Across the Bridge (4 page)

Silva, I’ve had an idea, about the car.

I wouldn’t let you speak. I shook my head and clapped and
hollered across the river, and then I walked over to Anna and
picked her up. I didn’t want to hear it again. No jobs for illegals
that pay enough, you kept saying, we should get a car, run a cab,
you knew guys who’d lend cash and do false papers, you’d work
nights. You’d pay the loan back, we’d get a proper place to live.
And I kept saying, the kind of people we’d have to borrow from, the
amount they charge, you don’t get out of trouble that way. I kept
saying we had to be patient and save up the proper way, owing
nothing, we already had just over three thousand, I’d remind you,
and then you’d lose your temper and tell me that way it would take
ten years to get enough. We never got anywhere, did we?

So we would chuck pebbles and call across the river to the
birds, we’d make childish jokes, make love, pull on each other’s
hair, play clap-hands with our daughter. Sometimes I was afraid our
whole life was getting to be like a silly guessing game we were
both secretly sick of. But still I hoped it could last. We needed
it to keep going long enough for an answer to come.

The bus will be along soon, I said. Give me your phone. Here’s
mine.

Just another of our little survival rituals, swapping phones so
I could plug each of them in, every few days, under the counter at
Vi’s, and that morning also a way back from the dangerous subject
of how to go on living.

You walked me up the track to the road and a bit of the way
along, until Anna got heavy. After you turned back, I watched you
for a while, walking away. The noise of the road and the bridge
traffic was too loud for me to shout out to you, and so I turned,
too, and set off to the bus stop at the service station.

We’d got another day started, I thought. And if in ten hours or
so I got off the bus and walked back along the road and down the
track, my long shadow cast behind me, carrying a bag of groceries
from Vi’s past their sell-by date, and if I heard your voices as
the rumble of evening traffic on the bridge died away, I would be
able to count this one as another day that had let us stay
together. Another day done and it still hadn’t all come to an end,
a day that would let the same day, with luck, come again tomorrow.
A good day was one when nothing got worse.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

I
didn’t go as far as
Inverness.

The road from the hotel followed the river for several miles. I
switched on the car radio and drove, singing along raucously with
one song after another, refusing to cry, trying to drown out Col’s
words in my head. From time to time rain fell, not in spiky drips
like English town rain but in milky currents that wet the air with
cold, gusting sprays. Between showers, and seeming more liquid than
the rain, sunlight poured down through gaps in the clouds onto the
rocks and larch and pine trees across the steel-bright river. When
my throat was so tired I could hardly make a sound, I turned the
radio off and kept driving. Just as, when my father was dying, I
used to absorb trivial details while waiting for bad news – every
stem and leaf on the wallpaper in the doctor’s surgery, every
scratch on the floor by his hospital bed – I concentrated now on
the sunlight, how it spilled over the landscape into refracting
pools of sharp, unfiltered silvers and russets and greens. This was
not my country, and I was glad I could numb myself with touristic
gawping; I felt no tug of ancestral pride, found nothing revelatory
or significant in its beauty. Each bend in the road and new angle
of the landscape consoled me with a distracting kind of
un
-belonging; I travelled with the lulling detachment I
might have felt thumbing through racks of postcards.

There were dozens of places to pull the car off the road and
admire the views, and I stopped often. In some of them there were
souvenir vans festooned with tartan flags and pennants, blaring out
disheartening bagpipe music over the roofs of parked cars and
caravans and food stalls. Sometimes I loitered, reading billboard
warnings about forest fires and litter and threats to wildlife,
watching people come and go, all of them in pairs or groups, never
alone. I saw a family of seven disgorge themselves from a camper
van and claim a damp picnic table; the mother and grandma spread
plastic bags over the benches, the dog crawled underneath and lay
down. The last of the four lanky children ran back to the van for a
football, and a loud, hazardous game began at the side of the car
park. The father got in the queue at the burger van and began a
long relay of shouts to the others. He brought an armful of boxes
back to the table, and the children darted into place, mauling the
packaging, snapping open cans of explosive drinks, pushing torn-off
lumps of pizza and burgers in their mouths, feeding the dog from
their fingers. I made my way back to the car. I wanted to get away
from them, from my envy of their messy, uncomplicated pleasure and
from the shame they aroused in me. I had married a man who shunned
the very idea of that noisy, easygoing acceptance within families;
surely I must be at heart the same kind of person. I was at the
very least someone who would consider aborting a child rather than
be abandoned by its father.

