Among the Missing (21 page)

The cabin. It was the answer. It always had been the answer. You were wrong about it and always had been. We should have been there long ago. But surely even you could see that it was necessary and urgent for us to go now. There was no danger there, nobody had been near the place for a year and more. We would go across and live on the other side, and the tramps would stay on this bank of the river, near the service station and Inverness. They wouldn’t want to come across, even supposing they could. There was nothing for them in the forest. They could take the trailer if they wanted, I didn’t care. The leaks were getting worse, and it wouldn’t last another winter. We would have a proper little house, not large but much bigger than the trailer; we would make it comfortable. Besides, I had to live on the other side now to get to work, and from the cabin there would be a way up through the trees to the road, and from there it would be only a mile or so to the Highland Bounty. And Annabel had nowhere else to go and nobody to care for her. She needed someone. She could stay as long as she liked and I would look after her while I was waiting for you and Anna.

And you’d know to come and find me there. That was the best part of it—knowing that when you came back and found the trailer taken over by tramps, or empty, you’d guess where I was. That’s if you even had to guess! Standing where I was now and looking across, you’d be able to see me sitting on the jetty, waiting, the cabin door open. Oh, Anna, I can see you watching me. I would hear you the moment you called out for me.

I went back inside and shook Ron.

“Ron! Ron, wake up! Will you help us? Can you get us back over the river? To our new place? Come, come and see. I need to take everything; it will be many times across and back. Please, will you help?”

It was Silva’s idea entirely. I let her excitement enter me; even so, it floated only on the surface of my feelings. Underneath, dread at what I was doing and where it was leading me, like a dragging undertow, pulled and ebbed. I had to get away, and yet I did not go. I did not go. In small, unguarded moments my fear swamped me, physically, leaving me nauseated and struggling for breath. I fought it down; I ascribed it to pregnancy, to shock, to the pure panic of displacement, to anything but my guilt and the need to outdistance it. I denied and resisted it. I was determined to erase the picture in my mind of Col’s face as he stared at the wrecked bridge. I would not test my reasons for disappearing from my life with him, for fear that the ingenuity of my excuses might fail. Yet I did not go.

I had to inhabit the here and now, I told myself, live in the present and pay no heed to the past. So, wanting to believe that the future would take care of itself and that meanwhile constancy to Silva would make me a little less reproachable for what I had done, I went along with her excitement about the new place. Maybe I could be on my way once I’d seen that she was settled and safe. It did not feel like a trick of avoidance, quite, to dwell on her pleasure in her plans for the cabin, and to share in it. It was simply that, for the moment, for the sake of Silva, the baby, and me, I could not leave her now.

Ron set off early along the road to get back to the boat and work his shift, promising to return later. Silva was surprised when I asked if it was all right for her not to turn up for work.

“Sometimes I have other things I have to do,” she told me. “Vi doesn’t care. I’ll go tomorrow.”

“But shouldn’t you call Vi and let her know?”

“Sure, I’ll call.”

I don’t believe she did. Soon we saw again, downstream, bonfire smoke in the air and slow, dark figures moving at the river’s edge, and we began loading Silva’s belongings into bags. With our arms full, we made our trips singly to the old jetty upriver, so that the trailer would not be unattended for even a few minutes. It did not take us long to strip the place; although the jetty was a few hundred yards away over difficult ground and we made several trips each, the bags and implements and tools did not amount to much as a whole family’s belongings. When we had finished, there was nothing to do but wait in the trailer, not just for Ron to finish work but, as he’d warned us, for the tide, which would not be high at the jetty until about six in the evening.

The light was fading when we heard the boat and watched it chug past us and up to the jetty. When it was moored, Ron helped us with the heaviest things. He disconnected the gas burner and brought it along with the tank, and went back for the water containers and mattresses and seating. There was nothing we might not need, he said. The cabin might be completely empty. Silva shrugged. Ron and I exchanged a glance, but neither of us added that it might not even be weather-tight, it might not be habitable at all.

I waited while Ron and Silva took the first load over. Ron returned alone and made four more crossings, bringing me over on the fifth with the last load. The jetty on the far side creaked and swayed, and the white rowing boat moored there was a useless wreck, half-submerged and filled with rotting river flotsam. I could not see how it even stayed afloat.

Silva had been all around the place, trying to peer in through the curtained windows. Up close, the cabin, set on a plain concrete platform, was unromantic. What had looked like silvery, weathered timber from the other side of the river was a scaly wash of gray paint over blistering, prefabricated hardboard. The flat, sloping roof of cracked bitumen sheeting was covered with a ragged blanket of fallen branches and cones and dead pine needles, and bright green streaks ran down the back and side walls as if the embrace of the forest were an encroaching stain. Moss and tree debris clogged the gutters that were supposed to channel rainwater into a covered water barrel at one corner. The door was cheap, with a plastic handle, and was padlocked. Ron had a toolbox in the boat.
Now he took a hammer, split the thin paneling around the hasp, and dug into the frame with a chisel until the door hung open.

