Across the Bridge (21 page)

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

I
was angry. I
suppose she didn’t know what it is to live in a country where you
have no right to be, where you are grateful for an empty shack. She
didn’t understand that you’re always afraid. She didn’t understand
that going unnoticed and surviving without begging counts as
success. People don’t mean to be cruel, not always, but they only
help their own. You never hope – never mind expect – that anyone is
going to help
you
, so you don’t start asking questions and
looking suspicious because someone shows you kindness. If you have
the luck to find it, you take kindness. You take it while you can
and put it down to the way this world works, and if something good
can come along, then something good can also be taken away. You
take the good while you can.

But after Ron left I didn’t say any of that, because I thought
maybe she was that way because of her baby. It makes you cautious,
being pregnant. And she wasn’t suspicious about everything. She
wouldn’t have been here at all if she hadn’t put her trust in me,
another stranger – and I did want her here.

I turned and walked off the jetty. I was angry, and there was
all the stuff still lying outside, the place dirty, so much to do.
I hadn’t thought much about furniture yet, but there was the matter
of cleaning, and a water supply. And what about power? There were
light switches in the place as well as the fridge and the shower,
so they must have had some electricity. Ron looked as if he would
know about water tanks and generators and that kind of thing. You
didn’t, not really, but you always managed to work things out well
enough to get us by. You were always so proud of getting us by. You
must be on your way home now, with Anna asleep on your back, I was
thinking, and meanwhile I had the whole of our new house to fix up.
Already I thought of it as our house.

She watched me take the gas burner and cylinder inside, and she
watched while I filled a water container from the river. All the
time I think she was wondering if she believed in it, if it was
worth all the work to get the place ready to stay in. A little
while later she followed me in and stood watching me in the
kitchen. I had set up the gas and was heating the water to scrub
the cupboards before I put plates and dishes away.

“Silva, you don’t need to,” she said. “I mean, we don’t need to
do all this. We don’t have to live here if we don’t want to.”

“What do you mean? It’s a good place.”

“We could rent somewhere.”

“Don’t be stupid. I don’t make enough to pay rent.”

“I’ve got some money.” She pulled out an envelope and showed me
a bundle of money. She looked ashamed of it.

“Where did you get that? You said you had nothing. You said you
didn’t have enough money for one night in a hotel. Did you steal
it?”

“No! I didn’t steal it. It’s mine. I mean, I want…It’s for both
of us. The point is we’ve got it. So we could pay rent.”

“How much?”

“Three thousand.”

It sounded plenty. It was a lot, the amount we had saved and you
had on you, minus whatever you needed to get by until you came
back. But then I thought about it. Around here we would have to pay
expensive holiday rents, even if there wouldn’t be so many tourists
this year because of the bridge. The money would be fine for a
while, but it wouldn’t last long. The summer would come and go.
Soon there would be a time when she couldn’t work, and then what? I
couldn’t go and live in a place I wouldn’t be able to keep. While I
was thinking all this, looking at the money she was holding out,
the notes began to shake in her hands. The sickness was coming over
her again, and she was looking at me, scared, her eyes begging me
to save her while her face and her lips were turning white and
grey. She shoved the money into her jacket and stumbled outside. I
waited for a few moments while she retched, and then I followed
with a cup of water and a biscuit. She was leaning against the
cabin wall sucking in huge, deep breaths. I pulled her over to the
heap of mattresses on the ground and made her sit down. It kept
surprising me how little she knew about taking care of herself.

“It’s a waste of money to pay rent,” I said. “This place is
free.”

She drank down the cup of water. “It’s a wilderness.” She looked
towards the steep bank of pines around the cabin. Beyond the trees
that stood like guards three or four deep at its edge, the forest
rose up into darkness in the shadow of the hill.

“How do we get out of here except by boat?” she said. “How far
is it to the road? I can’t even see a path.”

“There must be a path. People got down here once, didn’t they?
We’ll find a way up through the trees. It’s peaceful here. It’s
safe.”

