Across the Bridge (9 page)

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

T
he store wasn’t
busy; lunchtimes never are. A few campers from the Lochside Holiday
Cabins were coming in at the weekends now, but still hardly any
during the week, and they usually stocked up early in the day. The
bus stopped outside at two o’clock, on time. Nobody got off. Around
the same time some fishermen came in to fill up their flasks from
the vending machine. They told me again we should be selling soup
and hot pies. Get a microwave and you could do it easy, you’d make
a fortune this weather, they said.

I nodded over at Vi, who was sleeping behind the counter with
dribble going on her cardigan.

Tell her, it’s her place, I said. She says she’s not running a
bloody restaurant.

There was stuff from the Cash & Carry to price and put out,
so when the fishermen left, I woke Vi up and told her I was going
to the back room, not that she really heard. It was just cans and
cotton wool and firelighters and tinfoil, plus one of Vi’s impulse
buys, a bag of soccer shirts, so there was no hurry. I took a
sandwich past its sell-by from the chiller and made my tea, and
when I’d had my lunch, I sent a message to you, but you didn’t
answer. I thought you must be out of range, along the shore or
getting water from the car-wash tap at the service station. Then I
went back with a cup of tea for Vi and made her go across to the
house. I told her to have a lie-down and I’d see her later, but I
knew she’d have another bottle in there and I’d be locking up
tonight. She wouldn’t go at first, she said the house would be
cold. So I went over, and it was and also dirty, as always. I
switched on the gas fires and her electric blanket and bedside
light and then went back for her. I led her all the way to her
bedroom door, and I promised her I’d look after everything. I hoped
she’d fall asleep before she could start crying.

Soon after that a family came in. They’d been to the Netherloch
Falls. There was a sulky girl chewing on a leaflet from there, and
their feet were muddy. I didn’t like them. It was a weekday, so the
children should have been in school. I made the man go outside with
his cigarette even though it was only in his mouth and not lit. The
woman asked if we had Internet access, and I told her no because
I’d seen her wiping her nose with her hands. She said what’s that
then, pointing at the sign outside, and I said it wasn’t working.
For all I knew it wasn’t. Nobody had logged on for a couple of
weeks. Then she shook out a rail of tartan scarves and tried them
all on, even though there was no mirror and they were only scarves.
After that she took a basket and went up and down the shelves
helping herself, digging in the deep-freeze and handing ice creams
to her children before she’d paid for them. I told them there was
no eating in the shop, so they hung around staring at me and
sucking and tugging at their ice-cream wrappers and fingering the
chocolate bars and playing with the key rings in the ‘Under £3’
tray. I’m sure they took some. The eldest one kept whining to her
mother about why wasn’t there a toilet and when could she get on
Facebook.

After they’d gone, I sent you another message and told you what
they were like, but you were still out of range.

Then it was quiet again for a while. A man came in, someone I
remembered seeing before. He came in now and then, always in
outdoor clothes like the men who ran the angling weekends or worked
in the forest, but he was always by himself and he was older than
most of them. Not that I could really guess his age. He had cropped
hair that I thought would be silvery-grey if it were longer. When
he brought his things to the till he smiled as if he knew me. I
noticed the colour of his eyes again, a bluish-grey like the colour
of water in winter, and there was a brightness in them, almost a
flashing, as if he had just caught sight of something startling,
not in me but in the air surrounding me. But he was friendly. I
remember thinking he was the first person I’d seen smiling since
Anna waved me goodbye that morning, and my face felt a little
unaccustomed to smiling back. I forgot how it showed, worrying all
the time. He said something I didn’t hear. “Sorry, what did you
say?”

“Nothing, doesn’t matter. You were miles away,” he said, still
smiling. I laughed and started to ring up his shopping. “Yes, I
was. Sorry.”

“Good place to be, sometimes. I think so, anyway.” The radio was
on as usual, and I also remember there had just been a commercial
break and a time check. That was how I was sure exactly when it
happened. Two forty-five. He’d bought milk, a can of beans, cheese
and tomatoes and bread, I remember that as well. “You’re not
Polish, are you?” he asked. “Where are you from, then?”

