Across the Bridge Read online

  Morag Joss

  Across the Bridge

  2011, EN

  Aka Among the Missing

  When a bridge collapses in the Highlands of Scotland, dozens of people vanish into the river below. A car hired by a woman tourist was filmed pulling onto the bridge moments before it fell. Now numbered among the missing, the woman seizes her chance to start her life over. But her new path takes her no farther than a wooden cabin on the riverbank, where she seeks rebirth and freedom from her old self. There she lives with Silva, an illegal immigrant whose husband and daughter have not been seen since the day of the bridge’s collapse. The women are befriended by the boatman Ron, and together they create a fragile sanctuary. Lost souls all, they keep secrets from each other, yet connect in ways none of them expects, as they strive to reconcile their past histories with the present and shape for themselves an elusive, longed-for future.

  Table of contents

  Part One

  1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6 · 7 · 8 · 9 · 10 · 11 · 12 · 13 · 14 · 15 · 16 · 17 · 18 · 19 · 20 · 21 · 22 · 23 · 24 · 25 · 26 · 27

  Part Two

  28 · 29 · 30 · 31 · 32 · 33 · 34 · 35 · 36 · 37 · 38 · 39 · 40 · 41 · 42 · 43 · 44 · 45 · 46 · 47 · 48 · 49 · 50 · 51 · 52 · 53 · 54 · 55 · 56

  ∨ Across the Bridge ∧

  “Thousands of people are reported missing each year, yet very little is understood about who they are, why they disappear and what happens to them. It is known that most people go missing intentionally, to escape family or other problems. Adults most at risk of going missing are those going through a crisis or a difficult transition.”

  “The likelihood of missing adults being traced and possibly reunited with their loved ones decreases over time. Among those who are ever found alive, only one in five returns.”

  Extracts from: Lost From View: A Study of Missing Persons in the UK by Nina Biehal, Fiona Mitchell and Jim Wade (Bristol: Policy Press, 2003), research undertaken by the University of York in partnership with the National Missing Persons Helpline

  ∨ Across the Bridge ∧

  Part One

  ∨ Across the Bridge ∧

  One

  When Ron was first released he discovered that prison had made him observant, as if he’d been reminded there, by its sudden absence, of the world’s surfeit of objects, its over-abundance of things to look at. Not beautiful things. It wasn’t a case of seeing the world’s wonders anew or anything like that; rather, it was the opposite. Observation didn’t sharpen his faculties, it stupefied them. He was dazed by the quantity and variety, the massive, compacted volume of it all; he noticed everything but had no idea what was worth his notice. People’s faces and brick walls, town gutters and ploughed fields, church towers and shopfronts, all claimed his attention equally. He couldn’t discriminate, nor could he find in himself a particular attitude to any of it beyond disorientation, sometimes mild alarm. He surveyed the burgeoning, seething material of other people’s lives, and very little moved him.

  After a while, his alarm grew. He began to think there must be some invisible force at work in the world, some unstoppable law of accretion filling up every surface and corner with streets, office blocks, rivers, factories, houses. Only he seemed to see it, this chaotic, impossible density, all this hoarding and flowing over; was nobody else concerned? If it went on like this, some day the whole planet would clog up and there would not be enough room in the sky for all the criss-crossing exhaust trails of planes, or on the sea for the countless interweaving, frothy wakes of ships. Swirling lines of traffic would spill off the teeming highways. Already there was no such thing as an unfilled space; it was impossible to see nothing. However deserted or arbitrarily spacious, every inch of the world was a place taken up and touched in some way, claimed for one purpose or another, even if it was, as he found in Scotland, to be left bare so that people could see it empty. But there was no true emptiness, no real nothingness, no desert stillness, a phrase that came into his mind and he now wished were more than a phrase. Everywhere – crowded and disorderly, or deliberately pristine – was somewhere, laden with the paraphernalia and expectation of some human design, and in not one of these places was his presence relevant. He tried not to think about it. He tried not to panic, and to concentrate instead on tiny things, one at a time.

