Across the Bridge (7 page)

I had meant to take a different route, striking north at
Netherloch across the river at the small stone bridge there and
continuing eastwards up into the mountains above Netherloch Falls.
I had been studying my map and had worked out a route following the
road down through the forest on the north bank of the estuary,
eventually crossing back to its south side over the City Bridge and
entering Inverness. After a couple of hours wandering about in the
city, it would not take me long to drive back westwards to the
service station.

But I didn’t cross the river. Overcome with weariness and nausea
and fear, I stopped in a little car park on the south side of
Netherloch, before the stone bridge. I had got up far too early,
trying, I suppose, to bring the day’s transaction nearer, because
although I was a little shocked by how swiftly my mind had worked
out all the details of what I was going to do, I was still very
afraid. I was anxious to have it over with, one way or another,
both dreading and hoping that it would all come to nothing. Maybe
the man wouldn’t answer the phone. Maybe he wouldn’t show up, or I
could take fright myself and reconsider the whole idea. Or I might
not have to go through with it at all; my telephone could ring at
any moment and it would be Col saying he was sorry, he’d made a
terrible mistake. Please come back, he might say. Come back right
this minute, we’ll spend the whole day together. I’ll look after
you.

That was when I began to cry. The car park was one of those
places for tourists, with green areas planted up with bushes and
dotted with picnic tables, and there was nobody there. I sat in the
car weeping noisily, tears pouring down my cheeks. With the engine
turned off, the air was soon stuffy with the peppery, acrylic smell
of car upholstery, and to stop myself feeling any sicker, I wound
the window down. Cold, foggy air rushed in, and still I could not
stop crying. I sank my face into my hands and rested my head on the
steering wheel and cried, and cried.

When I raised my head several minutes later, feeling a bit
calmer, there was a man watching me. The fog was clearing under the
trees and he was sitting at one of the picnic tables a few yards
away, looking at me. He didn’t avert his gaze when he saw I had
noticed him. Instead he slowly got to his feet and, with a
sympathetic nod of his head, walked away. I wanted to be angry, and
I should have felt foolish, but all I felt was that I had been not
watched, but watched over. I stared after him. I couldn’t have
described his face except for his eyes, which even from a distance
had conveyed something light and clear. His head was heavy and
square and covered with greying stubble, he was powerfully built
and dressed in jeans and a black sweater. He climbed into a Land
Rover parked in a space on the far side of some bushes and drove
away.

I wound the window up and got the car warm, then I tipped back
the seat and slept.

Later, I drove on from Netherloch, staying on the south side,
retracing exactly my path of the day before. As before, I kept
pulling off the road and loitering along the river, for I had
decided against going to Inverness at all. The stopping places were
quiet, and because of the fog there was much less to see.

I went again to the café at the service station and sat at the
window. Across some fields to the east, near where the squat
concrete pillars of the bridge approach studded the ground towards
the river, lay a patch of industrial wasteland. Beyond it I could
see cold spangles of light on the water. There was a strong breeze
blowing across it, and the breeze was also rocking the bushes and
bracken in the fields and lifting the fog out from the trees. I
waited until it was time for me to call.

I waited, staring at my phone, until after it was time. When it
rang, I didn’t answer. It rang a second time, and on the third ring
I picked up.

“You’re supposed to call, you got a problem? Listen, you want to
sell the car you call me in next half hour, OK? That’s all the time
you got. You don’t call me back, I got other clients, OK? I pay
cash, remember, good deal. You call me back.”

I had expected that the man would tell me to drive into
Inverness, but when I dialled the number, and once I had assured
him I was alone, he gave me instructions to drive back towards
Netherloch.

“Go west along the river road. There’s a lay-by a mile on the
right. Slow down when you see it. Go past it two hundred metres
more and there’s a gap in the trees and a gate. On the right, the
river side. Pull off the road and stop at the gate. Wait
there.”

