Across the Bridge (13 page)

How could I comfort her? How could I dare offer comfort?

“Please, don’t. Please. I’m sorry,” I said.

We were stock-still for an instant. My grip on her wrist
loosened. Suddenly she wrenched her arm free and backed away. The
foldaway table and pull-out bed behind her, the blankets dragged to
the floor, a heap of clothes, were now caught in the glow of the
torch. She was alone. Part of the ceiling had curled away, exposing
a web of saturated fibrous stuff from which water was seeping into
a bucket on the floor.

“You tramp! You filthy tramp! Get out of here, get out now! Get
out!”

She lunged forwards, shoving me towards the door so hard I
stumbled and fell. Then she sank back into the dark mass of bedding
and hid her face in another burst of weeping. I scrambled to my
feet and ran from the trailer.

I climbed as fast as I could up the track, and when I reached
the top I collapsed on the ground, coughing and fighting for
breath. After a while I managed to sit up, and I stayed there,
trying to drag in a proper lungful of air and stop the shaking in
my legs. I was exhausted and sick from lack of food. I had nowhere
to spend the night. I had no name. Which terror should I face
first: being hungry, pregnant, homeless, or nameless?

But the worst terror was that Stefan and his daughter hadn’t
come back. They hadn’t come back, and the woman in the trailer
didn’t know why, and I had not been able to tell her. I had sold
him the car and now I had money to keep my child, but where was
hers? I turned towards the lights of the service station.

It was thronged with people, but hunger forced me inside. I had
to hope that although my face might appear in the papers and on
television as one of the dead, it would be an old wedding
photograph, the only pictures Col had of me. My hair had been
curled and adorned with ludicrous turquoise feathers on the day I
got married; now it was shorter and darker, and most of it was
hidden under a flat woollen hat. Nobody would link a smiling
photograph with this wretched woman, her face stung with cold,
shuffling along in a cafeteria queue. I bought what was available,
coffee and a muffin, and took them over to a table, which I had to
share. There was a television suspended from the ceiling tuned
soundlessly to the bridge news, and I ate and drank with my eyes
raised to it, avoiding contact with the three other people at the
table. I kept my cup up close to my face and let the coffee steam
rise and warm my skin in between sips.

By now the service station should have closed for the night, but
it was staying open for the people who were stranded. Extra plastic
chairs had appeared, and people were bedding down on car blankets
and jackets and coats all over the floor. Some appeared to be
sleeping, others were talking and drinking doggedly, doing puzzles
or playing cards, trying to control children. From the games arcade
came ceaseless zooming and firing sounds and the unfettered, giddy
yelps of teenage boys. A woman dozed in a wheelchair near the door
to the Ladies, half hidden by the fronds of a huge artificial fern.
Every table in the cafeteria was full, although the serving counter
was down to tea and coffee in polystyrene cups. In the shop, people
were buying up the last of the chocolate and sweets and magazines,
but the queues had lessened because there was nothing of much use
left; untouched stands of Frisbees and celebrity autobiographies
stood out among the emptied shelves and racks. Although the place
was thronged, there was a pall of numb, anxious quiet that perhaps
hangs over all refugees.

I was wondering what to do, hoping I might find a space on the
floor somewhere away from others and out of the freezing gusts from
the doors, when four police officers came in, two men and two
women. They didn’t seem to have any particular task in mind; there
was no disorder to bring under control. The manager and a younger
sidekick joined them, and after a few minutes of talk, swinging on
their heels and looking around, they drifted off, patrolling the
mass of sprawling bodies. Several people went up to talk to them,
with questions or complaints, I supposed. I watched all this from
behind a bookrack in the shop. When it began to look as if the
police were settled in for the night, I knew I couldn’t stay.

