Across the Bridge (8 page)

He saw me glance past him through the window. As if remembering
what I was there for, he pushed his cup aside and looked at his
watch.

He said, “There isn’t much time. Come outside. Anna, stay here a
minute and be a good girl.”

He stepped down from the trailer; I followed. He was in a hurry
now, but Anna scrambled after us to the door and wailed to be
lifted down and kept near him. He got her boots on again and
buttoned her into her coat.

We walked all around the car. He kicked at the tyres and peered
in the windows, and he tried all the doors and inspected the boot.
When he asked to see the engine we had to fish out the manual and
look up how to release the catch under the bonnet. I could tell he
knew no more about car engines than I did.

When he’d finished looking, he said, quietly and without
surprise, “Rental car. You steal it? You come to sell me a car
that’s not yours?”

“I need some money, that’s all. You said no questions.” I turned
away, pretending to cough, so he wouldn’t know that my voice
trembled and my eyes were filling with tears.

“OK, you didn’t steal it. You rent it. And this,” – he tapped
with his foot on the licence plate – “this is the real number?”

“Yes.”

He blew out his cheeks. “OK,” he said. “So. If you sell, you
have to tell them car was stolen. Because you are a thief.”

“No. Yes. I know.”

“So if I buy, I need to change the plates, maybe change the
colour. So I pay less for car.”

“I need three thousand,” I said, without thinking. I was
guessing; it sounded like enough to ask, enough to change Col’s
mind about the baby.

“Maybe. Maybe not so much. It drives good? I need to drive it.
If it drives good, I pay. No receipt, no documents.”

“How much?” I asked. “How do I know you’ve even got any
money?”

He glanced at Anna, who was absorbed, digging a pebble out of
the tread of one of the tyres. Turning from her, he produced an
envelope from inside his jacket. He drew out just enough for me to
see the top edge of a wad of banknotes.

“I got money.” He stood watching my face as I tried to control
another wave of tears. I had begun to tremble. I was horrified at
myself, bartering a car that wasn’t mine for money to keep a baby.
How flimsy it was proving to be, the border between the kind of
person I was before this, whose life had never strayed off the path
of the conventionally law-abiding, and the kind of person I was
turning into; it was terrifying to learn how irresistible, how
effortless was my descent. Could I have offered in mitigation of my
wrongdoing the plea that I had no choice? Of course I had a choice.
Having taken it upon myself to judge that the legal destruction of
my baby was the greater and truly unacceptable wrong, I was
choosing to break the law. But I was not acting out of principle in
pursuit of a finer moral good. My reasons, circumstantial, quite
possibly hormonal, were a clumsy, misshapen clump of love, need,
fear and, in the end, self-interest. I was going about getting what
I wanted.

“OK, listen. You’re selling me rental car, you need money that
bad. I need a car. For my wife. For a surprise, big surprise for
her, big difference for her life.” He gave me a hard grin. “So,
smart lady? You need the money, you owe it somebody?”

“I just need it.”

“OK, right. No questions. We go now to drive car around. If car
OK, we agree price, I pay.”

I shivered. “OK.”

He went back inside the trailer and brought out a heap of
bedding. He arranged it in a mound on the back seat, then lifted
Anna on top of it and began to fiddle with the seat belt.

“That’s not very safe,” I said. “Small children are supposed to
have those proper car seats when they go in cars.”

He clicked the seat belt in place and straightened. “Do I ask
you for help? What can I do about it right now?”

Anna started to wail. “Jee-raff! Papa, Jee-raff!” she said and
burst into tears. Stefan returned to the trailer and brought back
her giraffe.

“You will get her a car seat, won’t you?” I didn’t care that I
was making him angry. “You’ve got to get her a car seat so she’ll
be safe.”

“You drive it back up the track,” he said, getting in on the
passenger side. “Any damage then you don’t blame me.”

I drove very carefully up the track and stopped at the top, and
we swapped places. He turned the car towards Inverness, nudging it
back onto the road nervously, unused to having the controls on the
right and possibly to driving at all. Anna dropped her giraffe and
began to bounce and squirm on top of her heap of bedding in the
back seat, and he spoke to her sharply, in their own language. I
retrieved the giraffe for her, and she pushed it into her mouth;
her eyes began to close. In silence Stefan drove us past the
service station and on to the roundabout as if to turn left across
the bridge, then reconsidered and swerved round to go straight
ahead, to the outskirts of Inverness. The traffic grew heavier, and
it unnerved him. A couple of miles farther, cursing under his
breath, he made a complete circuit at another roundabout and headed
back the way we had come. At the bridge roundabout, he took us back
onto the Inverness road, where he picked up speed. Then he turned
back in the same place as before.

