered beehive hairdo, she looked less maternal as well as a whole generation, rather than the actual sixteen years that separated them, younger than my tightly permed and dirndl-skirted and still childless mother, whose sharp, wing-framed spectacles had caught a ray of sun and trapped her eyes as though behind small, blazing mirrors. Marjorie’s husband, Mr. Porter, whose first name I never knew, must have taken the picture. It was probably his cigarette in the ashtray.
The strangest thing about any old photograph is it is all containment, all ignorance. My parents and Mrs. Porter happy and joking on the second or third day of a heat wave: of course they had no idea what was coming, how could they? Their unawareness is the most tremendous thing in the picture. I used to scan their faces for a flicker of fear assailing any of them as they posed in the blinding sun; I searched for one of those microscopic, momentary twitches of dread that can descend on someone on a summer’s day, the dread that nothing can last. I never found it. If only they could have remained there forever, in their grainy, bordered ignorance, clicked and shuttered into rectangular place by Mr. Porter’s Box Brownie, trimmed and untouchable; if only they would not be propelled, in the coming days, into the imprisoning, defining series of events that would capture and frame them in their misery for as long as they lived. And of course, in that picture, they knew nothing whatsoever about me, for there was nothing yet to know, least of all that I was, in my way, in it with them. I thought that strange, too, that I could be conceived yet not conceived of, and this was not egotism on my part but a regret that I was powerless to turn them all in another direction altogether, even though I was there. I longed to shake them all alive again and make everything come out differently. But my wish was futile, and perhaps also paradoxical; my mother would have claimed that I could only have come alive to have such a wish because what happened did happen.
When Anna’s mother put her blanket around my shoulders and drew me against her, I was begging her silently to ask me nothing more than my name. She didn’t. When I got into the trailer, everything seemed very simple. I had no strength left, and I lay down. I knew I would sleep before long, but I lay with my eyes closed for a while, wondering about the name I had given myself-Annabel-and about the photograph.
I didn’t have it anymore. I had put it along with everything else on a bonfire in the back garden, the same garden beyond the fence in the background of the picture, though the fence had long since been replaced by an ornamental cinder-block wall. I had been in a hurry to be done with my father’s things and get going; in three weeks I would be married. I had watched the trembling air above the flames suck the photograph upward, curl and blacken it into weightless fragments of ash, and I had been impatient with myself for noticing at all that it was fragmenting away to nothing in the very place it depicted, our back garden captured in Kodachrome more than forty years before. But I hadn’t let myself ponder any further on my strange in utero status in it, both invisible and present, or on the absence in it of any omen of the tragedy into whose tainted echoes and rhythms I would be born and grow up. I just watched it burn, and I trusted it to disappear.
I woke her in the early afternoon. Her face was puffy and white and not healthy-looking at all, and she would have gone on sleeping, but I’d had enough of waiting. I was curious. Also I needed something else to think about, because although I knew you would be back before dark, I was puzzled at what was keeping you. I could hear that the traffic was moving again up on the road. You must have taken Anna over to the other side of the bridge, I was hoping, or maybe even to Inverness. You knew I didn’t like you doing that, and that would be why you hadn’t called. Or your phone battery had died. You’d confess to it when you were back, and after a time you’d try to make me forgive you, and after a time I would, in our usual way. Or maybe you’d caught the bus to Netherloch and got stuck there when the roads jammed up. Wherever you were, you’d be trying to get back. You would both be home soon.
While she’d been asleep, to keep busy and warm I had wandered up the bank and brought back some wood and laid a fire, and I’d dragged over the old enamel bathtub and set it there on top of the circle of big stones. Then I hauled water up from the river in plastic canisters and filled the tub and lit the fire. When the water heats up, it sends off great clouds of steam into the cold air. All that took hours.
When her eyes opened, I expected her to be shocked to find herself there in our trailer. I thought she would immediately be ready to go. But she lay there drowsy and half-awake and watched me as if she was in no hurry while I sorted through a bundle of clothes. I wasn’t sure if I liked or disliked that.
“You’ve been asleep. Are you feeling better now?”
She raised her head a few inches and shook it, then grunted and lay down again.
“I don’t know.” She rubbed her hands over her face, then sat up. “I’m still so tired.”
I picked out some things of yours and Anna’s for washing and went back outside to the fire. I drew off a few jugfuls of hot water into a basin, then I stirred in some washing soda crystals and added a few grains of detergent, for the scent. The soda is cheap and makes the powder last longer. I dropped your clothes in and let the slippery, bluish scum lap over the wet material. It always amazed me slightly, the chemically floral smell rising from a basin on the ground outside the trailer, where the real smells were of river mud and woodsmoke and sometimes frying onions and the rain drying on stones. I loved it, that house-proud, indoors scent of laundry.
She came outside and stood watching while I kneeled down and swirled the things around, pressing Anna’s little clothes against the sides of the basin.
“I was wondering… I mean, the bridge, if you knew,” she said. “Yesterday-I mean, you can see it from here. Did you see it happen? Has anyone-”
“I was at work. I heard it.”
“So you weren’t here? But was there, I mean, was there anyone-”
“Look, who are you? What do you want?”
“Nothing! Nothing, honestly. That is, I wanted… Are you here on your own?”
“My husband is on his way back. With my daughter. Right now.”
“On his way?” she said.
“Right now. I’m expecting them soon.”
I turned back to the washing. Now it came to it, I didn’t want her calling the hospital for me. Even asking her to would be like believing you and Anna weren’t safe and already on your way back to me. I went on knead, knead, kneading your saturated things, lifting, rubbing, squeezing, submerging them, over and over and over. She didn’t move. I looked up. She was staring at the basin of wet clothes. Tears were running down her face.
“Oh, thank God. So it’s all okay. Well. I should go.”
But she didn’t go. I stood up.
“Who are you? What do you want? What were you doing down here last night?”
“I’m sorry, I’ll go. I just needed… I was tired, I feel so sick sometimes. I’ll go.”
“What’s the matter? Are you ill?”
“I just wanted to make sure. Your husband… is he, I mean, where is he?”
“My husband is fine. What is it to you? We can take care of ourselves,” I said.
She was looking at me with her frightened, watery eyes, and suddenly she turned away and doubled over, trying to catch and hold her breath. She was going to throw up again.
“Oh, for God’s sake! Sit down. What’s the matter with you? Sit down and get warm.”
“Thanks. Just for a minute.” She hunkered by the fire and wiped her eyes, then pulled a ragged bit of tissue from her pocket and blew her nose. She stuffed the tissue into the fire and held her hands over the steam for a while to warm them, rubbing her fingers together. She looked hard at her palms, then rubbed them down her jacket. Her hands displeased her. There was disgust in her eyes at the way dirt and cold were starting to cling to her.
“Did you say your name was Annabel?”
She nodded. She was still rubbing her hands.
“Well, thanks. I’ll be off in a minute,” she said.
She lifted her head and looked out beyond the yellow ring of the fire and across the river into the raw afternoon. There were a few geese on the water, and the old gray cabin stood lonely as always, the sky collapsing with the weight of low cloud into the sloping tree line above it. Sounds from the bridge and the road were muffled by cold and fog.
“Oh, for God’s sake, look at you. You don’t have anywhere to go.”
She looked surprised. “Oh, well, not really, not anywhere permanent… I suppose I’ll get myself organized, find somewhere.” Her eyes filled with tears again. “I didn’t know it would be this hard. I didn’t think I’d feel this bad.”
“There’s hot water.” I nodded at the fire. “I need some of it for rinsing, but you can wash up if you want.”
She moved in a bit closer, waving the steam away with her arm, and peered in. The river water is dark with peat, but the silt stays at the bottom. She probably didn’t know that the salt water that comes in on the flow tide is heavier than river water and runs underneath it.
“In there? Wash in that?”
“It’s all right for washing. It’s not seawater. You have to wait awhile though,” I said. “I’ll kick out the fire and when the metal’s cooled down you get in.”
She looked round. “Get in? You mean here-out here? What about, I mean-”
“Where else? I do it all the time. You don’t have to if you don’t want to. I just thought you could do with it.”
“What if somebody comes?”
“Don’t be stupid. Who do you think’s going to come down here?”
I laughed, thinking of you coming back and finding her standing naked and dripping. She tried to smile, but there was a genuinely shy look about her. I didn’t think I had ever seen anyone older than me blushing before. How could she be embarrassed about her body, at her age?
I tipped out the clothes water from the basin on the ground and refilled it from the enamel bathtub.
“If Stefan comes I’ll make sure he doesn’t see you. I’m only offering. Of course you don’t have to.”
She managed to smile. “I’d love to get clean.”
“You’ll be okay,” I said. “There’s nobody here but us.” I kicked out the ashes of the fire with the end of my foot. “Wait till I’ve done this and then you can get in.”
When I’d rinsed and wrung out your things and hung them up, she pulled off her hat and ruffled her hair. It was thick and dyed reddish, and dark at the roots. She dipped a hand in the water. “Have you got any shampoo?”
“I’ll get it. You need to undress quick and get in right away. It cools down fast.”
