Among the Missing (22 page)

I turned and walked off the jetty. 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.

Annabel 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 an expensive tourist rent, 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 bills 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 gray. 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 toward 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 it 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 go back to Vi’s. You can come with me as far as the road. We’ll find a way up together. 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.”

He 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 over 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 hours, but he relished them, the quiet and space to himself before he was 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 other workers 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 labor. 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.

Midafternoon, when the catering 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 ferocity 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 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, paltry 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 scraps 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 had 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.