“Car OK?” I asked, and he nodded.

“I go back to service station now,” he said.

But when he pulled in, he shook his head and inched past the
rows of parked cars. “Too many cars, too many people,” he said. “I
don’t stop here.”

At the far end of the car park, just at the start of the slip
road back up to the road, a disused track jutted off to the left
towards the derelict ground near the bridge, the wrecked and
abandoned place I’d seen from the window of the café.

“More quiet here,” he said, turning the wheel. The track crossed
an empty field and then opened out onto a vast stretch of cracked
concrete where factories or warehouses had once stood. He stopped
the car. We got out into a terrain of piled-up rubbish: lumps of
masonry, rusted metal spars and guttering and old window frames,
warped board sheeting, buckled machinery, shattered glass and heaps
of what looked like sodden old clothes. In the distance a man
shuffled out from a broken shed clasping a piece of carpet around
his shoulders like a cloak. Without seeing us, he wandered away in
the direction of three or four plumes of smoke rising from behind a
half-demolished wall.

“Bad place. Junkies,” Stefan said, glancing in at Anna asleep on
the back seat. “Hurry up. Bad place.”

“Do you want it or not? If you want the car, you have to pay me.
Now.”

“First I need promise. I need favour,” he said. “No, not a
favour. For both of us.” His eyes were anxious. “I have to change
licence plates. It’s OK, I can do, there’s a guy I know. So you
don’t tell police the car is stolen straight away. You report the
car later, OK? Wait till I got new plates. Wait till six o’clock.”
He looked at his watch, then pointed back to the service station.
“Up there you can get the bus. You go in bus to Netherloch, you say
you left the car in Netherloch. The bus comes there soon, fifteen
minutes.”

“It’s too cold to wait for a bus. I’m not feeling well. Can’t
you drive me to Netherloch?”

“No,” he said, looking back to his daughter. “You can get bus
easy, plenty of time. Bus is warm. Listen, when you get to
Netherloch, there is car park behind the school.”

I nodded.

“So cars get taken from there. Stay in town a while, you can get
coffee, food. Wait till six, then I will have new plates. At six
o’clock you go to car park, you call police, you say you left the
car there all day. Tell them this morning you went to walk, you go
along by the water and in the forest and then you get back and car
is not there. OK? You got no car, you have to tell story, explain
them something. It’s for both of us. You understand?”

“OK.”

He pulled out the envelope from his jacket. “Two thousand,” he
said.

“Three,” I insisted, numbly. I had no idea what the car was
worth, no idea what I was talking about.

“Two thousand five hundred,” he said, counting it through his
fingertips, note by note, before I could argue.

“All right,” I said.

He handed it over, and pointed to the service station again.
“Just up there.”

He smiled. He was anxious for me to go. But some natural
courtesy – maybe even a little gratitude because I liked his
daughter – prevented him from showing it.

“All right. Goodbye.”

In absolute misery, I zipped the money into an inside pocket of
my shoulder bag. Just as I was turning to go, I glanced in at the
child, lying aslant across the collapsed wad of bedding and
beginning to stir from sleep. Seeing her father outside, she pulled
herself up and patted on the window with the palms of both hands,
about to cry. Stefan and I looked at each other; we both wanted to
say something else, and we both started to speak at once. He tried
to laugh.

“OK. What?”

“You will remember to get her a car seat, won’t you? Today?”

He smiled and reached out and gave my shoulder a little shake.
“Sure, sure, lady. Today. I will.”

“What were you going to say?”

“Nothing,” he said. He pulled out his envelope again, just as
Anna began to sob, pressing her face up to the glass. “Only, here.
Three thousand. Here, take,” he said, pushing more bills into my
hands. Then he turned quickly to the car and I started walking
away, towards the service station. I heard him open the car door
and speak gently, but I kept walking. I could not bear to see her
hands outstretched for him as he lifted her into his arms.

I didn’t want to wait for the bus. It was too cold to stand in
the shelter, and I wanted to get away and keep moving, putting
distance between myself and what I had just done. I kept walking.
Soon I had reached the bridge, and I could see that the pathway for
pedestrians was a separate narrow carriageway, built lower than the
steel deck that carried cars; once on it I would be almost
invisible except to anyone I might meet walking across from the
other side. I strode along fast with my collar up against the roar
of traffic and the estuary wind. I liked the thought of being
hidden. After a few minutes, the bus rumbled on past me.

