Despite the Angels (28 page)

“What is it?” Lewis’s voice was barely a whisper “What has happened?”

“Gone” The young woman’s voice rang out, startling the stillness.

“Gone? What is gone?”

“Our brother. On the train.” She started to cry again.

“The bridge.” The other woman put her arm around her sister and led her away.

Lewis put a hand to the rail and gripped it. His heart fluttered weakly, his bowels seemed turned to water and his legs sagged.

“When?” he whispered, but no one replied. He forced himself upright and walked down the steps to the stationmaster’s office. There was a crowd around the door, shouting and weeping, demanding explanations. Lewis listened. It seemed the train had crossed the bridge last night and had fallen into the Tay before they had all been told to go home.

“You lied to us!” a voice in the crowd shouted.

“There was nothing any of us could do on such a night, Madam. I thought it better to let you have your rest.” The stationmaster was dignified and sombre. Lewis turned away. He slowly pushed his way back up the stairs, heard himself saying “gone” to the new arrivals who were asking for news. He walked across to the edge of the river and looked upstream to the bridge. The central section was not there, the ends of the rails stuck out, twisted. He walked towards it automatically, not thinking at all, his mind crying out ‘Dorothy! Dorothy!’
Trynor walked beside him, holding his energies around Lewis, as though to protect him from the wind. He talked, but knew that he would not be heard. Eventually he called out,

“Roki!”

“Yes?” Roki was there, dancing around mischievously as usual.

“We need your help. He needs a friend who is in a body. He is too shocked to hear me, and later he will be too sunk in grief. Get Neil, will you?”

“Down to the river? He is on his way to work. He knows nothing of this. What has happened, anyway?”

Trynor explained. Roki mocked- “and they let them get on, when it was not in the plan? Rather a habit of messing up, haven’t you? Well, let me see what I can do…”

“If you get Neil to come to the flat at the dinner hour, I’ll try to get Lewis back there. Please, he needs someone to talk to.”

Lewis reached the end of the bridge, where the tracks turned to run along the shore and found he was joining a small crowd of people jostling for news, information, answers. He stood with them and listened, but his mind shut away the dread and he said to himself ‘no, they were not on the train. It was not crossing the bridge, so they went home. They are still at home with Mrs Milne. They will come across later on the ferry. I will have to go and meet it. I had better buy some food to have for their dinner.’ He straightened up and strode back to the town, full of resolve and plans for a hot meal. Dorothy so loved hot food, despite being so cautious about making it herself. It was always the way to give her a treat and himself too, to have something interesting to eat. He remembered when they had no money at all, before he got the job, Dorothy had experimented with different quantities of salt in the porridge, to ‘ring the changes’ as she said, to make their food more varied. So I will buy something special, to welcome her home after giving me such a fright.

“What kept you from work? The foreman is not pleased with you!” Neil was in the doorway, stamping his feet and rubbing his hands together. . “Are you coming for the afternoon shift?”

“No.”

“Just ‘no’? Are you sick? Or rich all of a sudden?”

“Did you not hear? Are they not all talking?”

“Hear what? I have no time to listen to gossip and tittle-tattle.”

“It is not gossip. For some people it is the end of the world.” Lewis let his head fall forward again, and his hands twisted together.

“The end of the world? I did not hear the last trump, did you? Come on man, what can be that bad?”

“The rail bridge collapsed. The train fell into the firth.”

“Oh, that! Amazing that a great bridge like that could just collapse. I wonder why?”

“How do I know? It makes no difference how. I only know the train is at the bottom of the Firth, but I must go and meet Dorothy off the ferry. She was staying with her mother.”

“You never said Dorothy was away. Why are you bothered about the bridge if they went by ferry? What time are they due back?”

“They went on the train.” Lewis began to tremble. “But they must be coming back on a ferry. They cannot be at the bottom of the sea. They cannot.”

“Did Dorothy have a return ticket?” Neil’s face was pale and his eyes were round.

“No!” Lewis jumped up, smiling and rushed to the window to look out. “No, for some reason she only bought a single. Waste of money, I thought, but she had some reason. So it is all right. Come on, come with me down to the ferry.”

“If they are safe you have no excuse to miss work and nor have I. I will walk part of the way with you, but it is in the wrong direction. You will have me late.”

“You can explain, you have a way with words.”

Lewis waited at the ferry’s landing place for most of the day, but no one he knew got off the ferries, until just as the short day was drawing to a close, the very last boat of the day pulled in to the shore and Lewis, sitting despondently on a bollard, saw at last the comfortable figure of his mother-in-law. She was first onto land and walked slowly towards him, her stout figure looking too heavy for her. She had never looked heavy before.

“Lewis, pet!” She put her arms around him. As he returned her embrace he could just see, in the dim light, the tracks of tears on her face. He took a deep breath.

“Were they on the train?”

“Yes,” her voice was gentle and sad. Lewis slumped down onto the bollard again. “I went up onto the bridge to watch the train leave and she was on it in Cupar, so unless she got out somewhere, she was on that train. I’m sorry to have to tell you so.”

“Oh, Mrs Milne! My Dorothy, my Dawn!”

“Yes. Our beautiful girls.” She lifted Lewis’s arm. “Come, on, let’s go home. We can talk as we go.”  But they walked in silence for most of the way, as the tears spilled out of Lewis’s eyes and poured unchecked onto his collar. They got into the little room and Rose stirred the fire into life and put on a kettle to boil. They sat and looked at each other. 

“How were they, when you saw them last? What did the doctor say?” For several minutes Lewis listened intently as Rose described their visit and all the now irrelevant, but so interesting details of the doctor’s opinion.

