Across the Bridge (34 page)

“They don’t fit you,” Silva called. “And they stink!”

She dropped the shoe she was holding back in the fire and lifted
the other. There was less than half of it left, only a blackened
piece of the sole with a rag of burnt fabric attached.

“You’re mad! What am I supposed to wear?”

She dropped it, too, and stirred the fire around, then put down
the tongs and walked calmly back. “They’re not worth crying over.
They were bad for your feet. And you lie around all day, you don’t
need shoes,” she said, walking past me.

“Of course I need shoes! I can’t go out without shoes!”

“Well, there might be flip-flops in Netherloch. I’ll get you
some. If I go.”

That was four days ago, and she hasn’t been anywhere except to
her place along the river. I’ve put my phone somewhere, and I can’t
find it, so I asked her to call Ron and get him to buy trainers or
something for me and bring them next time he comes. But he hasn’t
come.

“Where’s Ron? When is he coming, did he say?” I ask.

Apart from anything else, my feet are cold most of the time, and
I can hardly reach my toes to rub them. There were some thick socks
of Ron’s around somewhere, but I can’t find them now, either.

“He’s busy, he said. There’s a lot going on to get the bridge
ready in time.”

“But he hasn’t been here all week. He never misses more than a
day. Ask him when he’s coming.”

“He’s extra busy. He’ll come when he can.”

“I’m going to find my bloody phone and call him and see if he’s
all right. It must be somewhere. Have you seen it?”

“I haven’t seen it for days.”

I look for it again all morning but I don’t find it. These days
everything’s in a muddle and things do go astray. It’s somewhere
around, no doubt. But Silva’s never far away, so it’s not essential
for me to have it to hand. I ask her to send Ron another message,
asking him to come as soon as he can, with some shoes.

“I still can’t find my phone. And I do need shoes,” I tell her
when we have lunch, which is pasta again, with something out of a
tin. “I have to get out. I’m supposed to walk every day! Please ask
him if he can get something size forty.”

“I’ll ask him,” she tells me. “There’s no need to get upset.
You’re getting yourself in a state.”

“No wonder! I haven’t been able to get farther than the
door!”

“It’s quite normal to feel restless at this stage. But you
should be doing less, not more.”

“And ask if he can bring some apples or something. Or oranges.
Tomatoes, anything fresh.”

“I’ll ask him. But he’s very busy. Go and rest.”

This is how it goes every day now. She’s always telling me I’m
too restless, and probably I am, but never for long. After a while
a terrible listlessness will creep over me and I have to give in to
it. I lose things and get annoyed with myself (the phone still
hasn’t turned up), and I’ll try to settle to some knitting or
tidying, but very often I just sit or lie looking at the ceiling.
My back aches all the time.

I miss Ron. He has told Silva he’ll be here any day, but still
he doesn’t come. She feeds me in the middle of the day now, big,
hot platefuls of spaghetti with tomato sauce, or macaroni cheese,
and I eat from boredom, not knowing where I have room to put so
much food. Afterwards I’m even more sleepy. When I’ve rested I
often feel bloated and itchy, so I’ll go out and stand on the
freezing damp concrete for a few moments to breathe in cool air and
look at the river. The scent of pine from the forest has turned
brackish, and every day the sky is full of geese, circling in wide,
fluttering arrows, preparing to migrate. If it’s not raining, I
drag a chair to the doorway and sit and watch them for a while,
wretchedly sluggish, wondering if even after the birth my
distended, straining body will ever feel or look like mine again.
But my feet are always freezing, and it’s too cold to stay there,
even wrapped up, and anyway soon Silva complains I’m letting cold
air in, or blocking her way.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

R
on went back to
sleeping every night in the mobile unit with the other men. His
reappearance went without comment, because neither his presence to
begin with nor his many later absences had been noticed
particularly; the unit was a place where the men went just to
sleep, and there was a high turnover of occupants as shift patterns
became more complex.

