Across the Bridge (17 page)

“You actually saw them? These people’s faces?”

She nodded. “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.
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 mugs. 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 any more 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 coach 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. 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, Silva told me about Vi’s shabby little general 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 towards 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.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

O
n 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,
water-stained walls behind a scraggy hedge and the 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 hardly looked human.
She couldn’t get her mouth to work.

“I’m not dressed,” she managed to say. There was some scrabbling
behind the door, and then one hand and her dry 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 till and counted in the
coins, switched on the radio and wiped down the counter with the
spray and a paper cloth. I wiped the old words off the sandwich
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 paraffin 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 that? 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 verges in the rain, the aroma that would meet
me when I stepped inside the shop, of wrapped bread and
firelighters 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
pegboard 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 gear 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 long-life,” 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 offence, love, OK?” 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. Then the walk from there.”

“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. 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. It’s not a problem.”

“OK, 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 towards me. “Good. Now I
need to get going. What’s this lot come to?”

I totalled 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.”

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

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 memory 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 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 towards the road.