Authors: Morag Joss
Across the Bridge (16 page)
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 poor
woman needed looking after.
A
nother 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 talk 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 work. 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 roadside was crowded with
vehicles parked in all directions, abandoned the night before. From
the Highland Bounty Mini-Mart he set off in the Land Rover,
travelling 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 football on the tiny wall-mounted
television, lying naked on the glassy, nylon lilac 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 mid-stream, and he could see that work
was underway 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, 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 swivelling 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 upwards
with the telephone at his ear, listening with obvious
exasperation.
Ron stepped forwards. “Excuse me, I’m looking – ”
The young man looked up. “Skills?”
“Construction. General building, labouring. 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 form.
“Pens over there,” he said, and motioned him towards 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 that 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, harbour 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
try-out now and he’s OK,” 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, mudbanks, 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 OK, put him on the day rate. Put
‘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 fetching something
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, 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 canisters 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 rough
sleepers, 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 one of the obligations 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.”