I did as he said. I followed the road until I saw the lay-by. It
was where I’d stopped the day before. I bumped the car to a halt
over stones and deep ruts on the verge opposite the gate. I was
glad he’d told me not to go any farther. The gate was rusted and
skewed and off its hinges, and a track stretching behind it was
barely a track at all, just a narrow scree of stones and crushed
branches dipping sharply down through undergrowth in the direction
of the river. I waited, my heart thumping, with all the doors
locked. Traffic rushed past, buffeting the car. Then I noticed a
movement, and from the undergrowth at the edge of the track a
figure appeared, a young man in jeans and a short jacket. His arms
were clasped around a well-wrapped and heavy-looking bundle: the
child. He was wearing a hat but no gloves, and as he came up to the
fence I saw his hands were raw and red. With some difficulty he
hoisted the bundle higher up on his shoulder and motioned at me to
approach. I started to get out of the car, but he shook his head
and waved me back. Then he put the child down at the side of the
track and beckoned to me again, and I understood that he wanted me
to bring the car forwards. He freed the gate and hauled it back,
keeping hold of the child’s hand. I started the engine and turned
the car, and he waved me on past him. When he’d closed the gate, he
gestured at me to keep going, and I did, slowly and carefully, but
scraping the car sides against branches as I went, sinking into
ruts, skidding on the stones. He followed with the child in his
arms. I had no idea where the track led or how I might get back up
it again, with the car or not. But I had glimpsed his face and I
had seen how he held his child, and though those were hardly
reasons enough to trust him, I kept going, edging the car forwards
at barely more than walking pace.

A long way down, the ground levelled out into an area of water
pools and grimy rock and reeds strewn with jetsam and river debris.
Ice lay in patches under fallen trees. The tide was out; the river
ran along some distance away, and upriver, almost out of sight, was
a disused jetty sticking up from a shining field of mud.

Set on a patch of cleared ground under some trees a long way
from the river was an old trailer with plastic sheeting over its
roof. Amid the encroaching dereliction it was still clearly a home;
it looked tidy and well kept. Laundry swayed on a washing line
fixed between one corner of the trailer and a tree. A bucket and
broom, a plastic bath and picnic chairs, some large plastic toys
and water containers were stacked neatly along the side. Nearby was
an ashy fire pit set inside a circle of rocks.

I got out of the car and waited in the freezing wind for him to
make his way down. We were quite a long way from the road now and
well below it, hidden by a thicket of frost-bound undergrowth. On
the far side of the river the thickly wooded land sloped steeply
all the way to the shore. It was hard to tell how wide the river
was until I saw a frail-looking wooden hut set into a curve in the
bank and a white rowing boat moored to a little jetty nearby, both
standing out brightly against the silvery whorls and eddies of the
tide. All at once I understood what I was seeing on a human scale,
and then I saw that the wind in the pine woods around the hut was
restless and quick; branches jerked and trembled with none of the
dreamy enchantment of swaying trees seen from a distance. And I
thought, if someone were to appear from the door and walk down the
jetty to the boat, I would be close enough to call out. I looked
downriver to the bridge, maybe a mile away, arching over from the
city to the forest side. I walked a few yards down the shore and
closer, until I could hear above the shirring of the water a
stately, faint thrum from the traffic crossing over it, and carried
by the breeze that blew across, there came an eerie, soft booming
that I supposed had to do with the disturbance of air through the
steel spans stretching up into the windy sky.

Suddenly there was a rattle of stones and a shout behind me. I
turned in time to see the man struggling to keep his balance,
sliding sideways on the slope of loose rocks and puddles. Falling,
he let go of the child, pushing her away from him so as not to
squash her under his weight as he toppled. I ran towards them. The
child was a rolling bundle of unravelling clothes and wrappings,
and I reached her just as she began to scream. The man tumbled
several feet and landed heavily, letting out a long cry just as the
child screamed again. She wasn’t hurt, but she was frightened, and
when I picked her up she was so puzzled she abruptly stopped crying
to stare at my face. I saw her eyes register that she didn’t know
me, and then she writhed in my arms and took a deep breath, ready
to roar her head off. I jounced her up and down and smiled and
chuckled, and turned her around so she could see her father getting
to his feet.

“There, there, little one, there’s Papa, ooh, look,
oops-a-daisy! Silly Papa! Look!” I crooned, and the child gave me
another assessing look, before she burst out wailing, stretching
her arms out to her father. He came towards us breathless,
unsmiling. I handed the child over, but he had hurt his arm or
shoulder and winced under the weight of her.