“But suppose I…what if one of us got ill? Suppose one of us
needed something and we were stuck down here?”

“There would be two of us. And that’s only till Stefan comes.
Everything will be all right when Stefan and…” My voice gave out.
The single word of my daughter’s name was too much to say.

She turned away from me. “Yes, soon you’ll have your husband and
your little girl,” she said. Was she scared I wouldn’t let her stay
after that? But she sounded more sad than scared. Maybe she was
jealous, but she would have her own baby soon.

“Yes. I’ll have Anna back,” I said, and tears rushed into my
eyes. “Anyway, you won’t be ill much longer. It passes.”

She decided to ignore what I was really saying, and lay back on
the mattress.

“This place makes me feel lazy,” she said. “I like the sound of
the river. You can hear it now there’s no traffic on the bridge.”
She sighed. “I’m so tired. I could fall asleep.”

I wasn’t tired at all. “So we should stay here. We shouldn’t
waste that money on rent. If we went somewhere else and I lost my
job, Stefan wouldn’t know where to find me. If I’m not at the
Highland Bounty, he’ll think of here at once. He knows I’d come
here. He knows I love it.”

She didn’t trust what I was saying, but she wouldn’t say so. I
could tell she believed you’d left me and taken my baby away. She
didn’t know you, and what it was like, the three of us
together.

“Anyway, soon you’ll need your money for other things.”

“Well, but I’ll get a job, at some point.”

“You’ll need money for your baby.”

She sat upright. “Why do you say that? Could you tell? How could
you tell?”

“Do you think I’m stupid? Of course I can tell. Where’s the
father?”

She shook her head. “He’s got nothing to do with it. I’m not
with him. I’m going to manage on my own.”

“It’s hard. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“I’ll manage. Plenty of single mothers manage.”

“You don’t know anything. You’re lucky you’ve got me.”

She didn’t argue with that.

“Listen,” I told her. “Tomorrow I have to get back to Vi’s. You
can come with me as far as the road. We’ll find a way up, then
you’ll see. Then you can come back and unpack some of our things.
Sleep. You can have the little room at the front. Get us some
firewood. There’s lots of firewood. You’ll be fine. I’m going to
look after you.”

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

H
e rose at five
o’clock in the morning, was always first up and clattering to the
shower before anyone else, trying to make as little noise as
possible because the men he shared with worked until late at night.
Because of his hours he’d got a place in a mobile sleeper unit on
the site, which he shared with other men who couldn’t get home
between shifts. It was spartan – three narrow beds in cubicles, a
small recreation area and a shower room – but it was an improvement
on sleeping in the Land Rover. Another identical unit was stacked
above his, and alongside stood a third. He saw little of the other
men; they pitied him his early start, but he relished it, the quiet
and space to himself before he would be caught up in the flow of
another day filled with people. Much as he liked being no longer
alone, he found it exhausting.

On the first day he’d been instructed to take the boat across
and bring back the catering staff, but after he’d done that and
made several more crossings for other work crews, they hadn’t known
quite what to do with him. He’d driven up to the Highland Bounty
Mini-Mart to buy stuff the guys in the sleeper unit wanted: tea,
coffee, cereal. Then he’d done a few more boat runs and waited out
the day until it was time to collect Silva. On the second day he’d
been busier. By the third day, his work was acquiring a
pattern.

By half-past five he would start the launch and set off to pick
up the catering crew. Within half an hour they would be back,
unloaded and preparing breakfast in the canteen unit, while he
crossed the river again to bring over the first of the day’s relays
of workers. In the course of the first week, the emergency teams
faded away and were replaced by people recruited for salvage and
urgent repair work. The boat held only twelve people; Ron would be
busy for the next three hours or so, and then he would moor the
boat and get a late breakfast at the canteen. At first he made do
with tea and toast; by the fourth or fifth day Jackson, the
massive, tattooed cook in charge, knew Ron’s schedule and kept some
hot food for him. Ron tried to thank him.