  He practised on people. In cafes and checkout queues he would study them and take in only physical details: the curve of an ear, a ridged fingernail, the asymmetric lift of one eyebrow. Every feature was odd in some way, once he focused on it – not that this disappointed him at all, since he was not looking for perfection or hoping to find a special value in the unique. He simply noticed and remembered. He filed every detail in his mind disjointedly and without cross-reference, each alone for its isolated, particular, frangible self. He welcomed this dullness of perception in himself; it would have been unbearable to dwell on anything more than how precious and how breakable were these vulnerable, separate, flawed parts of other people’s bodies. Sometimes he knew he was staring at a stranger too hard and should apologize, but he didn’t know what to be sorry for. For not knowing how his own mind worked? For not being sure he bore more than a trivial surface resemblance to other human beings any more?

  He would have liked someone to tell it all to. He called his sister. She told him it would be fine for him to come for a few days if it was up to her, but Derek wasn’t ready to see him.

  “Listen Ron, he accepts it was an accident,” she said. “So do I. But he’s just not ready, you know?”

  Ron did know, but he said nothing.

  “I mean, Ron, criminal negligence is, well, what it says. You know?”

  “I know,” he said.

  “And as Derek says, six children died. Plus the pregnant woman. Give us a few months.”

  “I’ve been in prison over five years.”

  “And then he says, it just makes us look at our two and think, you know? Anyway, the extension’s not finished.”

  He left her another couple of messages. Then she sent him a cheque with a note saying she trusted the enclosed would help him make a fresh start ‘somewhere new’. She’d be in touch, she wrote.

  He called his former neighbour Jeff and thanked him for the card. It had meant a lot, he said, on his first Christmas in prison.

  “That’d be Lynne,” Jeff said. “She sends cards to everybody.”

  He left the words even you unspoken, but Ron heard them nonetheless.

  “How’s Kathy? Has Lynne seen her?”

  Jeff hesitated. “They’re in touch, yeah. Doing better. Knocks you sideways, divorce, never mind everything else she’s had to contend with.”

  Ron said it would be good to meet up for a drink. They agreed on a day the following week. The next day Jeff sent a text message to say he couldn’t make it and he’d call soon, but he didn’t.

  They’d found him a room for the first month, and a social worker, and he worked the night shift for a while in a bakery, standing on a line wrapping buns and cakes in a warm, yellow-lit factory that smelled of sugar icing and machine oil. His fellow workers were all women who spoke rapidly to one another in their own language and ignored him except to pass on commands about cellophane or cardboard boxes.

  To get away from all of that he cashed his sister’s cheque, bought an old Land Rover and reverted to his life’s previous pattern, the covering of distances. He knew how to measure a day or night in miles rather than in hours on a factory clock, and he found comfort in the old equation of roads travelled versus time spent equals a portion of his life somehow suspended in transit. As a boy he’d been fascinated by time zones, which he could hardly distinguish from time travel; if you went west crossing zone after zone, going always
back in time, one day would you be a man of twenty-one in a high chair with a bib and a spoon? Or going always east and forward, would you find yourself stooped and white-haired and still ten years old? It couldn’t be so, of course, but he had concluded then that the secret was to keep moving. Forget about direction and destination, just keep moving, and surely your life would never be able to catch you up with restrictions and obstacles and all its weighty boredom.

  Now, amused by a childish hope that was, if foolish, at least familiar, he took again to the road, sleeping most nights in the Land Rover, parking at the end of the day within reach of a pub and whenever possible near a fast-running stream or a river, whose sound in the night was perhaps a lulling echo of the flow of the daytime traffic. Occasionally he stayed in cheap places when he needed to shave and shower and wash clothes in a hand basin, and sometimes he halted for a week or two here or there and took casual jobs: kitchen portering, labouring, hauling timber, loading and moving, anything physical; it was surprising how often he got a few days’ work just by asking. But mainly he drove. As the first year passed, that was the task that kept him becalmed, though he had to get used to the absence of passengers. There could never be any more passengers.

