Among the Missing (19 page)

My attention was drawn back to my side of the river. Upstream and some way over to the left was a stretch of scrubby land where a few sheep grazed. Beyond the sheep, I could see some of the people from the wasteland coming and going around a fire they had just managed to light. Smoke swayed low and horizontal over the fields. Paused in a landscape in which only fire smoke and a few sheep moved, the human figures looked medieval, stranded out of their time and gazing across into another age in which a bulldozer was demolishing their already stooped and broken shelters. But their displacement was timeless, just another of the world’s arrhythmic visitations of calamity upon dispensable, unrecorded lives.

I turned away. I was hungry in a way I hadn’t been for days. I went first to the service station shop, bought soap, toothbrush, and toothpaste, and washed at a basin in the ladies’. In the café I ordered shepherd’s
pie and a pot of tea and took them to a window table from where I could watch the trucks and workmen. As I unloaded my tray, I realized I was almost enjoying myself. I sat down, poured out my tea, and began to eat. These transactions with strangers, no more than a few words and a polite glance over the paying for things and the taking of change, were so easy. Nobody I encountered had bothered to look at me. In a few days, everyone would have forgotten the face in the papers of the woman tourist drowned in a rental car. Until then, invisibility, it was turning out, could be pleasurable.

I started to make plans. Now that I was getting my nerve back, renting a room somewhere as Annabel Jones wouldn’t be any more difficult than ordering a pot of tea and the lunch special. When Silva came back this evening, Stefan and Anna might be with her. In the morning we’d explain everything, Stefan and I. We’d divide the money, and I would be on my way, arranging my new life properly. I’d get a place to stay and a few clothes and look for a job like Silva’s, one that paid in cash. I could work for months before the baby was born, and by then I would be used to my new name. For the first time in days I was managing to look ahead. That was when, through the window, I caught sight of Col.

I did not know until that moment how well I had come to read his feelings from the hunch of his shoulders, the bowing of his thick head. He stood motionless and alone, close to where I had stood only minutes ago. I was surprised that he was there at all; my disappearance would have delayed his return home on Friday, our departure date, but once he learned that my car was in the water with my body inside it, what could he achieve by staying? There was nothing to wait for, nothing he could do here. What was to be gained by staring at the bridge with puzzled, blinking eyes, tipping his head back and scanning the sky in a gesture of endurance, looking so bruised and forsaken? I felt a flare of anger. How dare he appear in this way, as if some truly dreadful blow had been dealt him, when all he had lost was me? There could be no possibility he was truly suffering; he had made it perfectly clear he could take or leave me. I could hardly bear to look at him.

Yet I stayed at the window. He had only to turn his head and some invisible wire connecting us would have fizzed to life and directed our eyes straight toward each other’s, and my deception would have been over. For a moment I was so curious I almost wanted it to happen. Or, if he didn’t turn his head, I could just get up from here and go to him.
But it was too late for any such move.
If you want to make a go of it with me, fine, I’ll make a go of it with you. But not with a kid
. I remained where I was. Then he took out his mobile phone, snapped some pictures, and trod heavily away.

Soon he was out of sight. I waited another half an hour until I could be sure he had gone, and then I returned, walking fast all the way, to the trailer.

By the time I got there it was pouring, and I sat inside and stared as raindrops pitted the water. When it stopped I went outside. The river lay like a swath of thick, dull cloth under the pall of the clouds, and seemed barely to flow. I could not stay here. The sight of Col had shown me that I had to act urgently to put distance between my old life and the new one. It was distasteful to linger in this way, like a mourner at my own funeral. The trailer was damp and falling apart; what had been asylum was now a rotting prison. If I did not get out at once and rejoin the living, my defiant vanishing act would amount to nothing but a self-imposed shackling to a dead end where I was alive to nobody on earth except Silva.

Besides, I could do nothing for her by staying. How would it help for me to stay and witness any more of her faith that Stefan and Anna were coming back, when I was too cowardly either to encourage her hopes or to destroy them? The best thing I could do for her would be to leave some money and be gone by the time she returned. I would write her a note explaining—only in part—why I had left. I could not be sure that she would be able to read much English, and she might ask someone she knew—her employer, probably—to read it for her. I could not tell her anything that mentioned the car and gave me away. But the truth was I could not tell her the truth anyway. I did not have the courage.

The only paper I could find was a coloring book of Anna’s, and I carefully removed a page she had already scrawled over and wrote on the back of it.

I knew my letter was formal in a way that was odd in the circumstances, but I didn’t know how else to do it. It took me much longer to compose than I thought it would. I had deliberately let my mobile phone battery go dead, so I could not know the time exactly, but I had reckoned it was the middle of the afternoon when I began the letter. By the time I had finished and folded fifteen hundred pounds into the single sheet of paper, I could hardly see to write. Daylight was fading, and the sky was lowering with waiting ice. Maybe it was later than I had thought after all, and I remember thinking that this was a good thing. It shortened the interval until Silva’s return when the trailer would be unattended, with the money inside lying on the table. But when I closed the door and went down the steps onto the shore, I saw at once that I couldn’t leave.

Downstream, between where I stood and the wrecked bridge end, two small fires at the river’s edge were burning through the blurry dusk. It was not difficult to gauge their distance from me; the nearer of the two had been set on a jutting-out part of the bank where three or four felled tree trunks lay on the ground. I had wandered down there several times in the past few days; it was a tricky walk over slippery rocks and around ponds of mud, and possible only at low tide, but it took no more than ten minutes. If the tramps displaced from the wasteland had encroached as far as that already, they could easily come farther. The trailer was set well back and under trees and could not be seen from their bonfire, but if any of them wandered along and found the trailer empty, of course they could easily steal the money and take the trailer over for the night. And for all nights to come. I might trust to the coming darkness to keep them from exploring any further today, but I would have to stay outside on the lookout just to be sure. And I was going to be very cold. I couldn’t risk drawing their attention by lighting a fire for myself.