When I came back, she was stepping into the bath and I saw I was right about her age. She was at least forty, maybe even old enough to be my mother. As she stooped and curled modestly into herself, her waist folded into a line just above her belly button, like a crease in a roll of dough, and the skin on her haunches looked dusty and neglected. She crouched and soaped herself, splashing water over her shoulders for the warmth, and her skin was wet and shining and bright white.
“Come on,” I said. “You have to be quick. My husband will be back soon.”
She stood up again and took the jug while I waited with the shampoo.
“Keep your mouth closed,” I said. “It’s not drinking water.”
She filled the jug and lifted it high in both hands to wet her hair, and as she raised her arms, her breasts swelled out, surprisingly firm and large and high. Her belly was rounded, as it would be at her age, but it looked hard, not soft. She tipped back her head and closed her eyes, and the water poured down, soaking her hair and face and neck. I watched it run in tiny branching trickles down her breasts; I saw beads form and hang and drop from her nipples, which stuck out like little carvings in polished red stone, the way they do. She was pregnant.
I handed her the shampoo and took the jug. She stood with her hands folded protectively over her stomach, and I rinsed the suds from her head with jugful after jugful of water, until it began to go tepid. By then she was starting to shiver, so I made her step into the towel I had brought and I sent her inside to get dry. And just as I did every time after Anna’s bath, I tipped out the water, picked up the jug and soap and shampoo and the pile of clothes, and followed wet footprints across the stones to the trailer. The stupid woman needed looking after.
Another day passed before Ron returned to the bridge.
Very early the first morning, he’d awakened in the cabin exhausted and cold, his mind stunned and somehow also stale from the shock of all that had happened. He knew he would barely be able to converse that day, let alone convince anyone he was strong and fit for work, and the floor was dirtier than he’d judged it to be in the dark; his clothes were heavy with damp and grime. He needed to steady himself and also get good and clean, he decided, before he went asking for a job. So he made his way back along the river’s edge and struck up the steep slope into the forest; across the patch of cleared ground he was now able to make out on the far side the remains of a track that took him, after another climb, up to the road. No traffic passed him but the roadsides were crowded with vehicles parked in all directions, abandoned the night before when their drivers calculated they could walk the three or four miles to Netherloch faster than they would reach it by car. From the Highland Bounty Mini-Mart he set off in the Land Rover, traveling inland.
By eight o’clock he had driven nearly forty miles, far enough from the bridge, he hoped, for the usual tourist places to be unaffected by scores of stranded people seeking rooms. In a village called Aberarder he knocked on the door of a bungalow with a Vacancies board swinging from the sign that read GLENDARROCH BED AND BREAKFAST and explained to the landlady that his plans had been disrupted, he’d been turned back from going farther north and had been on the road nearly all night. He even managed to make a joke of asking, if it could be managed, for breakfast and bed, in that order. She was sympathetic; she’d been up half the night herself, watching the news. He ate ravenously, showered, and fell asleep in an overheated, immaculately floral bedroom. In the afternoon he went out and found a camping and outdoor supplies shop, where he bought new jeans and work shirts, T-shirts and socks, a jacket and boots. He ate early in a pub and returned to the Glendarroch, where he watched soccer on the tiny wall-mounted television, lying naked on the glassy nylon quilt. Before he fell asleep, he realized that his face was tired and tight, because he had been smiling.
The next day he drove back up through Netherloch. He parked the Land Rover at the Highland Bounty Mini-Mart again, noticing and thinking it odd that the store was closed on a Saturday. As before, he walked the three miles to the bridge. The area around it was still crowded with spectators, and there were now several radio cars and two TV mobile broadcast vans parked just beyond the barricades on the road. He could see that down by the bridge approach a pontoon holding winching gear now reached from the bank almost a quarter of the way across the river. Men were walking up and down on it, directing the lifting of twisted, dripping hunks of steel and concrete onto a salvage barge moored alongside. Some dinghies and a couple of boats were tied up at the pontoon, close to the bank. Farther out he saw two pairs of divers flipping into the water from two launches midstream, and he could see that work was under way across the river, too. A smaller pontoon had appeared, and the industrial wasteland next to the opposite bridge approach was being razed by bulldozers. Engine noises from both banks rose into the air and met in a swirl of sound overhead.
Close to where he stood, chain-link fencing was going up in place of the crowd barriers and police cordon tape, and he asked one of the men at work on it where he would find the office. He was directed to a mobile unit parked on the far side of the approach road. A man stood smoking at the entrance, and another man waiting inside turned and stared as Ron stepped in. The place was airless and muddy and smelled of sweat and warmed-up plastic. Two men in shirtsleeves sat behind a cluster of desks, one young and slight in a way that marked him out as the junior. Both had wads of paper in front of them, and the older one was arched back and swiveling in his chair, speaking on the telephone. On the wall by his desk was a board with a year planner and a postcard that read “A Man Without a Woman Is Like a Neck Without a Pain.” Ron stood at a respectful distance.
The man in front of him was talking in halting English to the younger man behind the desk; after a while he called in the second man from outside, wrote down some figures for him, and after protracted translation, both signed some papers and left. The young man now had his head down writing; the older one was gazing upward with the telephone at his ear, listening with obvious exasperation.
Ron stepped forward. “Excuse me, I’m looking-”
The young man looked up. “Skills?”
“Construction. General building. Transport, mainly.”
“Transport? HGV? Excavators? Got rough-terrain experience?”
“LGV. And PCV. Just… driving. I’ll do anything. Don’t mind heavy work.” Ron paused. “I just want to help.”
The man handed him an application.
“Pens over there,” he said and motioned toward a narrow ledge at one side of the unit. “Answer all the questions, mind.”
Ron took his time, turning his back as he took the card of the Glendarroch Bed and Breakfast from his pocket and copied the details down under “Address,” and in brackets wrote “temporary.” He covered his prison years with a lie about working for a contractor in Spain, with names and places he’d long ago memorized for precisely this purpose. He handed the form back just as the older man finished his call and turned to his colleague, running his hands through his hair and groaning.
“Nae fucking use, Davey. There’s naebody else to try till Monday. They’ll have tae fucking swim.”
“It’s a difficult situation, Mr. Sturrock.”
Mr. Sturrock glanced over at Ron’s application, lying on the desk. “Transport? Can he drive a fucking boat?” he asked his colleague, sourly. He looked at Ron. “Eh? I’m a couple of guys short. I’ve eighteen men from Inverness starting this side eight o’clock tomorrow and I’ve naebody to get them over. Don’t suppose you can handle a thirty-foot boat with an outboard, son?”
The young man shook his head over Ron’s application. “Doesnae say so here, Mr. Sturrock,” he said.
“I can, I’ve worked boats,” Ron said recklessly. “Never thought to put it down, it was a while ago. Fishing, harbor boats. A thirty-footer’s no problem.”
Mr. Sturrock stared at him. “You kidding me?” He paused. “I’m no’ talking fucking barge holidays on the Norfolk Broads, mind. Have you got your ICC?”
“Doesn’t need an ICC,” the first man said. “He’s UK. Have you got your NPC?” He scanned the form. “No, well, you won’t, you’re fifty. Have you got NPC equivalent?”
“Not on me. But I could send for it,” Ron said. He could prevaricate over it for a while, if need be.
The two men looked at each other. “He has to be qualified, Mr. Sturrock. NPC, or equivalent,” the first man said.
“Aye, Davey, but we’re desperate here. If we give him a wee tryout now and he’s okay,” said Mr. Sturrock, “that’ll get us by for tomorrow at least. Alan’s down at the boat now, he can give him a go and see how he handles it. See what I’m saying?”
“Mr. Sturrock, he has to be qualified.”
“Come on, Davey, you want to spend the rest of the day trying to get somebody else frae fuck knows where?”
“I’m just trying to be thorough.”
“I’ve worked boats on and off since I was fifteen,” Ron said.
“But there’s the local knowledge,” the young man said, pulling a thick sheaf of papers from the desk and turning up the right page. “You’d need to familiarize yourself with ‘local seamarks, local traffic practices, mud banks, shoal waters,’ ” he read. “You’d have to ‘demonstrate knowledge of heights of tides, neap and spring tides and tidal streams, and local safe landing places according to differing weather conditions.’ ”
Ron nodded. At least not every term he’d just heard was unfamiliar. “It would be a matter of learning the local conditions. And being always safety-aware,” he said. “I learn fast.”
“Aye, and nobody else we could get at this fucking notice is going to have local knowledge either, are they?” Mr. Sturrock said. “And he’s qualified. Aren’t you, son? Mind you, I’ll take experience over a fucking certificate any day o’ the week,” he said, looking hard at Ron. “Paperwork to follow, eh? We just need a copy for the file here. You’ll get your paperwork in to Davey here right enough, won’t you?” He turned to his colleague. “I’m not paying eighteen men to stay idle for the sake of a wee bit of paper when I’ve got an experienced guy standing in front of me. Send him on down, and if Alan says he’s okay, put him on the day rate. Write down ‘paperwork to follow’ and we’re covered.”
The younger man shrugged and Mr. Sturrock smiled, and Ron signed.
