Across the Bridge (23 page)

My mother came to believe, once she could no longer deny that
the disturbance in her own body was a pregnancy, so late and
unlooked-for it felt unnatural, that she had taken Annabel’s life
as surely as if she had stopped her throat or driven a blade
through her chest.

Because there must have been a moment when she had sucked the
life out of the baby’s unconscious body and drawn it up, somehow,
into hers; that must be why she had left the darkened nursery
forgetting to whisper
God bless you
, and feeling even more
nauseous and drowsy and faint.

And it wasn’t enough that she believed she’d done it, my father
told me, she still had to know how God could have let her. She
spoke to her priest, not that it helped. He couldn’t convince her
that some force within her had not stolen the child’s life. It must
be, she reasoned, that in smoothing Annabel’s hair with too much
yearning, she had tapped a well in herself that was not love at all
but something distorting of love, something visceral and needy and
covetous. She had craved her own baby too much, and there had been
nothing to protect Annabel from such aching, unguarded cupidity.
The child had been christened, and had that done a thing to keep
her sanctified soul moored within her body? I imagined a flummoxed
young minister reaching for the orthodox comforts about baptism and
the life everlasting. But my mother would have shaken her head. No,
God had declined to lift a finger to save Annabel, and so where did
that leave it, the soul? Unprotected. Anywhere. Nowhere. There was
nothing eternal, or still, or unique about it. It did not – it
could not – belong to God. It was not merely unsanctified, but
unsanctifiable. She knew.

She left the church. Henceforth her soul, unsafe like every
other, would have to look after itself just as Annabel’s soul,
taking its chances, had proved itself restlessly and promiscuously
fluid, capable of passing from person to person, its tenure always
provisional upon the beckoning of its next nascent host. So it was
that my mother, slaking some ancient thirst for her own child, had
drawn Annabel’s supple, migrant soul out of her sleeping body and
into her own, where it was to alight, and embed, and animate the
simmering, multiplying cells that were even then readying
themselves to be expelled exactly thirty-seven weeks later as me,
the deplorable little thief whose veins raced with lifeblood stolen
from Annabel Porter.

Cot death or not, new phenomenon or not, it was a calamity so
woeful and mythic that it had, in fact, brought a chorus of women
wailing onto the streets to prise the corpse of an infant from the
arms of its deranged, barefoot mother. I think it might have saved
my mother’s sanity had her part in the affair been condemned
outright as diabolical; an explanation, however anachronistic, that
blackened her reputation with the name of witch might have been
preferable, in the months that followed, to her neighbours’ askance
looks and hasty crossings of the street. The Porters moved away. I
was born, and for the next thirteen years my mother did not leave
the house to go any farther than the back garden visible behind the
fence in the photograph.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

W
hen Ron began to
help us, I thought it was because he is kind, now I think it is
because he likes us. We are doing very well. Annabel is eating like
a pig. He has noticed it, and that must be why he brings us so much
food as well as all the other things. But I do not think he has
noticed why she is so hungry. Her stomach is beginning to show, but
he doesn’t look at her body, or at mine. He watches our faces. When
he finds out Annabel is having a baby, I think he will help even
more. He is a good man. When you come back, he will be like a
grandfather to Anna.

Sometimes, when Annabel is thinking about something far away, or
is asleep, the look on her face is so smooth I could cry, for envy.
Sometimes my stomach and throat shut themselves tight when I think
of her body getting ready, the way mine did with Anna. I feel a
prickling in my breasts the way I did when our baby was suckling.
When you come back, I want us to have another baby.

Of course I have wondered if you are dead, but you aren’t. It
isn’t possible. I need you too much for you to be gone for ever.
You can’t be dead, because if you are Anna must be, too, and that
isn’t possible, either. I need her too much for her no longer to
exist. There is no other need or purpose or reason in this world
stronger than my need to hold you both in my arms. You are coming
back.

Until then, I’ll watch Annabel grow heavy and lazy, and I’ll
take care of her as if the child inside her was mine. We can stay
here for a long time, as long as we like, as long as we need. Until
you come back and we have our own new baby, there will be Annabel’s
to look after. I didn’t know until now how beautiful the forest is.
The trees stand all around us like tall, guarding giants, and they
have a smell that is strong and clean, and the sound the branches
make at night is a safe sound, like me saying
shoosb-sboosb
to Anna when she cries.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

T
he Porters left; why
didn’t we leave, too? There was nothing about the house or my
father’s job at the council that could not have been replicated
elsewhere. Was it courage that made my father choose to stay and
stand by his wife in front of the whole town, or was it simple
obstinacy? Or was it a lack of imagination – at a time when every
family in England that wasn’t doing it themselves knew of some
other family, someone at the office or down the street, that was
packing its life into ocean-going containers and emigrating to
Australia or Canada – that he could not envisage the three of us
embarking on a journey even as far as the next county? I think it
most likely that by the time he thought of moving us anywhere it
was already too late. Our lives were too ingrained in the causes
and effects of my mother’s entrapment to withstand any such
uprooting.

He cycled everywhere; his bicycle clips were as redolent of his
presence in the house as the sound of his voice. They would be on
the draining board, or hanging out of the top pocket of his jacket
over a kitchen chair, or (to my mother’s consternation) balanced on
the Wedgwood clock on the side table in the hall. He went to work
and shopped and ran the errands on his bicycle; he fitted a seat to
the back of it, and until I was old enough to ride my own bicycle
he fetched and carried me to and from all the excursions of my
small life: school, the dentist, the cinema now and then, a
birthday party. He would take back to my mother an account of films
we saw, he brought her news of happenings in the town: businesses
opening or closing, roundabouts and supermarkets springing up, the
switching-on of the shopping-centre Christmas lights, new benches
along the riverbank. Over the years we all grew used to this rhythm
of forays and reports, but he never gave up suggesting gently she
might care to see these things for herself, and she always said
when she felt a bit more like it she might just do that. But she
preferred to stay at home
for the time being
.