But I have no choice, I said to myself, as if the family at
their picnic were challenging me. I have to stay married to him. He
is all I have.

After that I stopped only in deserted places. I would turn the
car onto verges choked with scrubby thickets of undergrowth, and
into lay-bys filled with sagging piles of gravel and sand heaped
there for highway repairs. I parked and wandered for a while in the
rubble-strewn forecourt of a boarded-up and derelict filling
station until from an outbuilding came a hissing, spiteful-looking
cat and two scraggy kittens.

Still some way before Inverness, I felt sick again and pulled
over. I got out of the car to feel the rain on my face and breathe
in its cold-water scent; there on the roadside, at the top of a
bank of fields sloping down to the river, the air was mixed with a
sharp, shelly, salt wind blowing in from the coast. Below me, the
estuary flowed along white-flecked and bright under a sudden patch
of clear sky. To the east about a mile downriver, a bridge arched
across from the city to the north shore, black and permanent
against the smoky, distant blues and greys of the horizon where
water and sky melded at the start of open sea.

The nausea passed, and to stop myself thinking about the baby, I
unfolded the road atlas over the boot of the car and began to trace
the contours and place names dotted along the route I had followed,
incredulous that the mountains, and swathes of forest, the concrete
and steel bridge and the river running beneath it could have
transmuted from the actual, touchable, physical vastnesses before
me into printed words and shapes on a map. I stared at the page now
softening under spattering drops of rain and felt, strangely, that
it should have been the other way round, that really their first
existence must have been as scribbles and marks in ink on paper
and, only then abstracted and set down, had the land risen up and
taken form out of nothing more than the idea of itself, to amass
and flow and come alive with air and light, and sprout crops and
trees and bridges, and teeth with creatures. And I longed to apply
the same sense of impossibility to the surely still notional little
lump of ectoplasm growing inside my body; if I disallowed any
connection between that act of cellular multiplication and a real
baby, maybe it wouldn’t become one, a terrifying, wondrous, real
one. Maybe an abortion wouldn’t be necessary, maybe I wouldn’t have
to make a decision at all. Maybe by the simple force of its
mother’s incredulity, a putative human being could be so belittled
and denied as to be fatally discouraged from coming into existence.
Suddenly I was filled with horror that this might be so.

I folded the map up and got back in the car. I waited for a
while, observing time flickering along by the numbers on the
dashboard clock and wondering how long I could stay like this,
enclosed and contained, halted. I wanted to arrest any further
forward momentum in time or space; although stranded on the edge of
a road with traffic thundering by and looking down on a river
flowing fast and deep towards the sea, I was, however improbably,
in the only place of safety and stillness I had. As long as I
remained there, I could put off my next move which, whenever it
came and wherever it led, would take me nearer to my decision,
whatever that was to be. For the future must have its location; if
I refused it that, if I just
didn’t
turn the key in the
ignition and go forwards, if with every thought and breath I
reduced the baby inside me to less than baby, to mere-ness, to
nothing, perhaps I could will it not to be. I wanted its end to be
painless and unknowing and without violence, and afterwards I
wanted to be left quiet and unnoticed. I wanted to be left alone to
carry on living as before. How could it be that I would afterwards
suffer the loss of something I had never quite had?