“Oh, here, I’ll hold her for you,” I offered, and tried to draw
her to me again, but she curled up crying into his chest and he
took two long steps back. He spoke a few words to her in a foreign
language I couldn’t identify, then cast me a pained look and nodded
towards the trailer. “I can manage that far,” he said.

At the trailer door the child scrambled down without a word,
plonked herself on the bottom step and lifted up first one foot and
then the other to her father, holding on to her socks while he
pulled off her boots. Inside, he unwrapped her from her layers
while she craned round, staring at me. She clambered up onto the
window seat and settled herself into a nest of soft toys, pulling a
rubbery-looking giraffe onto her lap, and the end of its tail into
her mouth. The wall above her head was covered with pictures in
crayon, some wild, coloured scribbles that had torn the paper, and
some done by an adult for a child, of cats and houses, flowers and
boats and birds. She kept watching me, no less suspiciously. She
was beautifully and magically the image of her father: the same
curly, slaty-blue-black hair, the intense gaze from strikingly
clear blue eyes, long, fragile hands. The man, nursing his wrist,
nodded to me to sit down, and as I took the place beside her, she
raised her eyes and smiled at me. I looked away. She made me
nervous, more nervous than he did. Her beauty was close to
overwhelming, but it wasn’t so much her beauty as her physical,
breathing existence that moved me. I was sitting close enough to
reach and touch her hair, and a few hours ago I had been almost
ready to rob myself of even that small gesture towards my own
child.

“Hello,” I said, turning to her. “And what’s your name?”

“No names,” the man said. We both looked at him. “Better we have
no names, OK?” he said, a little more gently.

The child poked one finger at her chest and said, “Anna.” She
beamed at me and then pointed at her father. “Papa!”

There was a pause, and then Anna declared her name again, and
then the man laughed, and he shook his head. Anna and I laughed,
too. I hesitated, and then I said, “And what’s Papa’s name?”

I saw at once I had made a mistake. There was another pause,
tighter than before; the man looked suddenly terrified, and angry
enough to hit me. Then Anna stretched out her giraffe towards me
and said carefully, “
Jee-raff
. Anna, Papa, Jee-raff…”

He took the giraffe and waggled it at her, then thrust its head
at her and cuddled it into her neck so it tickled. She tried to
grab it, giggling and squealing.

“OK, OK, Anna,” he said, letting it go and looking at her, and
then at me. “OK, so what. I’m Stefan.”

Whatever it was that had caused him to be so tense, his daughter
released him from it as if she had let go of a bird trapped in her
hands. She was sucking again on the fronded tail of the giraffe,
and staring at her father. She already knew something about
adoration, but she didn’t have an inkling of her power. She didn’t
understand that just the sight of her fingers flexing and pointing
at a stranger’s face and her voice experimenting with a stranger’s
name could do this. She made him believe that nothing else
mattered, that he could handle anything. He sank down on the seat
on the other side of the trailer, leaning gingerly on the
table.

“You hurt your arm,” I said. “Let me see.”

When I asked him to make a circle with his wrist, he hissed with
pain.

“Can you move your fingers?” I asked. “Can you bend your elbow?”
He could, but when he tried to turn his forearm, the pain shot up
and down between elbow and wrist. The redness of his hands had got
worse since we came inside the trailer, and they were now mottled
with blue, and he was shivering. He might have been quite ill; at
the very least he was frozen, and probably shocked by the fall.

“You need a hot drink,” I said.

He wiped his uninjured hand across his face and didn’t reply. I
got up and moved to the other end of the trailer, where there was a
double gas burner. I filled a small saucepan with water from a
plastic canister, lit the burner using a box of matches from a
shelf, and set the pan on it. I opened cupboards and found
grassy-smelling herbal tea bags of some kind. I decided that he
needed sugar but there didn’t seem to be any, so when the water was
poured I stirred some honey into it. As he drank, the trailer
filled with balmy, hay-scented steam, like when the sun warms
leaves and wild flowers after rain. The fumes reminded me of the
kind of summer day almost impossible to imagine looking at his
sore, pinched hands, while a few feet away outside the trailer the
air splintered with cold and the river ran past swollen by the
wintery, dark flow of melted ice.