I slept and slept, and I fell into dreams like long, perilous ruts, channels of movement that swept me along helter-skelter, not in pursuit or escape from anything I could name but with some formless, looming jeopardy present all around and above me. I slept all that night and for spells the following day, and if when I woke I saw or heard Silva nearby, stepping into the trailer or tinkering and fetching outside, I felt as though she was permitting me these collapsed hours as kindly as if she had put me to bed herself and told me to close my eyes and rest. I would come to, and lie there, slowly calculating the passing of seconds against the beating of my heart (would my baby have a beating heart yet?) while my waking thoughts began to tick once more to the rhythm of the day, of which, thank God, a little less would remain. The shaking that had been going on inside me since I walked out of the Invermuir Lodge Hotel abated. As I began to feel steadier, my sickness eased somewhat.
But my mind was empty, drab, as if it were choosing to turn away and live outside of what was happening to me. I slept through another night, and the next day I got up. But between sleeps, all I could do was sit outside wrapped in blankets, looking at the river. Silva watched me closely. I told her I had a nervous stomach, and she said she sometimes had one, too. The next time I felt sick she wouldn’t let me lie down or drink water. She tore a ragged triangle off the corner of a slice of bread, spread it with jam, and made me eat it. I felt better at once. She was taking me in hand in some way and I was grateful, but she didn’t know I was pregnant, of course.
She was restless. In the middle of the afternoon she took two empty containers and walked up to the service station. She was gone nearly three hours. Her absence filled me with terror. Having had her company for just a day and a half left me in such agitation at the thought of being alone again that when she came back I asked her sharply why she had been away so long.
“I needed to fill up with drinking water. I wanted to see what was happening. I was finding things out,” she replied, dumping the full containers on the kitchen counter. She told me the place was crowded with sightseers and journalists and drivers with trucks of supplies for the salvage work. There were also a lot of vagrants, turned off the wasteland behind the car park, and quite a few police. Not all the vehicles had been pulled out of the river yet, she said.
“There were thirteen survivors and they found nine bodies in the river. There’s four cars still in there. They can’t get them out yet because of the weather, it’s the big spring tides or it’s too deep or it’s the winds or something. They know who they are, all the people still down there. There’s seven.”
“How can they know, if they can’t get to them?”
She looked surprised. “Because they’re missing. Seven are missing. They’ve got their names. Their photos are in the papers, everywhere. They’ve told the families.”
Why did this shock me? Of course the victims would be counted and named; that anyone should die randomly and also remain anonymous would be an unbearably compounded sadness, and people are inquisitive about the deaths of others, even strangers on a list of lost and missing. The papers would keep a tally and reveal names and faces and describe good lives cut short and families bereft, it being an obligation of tragedy to ponder urgent reversals in the lives of those left behind, to bow gently in the direction of other people’s grief.
“So who are they?” I said. “Did you get a paper?”
“I saw them on the news in the cafeteria. There was a van with a father and his son and another man, they cleaned carpets. A woman tourist in a rental car, and a man and his secretary on business. Oh, yes, and a retired man coming back from golf. That’s the seven. So there you are.” Silva’s voice was newly fresh and relaxed, and her eyes shone. “You see? Nobody else.”
“You actually saw them? These people’s faces?”
She nodded. “They were all happy photos. Then I went outside. They’re clearing that dump down near the river. I saw trucks going in, same thing on the other side. There were people there just watching. I saw a man I know,” she said. “He was in the shop that day, I was talking to him the moment it happened. His name’s Ron. He asked if I was all right. I said it’s those poor people and their families I’m sorry for.”
I didn’t speak. I was picturing Col and trying the word families up against him, and it didn’t suit him. I couldn’t think of just the two of us as a family, and that was a relief. He would not suffer long or deeply for loss of me. He might remember things about me: my face, some words stored somewhere in his mind. I might even for a while warm his heart with an idea of love, now forever abstracted and beyond test, kept perfect by my absence. Then he would forget me, probably. I hoped he would.
“This man I was talking to, he said they might never get them out.”
“What does he know about it?”
“Oh, he knows. He’s something to do with boats. He’s working for the contractors, running crews across. He took some divers out to the middle where the cars were sunk, and they said they might not ever get to them,” Silva said. “They might get washed out to sea and break up and the bodies would just disappear.”
For a few hours after that she moved lightly about the place preparing for Stefan and Anna, setting little circles of order around herself, folding clothes, lining up shoes, separating cutlery and plates. She began to ask me about myself.
I told her I used to live in England and I had lost my job and I had no house anymore because it belonged to the mortgage company after my father died. That wasn’t so far from the truth. But what also seemed quite true to me was that I was not and never had been the woman tourist probably trapped in a rental car in the middle of the river. Nor did I feel I was really tricking either of us to imagine that this had happened to some other woman tourist; watching Silva dart around cleaning and tidying for them, I told myself that her certainty of Stefan’s and Anna’s safety was more to be relied upon than an assumption that they had been in the car. Suppose just after I left them Stefan had taken Anna to the service station for lunch? Then the car might have been stolen from the roadside. Or the man who had changed the plates that afternoon might have been driving it. Silva knew her husband best. Sharing her faith in him to stay alive was the only way I could spare myself the distress of believing them lost. It was also the only way I could help her.
And she was helping me. She asked me more and more, and I began to talk more easily, building my new history bit by bit as from her questions came my answers, like little blocks appearing in my hands that I could turn and consider to see where they fit, and set in place, one by one. After I lost my house I had spent three months in a hostel trying to get a job, until I had to leave. Then I had taken the bus all the way up to Inverness because I had two spinster cousins there. We hadn’t been in close touch, but I’d met them a few times when I was younger. They would be elderly by now, maybe frail and glad of my help in the house; I’d been thinking I could even move in with them. At least they wouldn’t turn me away while I got settled. As I told it, the story gained credibility for me; even though before I said all this the idea had never existed, it did now. I wanted Silva to think it brave and commendable of me, making a fresh start in the north of Scotland, closer to family. I did not want her to think me desperate or degraded. But then, I told her, despising the rise in my voice, it turned out I’d been sending the cousins Christmas cards for years and all for nothing (though I had to admit I hadn’t had one from them for some time). When I got to their address, they had long ago moved away. Nobody had even heard of them. The young couple living in the house now were very nice to me and had agreed to keep my luggage in their garage until I got myself organized. I’d been looking around Netherloch for shop or bar work and a roof over my head when the bridge went down and I’d got stranded without enough money on me for a hotel, and then I had got sick.
Silva looked at me with cool, curious eyes. It was possible she didn’t believe a word of it, but as long as she didn’t say so and as long as she let me stay, maybe I didn’t need her to. Whatever was true or not true, known or unknown-cars plunging off a collapsing bridge, Colin, the baby, Stefan and Anna, other people trapped and drowned-the fact was I could not bear to think of any of these things for more than a few minutes at a time.
In return she told me about Vi’s shabby little store and how Vi was drunk a lot of the time and how she put up with it because it meant cash, no questions about work permits. Vi hadn’t even asked exactly where she was from; she didn’t care.
“She sometimes says ‘your lot,’ but she doesn’t even know who she means.” Silva shrugged. “To her I’m just foreign. Just as well.”
I remembered Stefan’s demand that I ask no questions and how, when I did, his cold, pinchy face had softened.
“I don’t know where you’re from, either,” I said.
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. We went first to Greece and then Italy. Anna was born in Italy. We got to London, then we had to go to Glasgow. There were bad things. Things went wrong. So we came here.” She looked at me seriously. “We are better than this, we are not people who choose to be like this, Stefan and I. We used to have a place, a proper life. We are getting things better, soon we will be away from here. We will have our life again.”
She sighed and got up. A while later she made tea and we ate some bread and jam, and I had another nap.
So the day passed. Whenever she grew restless, she went off alone along the riverbank toward the bridge, or up to the top of the track, where, she told me, she just watched the traffic going by. When she wandered away, I stayed awake, watching over the place and keeping the fire going. We went our separate ways, both waiting for Stefan, each believing she was looking after the other. Later I heated a pot of water and cooked some rice, and when she came back we made a kind of stew with tomatoes and beans. As the afternoon began to fade, she set off again for the service station. Stefan and Anna might be there, she said, or most probably she would meet them on the road.
On Monday I got up early, before six. It was cold inside the trailer and the air was pale and empty. I dressed quickly and brushed my hair. When I put away the brush, I banged the cupboard shut on the wall above Annabel’s head, which woke her up.
“I have to get going,” I told her. “I need extra time. Maybe there’s a bus up to Netherloch and over the little bridge and I can get to work that way.” I hesitated. “Stefan knows I won’t be here. He’ll come and find me at work. So-”
“Do you mean-do you want me to-”
“Stay. You can guard the trailer. Go back to sleep.”
I got to the Highland Bounty at twenty to ten, more than two hours late. It was raining and the shop was locked up but the outside lights were on. Probably they’d been on all night after Vi went across to her place at the back. It was a horrible cottage, with water-stained walls, behind a scraggy hedge and a garden nothing more than dead grass. I banged on the door and waited. There was brown moss sprouting at the base of the water pipe. The rain was cold on my head.
