Among the Missing (5 page)

I folded the map up and got back in the car. I waited for a while, observing time flickering along by the numbers on the dashboard clock and wondering how long I could stay like this, enclosed and contained, halted. I wanted to arrest any further forward momentum in time or space; although stranded on the edge of a road with traffic thundering by and looking down on a river flowing fast and deep toward the sea, I was, however improbably, in the only place of safety and stillness I had. As long as I remained there, I could put off my next move, which, whenever it came and wherever it led, would take me nearer to my decision, whatever that was to be. For the future must have its location; if I refused it that, if I just
didn’t
turn the key in the ignition and go forward, if with every thought and breath I reduced the baby inside me to less than baby, to mereness, to nothing, perhaps I could will it not to be. I wanted its end to be painless and unknowing and without violence, and afterward I wanted to be left quiet and unnoticed. I wanted to be left alone to carry on living as before. How could it be that I would afterward suffer the loss of something I had never quite had?

But I gazed at the bridge and saw in the span of it over the water an inevitability, as if the points on each opposing bank had cried out to be joined, as if the flow of the river beneath the bridge depended upon each side’s throwing out its great black steel arch to connect across it.
Events must reach forward to meet their consequences, consequences must throw backward in time bridges linking themselves to causes; where else is the meaning of all the things that happen in the world to come from, if not from connection with what happened before and what will happen next? How unbearable otherwise, if human activity were no more than a succession of haphazard little incidents exploding at random all the time over the planet, arising from and leading to nothing. The commission of even a single action surely sets in motion somewhere a yearning, distant and reluctant maybe, for its outcome eventually to have a point. However oblique or delusory the link with past or future, the connection must be attempted, for one thing must be seen to lead from or to another; we prefer a rickety and unreliable bridge between events, if that is all we can have, to none at all. I started the engine and drove on. Even after all that has happened, I do not believe anyone can behold a bridge and not feel a compulsion to find out what lies on the other side of it.

Yet I would not go across. I parked at a service station a short distance farther on, just before a large roundabout where one road led off left to the bridge approach and another went straight on toward the outer edge of Inverness. I went into the café and sat there for a long time under the swimmy canned music, sipping water, pushing my finger into a little mound of crumbs on my opened biscuit wrapper and pressing them onto my tongue. It was quiet, the flow of customers sporadic: one or two truck drivers with deliveries for the city, I supposed, and a few people in suits, slightly self-important, traveling on business. Occasionally families came in; usually the men paid for fuel while the women hauled little children to the bathrooms. Between customers, two waitresses in striped, conical hats conversed in a clipped, private lexicon of phrases and low murmurs, and exchanged looks full of knowing. They could have been telling each other secrets, or complaining about the boss, or speculating about me.

I hadn’t until that moment felt conspicuous, but I realized then how intently I must look as if I were waiting for something, perhaps for a purpose either to stay or to leave. A person with nowhere to go could go anywhere, of course, but this was not the freedom I might have supposed. I still had to be
somewhere
, and this seemed to bring with it an obligation either to explain my remaining where I was or to keep moving.
Apologetically, I bought a cup of tea from the smirking waitresses and took it back to my table.

The fact was I did not have to sit here in this way as if under some vague suspicion, wondering where to go. There was a place on this earth where someone would be waiting for me this evening. Albeit on his terms, after his fashion, my husband wanted me. Not everybody had that. I had waited for so long for it, and I need not lose it. Why
should
I lose him, for the sake of a child that I had never thought I would have and that he, to be fair to him, had never led me to imagine he would want? If we had money, it would be different, but we didn’t. Col was just being honest and probably more realistic than I was. And since I hadn’t been expecting to have a baby, if I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t be continuing without anything I had been hoping for.

But I had set out in married life hoping to stay married, and if I did not, I could not shrink back into my old life. When I sold the house near Portsmouth and moved to Huddersfield, I disposed of every trace of it—not a difficult thing to do, in fact, with a life so small as to have gone almost undetected. In any case, I had grown so tired of it, tired of myself, tired of getting on my own nerves, tired of the thoughtless, overlapping, blurred accretion of years going nowhere; I had been desperate for greater distance from it, in any direction, even toward a mirage. If a mirage was what marrying Col turned out to be, it was still the first attempt I’d ever made to escape the person I had let myself become.

And escape her I had, so successfully that, except as Col’s wife, I no longer really existed. My dutiful care of my father (though I loved him) had arisen not from goodness but from a lack of vitality and imagination about myself; I stayed at home because I was diffident and unadventurous. I had not, as I had told Col, sacrificed a promising career in local government. I had been fired at twenty-five from a dull administrative job in Traffic and Highways in a restructuring simultaneous with my father’s first stroke, while three colleagues, including my fiancé Barry, were kept on and retrained. Within six months Barry was my exfiancé and engaged to somebody in Payroll. I may then have “devoted” myself to my father for sixteen years, denying myself the chance to meet someone else, but for most of that time I had been too isolated and easily discouraged to imagine any such thing, anyway. I did not, as I had also told Col, “enjoy my life,” and if he left me I would spend the rest
of it mourning the expense of my error and trying not to think too much about what it had displaced. It would be incalculable.

I would have to get rid of the baby. I could make arrangements as soon as I got back. A month from now, it would be over. Immediately I thought this I felt sick and suddenly wanted my tea sweet, though I didn’t usually. I reached into the sugar bowl and noticed a folded slip of paper, crammed among the packets. It read, in handwritten letters,

I glanced over at the next table, and there was a slip of paper in the bowl of sugar packets there, too, and at the table in front of me. Every bowl on every table I could see had one.