In the canteen a row erupted over all the extra men Jackson the
cook was now expected to cater for; he stormed out and was replaced
by a young man called O’Dowd, who went through his working day
saying as little as possible. His sullenness spread, somehow, or
maybe it was just a deeper concentration now that the end of the
project was in sight, or maybe it was simple fatigue that had set
in among the men. In any case, there was less banter, and that
suited Ron. He felt some of the old knack return to him, acquired
after his release from prison, of concentrating only on what was in
front of him, on the immediate task in hand, no matter how trivial.
He made himself notice frivolous details: the tiny
whoosh
of
a cascade of sugar from the packet into a mug of tea, the smell of
rain on concrete, the colour of toothpaste. He moved from job to
job in this way, trying not to think about Annabel, refusing to
bring to mind Colin’s face and voice, and still less his words.
Suppose he was wrong about it all? Suppose Annabel wasn’t the
missing wife? Why had he interfered? If she was his wife, and she
wanted to keep away from him, why shouldn’t she?

It was none of his business. Yet the thought of it – a father
grieving unnecessarily for his unborn baby and its mother – nagged
at him. He couldn’t stop himself sending Annabel messages every day
to tell her he’d come as soon as she wanted him to. Only
occasional, meaninglessly breezy answers came back. He called her a
number of times, but she never picked up. He tried Silva several
times also, and she answered once. Her reassurance that all was
well was terse. He wasn’t wanted. He decided to go on forcing the
small things to absorb him, immersing himself in a private world
deliberately shrunk to leave little room for hurt.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

D
o you remember
Anna’s birth? I never saw you so scared, before or since. I can
still see your face, and I can hear her first squeezed-out, mewly
cry. I hardly remember the pain.

I’m watching Annabel carefully, but not in the way she thinks.
She can’t think, actually. She’s lost the power of thought. She’s
had only three contractions and it’s nearly two hours since the
first one, but she’s been fretting and hefting herself around as if
she’s got a bucking bull in there. Weeping, now.

“Try him again! Why isn’t he answering? He promised, oh, he
promised,” she wails.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “Don’t worry, you’ve got hours and hours
yet. I’m sure he’s still busy and can’t pick up his voicemails,
that’s all. He must be busy at the bridge. It reopened today, you
know.”

She does, of course, know. We watched it all from here. The
bridge reopened at noon, and traffic has been streaming along it
for four hours. Now the afternoon is fading and the bridge lights
sparkle in strings in the sky across the river. Headlamps are
gleaming through the dusk, and again the constant groan of traffic
is in the air. The last time I remember hearing that, I was in the
trailer, lying with your arm around me, and Anna asleep between
us.

I’m making a show of timing the contractions. Thirty minutes.
I’ll keep her thinking they’re at thirty minutes even as they
gradually crowd together and come at her every twenty-five, twenty.
I don’t want her to panic. We have to spin this out for hours. I do
want the child born alive, and her alive to see it.

“Why not go and make sure all your things are together?” I say.
“It helps if you move around. I’ll make a cup of tea and try Ron
again.”

She has packed and repacked her overnight bag a number of times
already, but at least doing that occupies her. She gnaws her bottom
lip, nods and hauls herself to her feet.

In the kitchen I put on the kettle, and while she wanders around
picking things up and putting them down, I stand in the doorway and
say loudly, with the phone at my ear, “Hi Ron, me again. You got my
other messages? It’s coming, she’s started, it’s all going fine.
But will you get here as quick as possible? Can you call me back?
We’re OK, but we need you here now. She really needs to be in
hospital soon, OK? Call me back, OK? Soon as possible!”

Annabel appears from her room, looking brave. She pulls in a
long, deep breath and lets it out slowly. She thinks I dialled
Ron’s number before I spoke.

“He’ll be on his way the minute he hears that,” she says, trying
to keep her voice smooth. “Won’t he, Silva? Nothing to be worried
about. Is there? And it’s all going fine! It takes hours, doesn’t
it?” She glances at the door. “I heard something! I heard the boat!
I’m sure it’s him, go down and see! Go and wave, make him
hurry!”

I pretend excitement. “Maybe you’re right! Quick, come on!”

We go outside. While she dances at the doorway on her bare feet,
I run down to the jetty and scan the water. There’s a heavy drizzle
falling, and the river and sky are the same grey. Of course it’s
not the boat. It was probably a lorry on the bridge. I haven’t
spoken to Ron for days and days. I’ve replied to maybe one in ten
of the messages he sends to Annabel’s phone. Anyway, he thinks the
baby’s not due for another two weeks.

But for several minutes I wait there gazing across, allowing her
to think it might be him. Of course it’s cruel. But she deserves
cruelty. Don’t you know what she did to you and Anna? I walk back
to the cabin shaking my head. Oh dear, it wasn’t the boat.