I had to stand back when the door opened and the smell spilled out, the thick, salty smell of the stuff Vi ate, those pots of flakes she just poured boiling water into, and the smell of dirt, as if she kept sweating dogs in there with the windows shut. But she didn’t have any pets, she just never cleaned.
“Vi, I’m sorry I’m late, I had to get a bus to Netherloch and then I walked.”
Half of her face appeared round the door. Under the orange-shaded ceiling light in the hall, she looked hardly human. She couldn’t get her mouth to work properly.
“I’m not dressed,” she managed to say. There was some scrabbling behind the door, and then one hand and a dry-looking arm covered in yellow nylon appeared. She shook the bunch of keys and a bag of coins at me.
“Here, don’t keep me out on the doorstep! Go and open up.”
I took them and went back across the tarmac, unlocked the shop, and turned on the lights. I opened the cash register and emptied in the coins, switched on the radio, and wiped down the counter with the spray and a paper cloth. I rubbed the old words off the sandwich board sign and wrote on both sides, OPEN MILK SOUVENIRS GROSERIES ICECREAM, and I carried it outside. Then I swept off the steps and emptied the litter bin. I mopped the floor near the door, and then I lit the kerosene stove in case Vi came in later. She couldn’t stand the cold. By this afternoon she’d be at the vodka just to keep the cold out, or so she said, earlier if she couldn’t sit in the hot fug around the stove.
The shelves were full of gaps. I restocked them and put on the kettle, then I wrote a list of things Vi needed to get from the Cash & Carry when she was sober enough to go. I poured a mug of tea and took it across. I rapped on the door, opened it, and called out that I was leaving it on the hall mat for her. I heard the toilet flushing upstairs.
Then I walked back slowly in the rain. I didn’t mind being at work, but today, with you still away, I didn’t know where to find the energy. The day had only just begun, and already my strength for any more of it was leaking away. Whatever I did it felt like dragging about a heavy load on my back, and for what? If all it came to was this, trying to get through as a person alone, how could I face it? I asked you. I felt sick with loneliness, sick to my heart of simple, ordinary things that only I was there to notice: water drops landing in the puddles in the tarmac, the greenness of the wet roadside in the rain, the aroma that would meet me when I stepped inside the shop of wrapped bread and fire lighters and tea dust. I had never needed you more.
But you were coming back. Somehow I would have to wait out the day in the wobbly heat haze from the stove, listening to the grating of the freezers and the tinking of the turned-down radio and watching the weather outside strike rainy shadows off the Peg-Board walls and racks of empty shelving. And go on waiting, if I had to, for as long as it took.
When I came around the corner to the front, there was a Land Rover parked outside. Two men in work clothes were in the shop. One of them was Ron.
“Hello, Blondie,” he said, smiling, dumping tea, instant coffee, and sugar on the counter. “How are you? Had a nice lie-in?”
The other man called over. “Yeah, I was down here at half past eight, wasn’t I? Eight till eight you’re supposed to be open, aren’t you, love? Where’s the milk?”
We were out of fresh milk. “There’s only powdered,” I said. Then I tried to say there might be fresh later on, if Vi got an order in, but my eyes were stinging with tears. I picked up the box of tea bags to ring it up, but I couldn’t read the label. I fell into Vi’s chair and covered my face and burst into tears.
“Hey, hey, Blondie!” Ron said. “Hey, never mind him.”
The second man said, “Whoa, no offense, love, okay?” and then came Ron’s voice telling him to go and wait in the Land Rover and he’d only be five minutes, then I heard the ting of the shop bell. I looked up. The radio was squealing, distant and yappy like a tune tapped out with a fork on a wire.
Ron stepped around the counter and switched it off. “Having a rough time,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
I shook my head. “A bad start. I was late. Coming the Netherloch way now, it takes much longer.”
“You live on the other side? Where?”
“I used to get the bus over the bridge. Twenty-five minutes to here. Now it’s longer.”
“That’s tough. Going to be tough for a while.”
“I will have to get up more early. I’m sorry, it was silly to cry.”
“How’re you getting back tonight?”
I didn’t like that he was so nosy. “Same way,” I said in a sharp voice. “No problem. Like on the day the bridge fell. Walk to Netherloch, get a bus. Or maybe get a lift. People are kind.”
He was staring at me. “There’s nobody to help you? Nobody with a car? Where’s your husband?”
I was proud he had noticed my wedding ring. “He’s away. Just for a while. He has to be away, for work, he is looking for work,” I said. “But I am not alone. I have a friend. She stays with me.”
“But the friend hasn’t got a car.”
“No.”
“When do you finish?”
“At six.”
“Okay, well, here’s what we do. You finish at six. I come back here at six and take you over.”
“No! No, I can’t do that. I can’t. I don’t know you.”
“You really think I’d do you harm?”
I hesitated, and then I had to smile. “No.”
He nudged the things on the counter toward me. “Good. Now I need to get going. What’s this come to?”
I totaled it up, and he paid. “I’ll see you later,” he said, at the door. “Stop worrying. I’ll take you safe over the river.”
I got up and put away the bedding, and tidied up the trailer just as I had seen Silva do. But she was gone, and it was so quiet, and after a while I couldn’t bear the thought of the sounds of yesterday-our feet up and down the steps, a pan scraping on the fire stones, most of all, our voices-against the silence I would have to endure before I would hear them again. The gap of solitude that opened up between the memory and the expectation of her company was too great, so wide and dark I was afraid I would fall into it and never get out. Nothing but lonely sounds welled up from the river, the geese landing and feeding, the stray calls of gulls following the tide. In the salty, white stillness of the air, I thought I heard the faraway wash of sea waves. I couldn’t stay. I cleaned my face and did what I could with my clothes. Then I closed the trailer and set off up the track toward the road.
Not far along was the place I had stopped the car to look at the map. Had that been five days before? Now the jagged bridge ends stuck out from the far bank on the last bridge piers left standing, and the twisted lanes of the roadway, torn and still, dipped down to the river. The reflections of a line of emergency lights along the remaining edge of the pavement splashed in broken bars of blue and orange off the gray water and detonated behind my eyes in tiny explosive afterimages. The helicopters still roamed above, hovering low enough for gusts of air to blow flecked waves in circles around the wreckage sticking up from the surface. In the middle of the river, where three spans of the bridge had collapsed and vanished, the water was flat and empty. From here, the people struggling to save themselves would have looked like flies spinning in a puddle.
When I got to the service station, I didn’t go in. Instead, I cut across to the start of the track that led to the wasteland. All the cars had been cleared from that part of the car park, and the space was now the arrival point for trucks on their way down to the southern bridge end. There were policemen on duty, some with dogs, keeping spectators behind lines of tape on either side. I joined the back of the group and watched. The track entrance had been widened and a mobile office set up, its interior garish with strip lighting. Inside, boxes and computers and telephones were crowded on tabletops. Office chairs and filing cabinets, still wrapped in plastic, stood against the windows. Men in yellow hard hats went back and forth with flapping sheets of paper and two-way radios, checking trucks and sending them on, past two bulldozers and a digger that were leveling and pushing heaps of rubble into a low, loose wall at the site’s edge. Some of the trucks were covered, and most of the others carried machinery I couldn’t guess the use of, but I also saw two carrying more portable cabins, and on another a cluster of massive lights and chains and metal bars. The air was loud with droning generators and grinding wheels.
Across the river, upstream from the slanting northern end of the broken bridge, a muddy access road had been cut between newly felled trees down to the water’s edge. There, a long area had been leveled and a crane was at work, directed by salvage men stationed on the last slope of bridge road and in boats around the wreckage. A row of huge sheds was going up, and there was now an iron jetty with dinghies moored to it, lifting and falling in the slight swell of the ebb tide.
My attention was drawn back to my side of the river. Upstream and some way over to the left was a stretch of scrubby land where a few sheep grazed. Beyond the sheep, I could see some of the people from the wasteland coming and going around a fire they had just managed to light. Smoke swayed low and horizontal over the fields. Paused in a landscape in which only fire smoke and a few sheep moved, the human figures looked medieval, stranded out of their time and gazing across into another age in which a bulldozer was demolishing their already stooped and broken shelters. But their displacement was timeless, just another of the world’s arrhythmic visitations of calamity upon dispensable, unrecorded lives.
I turned away. I was hungry in a way I hadn’t been for days. I went first to the service station shop, bought soap, toothbrush, and toothpaste, and washed at a basin in the ladies’. In the café I ordered shepherd’s pie and a pot of tea and took them to a window table from where I could watch the trucks and workmen. As I unloaded my tray, I realized I was almost enjoying myself. I sat down, poured out my tea, and began to eat. These transactions with strangers, no more than a few words and a polite glance over the paying for things and the taking of change, were so easy. Nobody I encountered had bothered to look at me. In a few days, everyone would have forgotten the face in the papers of the woman tourist drowned in a rental car. Until then, invisibility, it was turning out, could be pleasurable.