Outside, the temperature had dropped further. I needed to find
shelter somewhere. I made my way around the back and followed the
fence into the darkness at the far corner of the car park, where I
found again the opening to the abandoned track I’d driven down with
Stefan and Anna twelve hours before. Only twelve hours? It seemed –
in a way it was – a lifetime ago. Ahead of me I could see the
flames of several small fires burning among the wrecked buildings
on the wasteland; to my right I could see the glow of arc lights
over the bridge abutments and the flicker of helicopters in the
sky. I walked past the first straggly piles of debris at the sides
of the track towards the fires, on through broken glass and old
cans, mounds of rubble and discarded tyres, piles of ripped roofing
felt, wiring and perished cable. Parts of wrecked cars rose in
heaps around me; broken office furniture and rotten carpet jutted
up from buckled and vandalized skips. I was far enough from the
traffic and the service station to catch the cold tang of the
estuary, mixed with the smell of damp fields and rust and a sullen
overlay of smoke. I reached the corner of a derelict brick shed and
edged my way along the wall to the next corner until I could see a
barren stretch of cracked concrete that must once have been the
floor of a factory or warehouse. At its far edges I could make out
the jagged remains of half-demolished walls. There burned several
bonfires in whose cloudy yellow light the stooping silhouettes of
people moved to and fro, passing bottles, lifting sticks into the
flames, collecting from the ground anything that might make
shelters for the night. Beyond them the black estuary glittered
with the sweeping lights of the helicopters, the air thudded and
shrieked with propeller noise and sirens. Under the gleaming sky
there was a great, desperate agitation, but here the faraway wails
were an unreal music, part of the rushing-by of a world miles from
this encampment among the scrub and banks of litter, where human
beings hunkered down to get through the night, staring into dying
fires.

I crouched down and watched. About a dozen people squatted or
lay in aloof, solitary hovels of cardboard and rags, arranged in a
haphazard outer ring as close to the warmth and light as they could
get, but several feet from one another and a safe distance from the
elite little groupings of twos and threes nearest the fires. Among
these, proprietorial squalls would break out over a swig from a
bottle, a cigarette, a package of food. From time to time the air
fell silent as if everyone had fallen asleep or retired to his own
thoughts, and then there would be cries and scuffles again,
sometimes the sound of breaking glass or a hallucinatory insult or
misunderstanding, for sly demons came and went among these people.
To some of them, the smoky sky was alive with spectres that could
enter through the space between blinks of their eyes and whisper
tormenting messages inside their skulls, goading them into
outbreaks of itching or howling or whimpering fear. One man sat
upright, staring round with crazed vigilance, batting away phantom
attackers with his empty bottle.

I got up carefully and foraged at the margins of the firelight.
No one turned from the flames to look at me. I found some plastic
and cardboard in a heap against a ruined wall, and I dragged an
armful across the concrete and set it down where I could feel a
little warmth but would not be presumptuously close to the fire.
The dark mounds around me shifted from time to time through the
smoke, coughing, rearranging their coverings. I saw the smooth
lifting of the burning dots of cigarettes, the red flares as they
were inhaled. Nobody spoke. I went back, found some frayed sheets
of bubble wrap, brought them to my place on the ground. I arranged
a kind of sleeve of cardboard, and pulled the bubble wrap around
myself. There I lay, my hand clasping the money in my pocket, my
body wrapped as china is against the breakages that occur in
transit through this world. I fell asleep. I dreamed of a man who
was taking me in the silver car on a hazardous journey. We drove
through puddles that turned into lakes, we splashed miraculously
out of them again and lost the road under a blizzard of snow, but
on we went, because our destination was a place where I was to give
a performance of some kind in front of a lot of people. I allowed
myself to be taken, keeping silent about the only thing I was sure
of, which was that I had nothing to give the audience, nothing to
merit their attention or applause. I walked to the centre of the
stage and waited for their disappointment. Then I was standing
under a tree and I had no excuse for my reticence to offer all the
reproachful people walking by, save the one I spoke as they went
past. I can’t give you anything, because I am going to have a baby,
I said, and although they kept on walking, they knew this was the
truth and they forgave me.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

Y
ou weren’t at the
trailer when I got there, but I knew you were coming back. You were
stranded somewhere, like everyone else that night, and you must
have lost your phone. You took perfect care of Anna, always. I knew
you were coming back.