Out here in the fading light, her face is blotchy. She’s
shivering and sweating and trying very hard not to cry again.
Naturally I’m moved by her distress, but I resist any wish to take
her in my arms by remembering exactly why it is she’s in all this
trouble. Why she is in even more trouble than she understands yet.
Of course it’s cruel, but has she not been cruel, is she not being
cruel even now? She let her husband believe her dead in the river,
she lets him go on believing it. Every day since the bridge went
down she makes him suffer for the loss of her, as I suffer my loss
of you. What is happening, what is about to happen, are what she
deserves.

We drink our tea. I make another show of calling Ron, and we
wait by the light of the stove. Then the contractions stop. We
wait. She shifts about, complains of backache, of wind, goes to
pee. We wait for an hour, and still no more contractions. Then she
goes to lie down. When she gets up, it’s quite dark. She announces
she is hungry and starts foraging in the kitchen. She comes back
with a plate of crackers and cheese and, for God’s sake,
beetroot.

“Aren’t you hungry?”

I shake my head and turn away from the sound of crunching and
the sight of her tongue licking crumbs from the corners of her
mouth. She is joking now, while she shoves the food in and chews.
Her gusts of laughter smell of vinegar. She says the baby was just
having a practice, keeping her on her toes, she’s heard this can
happen several times, up to three weeks before the birth. I have to
agree this is possible, and then I find I have nothing more to say.
The thought of this not being her time depresses me unbearably. I
sit staring at the stove with my arms tight around myself. I have
no taste for what I must do, I simply want to get it over with. If
it becomes any more drawn-out than this, I am afraid I may be
unable to go through with it.

She slumps back to the kitchen with her empty plate, and it’s
when she is calling out to me to let Ron know it was a false alarm
that she has another contraction, one that stops her breath in her
throat and produces a long, quiet moan. I wait, pretending I
haven’t heard. After a quarter of an hour, she reappears.

There’s a look on her face now that wasn’t there before, a
steadiness. She is going into battle. When the next contraction
comes, nineteen minutes later, she’s ready for it, and for the next
one, another nineteen minutes later. In between, she walks up and
down and gibbers on about Ron, will he bring her some shoes when he
comes, because without them how will she get to the jetty? After
another hour and three more contractions, I tell her it’s time to
forget about him. He must have lost his phone or something. The
contractions are getting stronger and we have to work this out by
ourselves. I remind her about the little white boat. I tell her
we’ll take it downriver, keeping close to our side of the bank, and
moor it at the bridge jetty. Ron won’t be far away, but even if he
can’t be found, somebody there will call an ambulance and it’ll
come straight away now that the bridge is open. It will get her
over to hospital in Inverness within minutes.

“And you’ve got at least twelve more hours to go,” I say.
“Plenty of time.”

She looks at me in terror. “We can’t go on the river in that
boat! You know what Ron says, it’s not safe. And it’s
pitch-dark!”

“Then you’ll have to have the baby here,” I tell her. “You
couldn’t walk along the bank to the bridge jetty now, even with
shoes. You can’t climb up through the trees to the road. Do you
want to have it here? I’m not a midwife.”

“I can’t even make it down to our jetty like this, in bare
feet,” she cries.

“Of course you can,” I say. “Come on, I’ll help you.”

I can’t offer her my arm, can I, because I’m carrying her bag in
one hand and the oars (which I brought into the cabin weeks ago to
keep dry) in the other. She’ll have to manage. It’s a drizzly
night, but a fuzzy three-quarter moon shines down through the
cloud. This is helpful, because I haven’t thought to bring a torch.
Annabel hesitates. She peers through the dark to find an easy way
down to the jetty, but there isn’t one. I shout at her to hurry up.
Soon she is sliding around on clumps of wet, warty seaweed and
sharp stones, falling and cutting her feet and hands, gasping with
pain. Every step is treacherous. After half an hour she is not even
halfway, and she screams at me that she’s going back. I shout at
her not to be stupid. She has no choice. On she goes, yowling
louder as she treads on lacerated feet through freezing saltwater
puddles. When another contraction comes, she stops and moans and
struggles to stay upright. I walk ahead, listening to her as she
snivels and stumbles behind me.