Across the Bridge (31 page)

Yet I wanted them kept exactly this way, leaning together, and I
wanted to be able to find them again the next time I came. So I got
up and gathered together a lot of the biggest stones I could lift
and I set them, one by one, in a wide circle around my stones (and
they were certainly, after my concentrated attention to them, mine,
as if I had sculpted every angle myself). Then I saw that one of
the large stones I’d placed in the circle was crusted with dead
strands of waterweed, blackened and brittle from the sun. This
displeased me. I carried it down to the river and cleaned it and
set it back in its place.

Now inside their circle, my pair of stones looked diminished and
without distinction. So I began clearing the space between them and
the circle, lifting away pebbles and digging my stones in with my
hands to fix them precisely, so elaborating, without changing it,
their relationship to each other. My mind was absolutely clear
about how these two figures should look. Yes, they were now
figures
. When I had finished, they stood proud on a flat bed
of shingle within the low ring of stones.

After that, every time I came there I set to work, adding a few
more stones to the circle. To protect the figures, I told myself. I
went up and down finding shards of slate and flat stones to keep
the ring stable as it grew, then I added bulky stones again, for
height. I made mistakes and learned as I went. As the circle rose
up around the figures, there were collapses to deal with; I had to
build, dismantle and rebuild. I needed to use smaller and smaller
stones as it went higher, and I don’t know why I didn’t abandon the
whole thing when it became irksome to go searching for just the
right stone to keep going. Instead, feeling very clever, I started
to bring Ron’s hammers with me so I could break stones to the size
I wanted. Nor did I know, when I loved the sight of my
father-and-child stones, why I went on with a task that was going
to conceal them from me. Because by then I had recognized that the
ring of stones was a wall going up around my beloved ones.

After a few weeks, and almost imperceptibly at first, the wall
began to incline inwards upon itself. At last I could see what was
happening. With much trial and error, and slow and careful
chipping, I fashioned long pieces of stone and slate and devised a
way of laying them so they overlapped and evolved, finally, into a
dome-like roof over the figures underneath. I had built a tomb.

I stayed away for a while after that, afraid that I would be too
restless to let it alone, afraid I might take the whole thing down.
But I drifted back, because now that you have a memorial, there are
repairs to attend to, most days. I like to sit under the trees, to
sit near you, the figures of you, invisible but close by and in the
shadow of the trees. I like to be here at the time of the incoming
current and watch the black rock disappear under the river until
there is nothing to see except a patch of silver on the surface,
strangely glassy and unrippled amid the running waters of the flood
tide.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

O
n the evening after
the visit to the doctor in Inverness, Silva was full of a hard,
snappy energy. Only six weeks to go, and was she the only one who
was concerned? Six weeks! Her impatience, her air of unspoken
superiority (what did either of them know about childbirth?) made
Ron feel he had been lackadaisical in some way, while Annabel was
simply worn out. While she dozed and half-listened, he watched,
startled, as Silva talked, words flying from her mouth, about the
new plans they now had to make. Though in fact she had made them
already.

Annabel handed over her mobile phone, not used since the first
night she’d turned up at the trailer. The next day Ron went after
work to Inverness and bought a new charger for it, and that evening
when it was working again Silva entered her own and Ron’s numbers
and explained once more how the system was going to work.

“We have phones switched on all the time, all day, OK? You don’t
go anywhere without phone, not even two minutes to the jetty,” she
told Annabel. “You’re so heavy now, and what do you do if you fall?
You take your phone in your pocket everywhere. Then, so, if I am
along the river and there is a problem, if the pains come, straight
away first you call me. Straight away, OK? Me first.”

Annabel smiled and nodded from the sofa bed where she lay every
evening now, her bare feet on two pillows. By the end of the day
her ankles were swollen and her shoes tight.

“Then, if the pains are coming, I call you,” Silva said to Ron.
“So same for you, you keep your phone on. I call you and straight
away you come to us here, straight in the boat. You bring her in
the boat to the bridge, then we take her up to the Land Rover and
we all go to hospital.”