I started to make plans. Now that I was getting my nerve back, renting a room somewhere as Annabel Jones wouldn’t be any more difficult than ordering a pot of tea and the lunch special. When Silva came back this evening, Stefan and Anna might be with her. In the morning we’d explain everything, Stefan and I. We’d divide the money, and I would be on my way, arranging my new life properly. I’d get a place to stay and a few clothes and look for a job like Silva’s, one that paid in cash. I could work for months before the baby was born, and by then I would be used to my new name. For the first time in days I was managing to look ahead. That was when, through the window, I caught sight of Col.
I did not know until that moment how well I had come to read his feelings from the hunch of his shoulders, the bowing of his thick head. He stood motionless and alone, close to where I had stood only minutes ago. I was surprised that he was there at all; my disappearance would have delayed his return home on Friday, our departure date, but once he learned that my car was in the water with my body inside it, what could he achieve by staying? There was nothing to wait for, nothing he could do here. What was to be gained by staring at the bridge with puzzled, blinking eyes, tipping his head back and scanning the sky in a gesture of endurance, looking so bruised and forsaken? I felt a flare of anger. How dare he appear in this way, as if some truly dreadful blow had been dealt him, when all he had lost was me? There could be no possibility he was truly suffering; he had made it perfectly clear he could take or leave me. I could hardly bear to look at him.
Yet I stayed at the window. He had only to turn his head and some invisible wire connecting us would have fizzed to life and directed our eyes straight toward each other’s, and my deception would have been over. For a moment I was so curious I almost wanted it to happen. Or, if he didn’t turn his head, I could just get up from here and go to him. But it was too late for any such move. If you want to make a go of it with me, fine, I’ll make a go of it with you. But not with a kid. I remained where I was. Then he took out his mobile phone, snapped some pictures, and trod heavily away.
Soon he was out of sight. I waited another half an hour until I could be sure he had gone, and then I returned, walking fast all the way, to the trailer.
By the time I got there it was pouring, and I sat inside and stared as raindrops pitted the water. When it stopped I went outside. The river lay like a swath of thick, dull cloth under the pall of the clouds, and seemed barely to flow. I could not stay here. The sight of Col had shown me that I had to act urgently to put distance between my old life and the new one. It was distasteful to linger in this way, like a mourner at my own funeral. The trailer was damp and falling apart; what had been asylum was now a rotting prison. If I did not get out at once and rejoin the living, my defiant vanishing act would amount to nothing but a self-imposed shackling to a dead end where I was alive to nobody on earth except Silva.
Besides, I could do nothing for her by staying. How would it help for me to stay and witness any more of her faith that Stefan and Anna were coming back, when I was too cowardly either to encourage her hopes or to destroy them? The best thing I could do for her would be to leave some money and be gone by the time she returned. I would write her a note explaining-only in part-why I had left. I could not be sure that she would be able to read much English, and she might ask someone she knew-her employer, probably-to read it for her. I could not tell her anything that mentioned the car and gave me away. But the truth was I could not tell her the truth anyway. I did not have the courage.
The only paper I could find was a coloring book of Anna’s, and I carefully removed a page she had already scrawled over and wrote on the back of it.
Dear Silva,
Thank you for the food and accommodation and for looking after me when I was unwell. Your hospitality was very welcome at a time when I needed it, and I valued your company very much.
I apologize for telling you I didn’t have enough money on me for a hotel when I first arrived. It wasn’t true, but for complicated reasons I had to sayit. It is a long story how I came to turn up at your place. I enclose herewith a sum to reimburse you for expenses incurred during my stay and also as a token of my gratitude. I hope it will be useful to you in the future, whatever it may bring.
I regret I was unable to let you know in advance that I was leaving today. I hope your husband and daughter are now back safe and sound.
Yours, Annabel
I knew my letter was formal in a way that was odd in the circumstances, but I didn’t know how else to do it. It took me much longer to compose than I thought it would. I had deliberately let my mobile phone battery go dead, so I could not know the time exactly, but I had reckoned it was the middle of the afternoon when I began the letter. By the time I had finished and folded fifteen hundred pounds into the single sheet of paper, I could hardly see to write. Daylight was fading, and the sky was lowering with waiting ice. Maybe it was later than I had thought after all, and I remember thinking that this was a good thing. It shortened the interval until Silva’s return when the trailer would be unattended, with the money inside lying on the table. But when I closed the door and went down the steps onto the shore, I saw at once that I couldn’t leave.
Downstream, between where I stood and the wrecked bridge end, two small fires at the river’s edge were burning through the blurry dusk. It was not difficult to gauge their distance from me; the nearer of the two had been set on a jutting-out part of the bank where three or four felled tree trunks lay on the ground. I had wandered down there several times in the past few days; it was a tricky walk over slippery rocks and around ponds of mud, and possible only at low tide, but it took no more than ten minutes. If the tramps displaced from the wasteland had encroached as far as that already, they could easily come farther. The trailer was set well back and under trees and could not be seen from their bonfire, but if any of them wandered along and found the trailer empty, of course they could easily steal the money and take the trailer over for the night. And for all nights to come. I might trust to the coming darkness to keep them from exploring any further today, but I would have to stay outside on the lookout just to be sure. And I was going to be very cold. I couldn’t risk drawing their attention by lighting a fire for myself.
Vi was sitting at the stove with a shawl round her shoulders and a glass of red wine in her hand when Ron returned to the shop. She looked up from a magazine spread over the counter. Her eyes were sour and watery, and her mouth was puckered and stained dark with wine, like a patch of rot starting on a small, bruised piece of fruit.
“Cold out there,” Ron said.
“You’ll have to be quick, I’m closing early.”
“Where’s Silva?”
Vi pushed herself up a little in her chair. “Silva!” she yelled, then slumped back. “You come from the river?” she asked, swinging her glass toward the darkness on the other side of the window.
“You could say that.”
“Terrible thing.”
Ron wandered farther into the shop, looking at the shelves, sniffing gently as if he found the air, laden with kerosene and wine, too heavy to breathe.
“It’s self-service. Take a basket. Aye, terrible thing, that bridge.”
She gulped some of her drink and returned to her magazine. Ron brought a packet of biscuits back to the counter.
“Drowning your sorrows, then,” he said, placing a five-pound note on the counter.
“What’s it to you? Keeps the cold out,” Vi said, but she stood up and placed her glass out of sight under the counter. She put the bill in the cash register and started pulling coins out for the change, counting aloud, but her voice slowed. She stared at the money in her hand, dumped it all back, and started again.
“Can’t add up the day,” she said, trying to smile. She made another mistake, turned the coins from hand to hand, counted them into her open palm, and then dropped them. They fell rattling over the counter and cascaded onto the floor. Swearing, she ducked to pick them up and almost knocked over the stove as they rolled away. As she resurfaced, she swayed forward and gripped the back of her chair, but it screeched away from her and she nearly fell.
Ron looked over his shoulder. Silva was walking down from the back room with her bag on her shoulder, wrapping her scarf round her neck, smiling.
“That’ll be four pounds, twenty-five pence I’m owed,” he said, turning back to Vi.
“Well, it’s on the bloody floor. You’ll need to come back for it.”
“I’d like my change, please.”
Vi slammed the register shut. “You’ll have to come back the morn. We’re closed.”
“Come on, Vi, I’ll do it,” Silva said, moving behind the counter to open the register.
Vi shoved her away. “Don’t you touch my bloody money! We’re closed!”
Silva looked at her for a moment, then pulled her wallet from her bag and counted out four pounds, twenty-five pence.
“Here, take it,” she said to Ron. “It’s better not to argue with her. It’s all right, I got paid today. I’ll get it back tomorrow.”
“Sure? Well, thanks.” Ron took the coins and picked up his packet of biscuits. Vi was now back in her chair with her glass in her hand.
“Are you locking up, Vi? Want me to do it?”
“I’ll do it myself. In my own good time,” Vi said. She lifted her glass and swigged. “Go on, fuck off home.”
“Bye, Vi. Don’t fall asleep there, now.”
But Vi didn’t hear. She was bending into the shelf under the counter, looking for her bottle.
Outside, Ron lit a cigarette while Silva picked up the sandwich board sign and took it inside. When she came back, he nodded toward the Land Rover, and Silva clambered up into the passenger seat. As they drove off, Vi was staring out at them across the window display of faded boxes and dusty bars of fudge with her drink in one hand, waving with the slow, clawed fingers of the other. Ron pulled onto the road and turned left toward the bridge.
“Stop! What are you doing? This is the wrong way!” Silva said. “We can’t go over the bridge, we have to go to Netherloch. To the little bridge.”
Ron shook his head. “There’s a bottleneck at Netherloch. If we go that way it’ll be over an hour. This way you’ll be across in less than twenty minutes. You won’t even get your feet wet.” He smiled. “Don’t worry, I won’t make you row. Trust me.”
“Row? We are going in a boat? I can’t! I can’t go in a boat!”
“Why not? You want to swim?”
“I can’t swim!”
“Well, you’ll be better off in the boat then, won’t you?” Ron laughed, rolled down the window and threw out his cigarette end.
“I can’t go in a boat!”
