Across the Bridge (12 page)

I straightened the bed so it looked untouched, emptied the
kettle and switched off the television. I deleted all my text
messages and voicemails and turned my phone off. I put it in the
bag I had left the hotel with that morning and walked from the
room. I slipped downstairs. Everyone was in the bar or the
restaurant. I let myself out of the door into the garden and made
my way towards the road.

I walked away, not just from Col but from my failure to become a
wife he wanted to keep. I walked away from having to justify
wanting my baby. And for my baby’s sake as well as mine, I walked
away from the humiliation of counting out money to its father as if
this or that sum were an opening offer in a haggle for its life. I
wasn’t just walking away; I was also bearing my baby, hidden in the
warm, fleshy pod of my body, to safety. I was saving both our
lives, and we were together.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

N
early a mile out
from the collapsed bridge, men in fluorescent jackets milled around
the ROAD CLOSED signs, directing cars back to the bridge at
Netherloch. Ron moved quietly into the stricken, displaced little
bands of people roaming around on the verges and among the trees,
like mourners or refugees. A bright moon in a silky, deep-violet
sky shone above the road, but in the distance arc lights lit the
river ominously, as if illuminating a stage for more spectacle and
greater violence; the limbs of the bridge, jagged and black against
flashing orange and blue emergency lights, jutted out above the
water. Helicopters roamed overhead, sending down vapoury cones of
light, hovering low enough for gusts of air from the propellers to
blow trembling circles of flecks across the impenetrable,
mercury-dark river.

The drift of people carried Ron along into a denser crowd at the
forest’s edge, where spectators stood facing a television crew, and
a spotlight under which a journalist was shouting into a
microphone. An exhausted-looking man in a safety helmet was led
forwards to be interviewed. The crowd began solemnly to applaud
him, and as he started to speak, Ron stepped away from the throng
and slipped under the barrier tape. Expecting to be stopped at any
moment, he passed quickly into the pines that covered the sloping
land between the river and the road. So close to the forest edge,
there was no path; keeping within the darkness of the trees, he
scrambled down through a prickly mesh of branches until he was
almost at the water.

When he emerged from the trees he saw that crowd barriers now
separated the forest from the site of the collapse. He could have
climbed them quite easily, but he remained outside, watching. There
seemed surprisingly few people at work on the riverbank; about a
dozen who looked like paramedics and rescue workers came and went
around a tent that had been set up, as far as Ron could tell, as a
first-aid station for casualties; he saw two men carry a stretcher
from the tent and up the uneven bank towards a helicopter standing
on the last strip of the bridge approach road. Ron had learnt first
aid when he became a driver, but he did not dare go forwards and
present himself. He would be ejected at once as
unauthorized
. There was no place here for simple willing
hands; this was not a neighbourly effort. The operation was
professional and, for all he knew, efficient. He drew farther back
into the trees. Once he was more familiar with what was going on,
once it was daylight again, he would find the courage to ask if he
could help.

