Among the Missing (9 page)

“It’s too cold to wait for a bus. I’m not feeling well. Can’t you drive me to Netherloch?”

“No,” he said, looking back at his daughter. “You can get bus easy, plenty of time. Bus is warm. Listen—when you get to Netherloch. There is a car park behind the school.”

I nodded.

“So cars get taken from there. Stay in town awhile, you can get coffee, food. Wait till six, then I will have new plates. At six o’clock you go to car park, you call police, you say you left the car there all day. Tell them this morning you went to walk, you go along by the water and in the forest and then you get back and car is not there. Okay? You got no car, you have to tell story, explain them something. It’s for both of us. You understand?”

“Okay.”

He pulled out the envelope from his jacket. “Two thousand,” he said.

“Three,” I insisted, numbly. I had no idea what the car was worth, no idea what I was talking about.

“Two thousand five hundred,” he said, counting it through his fingertips, bill by bill, before I could argue.

“All right,” I said.

He handed it over and pointed to the service station again. “Just up there.”

He smiled. He was anxious for me to go. But some natural courtesy—maybe even a little gratitude because I liked his daughter—prevented him from showing it.

“All right. Goodbye.”

In absolute misery, I zipped the money into an inside pocket of my shoulder bag. Just as I was turning to go, I glanced in at the child, lying aslant across the collapsed wad of bedding and beginning to stir from sleep. Seeing her father outside, she pulled herself up and patted on the window with the palms of both hands, about to cry. Stefan and I looked at each other; we both wanted to say something else, and we both started to speak at once. He tried to laugh.

“Okay. What?”

“You will remember to get her a car seat, won’t you? Today?”

He smiled and reached out and gave my shoulder a little shake. “Sure, sure, lady. Today. I will.”

“What were you going to say?”

“Nothing,” he said. He pulled out his envelope again, just as Anna began to sob, pressing her face up to the glass. “Only, here. Three thousand. Here, take,” he said, pushing more bills into my hands. Then he turned quickly to the car, and I started walking away, toward the service station. I heard him open the car door and speak gently, but I kept walking. I could not bear to see her hands outstretched for him as he lifted her into his arms.

I didn’t want to wait for the bus. It was too cold to stand in the shelter, and I wanted to get away and keep moving, putting distance between myself and what I had just done. I kept walking. Soon I had reached the bridge, and I could see that the pathway for pedestrians was separate from the road, built lower than the steel deck that carried cars; once on it I would be almost invisible except to anyone I might meet walking across from the other side. I strode along fast with my collar up against the roar of traffic and the exhaust fumes and the estuary wind. I liked the thought of being hidden. After a few minutes, the bus rumbled on past me.

Looking inland, I could see all the way to the point where the river emerged from the neck of the loch, and turning eastward, I saw as far as it ran, past the docks and the city, and widened into the sea. As I walked,
in each direction the views hit my eyes like old, stuttering film as the black spars of the bridge flickered past between me and the landscape.

At the first junction on the far side, where nearly all the traffic bore right to go north and up the coast, I turned left and followed a much narrower road that rose and curved inland. The signs pointed toward Netherloch Falls and Netherloch. The paved walkway from the bridge came to an end, and I continued along the side of the road, suspended in wintery afternoon darkness; the way was canopied by overhanging trees, through which blinding slashes of daylight cut until they stood too densely planted for light to penetrate. After a while I could only sense but not see the river, a long way beyond the trees and below me. One or two cars passed, leaving hollow echoes of engine noise. As the road rose ahead of me, I could tell I was going higher; soon I heard a faraway rushing in the treetops and the air was cold with pine resin and raw mountain winds that carried none of the green, reedy damp of the river. I came upon the remains of a clearing where trees had been felled in an apparently disordered kind of order: straight rows of sawn stumps poked up between tractor ruts that receded back into the line of the forest. Everywhere the ground was scattered with shards and chips of torn wood and the scabs of stripped bark. Dozens of tree trunks lay stacked parallel, and around them were stiff, feathery heaps of smaller pine cuttings alongside dried-out branches and twigs, gray and tangled like wires.

I had been walking for nearly an hour and had a stitch in my side, and I stopped to rest against a mound of logs, digging my foot into a mulchy carpet of pine needles and moss. I was scared and cold, and sick with disgust at myself; I stared into the darkness of the trees and wanted to escape into it. Just then I heard another bus. Without thinking, I ran back to the road and waved it down. I climbed on breathless and shivering and wondered if I was getting flu. By the time we reached Netherloch, I ached with tiredness and the afternoon had turned cloudy and raw. It was only a quarter past two. I knew I could not bear nearly four hours loitering in the streets, going from one café to another. I had to get into a quiet room and lie down, I had to sleep.

