Among the Missing (18 page)

Silva looked at me with cool, curious eyes. It was possible she didn’t believe a word of it, but as long as she didn’t say so and as long as she let me stay, maybe I didn’t need her to. Whatever was true or not true, known or unknown—cars plunging off a collapsing bridge, Colin, the baby, Stefan and Anna,
other
people trapped and drowned—the fact was I could not bear to think of any of these things for more than a few minutes at a time.

In return she told me about Vi’s shabby little store and how Vi was drunk a lot of the time and how she put up with it because it meant cash, no questions about work permits. Vi hadn’t even asked exactly where she was from; she didn’t care.

“She sometimes says ‘your lot,’ but she doesn’t even know who she means.” Silva shrugged. “To her I’m just foreign. Just as well.”

I remembered Stefan’s demand that I ask no questions and how, when I did, his cold, pinchy face had softened.

“I don’t know where you’re from, either,” I said.

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. We went first to Greece and then Italy. Anna was born in Italy. We got to London, then we had to go to Glasgow. There were bad things. Things went wrong. So we came here.” She looked at me seriously. “We are better than this, we are not people who choose to be like this, Stefan and I. We used to have a place, a proper life. We are getting things better, soon we will be away from here. We will have our life again.”

She sighed and got up. A while later she made tea and we ate some bread and jam, and I had another nap.

So the day passed. Whenever she grew restless, she went off alone along the riverbank toward the bridge, or up to the top of the track, where, she told me, she just watched the traffic going by. When she wandered away, I stayed awake, watching over the place and keeping the fire going. We went our separate ways, both waiting for Stefan, each believing she was looking after the other. Later I heated a pot of water and cooked some rice, and when she came back we made a kind of stew with tomatoes and beans. As the afternoon began to fade, she set off again for the service station. Stefan and Anna might be there, she said, or most probably she would meet them on the road.

On Monday I got up early, before six. It was cold inside the trailer and the air was pale and empty. I dressed quickly and brushed my hair. When I put away the brush, I banged the cupboard shut on the wall above Annabel’s head, which woke her up.

“I have to get going,” I told her. “I need extra time. Maybe there’s a bus up to Netherloch and over the little bridge and I can get to work that way.” I hesitated. “Stefan knows I won’t be here. He’ll come and find me at work. So—”

“Do you mean—do you want me to—”

“Stay. You can guard the trailer. Go back to sleep.”

I got to the Highland Bounty at twenty to ten, more than two hours late. It was raining and the shop was locked up but the outside lights were on. Probably they’d been on all night after Vi went across to her place at the back. It was a horrible cottage, with water-stained walls, behind a scraggy hedge and a garden nothing more than dead grass. I banged on the door and waited. There was brown moss sprouting at the base of the water pipe. The rain was cold on my head.

I had to stand back when the door opened and the smell spilled out, the thick, salty smell of the stuff Vi ate, those pots of flakes she just poured boiling water into, and the smell of dirt, as if she kept sweating dogs in there with the windows shut. But she didn’t have any pets, she just never cleaned.

“Vi, I’m sorry I’m late, I had to get a bus to Netherloch and then I walked.”

Half of her face appeared round the door. Under the orange-shaded
ceiling light in the hall, she looked hardly human. She couldn’t get her mouth to work properly.

“I’m not dressed,” she managed to say. There was some scrabbling behind the door, and then one hand and a dry-looking arm covered in yellow nylon appeared. She shook the bunch of keys and a bag of coins at me.

“Here, don’t keep me out on the doorstep! Go and open up.”

I took them and went back across the tarmac, unlocked the shop, and turned on the lights. I opened the cash register and emptied in the coins, switched on the radio, and wiped down the counter with the spray and a paper cloth. I rubbed the old words off the sandwich board sign and wrote on both sides,
OPEN MILK SOUVENIRS GROSERIES ICECREAM
, and I carried it outside. Then I swept off the steps and emptied the litter bin. I mopped the floor near the door, and then I lit the kerosene stove in case Vi came in later. She couldn’t stand the cold. By this afternoon she’d be at the vodka just to keep the cold out, or so she said, earlier if she couldn’t sit in the hot fug around the stove.

The shelves were full of gaps. I restocked them and put on the kettle, then I wrote a list of things Vi needed to get from the Cash & Carry when she was sober enough to go. I poured a mug of tea and took it across. I rapped on the door, opened it, and called out that I was leaving it on the hall mat for her. I heard the toilet flushing upstairs.

Then I walked back slowly in the rain. I didn’t mind being at work, but today, with you still away, I didn’t know where to find the energy. The day had only just begun, and already my strength for any more of it was leaking away. Whatever I did it felt like dragging about a heavy load on my back, and for what? If all it came to was this, trying to get through as a person alone, how could I face it? I asked you. I felt sick with loneliness, sick to my heart of simple, ordinary things that only I was there to notice: water drops landing in the puddles in the tarmac, the greenness of the wet roadside in the rain, the aroma that would meet me when I stepped inside the shop of wrapped bread and fire lighters and tea dust. I had never needed you more.

But you were coming back. Somehow I would have to wait out the day in the wobbly heat haze from the stove, listening to the grating of the freezers and the tinking of the turned-down radio and watching the weather outside strike rainy shadows off the Peg-Board walls and
racks of empty shelving. And go on waiting, if I had to, for as long as it took.

