Among the Missing (13 page)

It was cold, so I hurried. In Invermuir village, the main road was jammed with traffic bound for Netherloch and Inverness, but the other side, heading west to Fort Augustus, was choked, too. I don’t know why I set off in the direction of the bridge, but I walked eastward along the roadside into the night, at a pace hardly slower than the crawling line of cars. There were emergency vehicles stationed here and there with their lights flashing and policemen standing in the middle of the traffic, attempting to keep it moving. Drivers were sounding their horns and turning around, maneuvering back and forth and sending up plumes of exhaust, headlamps looming and crisscrossing the darkness with restless beams of light.

I kept away from the glare as much as I could and moved on through the smoky drifts of petrol fumes, my head down. Knots of stranded people had gathered at the village bus stops and cars were stopping to give them lifts, but I couldn’t risk joining them, looking lost and in need of help. I had watched my car go into the river, I had seen myself die; I ought to be gone, invisible forevermore. Until I had time to think and reestablish myself, somewhere and somehow, as another person, I had to learn how to have no presence at all, to move among people with the stealth of a ghost. I must be alive to no one.

Soon I no longer noticed the cold. I felt newly light and unhindered, exhilarated by having accomplished so conclusively and tidily the bringing to an end of my life with Col. But I also felt left behind, as if my true fate had gone forward and was enacting itself in advance of me, somewhere up ahead. I had to rejoin my life, or rather meet up with myself again and make another life. This was another reason to hurry.

I took a pathway off the road that led down to a walkers’ trail along the river, where the air was leafy and quiet. I had no flashlight, but the road ran parallel above and the lights of cars washed through the trees, showing me my way. From time to time the traffic thinned and the way cleared for wailing emergency vehicles. A few miles before Netherloch, the riverside path fizzled out, so I joined the road again.

I walked on, still not knowing why I was going in the direction of the bridge, but walking with purpose. Was I seeking out the broken gate in the hedge that led down to Stefan’s trailer? Not consciously. I was keeping disconnected in my mind any daytime memory of the road and the murky, illogical contours of the night landscape.

But it was getting late. More and more cars drove on past me, and I grew tired. Netherloch was still miles away, and I had to spend the night somewhere. I pulled my hat down over my ears, tucked my chin into my scarf, and waited at the next bus stop I came to. Within a minute a car stopped. It was driven by a woman about my age who had two teenage girls with her. They were doing their best to get to Inverness, and I was welcome, she said, to go with them. I was looking a bit shocked, was I all right? And wasn’t it a terrible thing that had happened?

I thanked her and got in the back. I was just cold and tired, I assured her, and gave her some story about my car breaking down and leaving it at the roadside because I preferred to walk rather than wait for rescue with the roads so jammed, but I’d underestimated the distance to Netherloch. She told me I had no chance of getting a room there for the night, the radio said the town was packed out. I’d do better going on to Inverness with her, however long it took. We crawled along; the two girls fell asleep, and to avoid conversation I pretended to as well, turning my face to the window and keeping my eyes half-closed.

It was only when I saw the lights of the service station up ahead that I realized I was returning to the trailer. All the hours I had been walking, I had been holding tight to myself a belief that Stefan and Anna were among the people who’d got out of the river alive. But I had to make sure they were safe. I had to talk to Stefan. He had lost the car that had cost him all the money he had, and I couldn’t alter that, but I had to divide the money with him. I would explain why I couldn’t part with all of it; as a father, he would understand. But I wanted to give him half of it back, to ease his loss. I made excuses to the woman about needing a bathroom and got out at the service station.

