Across the Bridge (30 page)

The worst days were the ones when I got ridiculously hungry. I
could eat half a loaf of bread in minutes, impatient with the time
it took me to spread the butter and jam, folding each oozing slice
over and shoving it in my mouth, chewing as I spread the next. This
put Silva in such a rage I would have to wait and gorge in secret
when she was busy getting firewood or washing her hair outside in
the tub, or had gone walking along the river. I could not explain
to her the need to fill myself up in this way, the strength and
pleasure it gave me, the floppy collapse in my mouth of bread slick
with butter, the tingle of strawberry syrup on the tongue.
Afterwards I would lie still and feel my stomach gurgling and
squirting its juices and doing its work like the wondrous factory I
now trusted it to be, transforming the heaps of food I had eaten
into the bones, flesh, hair, fingernails of my baby. I thought of
its face in the dark of my womb, blinking its wet eyes and smiling
a sated, gummy smile.

Other times, I craved sugar. It would hit me suddenly, the need
to crunch and suck on glassy grains of it, squeezing them through
my teeth; some days I stole so much sugar I made my tongue sore
with abrasions from working its sweet, scratchy crystals against
the roof of my mouth. Then there were days when I needed sugar to
slide around inside my mouth all smooth and golden and chewy, and I
walked around salivating with a desire for soft lumps of toffee.
Once I was so desperate I set about making some without a recipe,
just melting and boiling up sugar with butter, and Silva lost her
temper. She lifted the whole seething pan of it from the gas
burner, carried it outside and tipped it all out on the ground,
shouting at me that it was bad for me, bad for the baby, a waste of
gas, a waste of sugar, I had ruined the pan. Not even then did I do
more than protest I hadn’t meant any harm. Actually I had already
made up my mind to get Ron to bring me as much toffee as I could
ever want. Silva need never know.

After that she wrote down her rules for my diet. She made a
timetable with my hours all set out, for domestic tasks, periods of
rest, gentle exercise. I wanted to laugh. She was rationing my
knitting to an hour a day because, she said, pregnant women who
knitted too much could produce confused babies. I went along with
it, more or less. My days were all now so much the same, so
uneventful and poised for this last period of waiting, that I
didn’t care what I did. It hardly mattered that Silva wanted to
shift me along from one activity to the next according to her
notion of what was good for the baby.

In fact, it suited me to let her do the thinking. While time was
of course stretching forwards, I was basking in a dream that it
stood still. Insofar as I bothered to grasp that everything was
about to change, I was enjoying not knowing quite what to expect. I
never once thought of pain, for instance. I had the dreamiest
notions about breastfeeding. I trusted myself to deal with these
things naturally, when the time came. It was as much as I could do,
day by day, to heft around this massive body of mine and make sense
of the idea that all it was, for the time being, was a vault for
the round bulk of baby pushing harder and harder against its
walls.

Still, eventually I said I should find a doctor and make
arrangements. Silva was reluctant at first. I don’t think she
wanted me to hear any advice that might compete with hers, or get
the idea that anyone but she was managing my pregnancy. So, more
for vigilance than support, she came with me.

I stood no chance of making it up the slope through the pine
trees, so very early one morning Ron took us in the boat to the
other side of the river where he picked up the catering crew. Silva
and I walked to the service station and waited there for a bus. We
were in the centre of Inverness before half-past six. It was a
blowy, colourless morning, and the pavement at the bus station
where we stepped off was dark and cold in the long, early shadow
cast by high buildings; seagulls squabbled over discarded food
wrappers blowing along the gutter. The air was brackish with the
exhaust fumes of arriving and departing buses, and already the city
was noisy with traffic. We hung around until the bus station coffee
stall opened at seven o’clock, and we bought muffins and tea. There
wasn’t a proper seat in the place, just a ledge, and the ground was
littered with cigarette ends and was dark with the stains of drink
and dropped food and urine. My back ached and I kept yawning. The
tea was both weak and bitter, and I said I felt sick and wished I
was still in bed.