Ron nodded, too. Earlier that day, on Silva’s orders, he had
warned Mr Sturrock he might need to take some hours off at short
notice.

“Or I might not, it depends,” he’d said, not sure what mood Mr
Sturrock was in. “I’m on standby. To take a…someone to hospital.
She’s having a baby soon.”

“Fuck’s sake. You having a wean? Congratulations in order, eh?”
Mr Sturrock had said.

Immediately Ron not only corrected him but had an elaborate lie
ready. No, he wasn’t the father, in fact he hardly knew her, she
was the partner of a friend of his. She wasn’t due until the middle
of October, but the friend was working on the rigs, putting in all
the hours right through till the end of September, and they’d just
moved and she had no family here. The friend could get off the rig
in under three hours if the baby came early, but his partner was
nervous. Ron was the backup to take her to hospital in case he was
delayed. Almost certainly wouldn’t be. It was just for her peace of
mind.

Mr Sturrock had grumbled a little, then told him to inform the
office if he had to go off-site and to keep his time sheet straight
– oh, and be grateful he worked for a fool ready to let him away at
the drop of a hat to be a fucking ambulance service.

Afterwards Ron wondered why he had lied at all, never mind so
extravagantly. There had been no need to pretend that the mother
was almost a stranger, he could have said that she and the baby
were close to him without going into the peculiarity of their
arrangement. Why, when every part of him wished he could be the
child’s father, was he so afraid that someone might suppose he was?
Because he didn’t deserve to be, that was it. What he deserved was
what he most dreaded, to be found out for what he was instead: a
man who had killed children. If that happened, Mr Sturrock –
everybody – would turn on him, outraged that he was trying to pass
himself off as fit to take care of anyone ever again. What he
deserved was to feel like a monster for the rest of his life.

He and Annabel continued to bow under Silva’s dictatorship. It
was the price they paid to have her reanimated and back with them.
It was lovely, they said to each other privately, to see her
looking forward so much to the baby. A new life is a healing
thing.

One day at low tide Silva untied the partly submerged white boat
from the jetty and dragged it up onto the shore. Ron hadn’t looked
at it in months, but now she wanted it fixed up.

“Suppose the baby starts coming and we can’t get hold of you?”
she said.

She bailed out the rainwater and tipped the boat over, and Ron
cleaned off enough of the clinging green weed to inspect the hull.
It was sound, but the boat was barely eight feet long and made of a
light plastic. A rowlock was hanging loose, and one of the oars was
split at the handle end; although the paddle was in one piece, it
would be difficult to use.

“We can mend it. Or we’ll get another one,” Silva decreed.

Ron laughed and chucked the broken oar on the ground. It would
make a few sticks of kindling. “You can’t go out in a thing that
size, not even with two oars,” he told her. “It’s going nowhere,
not without an outboard. Look at it. It’d be just about all right
on a duck pond.”

“But someone here before us must have gone out in it. Fishing,
maybe.”

Ron shrugged. “Probably brought it down here and realized it was
useless in more than a breath of wind. Anyway, look at your arms.
You couldn’t row three feet with Annabel on board. You’d never make
it down to the bridge.”

“I can row a boat all right,” Silva said. “I want it ready, just
in case.”

He shook his head. “You wouldn’t be safe,” he said, and started
back to the cabin, away from her objections. “There’s no need,
anyway,” he said. “I’ll be straight up in the launch when the time
comes. It’s all arranged.”

In September, the weather suddenly turned colder. The cabin
floors were damp all the time, and Ron began to wonder how he could
put in a decent layer of insulation that wouldn’t involve hours of
disruption and threaten Annabel’s calm. He thought carefully about
her calm, and how to keep her cheerful. Lately, though she hadn’t
the will to withstand Silva, she was often tetchy with her. She
complained of being bossed about, and being uncomfortable and
bored. Silva was, by turns, impatient and morose, and she was also
constantly watchful, like an investor with a stake in a dumb but
valuable animal. Ron was struck by the simplicity of his function
in it all, which was to move between the two women as a force
dedicated to both of them equally, no matter how wayward or
unaccountable either of them became.