The sudden rush of air from the window felt white and clear, like a beam of cold light. Silva was aware he had half-turned and was looking at her and at the same time was somehow, almost magically, keeping his attention on the road. He had careful, strange eyes; they traveled out and over her as she sat there, dissolving the shadows around her so that she might be unconcealed to him, fixed and memorized. She felt she was being recorded like a specimen, categorized as an example of something or other, but she had no idea what.
“You can go in a boat.” He spoke matter-of-factly, winding the window up. “You’ll be fine.”
For a while Silva stared ahead at the road until she felt safe enough, in the dark of the cab, to look at Ron again. She could see that his face was grainy with white stubble and his square, shaved head sat on his shoulders like a boulder on a ridge. Why had she agreed to this? She had no reason to trust him. The back of the Land Rover was dark but obviously not empty: every bump and curve in the road brought dull clunking noises from an uneven mass of vague, heavy shapes behind. There could be guns in there. Knives. Chains. Rope. Even with just a pickax and spade he could kill her and nobody would ever know. Or out there on the river in the pitch dark, he could push her overboard. She turned back and gazed through the window. Her body might be buried among the trees or under the dark hills or lost at the bottom of the river, and Stefan would never know where she was. Would Anna, growing up, explain her mother’s absence to other people with three words: she went missing? It came to her suddenly that disappearance was worse even than death. Where were they?
“You’re not from round here,” Ron said.
“No.”
“But you’re not a tourist. Are you a student?”
“No.”
“Your husband. What sort of work was it you said he was looking for, again?”
“I didn’t say.”
He gave a short laugh and lifted his hands from the wheel for a moment, in mock fear. His eyes rested on her again.
“Okay. None of my business. Here we are, anyway,” he said, tapping on the steering wheel with straight, thick fingers, and turning off the road onto a gouged-out patch of land lit by a single orange light, bordered by a chain-link fence. He parked beside a security shed and got out, took a hard hat and a flashlight from the back of the Land Rover, and spoke a few words to the man at the shed window. The man snorted and shrugged, then handed another hard hat out through the window, which Ron told Silva to put on. The man came out and unlocked the gate in the fence.
“ ’Night, then, Ron. ’Night, madam,” he said, assessing Silva as she walked through. “Mind how you go.”
“She’s just going across the river,” Ron said.
The man laughed. “Hard hats must be worn at all times!” he called after them.
Ron led the way down a track of deep tire ruts, past giant machinery and stacked stone blocks and mounds of sand, silent under a misty glow from the moon. Bright electric light and music and men’s voices from other sheds at the far edge of the site spilled over the darkness. When they reached the jetty, Ron handed Silva the flashlight and swung himself down a metal ladder into a motor launch bobbing in the inky water. Silva handed over her bag and the flashlight, and he helped her down and onto a long seat that ran around the side of the boat. He started the motor, and at once, from somewhere among the sheds and piles of machinery, the barking and howling of several dogs rose into the air. The engine stalled. The barking grew louder and more vicious; two men shouted. Silva turned to Ron.
“Security. They’re locked in. Don’t worry.”
At that moment the boat surged away from the jetty with a force that pushed her back against the stern. Her hands found a rope, and she clung on. Icy spray flew up and soaked her face as the boat cut a path through the water into darkness and a night wind that carried the scent of oil and seawater.
Out on the river it was impossible to speak above the noise of the engine and the wind. Ron took off his hard hat and motioned to Silva that she could do the same. Immediately her hair flew up in a tangle, and as she pulled at it and tried to gather it into a roll under the collar of her jacket, she heard him laugh. The pitch of the motor rose, and the boat rocked and raced on. In another two minutes they were more than halfway across and Ron slowed down. The wind eased and the black water turned satiny under the light of the mooring they were heading for, the pontoon at the construction site near the bridge’s south end. Silva could see that the bank was dotted here and there with tiny bonfires, glowing on the shingle between the river and the heavy, dark shadow of the scrub that grew almost to the water’s edge. She strived to get her bearings in the dark. Beyond the last of the bonfires, the bank curved inward, and set deep and hidden into that curve some way farther up was the trailer. The last fire couldn’t be all that far from it. Or were there more fires around the bend in the river, presently out of her sight line-or could there be one at the trailer? Could it be Stefan? Ron cut the engine, brought the boat to, jumped out, and attached the rope. He helped Silva onto the jetty.
“That wasn’t difficult, was it?” he said. “You made it safe and sound.”
Silva was peering anxiously upstream. “What are those fires?”
“Bums, turned off their patch. Where they camped out, it’s the salvage site now,” Ron said. “They won’t be bothering you. Don’t worry.”
She fixed her attention on the lights of the service station up ahead across the cleared wasteland, then glanced again at the bonfires receding into the dark of the riverbank. “Well. Well, thank you. I should go.”
But she stood where she was. How could she move from here, not knowing what the fires meant? She didn’t know whether to run toward or away from them. “Where to?”
“I don’t know. I mean-”
“Where do you live?”
“I-Up there.” She nodded in the direction of the service station and the road. “Not far from there.”
“Come on, then. I’ll go with you.”
“Aren’t you going back across?”
“Don’t need to rush back. Come on.”
He steered her up from the jetty and across the ground that, just as on the opposite side, was now a site for the bridge salvage and rebuilding.
When they got to the service station entrance, he said, “You hungry? I am. Want some coffee?”
Silva shook her head. “I need to go.”
“You always look frightened. Are you in trouble? Where are you going?”
She waved a hand vaguely down the road. “Not far.”
“How far? You can’t just head off into the dark on your own on a busy road.”
“It’s really not far. I’ll be fine. My friend will be waiting for me.”
“Well, I’ll just make sure of that. I’ll walk you home.”
“It’s all right. I don’t need you to come.”
But she did, and Ron was already walking ahead. “Come on,” he said, turning back to her. “Damn, I forgot the biscuits,” he said, searching his pockets. “Never mind. Come on. It’s too bloody cold to hang about.”
Some time after it was properly dark, one of the bonfires went out. Soon after that the other grew bigger, burning fiercely enough to send smoke high into the night, where in the moonlight it drifted like a gray veil over the river. As the flames flew up, I thought I caught the sound of faint voices raised in satisfaction or triumph. Maybe some form of cooperation was at work and two groups had joined around one big fire, or maybe one group had overwhelmed the other. I couldn’t tell. I stayed outside wrapped in wads of bedding, listening for anyone who might be approaching in the dark along the shore. From time to time I dozed.
My first thought when I heard footsteps from the track and then Silva’s voice, followed by a man’s, was that she had found Stefan. But in an instant I knew it wasn’t him. The voice was older and deeper, and she was speaking as if to a stranger.
“I am here now, thank you.” The man said something I didn’t hear. I got to my feet and called out.
They came around the side of the trailer, and we all stood for a moment, trying to see one another in the dull moonlight. The man was solidly built; that was all I could make out. Then Silva gave a cry and rushed forward to hug me. I felt my breath catch in my throat and my eyes filled with tears, but over her shoulder I saw the man watching us steadily, as if trying to find something out. Would not a normal person have looked away at such a moment?
“They haven’t come up here, have they?” Silva asked, withdrawing from me and looking downstream. “Are you all right? They haven’t come this way?”
The man was gazing toward the fires.
“Thank God you’re back,” I managed to say.
“You’re so cold,” she said.
“I had to stay out to watch. I couldn’t light a fire. If I’d lit a fire, they’d have come.”
“They might have,” the man agreed.
“This is Ron,” Silva said. Her voice lifted when she spoke his name. “He brought me across the river. This is Annabel, my friend.”
He nodded at me. “You all right?” He spoke without smiling.
His words came through the dark as if he required an answer.
Silva said, “You’re so cold. Come on, get inside.”
We went in and lit candles. Silva used the gas burner to make tea. Ron and I watched her, and we watched each other. The trailer was cramped, and we settled onto seats and moved as little as possible, like tired roosting birds. We hardly spoke. It was too late-and our being all together too unexpected-for polite conversation among strangers. Besides, all the questions that came to mind (Why did you come here? Where do you live? Who are you?) would, out loud, have sounded not curious but distrustful. And the remarkable thing was that although I knew I should be wary, because everything about his sudden appearance here with Silva begged such questions, I felt I could trust him.
Stefan, I wonder if you would have liked her. Over the three or four days we were together I had got used to her, but when I saw Ron staring at her by the candlelight in the trailer, I could see what he saw. It was not that she looked strange or remarkable, though she kept the shape of her body disguised in her clothes and had a lumbering, secretive walk that suggested neither woman nor man, adult nor child. There was nothing about her, apart from her clothes, that stayed the same long enough for me to be sure she looked a particular way and not another, that she was a person like this, not like that. Her face changed with every turn of her head, her eyes large and seeing, then hooded and looking away, her lips drawn in tightly, then spilling with words. Her skin would be white and soft and new-looking, then dry and unhealthy. Her hands were as heavy as clay in her lap until her fingers fluttered like pages falling from a book as she pushed her hair back off her face. And the tangled hair on the top of her head reminded me of kemp on the back of some aged mountain animal, and then she pulled it around, and behind her ear it dropped on her neck in silky, babylike coils the color of charcoal. She looked neither happy nor sad, rich nor poor, old nor young. She had not an appearance at all so much as an atmosphere about her, of doubt and restlessness. It was as if, although present, she could, in her mind at least, leave and rejoin our company at will. In the close, glowing space we three shared that night in the trailer, she came and went like the ghosts of many people.