It struck me later, not at the time, that Ron stepped across the threshold and held the door open as if it were his own place, and that as we followed him in, all his attention was directed to us and not to the room we were all seeing for the first time. The disturbance of stagnant air as we entered raised dust and the warm, peppery smell of wood and linseed, and I sneezed, catching also the sharpness of old fire ash and cigarette smoke. The patchy linoleum floor was grainy with dirt and dead insects and soot blown down from the stove. Ron pulled back the curtains on their sagging wires, watching us like an eager host, scanning our faces for signs of disappointment.

In silence but for the scrape of our feet and the hollow creaking of the floor, we roamed and inspected the place as if each of us were there alone, privately assessing it against the unspoken measure of our own hopes for it, and our own needs. Within the small space, the distances between us expanded and grew vast.

The cabin must once have been a restroom or shelter for forestry workers. A black stove stood in a brick alcove, and a pile of magazines, a bucket of logs, and a poker sat alongside. The magazines, all dedicated, unsurprisingly, to naked girls, were dated between 1999 and 2002. In one corner a plywood tabletop and its two trestles were stacked against the wall next to a shelf holding a beer glass and three pub ashtrays. Two wall boards were marked with fuzzy, darker rectangles where notices and pinups must have been displayed. The gingham curtains bore shadow stripes of pale gray where light had fallen on the original dark blue. They were oddly homey, perhaps made by a wife or a girlfriend; perhaps there had been times when the workers had stayed here overnight. Behind the main room was a windowless kitchen with a sink and plastic-fronted cupboards. A small fridge stood open under the counter, the handle encrusted with dirt and rust. A door at one side led to a tiny vestibule, where a back door, sagging in its frame, led outside. We could have squeezed through it instead of busting the lock on the other door; now both would have to be mended. Off the vestibule there was one other door, behind which was a chemical toilet and a shower of the kind people use in caravans.

There were two much smaller rooms next to the main one, completely empty. In the one at the back, the window glass was cracked and
had been sealed over with tape, now a dry, flapping shred. The floor was dark with mold and sloped downward, and when I trod nearer the center of the room, it tipped a little and a gap opened under the bottom edges of the walls that met in the far corner, and a draft of cold air blew in around my feet. Roots had lodged themselves there and were pushing in like damp fists. I went outside and saw that some tree roots had split the concrete platform and were taking hold in the join between the side and back walls and along the line of the cabin’s base. I thought of calling out to Ron to ask if it could be mended, and then I wondered why I was so ready to consult him. He was a stranger, and my inclination to depend on him was foolish. I would not ask.

I wandered down onto the jetty, and very deliberately I turned and gazed back; for Silva’s sake (I believed) I needed to see the cabin from a little distance, to judge the idea of living in it as plausible or not. As I looked, Ron came out and pulled a couple of bags from the doorway over the threshold. I saw him move across the window, while Silva carried a bundle of something inside, out of sight. They passed to and fro for a while in this quiet little duet of housekeeping, and I felt a pang of exclusion. I was glad when Ron came to the door and beckoned me back.

“Place looks okay for now,” he said, to both of us. “The logs are dry and the flue’s all right.” He looked at his watch, then nodded toward the boat. “I have to go.” I glanced at Silva. Did she feel, as I did, a sudden unreasonable resentment, as sharp as fear, that he was going? Silva and I, even between us, might not get things right. I didn’t want to be left, and I was annoyed with myself that I didn’t want to be left.

“I’ll have a proper look round tomorrow,” he said, addressing me as if he knew. “See what needs doing.”

“Why are you helping us?” I asked.

“I thought you could do with it.” He motioned across the river. The trailer looked deserted and hopelessly vulnerable. The bonfires still burned.

“Maybe, but that’s not the point. Why are you—”

“I’ll be back tomorrow. So don’t be frightened if you hear the boat.”

“I’m sure it’s very kind of you. But why?”

“I want to,” he said, awkwardly. “I just do what I can.”

“But why?” I knew nothing about him. “Do you live here? Where are you from?”

“Be quiet, Annabel. Of course, we’ll pay you,” Silva said, quickly. “And we are grateful.”

Ron shook his head. “I just do what I can,” he said again, “and you don’t pay me anything.”

“Come tomorrow and there will be food,” she said. She sounded shy. “Not grand food, but you will be very welcome.”

He smiled and nodded and left. As he turned the boat in to the river tide, I called out to thank him, but he didn’t hear above the noise of the motor and the cries of the geese as they rose. Silva and I stood for a while on the jetty, watching the frill of the boat’s wake disappear and the geese glide back in pairs onto the silver-smooth water around the black rock.

I was angry. I suppose she didn’t know what it is to live in a country where you have no right to be, where you are grateful for even an empty shack. She didn’t understand that you’re always afraid. She didn’t understand that going unnoticed and surviving without begging counts as success. People don’t mean to be cruel, not always, but they only help their own. You never hope—never mind expect—that anyone is going to help
you
, so you don’t start asking questions and looking suspicious because someone shows you kindness. If you have the luck to find it, you take kindness. You take it while you can and put it down to the way this world works. If something good can come along, then something good can also be taken away. You take the good while you can.

But after Ron left I didn’t say any of that, because I thought maybe she was that way because of her baby. It made you cautious, being pregnant. And she wasn’t suspicious about everything. She wouldn’t have been here at all if she hadn’t put her trust in me, another stranger, and I did want her here.