Authors: Morag Joss
I didn’t sleep again. But before daybreak I knew even more
certainly you were coming back. It
was
foolish to worry.
Something had happened to keep you from getting home, but you
hadn’t been on the bridge when it collapsed. You were safe,
somewhere. You’d had to stay the night somewhere where there was no
telephone signal, and you were coming back.
I went down to the river edge as soon as it was light, with half
the bedding wrapped around me. From downstream, echoey metallic
sounds dented the air above the water. In the distance, the arms of
the bridge reached through the haze to each other, apart and still.
I crouched down and picked up a handful of stones and started
chucking them, sending them with short flicks of my wrist one by
one into the river, and humming some old tuneless thing along with
the rhythm of their little splashes.
It was very cold, but I kept sitting there, hugging the blankets
around myself and humming and tossing stones and remembering what
the man in the hospital had told me about the casualties. I was
also keeping a tight grip on something else I knew. You had never
taken Anna near the bridge, not once. It was over a mile along the
busy road from here to the start of it, too far for her to walk,
and anyway, yesterday had been much too cold. Oh, you did get
sudden ideas, but even if you’d had the thought of taking her along
the bridge to stand and look at the river and out to the sea, you
would have been turning it into a plan for a summer day. You would
have come to me with your eyes shining, and the whole thing worked
out. We would wait for fine weather and get the bus as far as the
southern end of the bridge. We could walk all the way across
because Anna would be a few months older and a bit more able to
manage. It would be windy whatever the time of year, but never
mind. We would find a way down through the pine trees on the
opposite bank and have a picnic at the water’s edge, almost under
the bridge. We’d be able to see our trailer way over on the other
side! You would fish, and Anna would splash in the water and I
would doze in the sun. I chucked more and more stones in the river
and thought of this, and as I gazed, the bridge ends began to
soften and float against a watery yellow sky and the far bank
wavered and sparkled with light. I could see us, little figures in
summer clothes clambering down through the dark pine trees to the
shore, our shoulders skinny and bare and warmed by the sun. I could
hear Anna playing in the water and squealing, our voices calling
out to her. I could hardly tell if I was imagining it or
remembering a day we’d actually spent. But we certainly would spend
a day like that, I decided, when the summer came. I smiled,
thinking that such a day was now my idea, not yours.
There was a sudden sound behind me, a low, human bellowing. I
turned and saw the mad woman from last night throwing up on the
ground, staggering away from the trailer. By the time I reached
her, her stomach was empty and she was gasping, watching me through
scared eyes. Her hat had slipped off, and she was using it to clean
vomit out of her hair and wipe her steaming mouth. The poor thing
looked terrified and half out of her mind, staring and dribbling
and moaning apologies. I couldn’t make out what she was trying to
say. I didn’t know what she wanted. Maybe she had people to find,
too.
“Are you looking for somebody?” I said. “Have you lost
somebody?”
She shook her head, then she nodded. “I think so.”
She didn’t say any more, because the nodding of her head had
started up a violent shuddering in her whole body. I thought she
was going to fall, so I took hold of her by the elbow. Her hand
clutched my forearm and sent a shiver through me. Her fingers were
hard and fleshless. She raised her other hand towards the trailer
and tried to speak again, but all she could manage was
I’m
sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry
.
I understood. She was saying sorry for last night. Maybe she had
needed somewhere to take shelter and thought the trailer was empty.
But she hadn’t come back just to say sorry. She still needed a
place to stay. Whatever had happened to her, she was in a worse
state than I was. If I scared her off again, she’d never make it
back to the road.
“Are you lost? Have you nowhere to go?”
She swallowed and gulped and looked me in the face, and nodded.
She had sweet, frightened eyes. Suddenly I didn’t want to watch her
go. I didn’t want to be left here alone again, maybe into another
night. You would come back soon, you could come back at any moment,
but until then we’d be safer together, this wretched woman and me.