First I told myself you had taken her out for a bus ride
somewhere and got stuck in the traffic. When it got past nine
o’clock that evening I knew you would be trudging towards me along
the road, cold and tired, with her asleep against your back, her
hair tickling your neck. I didn’t like to leave the trailer, but I
climbed up the track to meet you, going quietly so I would hear the
scrape of your feet or the rattle of the gate, your voice calling
from up ahead that you were home at last. I didn’t go as far as the
road, just to where I could hear the cars and see their headlights
splitting the dark. I stayed back in the trees and waited and
waited.

The traffic was moving almost as slowly as before. It was four
hours since I’d walked from the shop down to Netherloch and got a
lift with an elderly couple trying to get back to Inverness. They’d
been to see his sister in a nursing home in Fort Augustus. The man
had said nothing and the woman had tried to be nice, but I
pretended I couldn’t speak English because I couldn’t have told her
much that was true about me and I didn’t want to lie. They weren’t
big talkers anyway. In two and a half hours we travelled six miles
in silence except for the radio news and their soft remarks of
despair, about the tragedy and the inconvenience, equally. I got
out at the service station and walked back so they wouldn’t see me
set off down the track. It didn’t look like a suitable place for
people to live.

I waited for you at the gate until I was so cold I either had to
lie down where I was and burrow under leaves like an animal, or go
back, and when I turned away and thought of the empty trailer I
began to cry, and I couldn’t stop. When I got back I threw myself
onto the bed and lay sobbing, and after a while I lit a candle, as
if it could make me feel less alone, and in a strange way it did. I
think that’s why we light candles when we think of the people we
really have lost, supposedly to God; we need to fill the emptiness
of churches and the space their absence makes with small flames. By
then I was warm again, and I managed to fall asleep. It must have
been hours later I heard noises outside, feet on the stones and
then on the trailer steps. I was up and nearly crying out for joy
before I realized there was something wrong about it. If it had
been you, you would have been calling to me long before you got to
the trailer. For a moment I wondered if it was a deer. Then there
was a knock on the door. My throat went dry. I tried to speak, but
my voice wouldn’t work. Then the door opened. Everything it is
possible to feel at once – rage that it was some dirty, crazy
stranger and not you and Anna, terror that this person could just
knock and walk in like that, relief that it was a woman and not a
gang of men with knives – everything surged into hatred, and I
attacked her.

I remember thinking in the seconds after I’d scared her off that
she hadn’t really threatened me at all. She was pathetic, not
dangerous. She must have wanted something, because she left behind
an achy feeling about herself, some powerlessness. I felt almost
guilty. I never saw her face clearly, but if I had seen her eyes I
think they would have been saturated with want. But I thought these
things only after enough time had passed for me to be sure she
wasn’t coming back.

I felt calmer, even though I was weary and confused. It was
nearly two o’clock in the morning and I was wide awake.

I found the number of the hospital in Inverness and called it
again and again. When I got through I was given another number for
enquiries about the bridge victims. I kept calling that number
until finally somebody answered. I asked, quite calmly, because it
was of course foolish to worry, if any buses had been on the
bridge. No, the man said. Or, I asked, were there people killed or
injured who had been crossing the bridge on foot? He asked for
names, and although I was taking a risk I gave them your real ones,
vowing to myself that I would never, ever tell you I did this. I
had to wait a long time. Then he came back and said they did not
have those names on any lists. I could hardly speak, I was crying
so hard. But then, I thought, how stupid of me. Of course you would
have given false names. So I asked was there any man of about
twenty-five with a little girl – any man and child at all – injured
or, I whispered, lost? He told me that three adult cyclists were in
hospital and two had been killed, and all the other casualties had
been in vehicles. So far. There were cars still unrecovered, he
told me gently, and I should call back in the morning.