Among the Missing (17 page)

The next day he drove back up through Netherloch. He parked the Land Rover at the Highland Bounty Mini-Mart again, noticing and thinking it odd that the store was closed on a Saturday. As before, he walked the three miles to the bridge. The area around it was still crowded with spectators, and there were now several radio cars and two TV mobile broadcast vans parked just beyond the barricades on the road. He could see that down by the bridge approach a pontoon holding winching gear now reached from the bank almost a quarter of the way across the river. Men were walking up and down on it, directing the lifting of twisted, dripping hunks of steel and concrete onto a salvage barge moored alongside. Some dinghies and a couple of boats were tied up at the pontoon, close to the bank. Farther out he saw two pairs of divers flipping into the water from two launches midstream, and he could see that work was under way across the river, too. A smaller pontoon had appeared, and the industrial wasteland next to the opposite bridge approach was being razed by bulldozers. Engine noises from both banks rose into the air and met in a swirl of sound overhead.

Close to where he stood, chain-link fencing was going up in place of the crowd barriers and police cordon tape, and he asked one of the men at work on it where he would find the office. He was directed to a mobile unit parked on the far side of the approach road. A man stood smoking at the entrance, and another man waiting inside turned and stared as Ron stepped in. The place was airless and muddy and smelled of sweat and warmed-up plastic. Two men in shirtsleeves sat behind a cluster of desks, one young and slight in a way that marked him out as the junior. Both had wads of paper in front of them, and the older one was arched back and swiveling in his chair, speaking on the telephone. On the wall by his desk was a board with a year planner and a postcard that read “A Man Without a Woman Is Like a Neck Without a Pain.” Ron stood at a respectful distance.

The man in front of him was talking in halting English to the
younger man behind the desk; after a while he called in the second man from outside, wrote down some figures for him, and after protracted translation, both signed some papers and left. The young man now had his head down writing; the older one was gazing upward with the telephone at his ear, listening with obvious exasperation.

Ron stepped forward. “Excuse me, I’m looking—”

The young man looked up. “Skills?”

“Construction. General building. Transport, mainly.”

“Transport? HGV? Excavators? Got rough-terrain experience?”

“LGV. And PCV. Just … driving. I’ll do anything. Don’t mind heavy work.” Ron paused. “I just want to help.”

The man handed him an application.

“Pens over there,” he said and motioned toward a narrow ledge at one side of the unit. “Answer all the questions, mind.”

Ron took his time, turning his back as he took the card of the Glendarroch Bed and Breakfast from his pocket and copied the details down under “Address,” and in brackets wrote “temporary.” He covered his prison years with a lie about working for a contractor in Spain, with names and places he’d long ago memorized for precisely this purpose. He handed the form back just as the older man finished his call and turned to his colleague, running his hands through his hair and groaning.

“Nae fucking use, Davey. There’s naebody else to try till Monday. They’ll have tae fucking swim.”

“It’s a difficult situation, Mr. Sturrock.”

Mr. Sturrock glanced over at Ron’s application, lying on the desk. “Transport? Can he drive a fucking boat?” he asked his colleague, sourly. He looked at Ron. “Eh? I’m a couple of guys short. I’ve eighteen men from Inverness starting this side eight o’clock tomorrow and I’ve naebody to get them over. Don’t suppose you can handle a thirty-foot boat with an outboard, son?”

The young man shook his head over Ron’s application. “Doesnae say so here, Mr. Sturrock,” he said.

“I can, I’ve worked boats,” Ron said recklessly. “Never thought to put it down, it was a while ago. Fishing, harbor boats. A thirty-footer’s no problem.”

Mr. Sturrock stared at him. “You kidding me?” He paused. “I’m no’ talking fucking barge holidays on the Norfolk Broads, mind. Have you got your ICC?”

“Doesn’t need an ICC,” the first man said. “He’s UK. Have you got your NPC?” He scanned the form. “No, well, you won’t, you’re fifty. Have you got NPC equivalent?”

“Not on me. But I could send for it,” Ron said. He could prevaricate over it for a while, if need be.

The two men looked at each other. “He has to be qualified, Mr. Sturrock. NPC, or equivalent,” the first man said.