  There we were at breakfast in the Invermuir Lodge Hotel, on the last day when our distress was of a containable and ordinary kind. Colin was eating sausages at a table in the bay window, and I had gone to the sideboard for orange juice. The dining room was quiet, just us and a retired couple in hiking clothes, and a flat-footed teenage waitress going to and fro. I started to pour the juice, and suddenly the sugary scent of my shampoo as my hair fell over my face and the hot smell of the fried eggs the waitress was carrying past combined and attacked me, and I thought I was going to be sick. I had to put down the jug and steady myself with both hands and look away, and as I tried to swallow some air and breathe without drawing in more of the smell, I found myself concentrating on my reflection in the broad mirror fixed along the back of the sideboard. My face was not a good colour, but it did not reveal any disturbance, never mind dread. The hiking couple were squabbling about distances over a map unfolded across their table and did not look up. The waitress was waiting to set down their plates. So much is invisible.

  My focus in the mirror lengthened across the empty tables to the window and the moving silhouette of my husband feeding himself, his head as solid and bony as a calf’s, swaying down to the fork, his mouth opening and closing, working, emptying. I switched my gaze back to myself and saw all I expected to see: a nondescript woman over forty, her make-up slightly too determined and even a little clownish on a face sallow from sleep and perhaps also from some other cause – some new, active trouble. Then my attention flicked back as Col’s knife tipped off his plate, clattered on the table and hit the floor. He picked it up, scrubbed at the cloth with his napkin and then he licked his index finger and scrubbed some more, sighing and wincing as if it were all the fault of a vague, absent someone who had failed to materialize in time to prevent this latest blunder by an overgrown, under-supervised child. I faced myself in the mirror in time to see the expression in my eyes turn thin and resigned. I was used to the idea that the someone was me.

  I returned to my place as if nothing had happened, and maybe nothing had. We beamed at each other. Not even the briefest of dubious marriages foundered ultimately on a matter of dropped cutlery, did it? We smeared our toast from tiny unfolded packs of butter and miniature pots of jam, our faces puckered by the strain of being together on holiday at all, as well as in a worn-out hotel in mid-February. I’m sure we looked unremarkable, perhaps slightly formal, sitting up a little straighter than other couples about to enter a slow-moving middle age in a way that suggested they had never felt young or led rapid, excited lives. The hiking pair folded their maps and got up to leave, wishing us a good day as they went.

  As their boots creaked across the floor, I thought well, maybe it could still be a good day or at least, like other days in the past five months, a good enough one, a day whose course would offer up to us any number of chances to overlook the disenchantment of our late and incongruous marriage. I poured my husband more coffee. We had already learnt to fill the place of love with an obscuring politeness; we observed the etiquette of keeping our disappointment quiet with upbeat conversations over practicalities, like optimistic gardeners keeping an unpromising surface raked and hoed in the hope that a flower might be growing underground. Above all, we extended to each other self-serving magnanimity in the granting of opportunities to spend time apart. On this off-season budget break in Scotland (which we were not calling a honeymoon, it being as near as we would ever come to one and yet nowhere near enough), we were keeping our voices bright, trading all the usual cliches to excuse ourselves from each other’s company: not wanting to ‘get in each other’s hair’, we were each ‘doing our own thing’. Col was doing ‘guys’ stuff’, I was ‘chilling out at my own pace’. Col had rented a car, an expense he could barely afford, which made our separate agendas easier and perhaps almost natural. On this particular day he was ‘getting his money’s worth’ out of it by letting me drive myself up to Inverness to window-shop and visit the museum, while he went kayaking. We were, in fact, on two quite different holidays.