I walked back to the broken gate and down the track. The trailer was dark and shut up. There was nothing strange about that, I told myself. They might not be back yet; they could be still in one of the temporary first aid stations near the bridge. Or they might be in hospital, as a matter of routine. Of course they wouldn’t be here. I felt foolish, staring through the dark at the closed door. I imagined it opening and Stefan appearing at the top of the steps, looking suspicious and puzzled until he recognized me, and then I realized what an odd sort of rescuer I must look. Sweat was running down my body and through my hair, and I was shivering. Nausea swept over me again, as it often did when I was hungry. But my hand thrust in my pocket was clutching the envelope with the money; pleasure was welling up inside me as if I had already seen the relief on Stefan’s face. Of course there couldn’t be anyone inside the trailer, but I walked carefully across the stones, up the steps, and knocked on the door.

Nobody came. I waited, and the nausea grew worse. I tried the door handle. It opened into blackness and silence, and I was afraid, yet I wanted to go in. The night outside was suddenly no place to be; I needed walls and a roof, I needed shelter even if only this: precarious, thin, leaking. I stepped up into the doorway and peered inside. I could smell the soapy, vinyl smell from yesterday and also the bitter tang of cigarettes. Nothing moved, but in the darkness I knew there was something warm and alive. My heart was thumping like knuckles against the back of my ribs, bone against bone, and I took a breath to say something, but I doubled over instead, and retched. My mouth filled with saliva and bile. I spat on the floor, and as I was trying to stand up straight again, a flashlight snapped on. Instantly its beam lurched away and upward, and I felt it come down hard on my head and shoulders, and then a hand was hauling me upright by the hair. A woman’s screams filled the trailer, the flashlight fell with a clunk, and its beam played jaggedly on her kicking feet and jerked over the ceiling and walls. I was trapped. I couldn’t get out of the trailer or away from the screaming. Then the slapping and punching started.

I couldn’t speak. Even if I could have explained, or got any words out at all, she wouldn’t have heard. Fists and arms and feet were flying in a rolling beam of light, and through the screams she was spitting out words over and over, telling me to get out, go away, leave her alone. I held her off as best I could until, shielding my head, I managed at last to
stand up straight and face her. I was taller than she was. I stopped her next blow by grasping her wrists.

“Stop! Please stop! I didn’t mean any harm,” I said. “I’m sorry. It’s okay. Please! Please—”

My voice cracked suddenly. The woman stopped screaming and stared at me, and then she burst into tears. I wanted to say more, but I couldn’t. Keeping hold of one of her wrists, I scooped up the flashlight at my feet and shone it at her. In the shaking light, her face was colorless and stricken, the long blond hair sticky and matted to her scalp.

How could I comfort her? How could I dare offer comfort? “Please, don’t. Please. I’m sorry,” I said.

We were stock-still for an instant. My grip on her wrist loosened. She wrenched her arm free and backed away. The foldaway table and pullout bed behind her, the blankets dragged to the floor, a heap of clothes, were now caught in the glow of the flashlight. She was alone. Part of the ceiling had curled away, exposing a web of saturated fibrous stuff from which water was seeping into a bucket on the floor.

“You tramp! You filthy tramp! Get out of here, get out now!
Get out!
”

She lunged forward, shoving me toward the door so hard I stumbled and fell. Then she sank back into the dark mass of bedding and hid her face in another burst of weeping. I scrambled to my feet and ran from the trailer.

I climbed as fast as I could up the track, and when I reached the top I collapsed on the ground, coughing bile and fighting for breath. After a while I managed to sit up, and I stayed there, trying to drag in a proper lungful of air and stop the shaking in my legs. I was exhausted and sick from lack of food. I had nowhere to spend the night. I had no name. Which terror should I face first: being hungry, pregnant, homeless, or nameless?

But the worst terror was that Stefan and his daughter hadn’t come back. They hadn’t come back and the woman in the trailer didn’t know why, and I had not been able to tell her. I had sold him the car and now I had money to keep my child, but where was hers? I turned toward the lights of the service station.

