Among the Missing (32 page)

“No! Not me,” Silva said. “Only her.”

“Do you want the forms in English? We’ve got them in other languages,” she said, rolling back.

“I’m just having a baby,” I blurted. “I don’t need a doctor for anything else. I’m just having a baby.”

The receptionist sat up higher in her chair and looked at my belly, nodded, then swung herself over to another filing cabinet.

“You want Maternity Services. Here’s the antenatal questionnaire as well. We’ll need details of your previous GP. Once you’ve registered, we book you in for an assessment with the community midwife. Antenatal clinic’s Tuesday morning; you need to attend weekly from thirty-five weeks. Postal code?”

“Postal code? Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Sorry.”

“What’s your address? You have to be a resident within the area.”

“Oh, yes. I mean, we’re just moving in. I don’t have it on me.”

I had thought up an address, but suddenly I didn’t dare give it. I felt certain this woman had an encyclopedic memory of Inverness and knew the sound of every doorbell in every street.

Silva pushed forward and pulled at my arm. “Come on, we don’t need this!” she said fiercely. “Let’s go, come on!”

“Silva, wait. Just a minute,” I said. I smiled at the receptionist. “Sorry.”

Silva pushed her face to the window. “She’ll come back another day. She has many weeks still, maybe eight, nine. It’s not urgent.”

The receptionist ignored her and handed me several sheets of paper. “If you want to see a doctor today, you’ll need to go on the end of the list. First you have to fill in the new patient registration form, the patient questionnaire, and also the antenatal questionnaire. We’ll also need your medical card, passport or other photo ID, proof of address, and contact details of your previous medical practitioner.”

She looked past me to the next person in the queue. “Yes?”

Silva steered me out and strode off. She kept walking until we were several streets away and slowed only as we reached a park with paths and litter bins and a tatty children’s playground. She marched through the gates and sat down on a bench, and I followed, exhausted and sweating. She pulled the papers from my hands and sifted through them.

“Questions, so many! For one baby! Why?”

I pulled the papers back and began to read them. I could give a false name and address. I could make up a name for my previous doctor. I could say I had lost my medical card and leave my National Insurance number blank. They might not follow those up straightaway.

But the questions became more nosy, more dangerous. How would I rate my feelings about my pregnancy from one to five, extremely negative to highly positive? Did I live with a partner? How many adults, smokers and nonsmokers, were living at my address, and were any unemployed? Were there domestic pets or other animals at the premises? I could give false answers to all of them, too, but if I turned up every Tuesday at an antenatal clinic, there would be more and more questions. Soon I would make a mistake or give something away. If I registered but didn’t go to the clinic, they would make inquiries and find out I had lied. And once they knew I wasn’t Annabel, what else would they uncover? The newspapers had said nothing about the missing woman
tourist being pregnant, but that didn’t mean Col hadn’t told the police that I was.

Col. I had a sudden recollection of him as I had last seen him, his stricken face as he turned away from the wrecked bridge. But I could not undo what I had done.

“They want to know everything,” I said. “If I don’t tell them, they’ll find out anyway.”

Silva’s face was white. “You shouldn’t go back there,” she said. “If you do, when the baby’s born they’ll take it away. It was a stupid idea to come.”

“What am I supposed to do when I go into labor? I can’t have the baby all on my own. What if something goes wrong?”

Silva stood up and started walking. “You just have to go to hospital. Ron will take us. It will be fine.”

I was surprised at how relaxed she was about it.

“You mean just turn up?” I said. “They’ll think that’s very odd, they’ll ask me all sorts of questions. They’ll interfere.”

“So? Have you done a crime, to have a baby? No. They will look after you. Then afterward we’ll leave with the baby, they can’t stop us.”

“And you’ll come with me?”

“Sure, of course! Ron will take us in the boat, then the Land Rover. Then after, he comes again to pick us up in the Land Rover. Four of us!”

She looked almost happy.

“Then everything can get back to normal,” I said. “Then we’ll decide what to do next.”

On the way back she was silent. Just before we got off the bus, she turned to me and said, “I’m going to look after you.”

There’s that rock in the river you used to watch, the one you only see at the ebb tide, a long, low, shining lump of black. The geese and gulls land and feed around it, but no bird nests there because once a day the water swirls over and covers it again and the birds fly off. Between it and the forest bank of the river, there are other, smaller rocks in the water, some flat and some jagged, set in a loose tumble as if they landed there from a prehistoric avalanche. For all I know, they did. The water swirls and gathers and turns all around them, and maybe it’s also because of the rocks that the river flows in strongly just there and has worn a curve in the bank. Or maybe it’s because the ground in that particular place is so soft to begin with, formed of nothing but disintegrating acid shreds of forest soil that are easily licked out from the pine roots by the tongue of the tide. Either way, the water has washed the soil away and borne it down to the riverbed, and it has hollowed out a tiny bay in the bank right into the base of the trees, leaving their roots under a thin mortar of salty dried mud. They look grayish and gappy, like old teeth. And other stones, dragged in from the sea on the high winter currents and dropped there, are daily pulled and rolled up the beach by the methodical tide into an arrangement of ridges, the boulders lodged farthest up, a scree of stones you can walk on, and little pebbles and broken seashells shirring to and fro at the water’s edge.

Here is where I sit most often to think about you, close in by the trees in the deepest part of the curve and hidden from Ron or Annabel, who might just be (though seldom are) strolling along the river from the bridge or from the cabin. Here is where I began, without knowing that was what I was doing, to build.

One day I saw two stones side by side not far from where I sat, and it so happened I noticed them in a spell of numbness when I was neither talking aloud to you nor crying. In fact I was caught off guard, when I was not thinking of anything at all. Of these two stones, one was large and dark and squarish, and had a ribbon of quartz running through it. The other was pale and much smaller, and its rounded surface sparkled with dots of mica. It was touching the other one in a way that made me think of a person whose forehead was resting against the chest of someone bigger. They leaned toward each other, joined and motionless, arrested in the moment just before they would embrace. That was the remarkable thing, that their absolute stillness held within it an intimation of a movement yet to happen. Father and child. I moved closer, my eyes traveling across every line and plane, gauging the shape of the empty space around them, measuring the distance between. And as I gazed at the point where the two stones tilted and met—the touching of forehead to chest—I felt the world shrink around me. This was surprising, because what I was looking at were, after all, lumps of stone.

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 a pile 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, and 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. I had to build, dismantle, and rebuild. As the circle rose up around the figures, there were collapses to deal with. 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 inward 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 domelike roof over the figures beneath. 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.

On 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 again how the system was going to work.

“We have phones switched on all the time, all day, okay? 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, straightaway first you call me. Straightaway, okay? 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 straightaway you come to us here, 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.”