As the night wore on, the rescue settled into a regular rhythm,
determined and unspectacular. Under the arc lights, boats and
helicopters made their forays to the river in droning, dogged
circles. Ron hunkered against a damp tree trunk and grew drowsy. He
dozed until the cold woke him. Then he got up and moved back
farther into the trees, where the wind did not cut so keenly. He
didn’t want to spend the night in the open, but he was reluctant to
walk all the way back to the Land Rover; without knowing where he
was going, he slipped deeper still into the forest’s shelter. He
was afraid of losing his way, and remembering that the road above
him followed its path, he kept the river always in sight on his
left, shining through the fringe of pine branches. He was still
cold. After a while he came upon an area where trees had been
felled, but not recently; years of hard weather on the rutted
ground had left it almost impassable with dank troughs and exposed,
torn-up roots. From here the bank rose steeply to his right; there
was no clear path up to the road. So he made his way instead down
to the gleaming river, and when he reached it he saw he must be
almost a mile from the bridge. The sharp arc lights had softened to
a glow in the night sky. That was when, almost at the water’s edge,
he came across the derelict prefabricated cabin. The door on the
river side was padlocked, but at the back he found a small, warped
door, locked and jammed tight with damp. It was soft with rot and
sagged against his shoulder when he pushed at it. After several
heaves, the lower of its two hinges split from the frame, and he
was able to squeeze through. The place was unfurnished and
comfortless, cold and dirty, but it was a roof for the night and
out of the wind. By the moonlight through the smeared windows he
saw there was a stove and some fuel, but he had no matches. He
curled up on the floor and lay listening to the sounds from the
bridge; the motors and sirens had faded to remote purrs and squeals
that mingled with the river flowing softly by outside. Yet the
fright and injury of the day reached into him – or maybe he had
brought it with him – and suddenly his heart, a berg of ice, seemed
to shatter and burn within his chest. He began to shiver violently,
and he curled tighter, trying to tell himself this was physical
stress, nothing more. A fragment of his first-aid training came
back to him:
When people experience trauma, one of the first
things to go is the ability to fend for themselves
. It calmed
him to realize that he
was
fending for himself, to a degree;
at least he had found shelter. But why, he thought, was he steeling
himself at all against the disintegration of his heart? Let it
burn, let it melt. Let it even break again, if only he might no
longer be alone.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

I
t was cold, so I
hurried. In Invermuir village the main road was jammed with traffic
bound for Netherloch and Inverness, but the other side, heading
west to Fort Augustus, was choked, too. I don’t know why I set off
in the direction of the bridge, but I walked eastwards along the
roadside into the night, at a pace hardly slower than the crawling
line of cars. There were emergency vehicles stationed here and
there with their lights flashing and policemen standing in the
middle of the traffic, attempting to keep it moving. Drivers were
sounding their horns and turning around, manoeuvring back and forth
in the road and sending up plumes of exhaust, headlamps looming and
criss-crossing the darkness with restless beams of light.

I kept away from the glare as much as I could and moved on
through the smoky drifts of petrol fumes, my head down. Knots of
stranded people had gathered at the village bus stops and cars were
stopping to give them lifts, but I couldn’t risk joining them,
looking lost and in need of help. I had watched my car go into the
river, I had seen myself die; I ought to be gone, invisible for
evermore. Until I had had time to think and re-establish myself,
somewhere and somehow, as another person, I had to learn how to
have no presence at all, to move among people with the stealth of a
ghost. I must be alive to no one.

Soon I no longer noticed the cold. I felt newly light and
unhindered, exhilarated by having accomplished so conclusively and
tidily the bringing to an end of my life with Col. But I also felt
left behind, as if my true fate had gone forwards and was enacting
itself in advance of me, somewhere up ahead. I had to rejoin my
life, or rather meet up with myself again and make another life.
This was another reason to hurry.

I took a pathway off the road that led down to a walkers’ trail
along the river, where it was leafy and quiet. I had no torch, but
the road ran parallel above and the lights of cars washed through
the trees, showing me my way. From time to time the traffic thinned
and the way cleared for wailing emergency vehicles. A few miles
before Netherloch the riverside path fizzled out, so I joined the
road again.

I walked on, still not knowing why I was going in the direction
of the bridge, but walking with purpose. Was I seeking out the
broken gate in the hedge that led down to Stefan’s trailer? Not
consciously. I was keeping disconnected in my mind any daytime
memory of the road and the murky, illogical contours of the night
landscape.

But it was getting late. More and more cars drove on past me,
and I grew tired. Netherloch was still some miles away, and I had
to spend the night somewhere. I pulled my hat down over my ears,
tucked my chin into my scarf and waited at the next bus stop I came
to. Within a minute a car stopped. It was driven by a woman about
my age who had two teenage girls with her. They were doing their
best to get to Inverness, and I was welcome, she said, to go with
them. I was looking a bit shocked, was I all right? And wasn’t it a
terrible thing that had happened?