Silva told me to shut up. It wasn’t unusual for her to say that
kind of thing, but away from the cabin it sounded harsh and
different, a way of being spoken to that I should not have had to
get used to. Still, I didn’t let it bother me. I remember gazing at
her profile as she swallowed her tea and thinking how thin her
cheeks were, how much more in need of a doctor she looked than I
did. I took her hand and whispered my thanks to her for bringing
me. And then, although it hadn’t crossed my mind before, I told her
that she would be the first to hold the baby. She turned with a
gasp. Then she squeezed my hand and smiled, a shining smile full of
delight that I had never seen on her face before and that revealed,
perhaps, her delight in having me confirm something she had already
decided.

We waited until nearly eight o’clock and then caught a bus to
the surgery, which opened at half-past. Of course, we had had no
idea how to find a doctor in Inverness, so Ron had done an Internet
search for us and printed out details of the largest surgery in the
city. It wasn’t in the centre, but it had ten doctors as well as
nurses and mid-wives and other staff, and I hoped it would be busy
and impersonal, too system-bound to probe into my circumstances. I
didn’t want to be treated as a person, just as a container that
might need technical help to empty it of its load of baby.

I was glad to see that the building was modern and low, an
austere, small institution, its entrance doors plastered with
notices. Inside, we joined the queue at the receptionist’s window.
When my turn came, there were several people behind me and within
earshot. Silva kept turning and glaring at them.

“Yes?”

I opened my mouth and stalled. The receptionist had begun
writing and I didn’t like to speak to the top of her head.

“Hello,
yes
?” She looked up with a micro-smile, no more
than a twitch of the mouth.

“Sorry, yes, hello…I’ve just moved here,” I said. “I wonder if I
– ”

“You want to register,” she said, rolling herself a few feet
back on her office chair and reaching into a filing cabinet. “Both
of you?”

“No! Not me,” Silva said. “Only her.”

“Do you want the forms in English? We’ve got them in other
languages,” she said, rolling back.

“I’m just having a baby,” I blurted. “I don’t need a doctor for
anything else. I’m just having a baby.”

The receptionist sat up higher in her chair and looked at my
belly, nodded, then swung herself over to another filing
cabinet.

“You want Maternity Services. Here’s the antenatal questionnaire
as well. We’ll need details of your previous GP. Once you’ve
registered, we book you in for an assessment with the community
midwife. Antenatal clinic’s Tuesday morning, you need to attend
weekly from thirty-five weeks. Postcode?”

“Postcode? Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Sorry.”

“What’s your address? You have to be resident within the
practice area.”

“Oh, yes. I mean, we’re just moving in. I don’t have it on
me.”

I had thought up an address, but suddenly I didn’t dare give it.
I felt certain this woman had an encyclopedic memory of Inverness
and knew the sound of every doorbell in every street.

Silva pushed forwards and pulled at my arm. “Come on, we don’t
need this!” she said fiercely. “Let’s go, come on!”

“Silva, wait. Just a minute,” I said. I smiled at the
receptionist. “Sorry.”

Silva pushed her face to the window. “She’ll come back another
day. She has many weeks still, maybe eight, nine. It’s not
urgent.”

The receptionist ignored her and handed me several sheets of
paper through the window. “If you want to see a doctor today you’ll
need to wait till the end of surgery. First you need to fill in the
new patient registration form, the patient questionnaire, and also
the antenatal questionnaire. We’ll also need your medical card,
passport or other photo ID, proof of address, and contact details
of your previous medical practitioner.”

She looked past me to the next person in the queue. “Yes?”

Silva steered me out and strode off. She kept walking until we
were several streets away and slowed only as we reached a park with
paths and litter bins and a tatty children’s playground. She
marched through the gates and sat down on a bench, and I followed,
exhausted and sweating. She pulled the papers from my hands and
sifted through them.

“Questions, so many! For one baby! Why?”

I pulled the papers back and began to read them. I could give a
false name and address. I could make up a name for my previous
doctor. I could say I had lost my medical card and leave my
National Insurance number blank. They might not follow those up
straight away.