Looking inland, I could see all the way to the point where the
river emerged from the neck of the loch, and turning eastwards, I
saw as far as it ran, past the docks and the city, and widened into
the sea. As I walked, in each direction the views hit my eyes like
old, stuttering film as the black spars of the bridge flickered
past between me and the landscape.

At the first junction on the far side, where nearly all the
traffic bore right to go north and up the coast, I turned left and
followed a much narrower road that rose and curved inland. The
signs pointed towards Netherloch Falls and Netherloch. The paved
walkway from the bridge came to an end, and I continued along the
side of the road, suspended in wintery afternoon darkness; the way
was canopied by overhanging trees, through which blinding slashes
of daylight cut until they stood too densely planted for light to
penetrate. After a while I could only sense but not see the river,
a long way beyond the trees and below me. One or two cars passed,
leaving hollow echoes of engine noise. As the road rose ahead of me
I could tell I was going higher; soon I heard a faraway rushing in
the treetops and the air was cold with pine resin and raw mountain
winds that carried none of the green, reedy damp of the river. I
came upon the remains of a clearing where trees had been felled in
an apparently disordered kind of order: straight rows of sawn
stumps poked up between tractor ruts and receded back into the line
of the forest. Everywhere the ground was scattered with shards and
chips of torn wood and the scabs of stripped bark. Dozens of tree
trunks lay stacked horizontally, and around them were stiff,
feathery heaps of smaller pine cuttings alongside dried out
branches and twigs, grey and tangled like wires.

I had been walking for nearly an hour and had a stitch in my
side, and I stopped to rest against a mound of logs, digging my
foot into a mulchy carpet of pine needles and moss. I was scared
and cold, and sick with disgust at myself; I stared into the
darkness of the trees and wanted to escape into it. Just then I
heard another bus. Without thinking, I ran back to the road and
waved it down. I climbed on breathless and shivering and wondered
if I was getting flu. By the time we reached Netherloch I ached
with tiredness and the afternoon had turned cloudy and raw. It was
only a quarter past two. I knew I could not bear nearly four hours
loitering in the streets, going from one café to another. I had to
get into a quiet room and lie down, I had to sleep.

The sign on the front of the bus said Wester Muir/Fort Augustus,
which I knew were some miles west, beyond our hotel, so I clambered
down to the driver and paid the extra to go on to Invermuir where,
he told me, the bus stopped at the postbox on the far side of the
village from the hotel. Col would not be back before six o’clock. I
could hide in our room for at least two hours, and later I would
get back somehow to Netherloch. If there wasn’t another bus I could
get a taxi, and if I didn’t get there until after six it wouldn’t
matter; in fact it would help, it would give Stefan even more time.
We would be safe. But I didn’t know what safe meant any more. I
opened my bag and flicked the money through my fingertips, powdery
soft paper amounting to three thousand pounds. Just paper, after
all, but I was trusting to it to buy me my safety.

I stared through the bus window and tried to distract myself by
identifying the plants along the road. Gorse, bracken, patches of
rushes, and spongy, brownish pads of decaying nettles and saturated
moss. I was collecting observations that I could array before Col
one by one, to fill our evening before I mentioned the baby and the
money. Then I would tell him that I had solved the problem, that
there was now plenty of money, so there was no need to worry. He
would love his child when it arrived, and anyway, I would take care
of everything. Soon I found myself in a pitiful daydream in which
kindness and remorse and enlightenment washed over his face, and
henceforth we moved on together towards a sweetly melancholic,
poetic future as Mummy and Daddy. I modified the daydream; at some
later date, next year maybe, I would be pregnant again. If it
happened at forty-two, it could surely happen at forty-three, and
it would be different next time, because making the best of one
accidental baby was one thing, having a second quite another,
undertaken only by devoted and deliberate parents. By then I would,
as a mother, be well acquainted with anxiety about the world at a
level previously unimaginable, but I would be watchful and capable,
too, and our happy children would – I whispered the very words –
make our happiness complete. This was a manageable and familiar
dream to me, set in a future in which I was altered, having
blossomed in my husband’s eyes and acquired proper, wifely value as
a person whose wisdom and clarity about life were necessary to him.
I concentrated on it for the rest of the journey.