She looked too weak and ill to do me any harm, and by now I could
see she didn’t mean me any. My mind began to work properly at last.
She was English, and she was surely a nice person underneath all
that roughness. In a few hours, when she felt better, she’d be able
to talk to the police for me. She could find things out without me
taking the risk of being caught. If you weren’t already back – and
you could come back at any moment – she would help me find you. If
I helped her now, she would owe me that much.
“You’re sick. You can stay and rest here for a while, if you
want.”
Her eyes darted over to the trailer.
“You can stay here for a while,” I said. “I’m Silva.”
She clutched my arm tighter. “Thank you.”
“What’s your name?”
I pulled the blanket away from my own shoulders and drew it
around hers as well, and led her to the trailer.
“I’m…My name is Annabel.”
T
he next day dragged
me to its surface early, pricking my eyes open with a rush of chill
air and making them water. The sky was white with dense, icy cloud,
and full of noises; the sirens had stopped, but the drumming and
clanking of engines and heavy machinery had started up at the
bridge, and the road was already loud with traffic. It hadn’t
rained in the night, but the ground was damp and my clothes were
sodden. I checked I still had my money, then I peeled the cardboard
back and unwound myself from the plastic. Instantly the night’s
sweat froze on my body, and I felt the wind slipping between my
bones as if there were nothing under my skin but cold, flowing air.
All my joints and limbs hurt, and I started to shiver. The fires
had died out but for a reed of smoke rising from one or two. A man
was peeing into the scrub over at the far edge of the concrete, but
nobody else had stirred. My stomach felt empty yet queasy; I had to
get my body moving and I had to get warm.
I retraced my steps to the service station. Traffic was moving
past on the road again, but the car park was still full. I saw no
police vehicles and, when I paused at the entrance to look around,
no police officers. Inside, the concourse dormitory was waking up
to serene piped music and the smell of frying. People dazed with
sleep were moving slowly here and there among those still sleeping,
and cleaners quietly mopped floors and pushed trolleys and wiped
surfaces, trancelike in the warm, stale air. The washroom was a
mess, out of soap and paper and towels, but I managed to run some
hot water in a basin, and I splashed some on my face, which warmed
it without getting it much cleaner. When I came out, the café was
open. I was relieved to see there had been a changeover of staff,
and once I was quite sure I couldn’t see anybody who had been there
yesterday, I joined the others already lining up for food. New
supplies had been found from somewhere. I ate a big plateful of
sausages and beans, and I drank my tea so fast I scalded my mouth.
Almost as soon as I’d finished I felt sick, and went outside to get
some air. People were leaving in a steady stream now; I watched
them as they walked past me, talking into phones, getting in their
cars and driving away. They were all expected home.
I was not like them any more; the ‘I’ I had been could never
again be expected home, or call anyone to say how late she’d be.
That woman was dead. Not one single person, not even the most
primitive, empty shelter on the planet waited in anticipation of
her presence. Nowhere in the world was there a cupboard or a shelf
holding a single object of beauty or practicality belonging to her
that she would ever see or use again. Even last night’s cardboard,
if it had dried out enough by nightfall, would tonight be drawn
around another body or tipped onto the fire.
In Portsmouth there had been a man I sometimes saw in a
particular spot in the shopping-centre car park, a stinking recess
near the doors to the stairwell on Level C. Most days he was there
hunched in a heap of rags, drinking or asleep; sometimes I saw him
heaving himself up or down the stairways. He never begged, but I
used to drop him a coin as I went past. I suppose he was moved on
from time to time; he would disappear for a month or two, then
drift back. And always, lying in his filthy nest or shuffling
around the place, he would be guarding four dirty carrier bags.
Always four. I suppose he replaced them as they wore out, but he
always had four, clutched in both hands in a tangle of strings.
