Across the Bridge (11 page)

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 inwards and falling in cast-off tangles into the
water. Around and underneath them, 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 and 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 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 towards and
away from one another. With awful slowness they, too, crashed into
the river, one by one, 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 ends, girders
hung suspended in space and in time, not yet lethally collapsed. A
car arrested in a nosedive towards the water hovered in mid-air,
its occupants not yet trapped and drowned. There was a digital
whirring.

For a second or two, the video ran backwards 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 put down the kettle, scrabbled in my
bag for a scrap of paper, and wrote down all the figures 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 licence 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 soon after two
o’clock. They had parked and gone down to the riverbank on the
north side to record the first try-out with the new rod, a birthday
present. The bridge began to creak and lurch at two forty-six, 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 two
hundred and seventy feet and bearing, the young man estimated,
about twenty vehicles, had collapsed into the water. He contacted
the news channel straight away, 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. I cried for the strangers who were lost,
but also with relief for Stefan and Anna. They would be safe. By
now the new licence 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. Rescue teams with boats and helicopters and
ambulances were scrambled under emergency lighting. A reporter in
an overcoat stood on a roadside with 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
riverbanks, 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 moments before the collapse. It might provide
evidence as to the cause and help with identification of
fatalities. Some viewers might find the images disturbing, and at
this stage police were not confirming the identities of any of the
vehicles shown. In silence the new pictures rolled, blurred and
grey 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 stretched away in
the tarmac through the centre of the image. This was the vital
footage, said the voice, from the traffic camera at the top of one
of the arches of the approach on the southern side, only a hundred
metres 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, mid-afternoon and midweek
in low season, meant that traffic on the bridge had been relatively
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 that 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 grey 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 a fuzzy blizzard in the centre of the screen. The studio voice
stressed that the 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 forwards, 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 with the car-rental company logo
along the edge of the boot. 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 trainers 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 cars crawling sporadically up
the approach road. Again, my car passed under the arch and on
towards 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 any more, 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 for Stefan and Anna. They
must be there. He and Anna could not have died that way. What was
the use of it, a 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
exacted from her, and paid, for her child. 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 trainers

The light from the television flickered across the leg of the
dressing table and over one of Col’s trainers 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 zips 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 round
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 careful never to get caught out that way again.