“Me? I’m from miles away,” I said, and rang the till.

“Well, that’s two of us,” he said, and we laughed in the way
people laugh when they want to show something doesn’t matter, but
it does. Then the first sound of it came. It rolled at us like a
shape, a dark colour, a giant boulder. Other sounds were squashed
under it: the radio, the
ting
of the register, my voice
counting out change. I stopped trying to count, and we stood
staring at each other, then I began to feel the noise as well as
hear it; it came from underground and rumbled up through my legs
and into my throat, and rattled the words I was trying to say
against my teeth as if my mouth was full of buttons. The man was
trying to speak too, but his lips just opened and closed.

Then this underground roaring rose and grew into a jagged
crashing and breaking over our heads. Vi came hurrying in from the
house, through the back of the shop and heading straight for the
doors.

“Oh, Jesus!” she was shouting. “Jesus, what is it? Is it a
plane? Jesus, it’s a plane crashed at Inverness!”

We all went outside, our faces raised to the sky.

It wasn’t a plane, but the noise was coming from the direction
of Inverness. Faraway sirens started to wail. A couple of cars
stopped dead on their way up the road, and people got out of them
shouting, and two or three of them ran back, eastwards, towards the
noise. A moment later a car coming down the other side from
Netherloch braked suddenly and swerved in at the side of the road
just past the turn-off and our parking area; two bikes on the roof
shuddered and slipped forwards onto the bonnet. The door swung
open, and the driver stumbled in our direction with his phone at
his ear.

“Oh, my God! The bridge? The bridge, fuck! It’s going down, the
bridge is going down!” His voice was squealing and jerky. “Oh, my
God! Are you OK, are you OK? Yes, yes all right. Oh, my God! You
stay there. You stay where you are. Don’t move, OK? Oh, my God!” He
ended the call and for a moment stood rooted, staring at the phone
and pulling his hair. More cars were stopping, more people were
swarming on the road. He came towards us, waving his arms. “The
bridge! Hey, it’s the bridge! Something’s happened to the bridge!
It’s going down!”

His voice pulled other people in a circle around him. “It’s the
bridge! She saw it! My wife, she saw it! She’s in her office,
they’re on the twelfth floor, riverside, they all saw it! It’s gone
down, the bridge is down, they can’t leave the building. It could
be a bomb!”

From here there was nothing to see but the road and the forest
that grew right to its edges. From Vi’s place you had to cross the
road and climb in through the pines and go right up to the head of
the waterfall to get a sight of the other side, the town and the
falls tumbling down and the river stretching away from the east
corner of the loch, and on towards the bridge and beyond, Inverness
docks and the ocean. There was a moment of disappointment while we
all stood listening. The noises around us were changing. The roar
lessened to a low rumble under the screams of more sirens. Everyone
had turned in the direction of the city. Then a man in a checked
shirt tugged at his wife’s arm. “Come on! Come on, then!” he said,
and ran towards the trees. His wife glanced at us, then followed
him.

It was all the rest of them needed. The excitement returned. Of
course they had to see for themselves. Suddenly it was all right to
run after a glimpse of it. People headed for the trees. Cars were
still pulling up and stopping, and soon there were ten or twelve
banked up in both directions. Some drivers wanted to move on but
the road was too narrow for them to get around the cars blocking
them. They leaned on their horns and got out and stood with their
hands on their hips or went striding up to the vehicles in front.
Other people fished around in their cars for boots and cameras and
followed the others making for the trees. One couple quickly
unhitched their bikes from the back of their car and set off down
the road, weaving through the line of stopped traffic. Even though
she had no coat, Vi pitched forwards and joined the flow of people
disappearing into the woods. She turned back once and shouted
something at me, but I didn’t hear what. Probably something about
minding the store, which she knew I would do anyway. When I looked
round, the man had gone, too. He had left his bag of food on the
bench outside.