But the questions became more nosy, more dangerous. How would I
rate my feelings about my pregnancy from one to five, extremely
negative to highly positive? Did I live with a partner? How many
adults, smokers and non-smokers, were living at my address, and
were any unemployed? Were there domestic pets or other animals at
the premises? I could give false answers to all of them, too, but
if I turned up every Tuesday at an antenatal clinic, there would be
more and more questions. Soon I would make a mistake or give
something away. If I registered, but didn’t go to the clinic, they
would make enquiries and find out I had lied. And once they knew I
wasn’t Annabel, what else would they uncover? The newspapers had
said nothing about the missing woman tourist being pregnant, but
that didn’t mean Col hadn’t told the police that I was.

Col. I had a sudden recollection of him as I had last seen him,
his stricken face as he turned away from the wrecked bridge. But I
could not undo what I had done.

“They want to know everything,” I said. “If I don’t tell them
they’ll find out anyway.”

Silva’s face was white. “You shouldn’t go back there,” she said.
“If you do, when the baby’s born they’ll take it away. It was a
stupid idea to come.”

“What am I supposed to do when I go into labour? I can’t have
the baby all on my own. What if something goes wrong?”

Silva stood up and started walking. “You just have to go to
hospital. Ron will take us. It will be fine.”

I was surprised at how relaxed she was about it.

“You mean just turn up?” I said. “They’ll think that’s very odd,
they’ll ask me all sorts of questions. They’ll interfere.”

“So? Have you done a crime, to have a baby? No. They will look
after you. Then afterwards we’ll leave with the baby, they can’t
stop us.”

“And you’ll come with me?”

“Sure, of course! Ron will take us in the boat, then the Land
Rover. Then after, he comes again to pick us up in the Land Rover.
Four of us!”

She looked almost happy.

“Then everything can get back to normal,” I said. “Then we’ll
decide what to do next.”

On the way back she was silent. Just before we got off the bus,
she turned to me and said, “I’m going to look after you.”

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

T
here’s that rock in
the river you used to watch, the one you only see at the ebb tide,
a long, low, shining lump of black. The geese and gulls land and
feed around it, but no bird nests there, because once a day the
water swirls over and covers it again and the birds fly off.
Between it and the forest bank of the river, there are other,
smaller rocks in the water, some flat and some jagged, set in a
loose tumble as if they landed there from a prehistoric avalanche.
For all I know, they did. The water collects and turns all around
them, and maybe it’s also because of the rocks that the river flows
in strongly just there and has worn a curve in the bank. Or maybe
it’s because the ground in that particular place is so soft to
begin with, formed of nothing but disintegrating acid shreds of
forest soil that are easily licked out from the pine roots by the
tongue of the tide. Either way, the water has washed the soil away
and borne it down to the riverbed, and it has hollowed out a tiny
bay in the bank right into the base of the trees, leaving their
roots under a thin mortar of salty dried mud. They look greyish and
gappy, like old teeth. And other stones, dragged in from the sea on
the high winter currents and dropped there, are daily pulled and
rolled up the beach by the methodical tide into an arrangement of
ridges, the boulders lodged farthest up, a scree of stones you can
walk on, and little pebbles and broken seashells shirring to and
fro at the water’s edge.

Here is where I sit most often to think about you, close in by
the trees in the deepest part of the curve and hidden from Ron or
Annabel, who might just be (though seldom are) strolling along the
river from the bridge or from the cabin. Here is where I began,
without knowing that was what I was doing, to build.

One day I saw two stones side by side not far from where I sat,
and it so happened I noticed them in a spell of numbness when I was
neither talking aloud to you, nor crying. In fact I was caught off
guard, when I was not thinking of anything at all. Of these two
stones, one was large and dark and squarish and had a ribbon of
quartz running through it. The other was pale and much smaller, and
its rounded surface sparkled with dots of mica. It was touching the
other one in a way that made me think of a person whose forehead
was resting against the chest of someone bigger. They leaned
towards each other, joined and motionless, arrested in the moment
just before they would embrace. That was the remarkable thing, that
their absolute stillness held within it an intimation of a movement
yet to happen. Father and child. I moved closer, my eyes travelling
across every line and plane, gauging the shape of the empty space
around them, measuring the distance between. And as I gazed at the
point where the two stones tilted and met – the touching of
forehead to chest – I felt the world shrink around me. This was
surprising, because what I was looking at were, after all, lumps of
stone.