But I gazed at the bridge and saw in the span of it over the
water an inevitability, as if the points on each opposing bank had
cried out to be joined, as if the flow of the river beneath the
bridge was dependent upon each side’s throwing out its great black
steel arch to connect across it. Events must reach forwards to meet
their consequences, consequences must throw backwards in time
bridges linking themselves to causes; where else is the meaning of
all the things that happen in the world to come from, if not from
connection with what happened before and what will happen next? How
unbearable otherwise, if human activity were no more than a
succession of haphazard little incidents exploding at random all
the time over the planet, arising from and leading to nothing. The
commission of even a single action surely sets in motion somewhere
a yearning, distant and reluctant maybe, for its outcome eventually
to have a point. However oblique or delusory the link with past or
future, the connection must be attempted, for one thing must be
seen to lead from or to another; we prefer a rickety and unreliable
bridge between events, if that is all we can have, to none at all.
I started the engine and drove on. Even after all that has
happened, I do not believe anyone can behold a bridge and not feel
a compulsion to find out what lies on the other side of it.

Yet I would not go across. I parked at a service station a short
distance further on, just before a large roundabout where one road
led off left to the bridge approach and another went straight on
towards the outer edge of Inverness. I went into the café and sat
there for a long time under the swimmy piped music, sipping water,
pushing my finger into a little mound of crumbs on my opened
biscuit wrapper and pressing them onto my tongue. It was quiet, the
flow of customers sporadic: one or two truck drivers with
deliveries for the city, I supposed, and a few people in suits,
slightly self-important, travelling on business. Occasionally
families came in; usually the men paid for fuel while the women
hauled little children to the bathrooms. Between customers, two
waitresses in striped conical hats conversed in a clipped, private
lexicon of phrases and low murmurs, and exchanged looks full of
knowing. They could have been telling each other secrets, or
complaining about the boss, or speculating about me.

I hadn’t until that moment felt conspicuous, but I realized then
how intently I must look as if I were waiting for something,
perhaps for a purpose either to stay or to leave. A person with
nowhere to go could go anywhere, of course, but this was not the
freedom I might have supposed. I still had to be
somewhere
,
and this seemed to bring with it an obligation either to explain my
remaining where I was or to keep moving. Apologetically I bought a
cup of tea and took it back to my table.

The fact was I did not have to sit here in this way, as if under
some vague suspicion, wondering where to go. There was a place on
this earth where someone would be waiting for me this evening.
Albeit on his terms, after his fashion, my husband wanted me. Not
everybody had that. I had waited so long for it, and I need not
lose it. Why
should
I lose him, for the sake of a child I
never thought I would have and that he, to be fair to him, had
never led me to imagine he would want? If we had money, it would be
different, but we didn’t. Col was just being honest and probably
more realistic than I was. And since I hadn’t been expecting to
have a baby, if I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t be continuing without
anything I had been hoping for.

But I had set out in married life hoping to stay married, and if
I did not, I could not shrink back into my old life. When I sold
the house near Portsmouth and moved to Huddersfield, I disposed of
every trace of it – not a difficult thing to do, in fact, with a
life so small as to have gone almost undetected. In any case, I had
grown so tired of it, tired of myself, tired of getting on my own
nerves, tired of the thoughtless, overlapping, blurred accretion of
years going nowhere; I had been desperate for greater distance from
it, in any direction, even towards a mirage. If a mirage was what
marrying Col turned out to be, it was still the first attempt I’d
ever made to escape the person I had let myself become.

And escape her I had, so successfully that, except as Col’s
wife, I no longer really existed. My dutiful care of my father
(though I loved him) had arisen not from goodness but from a lack
of vitality and imagination about myself; I stayed at home because
I was diffident and unadventurous. I had not, as I had told Col,
sacrificed a promising career in local government. I had been made
redundant at twenty-five from a dull administrative job in Traffic
and Highways in a restructuring simultaneous with my father’s first
stroke, while three colleagues, including my fiancé Barry, were
kept on and retrained.