Authors: Morag Joss
He didn’t in the least care where Colin was from, but it was
necessary to pull words, on neat and neutral subjects, into the
empty space between them.
“Huddersfield,” Colin said dully. “Know it?”
“Passed through a couple of times. Nice place to live, is
it?”
The silence returned. Just as Ron was about to give up – he
couldn’t keep this going all on his own – Colin said, “My wife
didn’t like it. People don’t unless they’re from there.”
“Where was she from?”
“Way down south. Near Portsmouth.”
There was another silence.
Colin said, “She would’ve got used to it. She was only there a
few months.”
“Is her family in Portsmouth still?”
“No. There was just her dad, and he died last year. Nobody left
now.” Colin squeezed his eyes tight. “There’s nobody to talk to
about her. I went down there, found her old address, saw where she
grew up. Spent two days just walking about. How stupid is that?
Same again?”
He was already on his feet and on his way to the counter, and
Ron could not find the heart to say no. When he came back he tried
harder, since Colin had mentioned not being able to talk about his
dead wife and seemed to want to, insofar as he wanted to talk about
anything.
How had they met? What did she do? What were her hobbies? Colin
answered with a handful of words or skirted the questions
altogether. It struck Ron that the more he said, the more
distraught he became. Colin wanted to tell someone things about
her, but not these things; Ron was asking the wrong questions and
had no idea what the right ones might be. He sneaked a look at his
watch.
“Sorry, mate, you don’t want to hear me going on. A total
stranger,” Colin said.
Ron felt terrible, because it was true. “No, no, it’s just I
need to watch the time. I have to get Sturrock back across the
river. Talk all you want. If it helps.”
“Nah, I’m no good at talking. That was part of the problem,
maybe. But thanks, mate. Maybe it helps a bit.”
“Any time. Anything else I can do for you, feel free.”
Colin stood up and shifted on his feet. Shyly, he held out his
hand. “Thanks. Appreciate it.”
Ron got up and accepted the handshake. “Well, I’d better be
getting back to the boat,” he said. “Take care, now.”
“Actually there is something,” Colin said abruptly. “But
maybe…No, you probably can’t help.”
“What is it?”
Colin looked at him directly for the first time. Behind the
thick socket bones and pouches of his fleshy face, his eyes were
small, bewildered dots.
“Over the other side, is that where you’re going?” he asked.
“That’s right. The forest side.”
“Well, it’s just…I’ve never been there. Never thought of it.
Then when I did I couldn’t face it, but I could now, I kind of want
to. I mean, that’s where she was trying to get to, across the
bridge.” He raised his arms and let them drop against his sides.
“Never made it, did she? And they’re doing a memorial garden over
there, aren’t they? For all the victims. Putting up a proper
memorial. If I went over in the boat with you, I could, well, you
know, have a look round.”
Ron had heard something about the garden. “It’s not planted yet.
They’ve only just decided where it’s going. Don’t think there’s
much to see.”
Colin shrugged. “Never mind, doesn’t matter.” He turned away.
“Just thought I’d ask. See you around.”
“No, no, wait,” Ron said. “It’s just, it’s not up to me. Depends
on Sturrock. We can ask.”
Mr Sturrock turned out to have a view of his own. Colin’s
gesture at the barrier was a lovely wee tribute, he said. As if the
wean’s giraffe in the paper wasn’t enough.
“Och, go on, then, we’ll take you over the once,” he told Colin.
“Only the once, mind. Compassionate reasons, OK? And you’ll need to
get yourself back by Netherloch.”
They chugged over through the blustery wind saying nothing, the
tang of diesel mixing with the smell of cold rain. When they
reached the other shore, Sturrock hurried away to the site office
to pick up his car keys. Colin stepped off the jetty and followed
Ron’s directions to a new walkway. The garden, Ron said, was going
to be on the bank on the far side of the bridge, a short way
downriver. He watched Colin go, trudging through the mud, his eyes
on the ground and his big shoulders stooped under the rain. Then
Ron cast off again to go upriver to the cabin. He really couldn’t
do any more.