Vi was sitting at the stove with a shawl round her shoulders and a glass of red wine in her hand when Ron returned to the shop. She looked up from a magazine spread over the counter. Her eyes were sour and watery, and her mouth was puckered and stained dark with wine, like a patch of rot starting on a small, bruised piece of fruit.

“Cold out there,” Ron said.

“You’ll have to be quick, I’m closing early.”

“Where’s Silva?”

Vi pushed herself up a little in her chair. “Silva!” she yelled, then slumped back. “You come from the river?” she asked, swinging her glass toward the darkness on the other side of the window.

“You could say that.”

“Terrible thing.”

Ron wandered farther into the shop, looking at the shelves, sniffing gently as if he found the air, laden with kerosene and wine, too heavy to breathe.

“It’s self-service. Take a basket. Aye, terrible thing, that bridge.”

She gulped some of her drink and returned to her magazine. Ron brought a packet of biscuits back to the counter.

“Drowning your sorrows, then,” he said, placing a five-pound note on the counter.

“What’s it to you? Keeps the cold out,” Vi said, but she stood up and placed her glass out of sight under the counter. She put the bill in the cash register and started pulling coins out for the change, counting aloud, but her voice slowed. She stared at the money in her hand, dumped it all back, and started again.

“Can’t add up the day,” she said, trying to smile. She made another mistake, turned the coins from hand to hand, counted them into her open palm, and then dropped them. They fell rattling over the counter and cascaded onto the floor. Swearing, she ducked to pick them up and almost knocked over the stove as they rolled away. As she resurfaced, she swayed forward and gripped the back of her chair, but it screeched away from her and she nearly fell.

Ron looked over his shoulder. Silva was walking down from the back room with her bag on her shoulder, wrapping her scarf round her neck, smiling.

“That’ll be four pounds, twenty-five pence I’m owed,” he said, turning back to Vi.

“Well, it’s on the bloody floor. You’ll need to come back for it.”

“I’d like my change, please.”

Vi slammed the register shut. “You’ll have to come back the morn. We’re closed.”

“Come on, Vi, I’ll do it,” Silva said, moving behind the counter to open the register.

Vi shoved her away. “Don’t you touch my bloody money! We’re closed!”

Silva looked at her for a moment, then pulled her wallet from her bag and counted out four pounds, twenty-five pence.

“Here, take it,” she said to Ron. “It’s better not to argue with her. It’s all right, I got paid today. I’ll get it back tomorrow.”

“Sure? Well, thanks.” Ron took the coins and picked up his packet of biscuits. Vi was now back in her chair with her glass in her hand.

“Are you locking up, Vi? Want me to do it?”

“I’ll do it myself. In my own good time,” Vi said. She lifted her glass and swigged. “Go on, fuck off home.”

“Bye, Vi. Don’t fall asleep there, now.”

But Vi didn’t hear. She was bending into the shelf under the counter, looking for her bottle.

Outside, Ron lit a cigarette while Silva picked up the sandwich board sign and took it inside. When she came back, he nodded toward the Land Rover, and Silva clambered up into the passenger seat. As they drove off, Vi was staring out at them across the window display of faded boxes and dusty bars of fudge with her drink in one hand, waving with
the slow, clawed fingers of the other. Ron pulled onto the road and turned left toward the bridge.

“Stop! What are you doing? This is the wrong way!” Silva said. “We can’t go over the bridge, we have to go to Netherloch. To the little bridge.”

Ron shook his head. “There’s a bottleneck at Netherloch. If we go that way it’ll be over an hour. This way you’ll be across in less than twenty minutes. You won’t even get your feet wet.” He smiled. “Don’t worry, I won’t make you row. Trust me.”

“Row? We are going in a boat? I can’t! I can’t go in a boat!”

“Why not? You want to swim?”

“I can’t swim!”

“Well, you’ll be better off in the boat then, won’t you?” Ron laughed, rolled down the window and threw out his cigarette end.

“I can’t go in a boat!”

The sudden rush of air from the window felt white and clear, like a beam of cold light. Silva was aware he had half-turned and was looking at her and at the same time was somehow, almost magically, keeping his attention on the road. He had careful, strange eyes; they traveled out and over her as she sat there, dissolving the shadows around her so that she might be unconcealed to him, fixed and memorized. She felt she was being recorded like a specimen, categorized as an example of something or other, but she had no idea what.

“You can go in a boat.” He spoke matter-of-factly, winding the window up. “You’ll be fine.”

For a while Silva stared ahead at the road until she felt safe enough, in the dark of the cab, to look at Ron again. She could see that his face was grainy with white stubble and his square, shaved head sat on his shoulders like a boulder on a ridge. Why had she agreed to this? She had no reason to trust him. The back of the Land Rover was dark but obviously not empty: every bump and curve in the road brought dull clunking noises from an uneven mass of vague, heavy shapes behind. There could be guns in there. Knives. Chains. Rope. Even with just a pickax and spade he could kill her and nobody would ever know. Or out there on the river in the pitch dark, he could push her overboard. She turned back and gazed through the window. Her body might be buried among the trees or under the dark hills or lost at the bottom of the river, and
Stefan would never know where she was. Would Anna, growing up, explain her mother’s absence to other people with three words:
she went missing
? It came to her suddenly that disappearance was worse even than death.
Where were they?