“Aye, Davey, but we’re desperate here. If we give him a wee tryout now and he’s okay,” said Mr. Sturrock, “that’ll get us by for tomorrow at least. Alan’s down at the boat now, he can give him a go and see how he handles it. See what I’m saying?”

“Mr. Sturrock, he has to be qualified.”

“Come on, Davey, you want to spend the rest of the day trying to get somebody else frae fuck knows where?”

“I’m just trying to be thorough.”

“I’ve worked boats on and off since I was fifteen,” Ron said.

“But there’s the local knowledge,” the young man said, pulling a thick sheaf of papers from the desk and turning up the right page. “You’d need to familiarize yourself with ‘local seamarks, local traffic practices, mud banks, shoal waters,’ ” he read. “You’d have to ‘demonstrate knowledge of heights of tides, neap and spring tides and tidal streams, and local safe landing places according to differing weather conditions.’ ”

Ron nodded. At least not every term he’d just heard was unfamiliar. “It would be a matter of learning the local conditions. And being always safety-aware,” he said. “I learn fast.”

“Aye, and nobody else we could get at this fucking notice is going to have local knowledge either, are they?” Mr. Sturrock said. “And he’s qualified. Aren’t you, son? Mind you, I’ll take experience over a fucking certificate any day o’ the week,” he said, looking hard at Ron. “Paperwork to follow, eh? We just need a copy for the file here. You’ll get your paperwork in to Davey here right enough, won’t you?” He turned to his colleague. “I’m not paying eighteen men to stay idle for the sake of a wee bit of paper when I’ve got an experienced guy standing in front of me. Send him on down, and if Alan says he’s okay, put him on the day rate. Write down ‘paperwork to follow’ and we’re covered.”

The younger man shrugged and Mr. Sturrock smiled, and Ron signed.

I slept and slept, and I fell into dreams like long, perilous ruts, channels of movement that swept me along helter-skelter, not in pursuit or escape from anything I could name but with some formless, looming jeopardy present all around and above me. I slept all that night and for spells the following day, and if when I woke I saw or heard Silva nearby, stepping into the trailer or tinkering and fetching outside, I felt as though she was permitting me these collapsed hours as kindly as if she had put me to bed herself and told me to close my eyes and rest. I would come to, and lie there, slowly calculating the passing of seconds against the beating of my heart (would my baby have a beating heart yet?) while my waking thoughts began to tick once more to the rhythm of the day, of which, thank God, a little less would remain. The shaking that had been going on inside me since I walked out of the Invermuir Lodge Hotel abated. As I began to feel steadier, my sickness eased somewhat.

But my mind was empty, drab, as if it were choosing to turn away and live outside of what was happening to me. I slept through another night, and the next day I got up. But between sleeps, all I could do was sit outside wrapped in blankets, looking at the river. Silva watched me closely. I told her I had a nervous stomach, and she said she sometimes had one, too. The next time I felt sick she wouldn’t let me lie down or drink water. She tore a ragged triangle off the corner of a slice of bread, spread it with jam, and made me eat it. I felt better at once. She was taking me in hand in some way and I was grateful, but she didn’t know I was pregnant, of course.

She was restless. In the middle of the afternoon she took two empty containers and walked up to the service station. She was gone nearly
three hours. Her absence filled me with terror. Having had her company for just a day and a half left me in such agitation at the thought of being alone again that when she came back I asked her sharply why she had been away so long.

“I needed to fill up with drinking water. I wanted to see what was happening. I was finding things out,” she replied, dumping the full containers on the kitchen counter. She told me the place was crowded with sightseers and journalists and drivers with trucks of supplies for the salvage work. There were also a lot of vagrants, turned off the wasteland behind the car park, and quite a few police. Not all the vehicles had been pulled out of the river yet, she said.

“There were thirteen survivors and they found nine bodies in the river. There’s four cars still in there. They can’t get them out yet because of the weather, it’s the big spring tides or it’s too deep or it’s the winds or something. They know who they are, all the people still down there. There’s seven.”

“How can they know, if they can’t get to them?”

She looked surprised. “Because they’re missing. Seven are missing. They’ve got their names. Their photos are in the papers, everywhere. They’ve told the families.”