When I came around the corner to the front, there was a Land Rover parked outside. Two men in work clothes were in the shop. One of them was Ron.

“Hello, Blondie,” he said, smiling, dumping tea, instant coffee, and sugar on the counter. “How are you? Had a nice lie-in?”

The other man called over. “Yeah, I was down here at half past eight, wasn’t I? Eight till eight you’re supposed to be open, aren’t you, love? Where’s the milk?”

We were out of fresh milk. “There’s only powdered,” I said. Then I tried to say there might be fresh later on, if Vi got an order in, but my eyes were stinging with tears. I picked up the box of tea bags to ring it up, but I couldn’t read the label. I fell into Vi’s chair and covered my face and burst into tears.

“Hey, hey, Blondie!” Ron said. “Hey, never mind him.”

The second man said, “Whoa, no offense, love, okay?” and then came Ron’s voice telling him to go and wait in the Land Rover and he’d only be five minutes, then I heard the
ting
of the shop bell. I looked up. The radio was squealing, distant and yappy like a tune tapped out with a fork on a wire.

Ron stepped around the counter and switched it off. “Having a rough time,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

I shook my head. “A bad start. I was late. Coming the Netherloch way now, it takes much longer.”

“You live on the other side? Where?”

“I used to get the bus over the bridge. Twenty-five minutes to here. Now it’s longer.”

“That’s tough. Going to be tough for a while.”

“I will have to get up more early. I’m sorry, it was silly to cry.”

“How’re you getting back tonight?”

I didn’t like that he was so nosy. “Same way,” I said in a sharp voice. “No problem. Like on the day the bridge fell. Walk to Netherloch, get a bus. Or maybe get a lift. People are kind.”

He was staring at me. “There’s nobody to help you? Nobody with a car? Where’s your husband?”

I was proud he had noticed my wedding ring. “He’s away. Just for a
while. He has to be away, for work, he is looking for work,” I said. “But I am not alone. I have a friend. She stays with me.”

“But the friend hasn’t got a car.”

“No.”

“When do you finish?”

“At six.”

“Okay, well, here’s what we do. You finish at six. I come back here at six and take you over.”

“No! No, I can’t do that. I can’t. I don’t know you.”

“You really think I’d do you harm?”

I hesitated, and then I had to smile. “No.”

He nudged the things on the counter toward me. “Good. Now I need to get going. What’s this come to?”

I totaled it up, and he paid. “I’ll see you later,” he said, at the door. “Stop worrying. I’ll take you safe over the river.”

I got up and put away the bedding, and tidied up the trailer just as I had seen Silva do. But she was gone, and it was so quiet, and after a while I couldn’t bear the thought of the sounds of yesterday—our feet up and down the steps, a pan scraping on the fire stones, most of all, our voices—against the silence I would have to endure before I would hear them again. The gap of solitude that opened up between the memory and the expectation of her company was too great, so wide and dark I was afraid I would fall into it and never get out. Nothing but lonely sounds welled up from the river, the geese landing and feeding, the stray calls of gulls following the tide. In the salty, white stillness of the air, I thought I heard the faraway wash of sea waves. I couldn’t stay. I cleaned my face and did what I could with my clothes. Then I closed the trailer and set off up the track toward the road.

Not far along was the place I had stopped the car to look at the map. Had that been five days before? Now the jagged bridge ends stuck out from the far bank on the last bridge piers left standing, and the twisted lanes of the roadway, torn and still, dipped down to the river. The reflections of a line of emergency lights along the remaining edge of the pavement splashed in broken bars of blue and orange off the gray water and detonated behind my eyes in tiny explosive afterimages. The helicopters still roamed above, hovering low enough for gusts of air to blow flecked waves in circles around the wreckage sticking up from the surface. In the middle of the river, where three spans of the bridge had collapsed and vanished, the water was flat and empty. From here, the people struggling to save themselves would have looked like flies spinning in a puddle.

When I got to the service station, I didn’t go in. Instead, I cut across
to the start of the track that led to the wasteland. All the cars had been cleared from that part of the car park, and the space was now the arrival point for trucks on their way down to the southern bridge end. There were policemen on duty, some with dogs, keeping spectators behind lines of tape on either side. I joined the back of the group and watched. The track entrance had been widened and a mobile office set up, its interior garish with strip lighting. Inside, boxes and computers and telephones were crowded on tabletops. Office chairs and filing cabinets, still wrapped in plastic, stood against the windows. Men in yellow hard hats went back and forth with flapping sheets of paper and two-way radios, checking trucks and sending them on, past two bulldozers and a digger that were leveling and pushing heaps of rubble into a low, loose wall at the site’s edge. Some of the trucks were covered, and most of the others carried machinery I couldn’t guess the use of, but I also saw two carrying more portable cabins, and on another a cluster of massive lights and chains and metal bars. The air was loud with droning generators and grinding wheels.

Across the river, upstream from the slanting northern end of the broken bridge, a muddy access road had been cut between newly felled trees down to the water’s edge. There, a long area had been leveled and a crane was at work, directed by salvage men stationed on the last slope of bridge road and in boats around the wreckage. A row of huge sheds was going up, and there was now an iron jetty with dinghies moored to it, lifting and falling in the slight swell of the ebb tide.