Among the Missing (16 page)

I didn’t have it anymore. I had put it along with everything else on a bonfire in the back garden, the same garden beyond the fence in the background of the picture, though the fence had long since been replaced by an ornamental cinder-block wall. I had been in a hurry to be done with my father’s things and get going; in three weeks I would be married. I had watched the trembling air above the flames suck the photograph upward, curl and blacken it into weightless fragments of ash, and I had been impatient with myself for noticing at all that it was fragmenting away to nothing in the very place it depicted, our back garden captured in Kodachrome more than forty years before. But I hadn’t let myself ponder any further on my strange
in utero
status in it, both invisible and present, or on the absence in it of any omen of the tragedy into whose tainted echoes and rhythms I would be born and grow up. I just watched it burn, and I trusted it to disappear.

I woke her in the early afternoon. Her face was puffy and white and not healthy-looking at all, and she would have gone on sleeping, but I’d had enough of waiting. I was curious. Also I needed something else to think about, because although I knew you would be back before dark, I was puzzled at what was keeping you. I could hear that the traffic was moving again up on the road. You must have taken Anna over to the other side of the bridge, I was hoping, or maybe even to Inverness. You knew I didn’t like you doing that, and that would be why you hadn’t called. Or your phone battery had died. You’d confess to it when you were back, and after a time you’d try to make me forgive you, and after a time I would, in our usual way. Or maybe you’d caught the bus to Netherloch and got stuck there when the roads jammed up. Wherever you were, you’d be trying to get back. You would both be home soon.

While she’d been asleep, to keep busy and warm I had wandered up the bank and brought back some wood and laid a fire, and I’d dragged over the old enamel bathtub and set it there on top of the circle of big stones. Then I hauled water up from the river in plastic canisters and filled the tub and lit the fire. When the water heats up, it sends off great clouds of steam into the cold air. All that took hours.

When her eyes opened, I expected her to be shocked to find herself there in our trailer. I thought she would immediately be ready to go. But she lay there drowsy and half-awake and watched me as if she was in no hurry while I sorted through a bundle of clothes. I wasn’t sure if I liked or disliked that.

“You’ve been asleep. Are you feeling better now?”

She raised her head a few inches and shook it, then grunted and lay down again.

“I don’t know.” She rubbed her hands over her face, then sat up. “I’m still so tired.”

I picked out some things of yours and Anna’s for washing and went back outside to the fire. I drew off a few jugfuls of hot water into a basin, then I stirred in some washing soda crystals and added a few grains of detergent, for the scent. The soda is cheap and makes the powder last longer. I dropped your clothes in and let the slippery, bluish scum lap over the wet material. It always amazed me slightly, the chemically floral smell rising from a basin on the ground outside the trailer, where the real smells were of river mud and woodsmoke and sometimes frying onions and the rain drying on stones. I loved it, that house-proud, indoors scent of laundry.

She came outside and stood watching while I kneeled down and swirled the things around, pressing Anna’s little clothes against the sides of the basin.

“I was wondering … I mean, the bridge, if you knew,” she said. “Yesterday—I mean, you can see it from here. Did you see it happen? Has anyone—”

“I was at work. I heard it.”

“So you weren’t here? But was there, I mean, was there anyone—”

“Look, who are you? What do you want?”

“Nothing! Nothing, honestly. That is, I wanted … Are you here on your own?”

“My husband is on his way back. With my daughter. Right now.”

“On his way?” she said.

“Right now. I’m expecting them soon.”

I turned back to the washing. Now it came to it, I didn’t want her calling the hospital for me. Even asking her to would be like believing you and Anna weren’t safe and already on your way back to me. I went on knead, knead, kneading your saturated things, lifting, rubbing, squeezing, submerging them, over and over and over. She didn’t move. I looked up. She was staring at the basin of wet clothes. Tears were running down her face.

“Oh, thank God. So it’s all okay. Well. I should go.”

But she didn’t go. I stood up.

“Who
are
you? What do you want? What were you doing down here last night?”

“I’m sorry, I’ll go. I just needed … I was tired, I feel so sick sometimes. I’ll go.”

“What’s the matter? Are you ill?”

“I just wanted to make sure. Your husband … is he, I mean, where is he?”

“My husband is fine. What is it to you? We can take care of ourselves,” I said.

She was looking at me with her frightened, watery eyes, and suddenly she turned away and doubled over, trying to catch and hold her breath. She was going to throw up again.

“Oh, for God’s sake! Sit down. What’s the matter with you? Sit down and get warm.”

“Thanks. Just for a minute.” She hunkered by the fire and wiped her eyes, then pulled a ragged bit of tissue from her pocket and blew her nose. She stuffed the tissue into the fire and held her hands over the steam for a while to warm them, rubbing her fingers together. She looked hard at her palms, then rubbed them down her jacket. Her hands displeased her. There was disgust in her eyes at the way dirt and cold were starting to cling to her.

“Did you say your name was Annabel?”

She nodded. She was still rubbing her hands.

“Well, thanks. I’ll be off in a minute,” she said.

She lifted her head and looked out beyond the yellow ring of the fire and across the river into the raw afternoon. There were a few geese on the water, and the old gray cabin stood lonely as always, the sky collapsing with the weight of low cloud into the sloping tree line above it. Sounds from the bridge and the road were muffled by cold and fog.

