Across the Bridge (3 page)

So began a habit of stopping for hitch-hikers and offering to
take them wherever they were heading, since the direction or
distance didn’t affect him much. That winter, drifting farther
north on the main tourist routes, he came across more of them than
he expected, and once or twice in bad weather he slowed down and
offered lifts when none was being asked, until he realized how that
might look. He told himself it was a way of meeting people – people
distinct in his mind from fellow prisoners – though it was really
only practice at being in proximity to them again.

Their company was easy because, he soon discovered, young people
were curious only about themselves. He just had to keep quiet, as
he was anyway inclined to do, and within minutes his youthful
passengers would launch into an account of themselves that kept
them chirping on for miles, as if Ron had demanded some
justification for their being where they were at that precise point
in their lives. Unless the journey was very short, Ron would soon
know pretty much all there was to know about whole extended
families: the birthday parties, the funerals, the divorces, the day
the dog had puppies. A hundred personal philosophies were explained
to him in all their complexity and variation; he learned of
ambitious and intricate life plans based on a faith in something or
other or on recovery from the loss of it, and all of it was offered
to him, he sensed, as barter, a diligent trading of autobiography
for transportation. Not that that made them real
passengers
,
certainly not. It was a symbolic reckoning only, a token proffered
for safe passage. So he listened quietly, intending his silence to
convey that his side of the bargain was that he would not trouble
his companions to pretend they were in the least interested in him.
For the most part they honoured the transaction, measuring out
their disclosures like shining coins counted from palm to palm and
expecting none in return.

But on the rare occasions anyone asked, he was always ready to
say that he was just taking time out, he liked Scotland, and it
suited him not to stay in one place for long. Sometimes he was
tempted to volunteer a remark or two about himself beyond that,
just to hear his own words cross the air between himself and his
passenger, to test the link between that person’s life and his own.
But when he rehearsed in his mind what those words would have to
be, the temptation vanished.

I used to be a coach driver. Seven summers ago I took a party
of schoolchildren to Portugal. We were late for the ferry going
back, and during the ninth hour of driving, in torrential rain, I
must have fallen asleep. We came off the motorway. Six children and
a teacher, who was pregnant, were killed. I went to prison
.

What link could there possibly be, after that, between him and,
say, a happy young Canadian couple who were really into
folklore?

During the evenings, and when he woke in the night, his
passengers’ words would come back to him as intermittent phrases in
a dozen accents, the sounds fragmenting in his head like the
scrapbook of images of the small physical details he recalled: the
back of a hand sore from an insect bite, a damp space where a tooth
was missing, an ear lobe punctured decoratively in three places. He
would remember the smells they brought into the car, of the ferny,
rain-soaked hills and their sour trainers and wet nylon clothes,
and he’d recall how secretly and greedily he had inhaled, once they
got talking, their cigarette and bubblegum-scented breath. As he
lay awake in the night, it made him gasp, the fear he had felt for
them at journey’s end, setting them down blithe and undefended to
fare again for themselves in this world crowded with dangers. He
had no interpretation for any of these things.

Towards the end of the second winter, he noticed that most days
he thought about stopping. He was still in the north, mainly
because nothing was drawing him in any other direction, but he was
running out of places to go. The landscape was beautiful, he could
see that, but he had had his fill of the more or less stultifying
succession of glimpses taken from the road, the amassing of the
same mental snapshots over and over. On the night of his fiftieth
birthday, he washed and shaved in the Gents of a pub called The
Highlander’s Rest, ate the mixed grill and chips alone in the bar,
and slept parked in a lay-by. He woke tired. He wanted a spell of
quiet away from the engine drone and diesel warmth of the Land
Rover, to be in one place for a while. He had no idea where or how
it was to be found, but he longed for somewhere to stay.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

S
ilva, the geese are
back, you said as you stepped into the trailer. Hundreds of them.
You can see their shapes but not their colours yet, it’s too misty.
They’re downstream over on the far side of the river on that long
black rock you can see at low tide, just down from that old ruin
you like, the cabin with the little jetty.

You left the door open. It was still early, and you let in the
cold.

They must have found a whole family of fish down there, you
said, waving your hands. All around the rock where the water’s
glassy, they’re feasting. You should see them, they’re landing and
diving and dipping their necks and sending ripples all the way
across, beautiful slow ripples lapping all the way over onto our
side. You can hear them. Listen, can you hear the water?

I whispered to you to shut the door. Anna had kicked her covers
off, and I was afraid the chill on her legs might wake her up. Then
I listened and shook my head.

No, Stefan, I don’t hear anything.

Well, of course you don’t, not with the door shut, you said,
coming over and sitting down. But it’s a nice noise when you’re
outside. Want to come out, lazybones?

I hushed you with a finger placed on your lips.

What’s the time? I whispered. She’s still asleep. We’ve got a
little time, haven’t we?

You glanced over at Anna and back at me, pretending to be
puzzled. You’re awake, I’m awake, why would we want Anna to stay
asleep? Then you rose and quietly drew the blanket back over Anna’s
curled little body and tucked her giraffe in beside her. You came
towards me, smiling. I still remember precisely how the mattress
tilted as you clambered onto it. We didn’t have a lot of time. When
you entered me, I wanted to cry out, but I trapped the sound in my
throat and pressed my mouth against your neck.

Not long afterwards it was Anna who broke the silence with her
creaky, waking-up noise that was not exactly crying but a test of
her voice, a call of emergence. Although she was nearly two, when
she fell asleep it really was still a fall, a sheer drop into that
fathomless well of baby sleep; it turned her body solid, so her
chest hardly rose and fell and her eyelids did not even flicker. It
seems fantastic to me now that I could watch her like that without
feeling panic at how far away from me she went in her sleep. I
loved her waking-up noises, like the snuffling of a small creature
returning from the lost, clambering back up through undergrowth
from a foray a little too far from the nest. The real crying would
start a few moments later, when she was awake enough to know she
was hungry.

