Across the Bridge (10 page)

I remembered the first time we went there. I remembered the
little bridge, made of dark-grey 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 police cars with blue
flashing lights swept past in the direction of Netherloch.

“See?” Vi said. “That’s them going in to set up the diversions.
Pan-de-bloody-monium.”

It was getting dark and soon from down the road another blue
flashing light appeared and drew nearer, travelling 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 towards
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 down 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 ring the till
open. 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, OK?
You’d struggle to get here anyway, all that bloody big detour.”

She started thumbing through the few notes in the till 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 paraffin 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 any more.

“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, their beams 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.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

O
n 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
blonde 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 blonde 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 also partly
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 grey.
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; 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 lifts 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 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 towards the
bridge against an oncoming line of vehicles. It was the nearest to
happy he had felt for seven years.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

W
hen 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 but 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 towards, 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
this way, looking with yearning across distances. I had reached
from my father’s sickness-bound house in Portsmouth towards 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 towards 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 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 clock alarm 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 towards 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 programmes 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.