“Oh, for God’s sake, look at you. You don’t have anywhere to go.”

She looked surprised. “Oh, well, not really, not anywhere permanent.… I suppose I’ll get myself organized, find somewhere.” Her eyes filled with tears again. “I didn’t know it would be this hard. I didn’t think I’d feel this bad.”

“There’s hot water.” I nodded at the fire. “I need some of it for rinsing, but you can wash up if you want.”

She moved in a bit closer, waving the steam away with her arm, and peered in. The river water is dark with peat, but the silt stays at the bottom.
She probably didn’t know that the salt water that comes in on the flow tide is heavier than river water and runs underneath it.

“In there? Wash in that?”

“It’s all right for washing. It’s not seawater. You have to wait awhile though,” I said. “I’ll kick out the fire and when the metal’s cooled down you get in.”

She looked round. “Get in? You mean here—out here? What about, I mean—”

“Where else? I do it all the time. You don’t have to if you don’t want to. I just thought you could do with it.”

“What if somebody comes?”

“Don’t be stupid. Who do you think’s going to come down here?”

I laughed, thinking of you coming back and finding her standing naked and dripping. She tried to smile, but there was a genuinely shy look about her. I didn’t think I had ever seen anyone older than me blushing before. How could she be embarrassed about her body, at her age?

I tipped out the clothes water from the basin on the ground and refilled it from the enamel bathtub.

“If Stefan comes I’ll make sure he doesn’t see you. I’m only offering. Of course you don’t have to.”

She managed to smile. “I’d love to get clean.”

“You’ll be okay,” I said. “There’s nobody here but us.” I kicked out the ashes of the fire with the end of my foot. “Wait till I’ve done this and then you can get in.”

When I’d rinsed and wrung out your things and hung them up, she pulled off her hat and ruffled her hair. It was thick and dyed reddish, and dark at the roots. She dipped a hand in the water. “Have you got any shampoo?”

“I’ll get it. You need to undress quick and get in right away. It cools down fast.”

When I came back, she was stepping into the bath and I saw I was right about her age. She was at least forty, maybe even old enough to be my mother. As she stooped and curled modestly into herself, her waist folded into a line just above her belly button, like a crease in a roll of dough, and the skin on her haunches looked dusty and neglected. She crouched and soaped herself, splashing water over her shoulders for the warmth, and her skin was wet and shining and bright white.

“Come on,” I said. “You have to be quick. My husband will be back soon.”

She stood up again and took the jug while I waited with the shampoo.

“Keep your mouth closed,” I said. “It’s not drinking water.”

She filled the jug and lifted it high in both hands to wet her hair, and as she raised her arms, her breasts swelled out, surprisingly firm and large and high. Her belly was rounded, as it would be at her age, but it looked hard, not soft. She tipped back her head and closed her eyes, and the water poured down, soaking her hair and face and neck. I watched it run in tiny branching trickles down her breasts; I saw beads form and hang and drop from her nipples, which stuck out like little carvings in polished red stone, the way they do. She was pregnant.

I handed her the shampoo and took the jug. She stood with her hands folded protectively over her stomach, and I rinsed the suds from her head with jugful after jugful of water, until it began to go tepid. By then she was starting to shiver, so I made her step into the towel I had brought and I sent her inside to get dry. And just as I did every time after Anna’s bath, I tipped out the water, picked up the jug and soap and shampoo and the pile of clothes, and followed wet footprints across the stones to the trailer. The stupid woman needed looking after.

Another day passed before Ron returned to the bridge.

Very early the first morning, he’d awakened in the cabin exhausted and cold, his mind stunned and somehow also stale from the shock of all that had happened. He knew he would barely be able to converse that day, let alone convince anyone he was strong and fit for work, and the floor was dirtier than he’d judged it to be in the dark; his clothes were heavy with damp and grime. He needed to steady himself and also get good and clean, he decided, before he went asking for a job. So he made his way back along the river’s edge and struck up the steep slope into the forest; across the patch of cleared ground he was now able to make out on the far side the remains of a track that took him, after another climb, up to the road. No traffic passed him but the roadsides were crowded with vehicles parked in all directions, abandoned the night before when their drivers calculated they could walk the three or four miles to Netherloch faster than they would reach it by car. From the Highland Bounty Mini-Mart he set off in the Land Rover, traveling inland.

By eight o’clock he had driven nearly forty miles, far enough from the bridge, he hoped, for the usual tourist places to be unaffected by scores of stranded people seeking rooms. In a village called Aberarder he knocked on the door of a bungalow with a Vacancies board swinging from the sign that read
GLENDARROCH BED AND BREAKFAST
and explained to the landlady that his plans had been disrupted, he’d been turned back from going farther north and had been on the road nearly all night. He even managed to make a joke of asking, if it could be managed, for breakfast and bed, in that order. She was sympathetic; she’d been up half the night herself, watching the news. He ate ravenously, showered, and
fell asleep in an overheated, immaculately floral bedroom. In the afternoon he went out and found a camping and outdoor supplies shop, where he bought new jeans and work shirts, T-shirts and socks, a jacket and boots. He ate early in a pub and returned to the Glendarroch, where he watched soccer on the tiny wall-mounted television, lying naked on the glassy nylon quilt. Before he fell asleep, he realized that his face was tired and tight, because he had been smiling.