I watched Ron’s study of her, wishing that he would not find her worthier of his scrutiny than I was, yet what I felt was not jealousy. It wasn’t that. It was a need for him to know about me, and about you and Anna. I didn’t want him puzzled by her instead. There was a satisfaction in knowing there was more I could have told him about her than he would be able to tell from looking. Dressed, she was almost sexless. I had seen her naked. I could have described the line of her back, the tilt of her breasts, the curve of her flank. I could have mimicked the sheltering, modest gesture of her hands across her stomach as she stood in the bathtub under the flow of steaming water over her shoulders. I liked keeping all this to myself. My knowledge of her body, that there was a baby growing inside it, had a power only for as long as I did not share it.
“Yes, they might have come here tonight,” Ron said again, “if they’d seen a fire burning. But I don’t think they’ll bother us now. It’s late.”
When he said “us,” I knew he intended to stay. He got to his feet.
“But I’ll sit out another couple of hours, just in case. You two should get to sleep.” He nodded at the long window seat. “If it’s all right with you, I’ll bed down there in a while.” He opened the door.
Annabel said, frightened, “But they’ll come when it’s light. If not tomorrow, then in a day or two.”
“Sure enough, they’ll be along,” Ron said. “We’ll look at it all in the morning.”
Annabel and I got ready for bed, shyly, saying little. Ron’s presence was an excitement that neither of us chose to find words for, nor were we able to admit that he made us feel safer. When we were lying down and the candles were blown out, I think we were both grateful for the dark, for not having to see each other’s faces. But then came the tears that I had been holding back since the morning.
“Don’t cry,” Annabel said.
How could I not cry? You were gone. I hid my face in the bedclothes and cried until I was exhausted. She lay in the dark and said over and over that you were surely safe somewhere and would return soon. Maybe both of us knew that this was a prayer and not a belief, but I let it comfort me anyway, and I fell asleep.
In the morning, Annabel was up first. She had hauled a tub of cold water round the back of the trailer and was splashing in it and singing, very badly, probably to let Ron know to keep his distance. I went outside, leaving him on the long seat stretched out under his blankets and his hands folded on his chest, like a dead saint. Downriver, the bonfire remains were dark smudges on the shore; nothing moved. The geese bobbed on the water, and I heard the sad, wavering cries of the gulls scavenging on the incoming tide. Annabel’s voice rose from behind the trailer, and I laughed and called out to her to stop frightening the birds. The geese flew up from the water with a great flapping of wings. Across the river, my deserted cabin stood unchanged.
The cabin. It was the answer. It always had been the answer. You were wrong about it and always had been. We should have been there long ago. But surely even you could see that it was necessary and urgent for us to go now. There was no danger there, nobody had been near the place for a year and more. We would go across and live on the other side, and the tramps would stay on this bank of the river, near the service station and Inverness. They wouldn’t want to come across, even supposing they could. There was nothing for them in the forest. They could take the trailer if they wanted, I didn’t care. The leaks were getting worse, and it wouldn’t last another winter. We would have a proper little house, not large but much bigger than the trailer; we would make it comfortable. Besides, I had to live on the other side now to get to work, and from the cabin there would be a way up through the trees to the road, and from there it would be only a mile or so to the Highland Bounty. And Annabel had nowhere else to go and nobody to care for her. She needed someone. She could stay as long as she liked and I would look after her while I was waiting for you and Anna.
And you’d know to come and find me there. That was the best part of it-knowing that when you came back and found the trailer taken over by tramps, or empty, you’d guess where I was. That’s if you even had to guess! Standing where I was now and looking across, you’d be able to see me sitting on the jetty, waiting, the cabin door open. Oh, Anna, I can see you watching me. I would hear you the moment you called out for me.
I went back inside and shook Ron.
“Ron! Ron, wake up! Will you help us? Can you get us back over the river? To our new place? Come, come and see. I need to take everything; it will be many times across and back. Please, will you help?”
It was Silva’s idea entirely. I let her excitement enter me; even so, it floated only on the surface of my feelings. Underneath, dread at what I was doing and where it was leading me, like a dragging undertow, pulled and ebbed. I had to get away, and yet I did not go. I did not go. In small, unguarded moments my fear swamped me, physically, leaving me nauseated and struggling for breath. I fought it down; I ascribed it to pregnancy, to shock, to the pure panic of displacement, to anything but my guilt and the need to outdistance it. I denied and resisted it. I was determined to erase the picture in my mind of Col’s face as he stared at the wrecked bridge. I would not test my reasons for disappearing from my life with him, for fear that the ingenuity of my excuses might fail. Yet I did not go.
I had to inhabit the here and now, I told myself, live in the present and pay no heed to the past. So, wanting to believe that the future would take care of itself and that meanwhile constancy to Silva would make me a little less reproachable for what I had done, I went along with her excitement about the new place. Maybe I could be on my way once I’d seen that she was settled and safe. It did not feel like a trick of avoidance, quite, to dwell on her pleasure in her plans for the cabin, and to share in it. It was simply that, for the moment, for the sake of Silva, the baby, and me, I could not leave her now.
Ron set off early along the road to get back to the boat and work his shift, promising to return later. Silva was surprised when I asked if it was all right for her not to turn up for work.
“Sometimes I have other things I have to do,” she told me. “Vi doesn’t care. I’ll go tomorrow.”
“But shouldn’t you call Vi and let her know?”
“Sure, I’ll call.”
I don’t believe she did. Soon we saw again, downstream, bonfire smoke in the air and slow, dark figures moving at the river’s edge, and we began loading Silva’s belongings into bags. With our arms full, we made our trips singly to the old jetty upriver, so that the trailer would not be unattended for even a few minutes. It did not take us long to strip the place; although the jetty was a few hundred yards away over difficult ground and we made several trips each, the bags and implements and tools did not amount to much as a whole family’s belongings. When we had finished, there was nothing to do but wait in the trailer, not just for Ron to finish work but, as he’d warned us, for the tide, which would not be high at the jetty until about six in the evening.
The light was fading when we heard the boat and watched it chug past us and up to the jetty. When it was moored, Ron helped us with the heaviest things. He disconnected the gas burner and brought it along with the tank, and went back for the water containers and mattresses and seating. There was nothing we might not need, he said. The cabin might be completely empty. Silva shrugged. Ron and I exchanged a glance, but neither of us added that it might not even be weather-tight, it might not be habitable at all.
I waited while Ron and Silva took the first load over. Ron returned alone and made four more crossings, bringing me over on the fifth with the last load. The jetty on the far side creaked and swayed, and the white rowing boat moored there was a useless wreck, half-submerged and filled with rotting river flotsam. I could not see how it even stayed afloat.
Silva had been all around the place, trying to peer in through the curtained windows. Up close, the cabin, set on a plain concrete platform, was unromantic. What had looked like silvery, weathered timber from the other side of the river was a scaly wash of gray paint over blistering, prefabricated hardboard. The flat, sloping roof of cracked bitumen sheeting was covered with a ragged blanket of fallen branches and cones and dead pine needles, and bright green streaks ran down the back and side walls as if the embrace of the forest were an encroaching stain. Moss and tree debris clogged the gutters that were supposed to channel rainwater into a covered water barrel at one corner. The door was cheap, with a plastic handle, and was padlocked. Ron had a toolbox in the boat. Now he took a hammer, split the thin paneling around the hasp, and dug into the frame with a chisel until the door hung open.
It struck me later, not at the time, that Ron stepped across the threshold and held the door open as if it were his own place, and that as we followed him in, all his attention was directed to us and not to the room we were all seeing for the first time. The disturbance of stagnant air as we entered raised dust and the warm, peppery smell of wood and linseed, and I sneezed, catching also the sharpness of old fire ash and cigarette smoke. The patchy linoleum floor was grainy with dirt and dead insects and soot blown down from the stove. Ron pulled back the curtains on their sagging wires, watching us like an eager host, scanning our faces for signs of disappointment.
In silence but for the scrape of our feet and the hollow creaking of the floor, we roamed and inspected the place as if each of us were there alone, privately assessing it against the unspoken measure of our own hopes for it, and our own needs. Within the small space, the distances between us expanded and grew vast.