“So there was nothing wrong. They need not have gone. And they would be here now.”

“No.... They could have stayed longer with me. They nearly did, you know.” Rose explained how Dawn had cried and they had considered taking her home.

“So Dawn knew.”

“Yes!!”

“No. How could she? She was just upset by the noise.”

“Poor little mite. She did not want to be there, one way or other.”

Footsteps thudded up the stairs, the door burst open and Neil came in, his cheeks red and his eyes shining from the cold and exertion. He looked quickly around the room, leaning over to see into the tiny bedroom beyond and then his eyes settled on Rose and the stuffing went out of him.

“Mrs. Milne? What…” He broke off.

“They were on the train, Neil. Mrs Milne saw them leave, saw the train leave with my girls in it.”

“Oh.” Neil was silent and stood turning his cap through his hands.

“Go on, say something sympathetic. ‘Oh’ is a bit feeble.”

“I ah, uh, I, I mean, oh dear.” Neil’s cap was now a small twist of cloth in his white knuckled hands.

“Brilliant! What happened your ‘way with words’? Easy to see you were never an orator,” Roki was grinning.

“Come in properly, Neil, stay awhile,” Rose was indicating the stool under the table. Neil pulled it over to the fire and sat down. His eyes flitted uneasily between Lewis and Mrs Milne.

“Keep quiet. Listen. Maybe you will be useful just by being here.”

They sat in silence for a long while, watching the fire, the slow steady burn of the coal and the spit and hiss of the wood Lewis had thrown on. Lewis looked up at the noise and gazed sadly at the half finished carving on the table.

“She will never play with it. It was for her birthday. She will not have a birthday, not even one. The best Noah’s Ark in Dundee, it was going to be. Wasted.”

“It will not be wasted, Lewis. You can keep going and in time you will meet another woman and have another daughter. I will like to meet them,” Rose’s voice began to shake, “to fill the gap.” She fell silent, her hands busily dealing with her nose and eyes.

“No. That was my family. My only family. Gone. How could I replace them?” There was a long pause.

“They must have been so frightened, to be suddenly falling into the sea. And the sea so cold, and dark. Trapped in the carriage, maybe, struggling to escape. The water rising.” His voice rose to a tremulous shriek and he started to shiver violently. Neil put out a doubtful hand and patted Lewis’s shoulder.
Trynor and Roki were talking together, discussing the best way to handle this unexpected disaster.

“I’m worried, Roki. He might get through this, but he has to get through his life now. We have no plan for it. What will I do?”

“What can you do? Just stay with him. I’ll encourage Neil to be his friend, if I can. Pity Neil’s not a woman this time, it could have been their chance to marry.”

“Just as well he’s not. That would have been an extra complication. A friend will be enough, but can you stop him trying to be funny? That is too exhausting.”

“I can try. But that is his nature. Listen!”

“Come on, Lewis. You will feel better soon. After all, did I not hear you complain that the baby cried all night and you wished she would stop? You can sleep well now!”

“I will never sleep again.”

“No, you will. Once the funeral is over, you will feel better.”

“There can be no funeral. There is no body.”

“Oh.”

“We have to wait until they are found. Oh, I hope they will be found.”

They sat in silence until the clock whirred again. Neil jumped to his feet.

“Oh my goodness, I will have to run, I said I would meet someone.” He was gone, banging the door behind him with his usual exuberance. Lewis and Rose could hear his feet running away and the endless ticking of the clock.

Dorothy found herself on a hillside, looking down over a beautiful valley. It looked like home, but when she looked again, she realised it was not quite the same. There were houses, but they were bigger and in the wrong places. She felt confused and shook her head, trying to remember.

“It was dark, it was late. We were on the train. Why am I here?” her voice rose. “Where is Dawn?”

“She will be here in a moment. I wanted to talk to you first.”

“Jotin!” said Dorothy straight away, then stopped; a puzzled look came over her face. “Why do I know your name? Who are you?”

“You know me. You have forgotten for a moment, because you have come home so suddenly. But I am always with you, always have been with you.”

“Are you God?”

“No.”

“Are you Jesus? You do not look like Him.”

“No, I am not Jesus, though we are often mistaken for him.”

“Who is ‘we’?” Dorothy looked around at the empty landscape.

“Me and the other guides. You humans have one each. Come, you need to rest and learn to remember.” He led her to a waterfall and handed her over to a woman with a soft face, who encouraged Dorothy to sit under the gentle water and sang softly to her.

Mohmi arrived with Dawn, who was dancing around her guide and laughing.

“I did what you said, didn’t I, Mohmi? I yelled. It was hard work, all that yelling. But I heard you, even in that little body and I yelled as hard as I could.”

“Yes, you did. Every time I hope you will always hear me, but when you grow up you always go deaf. It is fun for the first months, but so difficult when you cannot talk their language.”

“Why?”

“Because if you could you would not be back here so soon. You would be in Dundee getting ready for your first Hogmanay.”

“Would I have liked that better than being here?” Dawn danced around Mohmi, waving her arms.

“Maybe not, but you would not have to go back again, like you must now.”

Dawn stopped dancing and sat down at Mohmi’s feet. Her energies stilled and she grew pensive. After a long time, she spoke.

“I remember now. I was the baby again. What went wrong?”

“The train you and your mother were on fell into the sea.”

“Where is my mother?”

“Coming now, see?”  Dorothy was walking towards them and the cleansing waterfall was fading into the surrounding scenery now that it was no longer needed. As Dorothy approached she saw Dawn and broke into a run.