“Plate’s hot, mind,” was all Jackson said, passing it over in
huge hands etched with blue-black thorns and wine-red roses that
entwined all the way up his forearms.

Around nine o’clock each day Ron presented himself at the site
office, and now either the younger man or Mr Sturrock, neither of
whom had mentioned Ron’s paperwork again, would assign him here or
there to fill in for absentees or where an extra man was needed for
unskilled labour. They would also give him a list of river
crossings scheduled for that day; as well as contingents of workers
there were police officers and accident investigators, engineers,
contractors and dozens of officials whose role it was not Ron’s
place to know.

Mid-afternoon, when the crew would be finishing with clearing
after the lunch service and getting ready to return to the jetty
for the trip back to the Inverness side, he would return to the
canteen. That was how he found himself included in the distribution
of the day’s leftovers to the staff; Jackson counted him in, he
supposed, because he knew that the men who stayed on-site overnight
had to microwave their own evening meals.

Small kindnesses such as these and the routine of work and sleep
and waking up in the same place each day put Ron in a more even
mood than he had known for years. He was friendly but remained a
little reserved. He didn’t join in the daily, mainly obscene banter
of the men; he never topped a dirty joke with one of his own. Nor
did he care for the taunting that went on among the work teams, for
almost every man was singled out for something – having red hair,
no hair, being good at darts, unable to whistle – and given a
nickname and a greater or lesser amount of teasing about it. Though
the banter was not at heart malicious and Ron himself escaped it,
probably because he was the boatman and not part of any one team,
it sapped his energy to withstand the relentless camaraderie, even
as a witness. He dreaded being made conspicuous for any reason at
all.

That must be why, he decided, he looked forward all day to the
peaceful company of the two women. He carried pictures of them in
his head, and he thought about them carefully. The older one,
Annabel, was the softer-natured of the two and at times even seemed
the younger. Silva didn’t order them about, exactly, but she was
always first to be clear about domestic matters, and there was an
edge in her way of asserting that things had to be done thus and
not otherwise: how long to boil potatoes, how to get their towels
dry, which wood burned best on the fires she lit to heat water for
washing and where in the forest to find it (about which she was
often wrong). Annabel never tried to assert control, and so neither
did he. Annabel appeared, actually, to welcome Silva’s bossiness,
meeting it always gently, and over the course of an evening Silva’s
abruptness would subside a little and slowly she would become less
brittle.

All around him at the bridge site there was pilfering going on,
not on a big scale but in so matter-of-fact a manner it was
clearly, up to a point, tolerated. So on his tasks around the place
he was always on the lookout for things Annabel and Silva might
need. Being discreet, and keeping his acquisitions modest, he took
the small things: pallets for kindling sticks, canisters sloshing
with the dregs of something useful – a good spoonful of lubricating
oil, or bleach, or detergent – a handful of screws and nails, small
amounts of sand and cement.

What tools he needed for work on the cabin he borrowed,
returning them always to the same places. With one thing and
another, there was never an evening when he turned up
empty-handed.

Every time he went, there was daylight a little longer into the
evening by which he could work on the repairs. He brought offcuts
of timber and bitumen sheeting and sealant, and after he’d sawn
back the tree roots that were forcing their way into the cabin’s
back room, he replaced the split and rotten wood and secured the
join between walls and floor. There was no glazing work going on at
the bridge, so he took the window measurements and got one of the
Inverness men he ferried across each day to have the glass cut
there. If the man was curious about why the boatman needed a pane
of glass, he didn’t say so.

As soon as the window was mended and the back room dried out
after being leaky for so long, Silva, who had been sleeping in the
main room while Annabel took the front room, moved her things in.
She set out a mattress from the trailer on the floor and kept her
own clothes in a couple of deep plastic tubs at the foot of it.
Along one wall she arranged a bank of Anna’s and Stefan’s neatly
folded clothes and shoes. Anna’s dolls and teddy bears perched atop
the pile, staring into space.