  The hotel was built at the top of an incline, and the bay window looked down over the beer garden, still dank under dawn shadows, as the sun was not fully risen. Rain and melting frost dripped from a black monkey-puzzle tree onto the twiggy roof of a gazebo filled with stacks of empty bottle crates and drifts of dead leaves. Banks of chilly-looking cloud weighted the sky above the main road going north past the garden railings; beyond the road, the river flowed over rocks into glossy brown pools that spun with curls of froth.

  “I’m afraid it’ll rain on and off all day,” I said. “I hope the weather won’t spoil it for you.”

  “A bit more rain won’t hurt,” he said. “If it rains, it rains.” He cleared his throat. “It might dry up in Inverness.”

  “It might. I won’t mind,” I said, my eyes still on the river. “That current’s very fast. You wouldn’t want to capsize in that.”

  “Well, if it’s raining, I’ll be wet anyway, won’t I?” he said. “That would be quite funny.”

  I cast him too bright and grateful a smile, as if capsizing into rivers were some huge amusement I’d forgotten about. We went quiet again. Our table was crowded with white china and over-large spoons and knives that made too much noise, beneath which our silence seemed delicate and even meaningful, which it was not. But nor was it desolate, I thought. Incongruous it certainly was, after a year of Internet romance via an online chat room for housebound caregivers, finally to meet and within six weeks get married, all in a rush. But was it such a mistake to be in a hurry to ignore the undertow of something missing, to prove ourselves still marriageable before the notion of being in love, fast receding, could vanish utterly? After all, no marriage was ever spontaneous, and most between people over forty were arranged, somehow or other and for any number of fragile reasons, among them a fear of loneliness. That was by no means a small thing. Col’s parents had been dead for three years (he had kept up his membership in the caregivers’ chat room, out of familiarity), and he stayed on alone in their house in Huddersfield; my father had just died, leaving me with no reason to stay in Portsmouth. These seemed good reasons, not bad ones, to chain ourselves to the mediocre but likeable real forms of each other that we encountered face to face, and put aside our hankering for the early, impossible, younger-seeming versions of ourselves we had come to know at our computer-aided distance.

  His mobile phone burbled, and he took it out to read the message. “That’s them telling us to bring waterproofs,” he said. “We’re in for a soaking. Time I was going.”

  “There’s something I should tell you,” I said, quickly. “I’m pregnant.”

  “What?” He flinched, then looked away.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  “Oh, God
,” he said, blowing out his cheeks. He pushed himself back as far as he could get without moving out of his chair, and then, of course, the first thing that would spring to anyone’s mind sprang to his.

  “God. I mean, but aren’t you – ”

  “I thought I was too old, too! It is a surprise. A mum at forty-two!”

  “But you’re supposed to be getting a job in Huddersfield.”

  “Well, and I will, when I can. Is that all you’re going to say?”

  He looked at me hard, as if searching for something to admire. “You know we both need to work. It’s not my fault I don’t bring in enough.”

  “Col, I know, but I can’t help it. It’s happened.”

  “I don’t make enough for two, never mind three. You’re supposed to be looking for a job.” He gulped from his coffee cup and crossed his arms. “Anyway, I don’t want kids. I told you from the start. I told you, for God’s sake.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but that was before. Ages ago, online. Before we’d even met.”

  He tipped his head and gazed at the ceiling for a while. His face was just as it had been when he was rubbing at the tablecloth. Was this the same to him as a dropped, greasy knife – an accidental mess, not much to do with him? Another blunder?

  “It is a shock, I didn’t expect it, either! But I didn’t do it on my own. Please don’t act as if I should say sorry or something!” I said, trying to sound light. “It must happen all the time. Other people manage it.”

  “I said I didn’t want kids. I said so. I said so right from the start, when we were getting to know each other.”

  But we didn’t get to know each other, I wanted to say. That wasn’t knowing each other. This is.

  “We said lots of things then. We hadn’t really met, that was just online chatting. It was the Internet, it wasn’t real.”