I
f Silva slept at
all, she would often wake distraught and wander about the cabin
with rage in her eyes, pulling at her hair and clothes. She would
not be held or comforted. Other times she would lie helpless and
weep for hours until the skin on her cheeks was raw from her tears.
Sometimes I found her, as I had the first morning, staring at the
water and unable to move. Every couple of days, I think to get away
from me, she would wander off farther downriver and come back hours
later, exhausted. She hadn’t the strength to go far. I tried to
judge when to leave her be and when to talk. I kept her warm,
covering her when she fell asleep, and I cooked her tiny meals of
eggs or pasta and coaxed her to eat, not that I managed to get her
to take much, often she’d only accept tea. Her grief terrified me,
and all the time I looked after her I hardly spoke. When I did,
something about her made me whisper.
I cared for her on my own, until Ron came in the evenings. I
looked forward all day to seeing him, and by the time he arrived
was desperate for his company. With Silva he was circumspect and
solemn, hardly less reticent than I, and I was pleased if she went
to bed after supper and I could have him to myself. I was delighted
when he noticed how much bigger I was getting and fussed over me a
little. Now each night he would lie with me for a while, sometimes
shyly stroking my belly and sometimes not, but always peacefully,
without intensity. I was grateful. When I was nearly asleep, he
would go back out to the main room and bed down next to the
stove.
Silva began to sleep longer and more deeply, and slowly she
began to eat a little more. After several more days she was almost
alert again and more talkative, but she was also restless and
weepy, and she tired so easily. She hadn’t been to work for weeks.
We had sent Vi a text message when Silva first missed work saying
she was ill and would be back when she was better. There had been
no reply. One evening Ron suggested she might try going back.
“Routine,” he said. “Good thing, routine.”
I didn’t think it was such a good idea. I was afraid Silva
wouldn’t be able to stand up to Vi in one of her difficult moods.
And there was still some money left; we didn’t need to worry
yet.
“It’s a bit soon,” I said. “Why not wait a little longer?”
Silva listened as if none of it had anything to do with her, and
I took her calm as a sign she was getting better.
Y
ou are not gone. I
am full of pictures of you that spill through my head in an
unending stream, and I have your voices all around me. You are not
gone, because what I see and hear are not memories. I am not
remembering the sight of you both, your sounds and your words, I am
not bringing you to mind as you once were. It is
you
I see
and hear. But there is no comfort in it, because I know you are
dead. I have not gone mad. You are dead, and how can there ever be
any comfort from that? I no longer have you, though I see and hear
you. It just means that nothing in this world is as real as you
are. You will never be gone, but no more will you ever come back to
me. You are both dead.
I remember the first few days only as a time when I thought my
throat was blocked with stones and I wanted my heart to stop. Every
beat of it hurt me. I tried to stop breathing. I wanted my lungs to
choke, I wanted to sink to the bottom of the river and be with you,
not that that made sense, even to me. Of course I knew you were no
longer there, for they had lifted you, poor drowned souls, out of
the water.
Yet the river is, for me, where you were and will now always be,
down under the water, your faces calm and your skin as clean and
white as shell. You do not perish. Slowly, patiently, you blink
your eyes, and your dark, curling hair still grows, and all day
long the river current plays with it, spinning it in wafts around
your shoulders. You let the water turn you this way and that, and
your hands rise and fall, your fingers open and close. You are
waiting for me now, just as I, since the day you disappeared,
waited for you. This is why I will not go far from the river.
Other people are waiting, too, official people. They are waiting
for someone to come and tell them who you are, and to bury you. And
I can’t, because the official people have got rules. They are
holding behind their backs all the rules they have for people like
us, and as soon as they knew I didn’t belong here, they wouldn’t
let me near you. There are laws, they will say. They wouldn’t let
me bury you, and they’d send me back, and then I would be farther
away from you than ever.
So, soon they will have to bury you without your names, and I
won’t know where. But at least you – no, not you, only the
discarded shells of you they brought to the shore – will lie
together, and not far away. I will stay nearby and go on talking to
you every day, and every day I will watch the river for a runnel in
the tide, a flicker of light, a wave feathering the surface that
will tell me you are waiting.