In the space of the next minute, everyone vanished. I sat down
on the damp bench and tried to call you, but I couldn’t get
through. Two miles farther up the river and on the south side, you
were much nearer to what was happening than I was. I wanted to know
that Anna wasn’t scared.

I couldn’t always predict what Anna would understand, what would
frighten or delight her. Sometimes she would stare at me for a
long, long time and sometimes she looked away into such a far-off,
sad place in her mind that I could believe she saw every sorrow
there has been and is yet to come in this world. At other times,
she was brave and bold. Do you remember one time when she was
crawling, last summer, and you and I both thought the other one was
watching her? It was only for a moment, but she set off on her
hands and knees across those sharp stones towards the river, and
I’ll never be sure she wouldn’t have kept on until the water was
over her head if you hadn’t yelled and dashed down and scooped her
away from the edge. You lifted her up high to show me she was fine,
and she was laughing and kicking, her legs were dripping. She
laughed as if it was funny I might think she was anything other
than immortal. She was laughing at me for being afraid she’d do
anything as stupid as get herself drowned.

I tried you again, but still I couldn’t get through. Then I felt
guilty, remembering that phone signals get overloaded at such times
with callers trying to find people they fear are caught up in the
danger. There would be hundreds of people frantic for news, not
just a little anxious, as I was, that a child might have seen
something frightening from a distance. I thought of you coming down
the trailer steps and hurrying to the water’s edge with Anna in
your arms. You wouldn’t be able
not
to watch the bridge, but
you’d make sure she wasn’t scared. You’d hold her tight, shield her
eyes, comfort her. She might not even know what it meant, it might
be simply exciting to her, a spectacle. She might be clapping her
hands. I flicked through the photos I kept on my phone of the two
of you. Shivering on the bench and with the sirens wailing far away
but all around me, I sat smiling and looking at pictures.

After another while the sirens faded, as if all the panic were
somehow being placed at a distance. The cars on the road were
empty. I decided I would go in and make some tea and see if I could
fiddle with the radio dial and get the news. I picked up the man’s
bag of groceries and took it inside to keep safe for him in case he
came back.

Soon afterwards Vi returned. She was sober now, and
scorched-looking, as if what she’d seen had radiated a kind of
blast that had burnt off the drink in her. Her sandy, dry hair had
frizzed up in corkscrews, and her eyes were small and hot under her
stiff eyebrows. She’d been up to the top of the falls, she told me,
high enough to see down the estuary to the ruined bridge.

“There’s a whole bit gone right out of the middle,” she said,
talking fast, bringing her hands together and opening them wide
again. “Disappeared. Torn right away and in the river. And there’s
loads of cars went with it, they don’t know how many. Cars with
folk still in them.”

I had never heard her talk so much. Disaster had made her
lively. The river was choked with wreckage: girders, concrete,
tarmac. She had seen the roofs of cars and an upended truck in the
water. She hadn’t seen any corpses, but people were dead, people
were missing. The roads on both sides were closed. Up at the falls
the man in the checked shirt had been getting news and police
reports on his phone, and he’d told her that on this side of the
river the police would be stopping all the traffic coming down from
the north to Inverness and diverting it past the broken bridge.
Everyone would have to come all the way along here on our little
road, seven miles inland, and cross the river by the little stone
bridge at Netherloch. Then from Netherloch the traffic would have
to travel the seven miles back again, right down the riverbank on
the other side to the end of the estuary at Inverness.

“Oh, think of the people,” I said. I realized I was crying.
“Those poor people.”

“It’ll be pandemonium,” Vi said. “Pandemonium. Detours from here
to Inverness, it’ll add hours, you wait and see.” Her voice was
greedy. She was thinking of all those cars crawling past outside,
all those drivers, bored and hungry and thirsty. She was trying not
to look pleased.

“I mean the people in the water,” I said. “The drowned
people.”

“Aye, right enough, but now what? That wee bridge at
Netherloch’ll never cope, it couldn’t even take two wee vans going
past each other, never mind thay great big trucks.”