I found myself wishing, those first weeks in the cabin, that I
had known then what I was discovering now: that it is possible –
not easy, but possible – to draw a life to a close in one place and
start another, not only somewhere else but
as
someone else.
It would have helped my parents to believe in just the possibility;
to dream of it, even if it had remained always a dream, might have
saved them. And I still wanted them to know, as if somehow they had
time remaining to them to change anything, that with the right
moves it could be done, and so I went about the cabin as if they
were watching. I wanted all the tasks of cleaning and clearing and
getting the place fit to live in to look transparently sensible and
natural to them. I wanted to convince them, by taking the
strangeness out of it, that I was making a success of this odd turn
of events. You see, I was trying to say, it’s all about taking a
risk, getting out while you can, finding somewhere to fix up and
call home. You can just
go
. They were present to me every
bit as much as my baby was, and I was sure they were pleased to see
me perform this act of reinvention for the sake of their
grandchild.

The weather improved, and this, too, I could not see as anything
other than approval, a kindly warmth cast on my enterprise. During
the first two weeks I scrubbed the cabin from top to bottom: walls,
floors, ceilings. I carried out bucket after bucket of filthy black
water floating with dead insects and cobwebs and dumped it all in
the pit we had dug at the back, a little way into the trees. I
unstuck the windows and kept them as well as the doors open all
day, and the sun dried out the place and left behind a smell of
soap and resin and sawdust. I washed the curtains and hung them
back up (they still looked shabby but would have to do for now). I
pulled out the linoleum flooring completely, and Ron took it away
in the boat to dispose of. At the end of each day, Silva came back
down through the trees with pine needles stuck to her shoes and in
her hair, and I would make a point of spending the first hour or so
showing her all I had done. She needed distracting when she got
home at the end of another day without word or sight of Stefan and
Anna.

Ron would come later, after his work on the river, either with
something we had asked him to get for us or more often with
something he had seen we needed: oil for the creaking doors, a pane
of glass and some putty, paraffin lamps, a plastic picnic table. I
gave him money for the things I asked him to get, but usually he
shrugged and refused it, as if the notion of paying for things just
didn’t interest him for the moment. He had access to all kinds of
tools and materials; he secured both doors and cleared the roof and
gutterings and got the water collection tank off the roof, cleaned
out, and working again, with new piping. He was looking for a small
generator, he told us, so we could run the fridge, and use the
shower instead of heating up water in a tin bath outside. He
brought containers of drinking water every day, saving Silva the
trouble of getting it at Vi’s and carrying it down through the
forest. Often he brought leftover food: big slabs of lasagne or
bags of meatballs, half a cheesecake, for which I was grateful
because I was always hungry. He was staying in a kind of bunkhouse
for the workmen who lived on-site during the week, and the catering
was crude and generous.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

B
y the middle of
April the bridge was secured, the salvage work scaled back, and the
investigation into the cause of the collapse, as far as Ron could
tell, all but wound up. For the time being the diving teams had
been stood down and the five vehicles still in the water left
wherever they might be lying; strong spring currents were pushing
what was left of them to and fro among hunks of submerged rubble
and steel, making further recovery dives impossible. Ron heard
people say they would never be brought out. They and the bodies in
them would probably be washed all the way down the estuary by
underwater currents and devoured by the sea.

On the site there was a lull while what Mr Sturrock called ‘the
fuckin’ powers that be’ considered tenders (“twiddled their fuckin’
thumbs”) for the rebuilding of the bridge. But Ron was if anything
busier; almost every day he took Mr Sturrock and groups of
surveyors and engineers out to examine the bridge piers that were
still standing, and every day he overheard them discuss the latest
analyses of the wreckage.

Mr Sturrock also had a new task. The trouser-suited young woman
called Rhona whom Ron had seen from time to time in the site office
(there were few women on the site, and no others as memorably
glamorous) turned out to be in charge of public relations for the
project. However preposterous he thought the very idea of public
relations, every other Saturday Mr Sturrock had to ‘keep the
community updated’ by meeting groups of people who signed up for
guided walks of the reconstruction site. Ron would take him over by
boat, and all the way across Mr Sturrock would complain his job
wasn’t ‘being a fucking tour guide’. On the other side, Rhona
brought the people who had assembled at the service station down to
the bridge end, from where, wearing an assortment of hard hats and
clutching information packs, they would walk along a section of the
old roadway, listening to Mr Sturrock.

Ron listened, too, and he learned that the bridge had been old
for its type, opened in 1956 and due for replacement in 2012
anyway. This was fortunate, because work that was already in hand
on a provisional new design could be brought forward for almost
immediate adoption, with a great saving of time. Not that the
bridge’s collapse could be directly related to its age, nor had
anything been discovered that pointed to faulty structural design
or construction. The maintenance records were up to date, and the
routine repairs, neither critical nor urgent, that had been
completed three months before the bridge collapsed were not
considered to have been in any way connected with the accident.
Metal fatigue due to heavy traffic had been ruled out.

The bridge was of a deck-truss design (here Mr Sturrock produced
from his pockets a handful of metal rods and sticks and laid them
one against the other, explaining tension, compression and load
transfer), and in the collapse six of its spans had been destroyed.
The final tests on the concrete and steel were still underway, but
one theory was that salt used on the roads in winter might over
several years have seeped into the concrete and corroded the
reinforcing steel rods inside it, causing one or more piers to
fail.