It was thronged with people, but hunger forced me inside. I had to hope that although my face might appear in the papers and on television as one of the dead, it would be a wedding photograph, the only pictures
Col had of me. I was surely unrecognizable now as the person who’d smiled into the camera that day. My face was grim under the wreckage of makeup and stinging from cold and the blows and scratches of the struggle in the trailer. My hair had been curled and adorned with ludicrous turquoise feathers on the day I got married; now it was shorter and darker, and most of it was hidden under a flat woolen hat. Nobody would link a smiling photograph with this wretched woman shuffling along in a cafeteria queue. I bought what was available, coffee and a muffin, and took them over to a table, which I had to share. There was a television suspended from the ceiling tuned soundlessly to the bridge news, and I ate and drank with my eyes raised to it, avoiding contact with the three other people at the table. I kept my cup up close to my face and let the coffee steam rise and warm my skin in between sips.

By now the service station should have closed for the night, but it was staying open for the people who were stranded. Extra plastic chairs had appeared, and people were bedding down on car blankets and jackets and coats all over the floor. Some appeared to be sleeping; others were talking and drinking doggedly, doing puzzles or playing cards, trying to control children. From the games arcade came ceaseless zooming and firing sounds and the unfettered, giddy yelps of teenage boys. A woman dozed in a wheelchair near the door to the ladies’, half-hidden by the fronds of a huge artificial fern. Every table in the cafeteria was full, although the serving counter had been stripped of everything except tea and coffee in foam cups. In the shop, people were buying up the last of the chocolate and sweets and magazines, but the queues had lessened because there was nothing of much use left; untouched piles of Frisbees and celebrity memoirs stood out among the emptied shelves and racks. Although the place was thronged, there was a pall of numb, anxious quiet that perhaps hangs over all refugees.

I was wondering what to do, hoping I might find a space on the floor somewhere away from others and out of the freezing gusts from the doors, when four police officers came in, two men and two women. They didn’t seem to have any particular job to do; there was no disorder to bring under control. The manager and a younger sidekick joined them, and after a few minutes of talk, swinging on their heels and looking around, they drifted off, patrolling the mass of sprawling bodies. Several people went up to talk to them, with questions or complaints, I supposed. I watched all this from behind a book rack in the shop. When
it began to look as if the police were settled in for the night, I knew I couldn’t stay.

Outside, the temperature had dropped further. I needed to find shelter somewhere. I made my way around the back and followed the fence into the darkness at the far corner of the car park, where I found again the opening to the abandoned track I’d driven down with Stefan and Anna twelve hours before. Only twelve hours? It seemed—in a way it was—a lifetime ago. Ahead of me I could see the flames of several small fires burning among the wrecked buildings on the wasteland; to my right, I could see the glow of arc lights over the bridge abutments and the flicker of helicopters in the sky. I walked past the first straggly piles of debris at the sides of the track toward the fires, on through broken glass and old cans, mounds of rubble and discarded tires, piles of ripped roofing felt, wiring, and cable. Parts of wrecked cars rose in heaps around me; broken office furniture and rotten carpet jutted up from buckled and vandalized dumpsters. I was far enough from the traffic and the service station to catch the cold tang of the estuary, mixed with the smell of damp fields and rust and a sullen overlay of smoke. I reached the corner of a derelict brick shed and edged my way along the wall to the next corner until I could see a barren stretch of cracked concrete that must once have been the floor of a factory or warehouse. At its far edges I could make out the jagged remains of half-demolished walls. There several bonfires burned, and in their cloudy, yellow light the stooping silhouettes of people moved to and fro, passing bottles, lifting sticks into the flames, collecting from the ground anything that might make shelters for the night. Beyond them the black estuary glittered with the sweeping lights of helicopters, the air thudded and shrieked with propeller noise and sirens. Under the gleaming sky, a great, desperate agitation was in progress, but here the faraway wails were an unreal music, part of the rushing-by of a world miles from this encampment among the scrub and banks of litter where human beings hunkered down to get through the night, staring into dying fires.