The cabin must once have been a restroom or shelter for forestry workers. A black stove stood in a brick alcove, and a pile of magazines, a bucket of logs, and a poker sat alongside. The magazines, all dedicated, unsurprisingly, to naked girls, were dated between 1999 and 2002. In one corner a plywood tabletop and its two trestles were stacked against the wall next to a shelf holding a beer glass and three pub ashtrays. Two wall boards were marked with fuzzy, darker rectangles where notices and pinups must have been displayed. The gingham curtains bore shadow stripes of pale gray where light had fallen on the original dark blue. They were oddly homey, perhaps made by a wife or a girlfriend; perhaps there had been times when the workers had stayed here overnight. Behind the main room was a windowless kitchen with a sink and plastic-fronted cupboards. A small fridge stood open under the counter, the handle encrusted with dirt and rust. A door at one side led to a tiny vestibule, where a back door, sagging in its frame, led outside. We could have squeezed through it instead of busting the lock on the other door; now both would have to be mended. Off the vestibule there was one other door, behind which was a chemical toilet and a shower of the kind people use in caravans.
There were two much smaller rooms next to the main one, completely empty. In the one at the back, the window glass was cracked and had been sealed over with tape, now a dry, flapping shred. The floor was dark with mold and sloped downward, and when I trod nearer the center of the room, it tipped a little and a gap opened under the bottom edges of the walls that met in the far corner, and a draft of cold air blew in around my feet. Roots had lodged themselves there and were pushing in like damp fists. I went outside and saw that some tree roots had split the concrete platform and were taking hold in the join between the side and back walls and along the line of the cabin’s base. I thought of calling out to Ron to ask if it could be mended, and then I wondered why I was so ready to consult him. He was a stranger, and my inclination to depend on him was foolish. I would not ask.
I wandered down onto the jetty, and very deliberately I turned and gazed back; for Silva’s sake (I believed) I needed to see the cabin from a little distance, to judge the idea of living in it as plausible or not. As I looked, Ron came out and pulled a couple of bags from the doorway over the threshold. I saw him move across the window, while Silva carried a bundle of something inside, out of sight. They passed to and fro for a while in this quiet little duet of housekeeping, and I felt a pang of exclusion. I was glad when Ron came to the door and beckoned me back.
“Place looks okay for now,” he said, to both of us. “The logs are dry and the flue’s all right.” He looked at his watch, then nodded toward the boat. “I have to go.” I glanced at Silva. Did she feel, as I did, a sudden unreasonable resentment, as sharp as fear, that he was going? Silva and I, even between us, might not get things right. I didn’t want to be left, and I was annoyed with myself that I didn’t want to be left.
“I’ll have a proper look round tomorrow,” he said, addressing me as if he knew. “See what needs doing.”
“Why are you helping us?” I asked.
“I thought you could do with it.” He motioned across the river. The trailer looked deserted and hopelessly vulnerable. The bonfires still burned.
“Maybe, but that’s not the point. Why are you-”
“I’ll be back tomorrow. So don’t be frightened if you hear the boat.”
“I’m sure it’s very kind of you. But why?”
“I want to,” he said, awkwardly. “I just do what I can.”
“But why?” I knew nothing about him. “Do you live here? Where are you from?”
“Be quiet, Annabel. Of course, we’ll pay you,” Silva said, quickly. “And we are grateful.”
Ron shook his head. “I just do what I can,” he said again, “and you don’t pay me anything.”
“Come tomorrow and there will be food,” she said. She sounded shy. “Not grand food, but you will be very welcome.”
He smiled and nodded and left. As he turned the boat in to the river tide, I called out to thank him, but he didn’t hear above the noise of the motor and the cries of the geese as they rose. Silva and I stood for a while on the jetty, watching the frill of the boat’s wake disappear and the geese glide back in pairs onto the silver-smooth water around the black rock.
I was angry. I suppose she didn’t know what it is to live in a country where you have no right to be, where you are grateful for even an empty shack. She didn’t understand that you’re always afraid. She didn’t understand that going unnoticed and surviving without begging counts as success. People don’t mean to be cruel, not always, but they only help their own. You never hope-never mind expect-that anyone is going to help you, so you don’t start asking questions and looking suspicious because someone shows you kindness. If you have the luck to find it, you take kindness. You take it while you can and put it down to the way this world works. If something good can come along, then something good can also be taken away. You take the good while you can.
But after Ron left I didn’t say any of that, because I thought maybe she was that way because of her baby. It made you cautious, being pregnant. And she wasn’t suspicious about everything. She wouldn’t have been here at all if she hadn’t put her trust in me, another stranger, and I did want her here.
I turned and walked off the jetty. There was all the stuff still lying outside, the place dirty, so much to do. I hadn’t thought much about furniture yet, but there was the matter of cleaning, and a water supply. And what about power? There were light switches in the place as well as the fridge and the shower, so they must have had some electricity. Ron looked as if he would know about water tanks and generators and that kind of thing. You didn’t, not really, but you always managed to work things out well enough to get us by. You were always so proud of getting us by. You must be on your way home now, with Anna asleep on your back, I was thinking, and meanwhile I had the whole of our new house to fix up. Already I thought of it as our house.
Annabel watched me take the gas burner and cylinder inside, and she watched while I filled a water container from the river. All the time I think she was wondering if she believed in it, if it was worth all the work to get the place ready to stay in. A little while later, she followed me in and stood watching me in the kitchen. I had set up the gas and was heating the water to scrub the cupboards before I put plates and dishes away.
“Silva, you don’t need to,” she said. “I mean, we don’t need to do all this. We don’t have to live here if we don’t want to.”
“What do you mean? It’s a good place.”
“We could rent somewhere.”
“Don’t be stupid. I don’t make enough to pay rent.”
“I’ve got some money.” She pulled out an envelope and showed me a bundle of money. She looked ashamed of it.
“Where did you get that? You said you had nothing. You said you didn’t have enough money for one night in a hotel. Did you steal it?”
“No! I didn’t steal it. It’s mine. I mean, I want… It’s for both of us. The point is we’ve got it. So we could pay rent.”
“How much?”
“Three thousand.”
It sounded plenty. It was a lot, the amount we had saved and you had on you, minus whatever you needed to get by until you came back. But then I thought about it. Around here we would have to pay an expensive tourist rent, even if there wouldn’t be so many tourists this year because of the bridge. The money would be fine for a while, but it wouldn’t last long. The summer would come and go. Soon there would be a time when she couldn’t work, and then what? I couldn’t go and live in a place I wouldn’t be able to keep. While I was thinking all this, looking at the money she was holding out, the bills began to shake in her hands. The sickness was coming over her again, and she was looking at me, scared, her eyes begging me to save her while her face and her lips were turning white and gray. She shoved the money into her jacket and stumbled outside. I waited for a few moments while she retched, and then I followed with a cup of water and a biscuit. She was leaning against the cabin wall sucking in huge, deep breaths. I pulled her over to the heap of mattresses on the ground and made her sit down. It kept surprising me, how little she knew about taking care of herself.
“It’s a waste of money to pay rent,” I said. “This place is free.”
She drank down the cup of water. “It’s a wilderness.” She looked toward the steep bank of pines around the cabin. Beyond the trees that stood like guards three or four deep at its edge, the forest rose up into darkness in the shadow of the hill.
“How do we get out of here except by boat?” she said. “How far is it to the road? I can’t even see a path.”
“There must be a path. People got down here once, didn’t they? We’ll find a way up through the trees. It’s peaceful here. It’s safe.”
“But suppose I… What if one of us got ill? Suppose one of us needed something and we were stuck down here?”
“There would be two of us. And that’s only till Stefan comes. Everything will be all right when Stefan and…” My voice gave out. The single word of my daughter’s name was too much to say.
She turned away from me. “Yes, soon you’ll have your husband and your little girl,” she said. Was she scared I wouldn’t let her stay after that? But she sounded more sad than scared. Maybe she was jealous, but she would have her own baby soon.
“Yes. I’ll have Anna back,” I said, and tears rushed into my eyes. “Anyway, you won’t be ill much longer. It passes.”
She decided to ignore what I was really saying and lay back on the mattress.
“This place makes me feel lazy,” she said. “I like the sound of the river. You can hear it now there’s no traffic on the bridge.” She sighed. “I’m so tired. I could fall asleep.”
I wasn’t tired at all. “So we should stay here. We shouldn’t waste that money on rent. If we went somewhere else and I lost my job, Stefan wouldn’t know where to find me. If I’m not at the Highland Bounty, he’ll think of here at once. He knows I’d come here. He knows I love it.”
She didn’t trust what I was saying, but she wouldn’t say so. I could tell she believed you’d left me and taken my baby away. She didn’t know you, and what it was like, the three of us together.
“Anyway, soon you’ll need your money for other things.”
“Well, but I’ll get a job, at some point.”
“You’ll need it for your baby.”
She sat upright. “Why do you say that? Could you tell? How could you tell?”
“Do you think I’m stupid? Of course I can tell. Where’s the father?”
She shook her head. “He’s got nothing to do with it. I’m not with him. I’m going to manage on my own.”
“It’s hard. You don’t know what it’s like.”
“I’ll manage. Plenty of single mothers manage.”
“You don’t know anything. You’re lucky you’ve got me.”
She didn’t argue with that.
“Listen,” I told her. “Tomorrow I have to go back to Vi’s. You can come with me as far as the road. We’ll find a way up together. Then you can come back and unpack some of our things. Sleep. You can have the little room at the front. Get us some firewood. There’s lots of firewood. You’ll be fine. I’m going to look after you.”