Draughts whistled in through the windows and walls, and they had
to keep the stove alight all day. He set to work on getting in a
log supply for the months to come, but pine wood burned up fast,
and he was having to go farther and farther into the forest to find
dead trunks he could drag back for cutting. But it occurred to him
over and over that secretly he was delighted all these obstacles
had presented themselves, otherwise where else would he be now,
what would he be doing?

More and more was being required of him, and it was exhausting,
but also exhilarating. He loved how the land was sodden and chill
and how the sky lowered; he hoped for a dramatic, freezing winter.
All day long he walked around trying to keep his gratitude
hidden.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

T
he cranes and
concrete pourers were at work; dull cranking sounds vibrated around
the small group assembled on the jetty. Even after several months,
the bridge talk was still an ordeal in public speaking for Mr
Sturrock. He could not look at even familiar faces as if he had
seen them before; he stared over his audience’s heads for fear of
making eye contact, and called above the noise.

“As you can see, the last segment has been brought along the new
roadbed and the crane will lift it into position within the next
forty-eight hours. This represents” – a gull streaked past him,
shrieking – “a significant achievement, and not a little way ahead
of schedule. Thank you for your attention, ladies and gentlemen,”
he added with a formal smile as he folded his speech back into his
pocket.

The tiny group nodded. They had been expecting all this, because
they had been on several bridge walks already. This was the very
last one, and numbers had tailed off to just three; the bridge
would be reopening in a few weeks. Ron recognized every face, and
so did Rhona and Mr Sturrock. Two of the three were a couple whose
interest had become for some reason obsessive. Each time they made
a day of it: after the tour they would drive up to Netherloch for
lunch and in the afternoon walk through the forest to the top of
the Netherloch Falls. There they would take photographs of the
river snaking from the far end of the loch and widening into the
distance as far as the bridge, and on the next bridge walk, after
Mr Sturrock had finished, they would pass the new pictures around
in a way that seemed to Ron strangely agitated and boastful, as if
the gap between the broken bridge ends were being closed under
their personal supervision. Today as usual the woman produced some
new photographs, but apart from himself, Mr Sturrock and Rhona (who
all saw the bridge every day), there was only Colin, the third
member of the audience, to show them to. He took them reluctantly.
The woman would not permit his indifference. She pointed out this
and that detail, eager for him to show more pleasure. Not that she
didn’t understand that the restored bridge was no compensation for
his loss, of course not, but still, a new bridge. That was
something positive, wasn’t it, something that would help everybody
move on? Colin’s big face worked away with an expression of polite
interest. Handing back the last of the photographs, he sighed.

Rhona stepped forwards. As this was the final bridge talk, she
said, she was sure the group would want to take this opportunity to
join her in thanking Mr Sturrock. A thin, clacking round of
applause rose and died. One by one the three shook Rhona’s and Mr
Sturrock’s hands and then one another’s, and they drifted away,
pulling off their hard hats and depositing them on the ground at
Rhona’s feet. Colin lingered. It was four weeks since his tribute
to the victims and his dead wife. Since then, he had been quieter
than ever. He looked as if he might have wanted to speak, but
instead nodded to Ron and turned away.

Rhona was applying something glittery to her lips and shaking
out her hair. She grinned at Ron, who knew what was about to
happen; she’d let him in on it two weeks ago, apologizing that she
couldn’t include him, too.

“And now, John,” she said playfully, turning to Mr Sturrock. “I
am spiriting you away. I’m taking you for lunch at the Royal
Highland Hotel. I hope you’re hungry?”

“What? Steady on, now. Lunch? The Royal Highland?” Sturrock
said.