I drank my tea. I fingered the piece of paper, turning it over and over. Practicalities flooded into my mind: all the reasons why this was an outrageous thing to contemplate. What its consequences would be in the next hour, the next twelve hours, in a day’s time. I thought of a month from now, a year, ten years. I thought how simple the next step would be. Merely texting one word to a telephone number, such an insignificant thing to do. How could a thing so small affect very much? I thought of my baby and the decision I had just reached. I thought of the need to make this effort to survive. I could settle the matter quickly. I drained my cup and went outside.

I texted the word
CAR
to the number. My telephone rang, and a man’s voice, foreign, harsh, and breathless, asked me where I was calling from. When I told him, he demanded I call him back in exactly half an hour. I hung around shivering, and then I did so, and when he began to interrogate me, my voice shook. I realized I didn’t know anything about the rental car except that it was a Vauxhall. I read him the license number written on the key tab.

“I don’t know the exact model or the mileage. It’s pretty new, I think,” I told him. There was a silence. “It’s silver,” I added.

“Yes, I see it’s silver,” he said. “You sell or not? You waste my time?”

I stared round at the car park, the fuel pumps, the café windows, the scrub and farmland beyond, but I couldn’t see anyone.

“You sell or not?”

“It’s just, the car … I don’t know if you … if you …,” I said. “I
mean, I haven’t done this before. The thing is, I need money. The car doesn’t actually—”

“Don’t give me details. That’s none of my business. You need money, I need car. You got a car, if I want it, I pay you cash. No papers. That’s it. Okay?”

“Okay. But I don’t even know who—”

“No names! No documents, you understand? No papers. That way it’s all private, okay?”

“Yes, but how much—”

“Listen. You come back here tomorrow. Just you. You understand?”

Just then I heard the cry of a young child in the background. “Wait,” he said. He spoke a few words in another language. A pause, then I heard him speak in English. “Ssh, hey, hey, Anna? It’s all right, wait just a minute, Papa’s busy …”

I caught my breath. His voice had grown musical and soft.

There were some noises of movement and murmuring from the child and then, “Good girl, Anna. Papa’s baby …”

He would think me insane if I began to cry.

“Okay, listen,” he said to me. “So you come back tomorrow. Exactly same place. Then you call me again, same time, I tell you where you bring me the car. If car okay, we agree price, I pay, you get cash, we both get discretion. We don’t say to nobody.”

His voice was changed, young and rounded and cadenced. I was certain this gentler, slightly shy voice belonged to the person he really was.

“I’ll be here tomorrow,” I said.

Since last year, a certain mood would come over me at nightfall. When night masked the trees around the trailer and turned the river water to ink and the far bank was a steep black hulk against the softer dark of the sky, I couldn’t tell what country this was, or what season or century. It was night and it was anywhere and any year, that was all. The moon made me feel smaller and safer than the sun. If it was a fine evening, I would go outside alone. I liked to walk with my head thrown back, following the moon. I could go in any direction I chose along the shore, and often I missed my footing and nearly fell, but somehow I would still always be following the moon. Wherever it led I followed, until my neck felt stiff or I finally stumbled. I must have looked so silly. Then I would do it all over again but imagine this time the moon was following me, and it always did. Dreamy and drunk on moonlight, I needed a while afterward to steady myself and get used to being back on the river shore by the trailer, for it really did feel as if I’d been a long way away.
Moonbathing
was how I thought of it.

I didn’t speak of it to you; I knew you would have found the idea of it amusing. You’d have snatched it away and held it out of my reach while you scrutinized it, you would have tossed it around for fun and handed it back to me, a little spoiled. Though you never meant to be unkind.

And though it was funny, I didn’t do it for amusement. Though I was soothed by it, it wasn’t for relaxation. It was surrender. I gave myself up to it long, long before it was dark. Even when Vi wasn’t being difficult, I would be looking forward to the day at work being over. Part of me would yearn all day long for the coming reward, to be absorbed and lost
in the moon. You knew that much, I think. You would gather wood while it was still light and stack it around the circle of rocks we’d built on the ground between the trailer and the riverbank, and you would bring out chairs for us and a blanket for when the evening got colder. You’d light the fire while I was settling Anna in bed, so I would be guided down to you by the orange glow and the crackle of burning sticks. At night the noise of traffic passing on the bridge far away downriver settled to the occasional whirring rise and fall, as cars in twos and threes approached and crossed over. That was soothing, too.

I liked it best when you found silvery fallen tree branches for the fire, which burned with the baking smell of old, sun-parched timber. Sometimes we had to burn scrap wood that people had dumped along the edge of the road at the top of the track: bits of old furniture, broken doors—once, nearly the whole side of a garden shed—and then the fumes would be harsh and chemical and the fire would flare with blistering paint and melting glue.

That night the flames were different, a sulky, wavering yellow giving off greenish clouds of smoke with a sharp, rotten smell.

These sticks are damp. They must have been lying in the water, I said, poking at one with my foot. Did you pick them out of the water? The smoke smells of weeds. And dead fish.

You grunted. It’s all I could get, I didn’t have time to go getting dry stuff. We’ve used up all there is round here; the only dry stuff’s a mile down the shore. Anna was too tired.