I thanked her and got in the back. I was just cold and tired, I
assured her, and gave her some story about my car breaking down and
leaving it at the roadside because I preferred to walk rather than
wait for rescue with the roads so jammed, but I’d underestimated
the distance to Netherloch. She told me I had no chance of getting
a room there for the night, the radio said the town was heaving.
I’d do better to go on to Inverness with her, however long it took.
We crawled along; the two girls fell asleep, and to avoid
conversation I pretended to also, turning my face to the window and
keeping my eyes half-closed.

It was only when I saw the lights of the service station up
ahead that I realized I was returning to the trailer. All the hours
I had been walking, I had been holding tight to myself a belief
that Stefan and Anna were among the people who’d got out of the
river alive. But I had to make sure they were safe. I had to talk
to Stefan. He had lost the car that had cost him all the money he
had, and I couldn’t alter that, but I had to divide the money with
him. I would explain why I couldn’t part with all of it; as a
father, he would understand. But I wanted to give him half of it
back, to ease his loss. I made excuses to the woman about needing a
bathroom, and got out at the service station.

I walked back to the broken gate and down the track. The trailer
was dark and shut up. There was nothing strange about that, I told
myself. They might not be back yet; they could be still in one of
the temporary first-aid stations near the bridge. Or they might be
in hospital, as a matter of routine. Of course they wouldn’t be
here. I felt foolish, staring through the dark across the shingle
at the closed door. I imagined it opening and Stefan appearing at
the top of the steps, looking suspicious and puzzled until he
recognized me, and then I realized what an odd sort of rescuer I
must look. Sweat was running down my body and through my hair, and
I was shivering. Nausea swept over me again, as it often did when I
was hungry. But my hand thrust in my pocket was clutching the
envelope with the money; pleasure was welling up inside me as if I
had already seen the relief on Stefan’s face. Of course there
couldn’t be anyone inside the trailer, but I walked carefully
across the stones, up the steps and knocked on the door.

Nobody came. I waited, and the nausea grew worse. I tried the
door handle. It opened into blackness and silence, and I was
afraid, yet I wanted to go in. The night outside was suddenly no
place to be; I needed walls and a roof, I needed shelter even if
only this: precarious, thin, leaking. I stepped up into the doorway
and peered inside. I could smell the soapy, vinyl smell from
yesterday and also the bitter tang of cigarettes. Nothing moved,
but in the darkness I knew there was something warm and alive. My
heart was thumping like knuckles into the back of my ribs, bone
against bone, and I took a breath to say something but I doubled
over and retched. My mouth filled with bitter saliva. Without
intending to, I spat on the floor, and as I was trying to stand up
straight again, a torch snapped on. Instantly its beam lurched away
and upwards, and I felt it come down hard on my head and shoulders,
and then a hand was hauling me upright by the hair. A woman’s
screaming filled the trailer, the torch fell with a clunk, and its
beam played jaggedly on her kicking feet and jerked over the
ceiling and walls. I was trapped. I couldn’t get out of the trailer
or away from the screaming. Then the slapping and punching
started.

I couldn’t speak. Even if I could have explained, or got any
words out at all, she wouldn’t have heard. Fists and arms and feet
were flying in a rolling beam of light, and through the screams she
was spitting out words over and over, telling me to get out, go
away, leave her alone. I held her off as best as I could until,
shielding my head, I managed at last to stand up straight and face
her. I was taller than she was. I stopped her next blow by grasping
her wrists.

“Stop! Please stop! I didn’t mean any harm,” I said. “I’m sorry.
It’s OK. Please! Please – ”

My voice cracked suddenly. The woman stopped screaming and
stared at me, and then she burst into tears. I wanted to say more
but I couldn’t. Keeping hold of one of her wrists, I scooped up the
torch at my feet and shone it at her. In the shaking light, her
face was colourless and stricken, the long blond hair sticky and
matted to her scalp.