What could be in them that was so precious, I used to wonder: spare
shoes, a quarter bottle of booze, a lucky rabbit’s foot? Now I
thought I understood why he haunted the place and why he guarded
his bags as if they contained gold bullion. He wasn’t just afraid
they would be stolen. In a life eked out on a patch of concrete, he
was holding off the final shame of destitution, an existence that
carried no trace of who he was; for as long as he occupied the
same
patch of concrete, and was custodian of four bagfuls of
the talismans and gadgetry and keepsakes that made that life his,
he was a person, not a stray animal. Though he no longer had his
own roof or so much as a bed or a chair, he still had his place and
his ‘things’. He still owned a few of those nuggets of significance
or usefulness or whimsy that accrue in even the poorest of
lives.
But I no longer had even the poorest of lives. I had no life
that I could lay claim to. In less than a day, I had discovered
what perhaps should have been obvious: in ceasing to be the person
I was, I had lost more than my life as Col’s wife. I had lost
something even more crucial than her home to go to, an enclosing
place to be at night, her belongings; I had lost the possibility of
journey’s end. However meagre it might have been, the life I had
discarded had been the nearest I had to a compass, a fixed point
recognizable as mine that I could travel from or towards. All that
lay ahead of me now was a wearying and arbitrary moving on, in
perpetuity. Being no one, I had no reason to be anywhere, and I had
not expected such a falling-off of purpose.
Had it not been for the baby I would have despaired, and for the
baby’s sake as well as my own I had to decide what the hell I
thought I was doing. Twelve hours ago I had walked away from my
life, yet I was still less than ten miles from it. What was wrong
with me that I felt anchored here? Something had been overlooked,
something had me in shackles. I was behaving as if I still had
hopes of having the baby with Colin, as if nothing he had said was
real enough to have a bearing on what happened now. I had to get
away before I started to consider asking him to forgive me. I had
to start believing that, after what I had done yesterday, I even
deserved my baby.
I
watched her
sleeping. I knew her exhaustion was real as soon as we were inside
the trailer, because the first thing she did was pull off her
boots. Nobody who’s planning to attack and rob you would do that.
She crawled onto the bed, and her eyes were closing even before she
had shrunk herself away into the covers. Soon her shivering
stopped, but she lay for a long time with her eyes closed before
she fell asleep. So I watched her sleeping out of wariness, though
I knew there was no real need for it. But by then caution was a
habit with me.
She wasn’t clean, but I also knew about that. I knew the
hopeless filth of people accustomed to months without hot water and
soap and a proper, safe space to be undressed and attend to
themselves. I had seen plenty of that on the journey to here, and
after a while that loss of pride doesn’t wash off at all. It wasn’t
the same as the swift, dismaying layer of dirt on someone like her,
unable to wash for a single day and a night.
And in fact there’s a third way homeless people go, and that’s
the laboured cleanliness of people like me, encamped in rundown
places, condemned buildings, damp trailers, people who will lug
buckets and light fires to heat water and scrape their skin raw and
wear their clothes out with scrubbing. We’re the ones who are
terrified that the dirt and shame that encroach on illegal lives
might touch ours. She wasn’t like that, either. She was used to
keeping clean easily and had never thought that having the means to
do so might be a luxury. She was stained by sudden and brief
deprivation, and as I watched her sleeping, I wondered why.
M
y name isn’t
Annabel. But at that moment I needed a new name, and I hadn’t until
that instant thought what it would be. I still wasn’t thinking when
I blurted out
Anna
. My mouth opened in a panic and produced
a sound almost involuntarily, and it was a natural pair of
syllables to utter in those circumstances, I do believe that. I
didn’t choose to say it. But it was the obvious association to
make, stumbling towards the trailer with Anna’s mother’s arm around
my shoulder, her kind, sad face looking at me like that. And
although it was also unthinking – and not a piece of deliberate and
hasty disguise – to add the
-bel
, it was also necessary, for
the time being, to conceal that I knew anything about her daughter
and Stefan. I would have to go into it all later, but I knew I was
about to collapse. I had to get inside and lie down, and I couldn’t
start to explain it then. But of course there was more to it than
that.