I have heard them since I was a child, but I never felt before
now the truth of them, those fairy tales of mortal people who step
off dry land leaving not a single footprint, drawn to the sea or a
lake or river for love of a lost one who has been taken and
transformed into an underwater spirit. But the oldest stories turn
out to be true, at least in this: the vanishing from sight, the
yearning of the one left waiting for the beloved who is never
coming back. An old story, my love, is what we are now, and all we
have.
Annabel and Ron try to take my mind off all this. They think it
is not good for me to spend my time wandering between my bed and
the river. They think I talk to myself. Ron thinks I should go back
and work for Vi again, Annabel doesn’t, but she doesn’t know what I
should do instead. I don’t want them to worry so much, especially
not Annabel. I want her to think I am beginning to recover.
Meanwhile she is very kind, and Ron would do anything in his
power to make me comfortable, and it is calming to know I am not
wholly alone. I am grateful for them. If they were not here, there
would be no reason not to go mad. Annabel herself is growing
heavier and slower by the day, and there is a certain calm in that
for me, too. She is stupidly content. She does not know I am
waiting for her baby just as much as she is. She does not know her
baby is my reason to stay alive a little longer.
I
wasn’t so out of
touch with reality as to want to give birth in the cabin, without
help. I knew I would have to see a doctor eventually. I wanted to
be the one to choose when, that was all. I would go when I felt
ready. For months I’d imagined it as if I were watching myself in a
film, enacting the scene where I present myself to a jovial doctor
with some story about being new in the area, and my bump would be
routinely examined and we’d make arrangements about the delivery.
Well done, mum, you’re doing fine, we’ll expect you at the
hospital when baby decides to put in an appearance!
Now I could see it might be more difficult than that. I needed
time to prepare myself, but there was no hurry. By the middle of
August the northern summer had begun to give way to autumn, but
still I had no proper sense of time passing. Across the river on
dry days now the combines were at work in the fields, raising
clouds of pale dust in long straight rows. I went for walks under
rainy skies, grateful for a new sharpness in the wind off the
water, utterly content. I don’t know where my complacency came from
unless from pregnancy itself – some merciful, hormonal muffling of
the very idea of risk – but I was sure everything was fine. The
baby was growing and kicking, and didn’t thousands of women gave
birth every day? There was nothing to worry about. There were times
when I was tempted to give up on the idea of the doctor and just
let nature take its course. I had ages to go.
It was worth putting up with Silva nagging me about it, and
about everything else, to hear her talking again, or so I thought.
At least she had come far enough out of her torpor to care about
something. Besides, nothing upset me much. I felt safer than I had
ever felt in my life, attuned to my body’s growing weight, its
rhythms, even to its small lapses and betrayals; I swelled and
sweated, I gasped with heartburn, the veins on my legs bulged like
coiled worms. I had to pee a dozen times a day, and I could no
longer lie flat on my back. But I accepted everything that was
happening to me. I marvelled at the willing, aching vessel my body
had become for the child, whose size was now quite terrific, and I
gave myself up easily to its nightlong pummelling under my ribs. I
was happy.
But unlike me, and although there was no reason for it, Silva
was edgy all the time. At the cabin she watched me constantly, and
although she cared about the baby, she wasn’t kind to me. Her
attention was scrupulous but disapproving, as if the baby needed
her guardianship because it was being born to a mother too hapless
to deserve it. And she was full of opinions, all of them
superstitious and most of them closer to witchcraft than to
midwifery: I mustn’t stand for more than half an hour (as if I
wanted to), because I’d draw blood from the baby’s brain; I
shouldn’t cut my hair because the baby would then be born with weak
hair. I suppose I was touched, but nonetheless her scrutiny was
wearing, and if I objected mildly to any of it or took a shade too
lightly some silly piece of advice, she got angry. I learned to
overcome the urge to laugh her concerns away. There was some
respite when she went off on her wanderings along the river, but
when she returned she would be more dogmatic still, with plans for
more unpleasant, punitive little rituals that I would have to
undergo. I lay with my feet pointing to the ceiling, I inhaled
bitter, steaming concoctions of boiled leaves for lung strength.
All, of course, for the baby’s good. Often the cabin seemed
unbearably small, yet when Ron came there would always somehow be
more room, not less.