You tried to ease yourself away from me, but I caught hold of
the chain around your neck and pulled you back for a kiss.

Oh, you’ve got me on the end of a chain, you said. Haven’t you?
A chain that I’ll never take off.

Good. That’s why I gave it to you, I said, as I let you go.

You stepped back into your jeans and went to her, laughing
softly. You lifted her up high and crooned –
oh, Anna, Anna,
Anna –
and the crying stopped at once. You carried her outside,
sending me a single look over her head that signalled you were
giving me some time, a moment or two to shake off the thought of
any more of you for now, to get out of bed and dressed and ready to
balance myself against the day. I sat up and watched you through
the trailer window. You put her down on her feet in front of you
and walked her along, holding both her hands. Her arms were raised
and outstretched and you were edging her along on her wobbly,
sleepy legs, her bare feet curling on the cold stones. You were
asking too much of her. Sometimes you did that, forgetting she was
so little. You wanted to show her the geese, but she had other
ideas, she wanted her breakfast.

Look, Anna, look, you said, lifting her up again and pointing
across the water. You made the
wark wark
noise of the geese
against her cheek, and she laughed and twisted away, patting the
stubble on your chin with both hands. I pulled on clothes and
walked down to the end of the trailer and set out bowls and cereal
and milk on the table. I put a pan of water on to heat for coffee.
I got out spoons, juice, cups. I stood in the trailer doorway for a
few minutes longer, watching you before I called you in.

You never knew I did this. Every day I watched you together,
keeping myself apart while you were absorbed in each other and busy
with this or that little thing around the place. I liked to study
you, your resemblance to each other, with that identical tangle of
dark hair, so different from mine. I liked that simple evidence of
how much you belonged to each other, the everyday fact of it. The
mother is blonde and the father dark, the child inherited her
father’s colouring – it’s the kind of remark that gets made about
families. It helped me pretend our life was like other people’s,
easy and regular.

I tried to keep them all in my mind, these pictures I made of
you then. You feeding Anna, carrying her about talking nonsense,
drawing pictures and singing songs. She gazing so seriously with
her giraffe in her mouth and then chuckling back, reaching for your
hands, tugging your hair. She left the wet trails of her kisses all
over your face. Each of these pictures had to stand for something,
a sign that our life would go on being possible, so I could say to
myself, look at this life we have, so natural and loving, we are
not defeated, we are not despairing.

That day I watched you. You dipped her hand in the river and
waggled her wrist, sprinkling water drops from her fingers all over
your face. You spluttered and screwed up your eyes, she laughed and
laughed. You turned her hand and sprinkled her own face, too. I
memorized you both for later that day, to bring you to mind when I
was at work at Vi’s general store over the bridge on the other side
of the river. I needed to save you up like this, it was the only
way I could spend the day away from you.

When I had put my hair in a ponytail and brushed my teeth, I
still had some time before I had to set off to get the bus.

Silva, come on out, you called.

Anna was sitting on the ground with an old spoon in her hand,
digging into tufts of grass that sprang up between the sand and
stones of the shoreline. You led me a little farther down so I
could see the geese bobbing on the river. The sun was up by then
and still bright through a mist of cloud. I had to shade my eyes to
see. On the far side, the old wooden cabin looked silvery-grey as
if it were made out of water rather than from pine trees like the
ones that grew steeply all around it. It shimmered like something
wet, scooped out of the current and set up on the bank, solid but
made of water all the same, shining in the sun just like the sheeny
membrane of the gliding river. The white rowing boat moored at the
little jetty sat as it had always sat. It hadn’t moved in all the
time we’d been there.

Stefan, see? That cabin, it’s still empty. Nobody’s even been
there in over a year, that boat never moves. It’s deserted. We
could find the way down to it through the trees on the other side.
Why don’t we? It would be great to live there. At least for the
summer.

You tugged on my hair. And then what? you asked. You think next
winter we’ll be better off there? First storm that comes, the roof
blows off, then what? We’ll have nowhere at all.

But the trailer leaks anyway. And the roof doesn’t look so bad,
it looks OK. We could do repairs. It’s bigger than the trailer.

Don’t keep going on about it, you said, tugging again on my
ponytail. You can’t even tell if there’s glass in the windows. And
it’s not that much bigger.

I caught hold of your hand and pulled your arm around my neck,
wrapping myself within a circle of you. You curled your other arm
around my waist, and we stood swaying together, gazing across the
river. Behind us Anna was talking to herself in a singsong and
scrabbling with her spoon in the shingle.

Anyway, you said in my ear, it must belong to somebody. Any day
they could just show up. We’d go to jail.

I know, I said. Worse. They’d send us back.

Then what about Anna?

Oh, I know. Don’t talk about it.

I raised your hand to my mouth and kissed it, then I nipped at
your fingertips. I didn’t want you to start on again about
borrowing money to get us out of our trouble. We’d been over and
over it. You drew away, cupped your hands around your mouth, and
hallooed, and the call rolled across and startled the geese off the
rock in the river, all in a flurry. This was our way. We kept
ourselves restless on purpose, distracting each other with these
innocuous forms of disturbance: making love, sudden bursts of song
and silly games, scaring geese into the sky. Anything that kept us
from talking about it too often, about living in a leaking trailer
hidden from the road, never having enough money to change anything.
Being illegal in a foreign country, such a beautiful country but
one that could give us no resting point, one we occupied like flies
on the surface of a painting.

The geese were gliding back down to the rock. I clapped my
hands, and they rose up again, flapping their wings.