Why did this shock me? Of course the victims would be counted and named; that anyone should die randomly and also remain anonymous would be an unbearably compounded sadness, and people are inquisitive about the deaths of others, even strangers on a list of lost and missing. The papers would keep a tally and reveal names and faces and describe good lives cut short and families bereft, it being an obligation of tragedy to ponder urgent reversals in the lives of those left behind, to bow gently in the direction of other people’s grief.

“So who are they?” I said. “Did you get a paper?”

“I saw them on the news in the cafeteria. There was a van with a father and his son and another man, they cleaned carpets. A woman tourist in a rental car, and a man and his secretary on business. Oh, yes, and a retired man coming back from golf. That’s the seven. So there you are.” Silva’s voice was newly fresh and relaxed, and her eyes shone. “You see? Nobody else.”

“You actually saw them? These people’s faces?”

She nodded. “They were all happy photos. Then I went outside. They’re clearing that dump down near the river. I saw trucks going in,
same thing on the other side. There were people there just watching. I saw a man I know,” she said. “He was in the shop that day, I was talking to him the moment it happened. His name’s Ron. He asked if I was all right. I said it’s those poor people and their families I’m sorry for.”

I didn’t speak. I was picturing Col and trying the word
families
up against him, and it didn’t suit him. I couldn’t think of just the two of us as a family, and that was a relief. He would not suffer long or deeply for loss of me. He might remember things about me: my face, some words stored somewhere in his mind. I might even for a while warm his heart with an idea of love, now forever abstracted and beyond test, kept perfect by my absence. Then he would forget me, probably. I hoped he would.

“This man I was talking to, he said they might never get them out.”

“What does he know about it?”

“Oh, he knows. He’s something to do with boats. He’s working for the contractors, running crews across. He took some divers out to the middle where the cars were sunk, and they said they might not ever get to them,” Silva said. “They might get washed out to sea and break up and the bodies would just disappear.”

For a few hours after that she moved lightly about the place preparing for Stefan and Anna, setting little circles of order around herself, folding clothes, lining up shoes, separating cutlery and plates. She began to ask me about myself.

I told her I used to live in England and I had lost my job and I had no house anymore because it belonged to the mortgage company after my father died. That wasn’t so far from the truth. But what also seemed quite true to me was that I was not and never had been the woman tourist probably trapped in a rental car in the middle of the river. Nor did I feel I was really tricking either of us to imagine that this had happened to some
other
woman tourist; watching Silva dart around cleaning and tidying for them, I told myself that her certainty of Stefan’s and Anna’s safety was more to be relied upon than an assumption that they had been in the car. Suppose just after I left them Stefan had taken Anna to the service station for lunch? Then the car might have been stolen from the roadside. Or the man who had changed the plates that afternoon might have been driving it. Silva knew her husband best. Sharing her faith in him to stay alive was the only way I could spare myself the distress of believing them lost. It was also the only way I could help her.

And she was helping me. She asked me more and more, and I began to talk more easily, building my new history bit by bit as from her questions came my answers, like little blocks appearing in my hands that I could turn and consider to see where they fit, and set in place, one by one. After I lost my house I had spent three months in a hostel trying to get a job, until I had to leave. Then I had taken the bus all the way up to Inverness because I had two spinster cousins there. We hadn’t been in close touch, but I’d met them a few times when I was younger. They would be elderly by now, maybe frail and glad of my help in the house; I’d been thinking I could even move in with them. At least they wouldn’t turn me away while I got settled. As I told it, the story gained credibility for me; even though before I said all this the idea had never existed, it did now. I wanted Silva to think it brave and commendable of me, making a fresh start in the north of Scotland, closer to family. I did not want her to think me desperate or degraded. But then, I told her, despising the rise in my voice, it turned out I’d been sending the cousins Christmas cards for years and all for nothing (though I had to admit I hadn’t had one from them for some time). When I got to their address, they had long ago moved away. Nobody had even heard of them. The young couple living in the house now were very nice to me and had agreed to keep my luggage in their garage until I got myself organized. I’d been looking around Netherloch for shop or bar work and a roof over my head when the bridge went down and I’d got stranded without enough money on me for a hotel, and then I had got sick.