The sign on the front of the bus said
WESTER MUIR/FORT AUGUSTUS
, which I knew were some miles west beyond our hotel, so I clambered down to the driver and paid the extra to go on to Invermuir where, he told me, the bus stopped at the postbox on the far side of the village
from the hotel. Col would not be back before six o’clock. I could hide in our room for at least two hours, and later I would get back somehow to Netherloch. If there wasn’t another bus I could get a taxi, and if I didn’t get there until after six it wouldn’t matter; in fact, it would help, it would give Stefan even more time. We would be safe. But I didn’t know what safe meant anymore. I opened my bag and flicked the money through my fingertips, powdery, soft paper amounting to three thousand pounds. Just paper, after all, but I was trusting to it to buy me my safety.

I stared through the bus window and tried to distract myself by identifying the plants along the road. Gorse, bracken, patches of rushes, and spongy, brownish pads of composting nettles and saturated moss. I was collecting observations that I could array before Col one by one, to fill our evening before I mentioned the baby and the money. Then I would tell him that I had solved the problem, that there was now plenty of money so there was no need to worry. He would love his child when it arrived, and anyway, I would take care of everything. Soon I found myself in a pitiful daydream in which kindness and remorse and enlightenment washed over his face, and henceforth we moved on together toward a sweetly melancholic, poetic future as Mummy and Daddy. I modified the daydream; at some later date, next year maybe, I would be pregnant again. If it happened at forty-two, it could surely happen at forty-three, and it would be different next time, because making the best of one accidental baby was one thing, having a second quite another, undertaken only by devoted and deliberate parents. By then I would, as a mother, be well acquainted with anxiety about the world at a level previously unimaginable, but I would be watchful and capable, too, and our happy children would—I whispered the very words—make our happiness complete. This was a manageable and familiar dream to me, set in a future in which I was altered, having blossomed in my husband’s eyes and acquired proper, wifely value as a person whose wisdom and clarity about life were necessary to him. I concentrated on it for the rest of the journey.

The store wasn’t busy; lunchtimes never are. A few campers from the Lochside Holiday Cabins were coming in at the weekends now but still hardly any during the week, and they usually stocked up early in the day. The bus stopped outside at two o’clock, on time. Nobody got off. Around the same time some fishermen came in to fill up their flasks from the vending machine. They told me again we should be selling soup and hot pies. Get a microwave and you could do it easy, you’d make a fortune this weather, they said.

I nodded over at Vi, who was sleeping behind the counter with dribble going on her cardigan.

Tell her, it’s her place, I said. She says she’s not running a bloody restaurant.

There was stuff from the Cash & Carry to price and put out, so when the fishermen left, I woke Vi up and told her I was going to the back room, not that she really heard. It was just cans and cotton wool and fire lighters and tinfoil, plus one of Vi’s impulse buys, a bag of soccer shirts, so there was no hurry. I took a sandwich past its sell-by from the chiller and made my tea, and when I’d had my lunch, I sent a message to you, but you didn’t answer; I thought you must be out of range, along the shore or getting water from the car-wash tap at the service station. Then I went back with a cup of tea for Vi and made her go across to the house. I told her to have a lie-down and I’d see her later, but I knew she’d have another bottle in there and I’d be locking up tonight. She wouldn’t go at first, she said the house would be cold. So I went over, and it was and also dirty, as always. I switched on the gas fires and her electric blanket and bedside light and then went back for her. I led her all the way to her
bedroom door, and I promised her I’d look after everything. I hoped she’d fall asleep before she could start crying.

Soon after that a family came in. They’d been to the Netherloch Falls. There was a sulky girl chewing on a leaflet from there, and their feet were muddy. I didn’t like them. It was a weekday, so the children should have been in school. I made the man go outside with his cigarette even though it was only in his mouth and not lit. The woman asked if we had Internet access, and I told her no because I’d seen her wiping her nose with her hands. She said what’s that then, pointing at the sign outside, and I said it wasn’t working. For all I knew it wasn’t. Nobody had logged on for a couple of weeks. Then she shook out a rail of tartan scarves and tried them all on, even though there was no mirror and they were only scarves. After that she took a basket and went up and down the shelves helping herself, digging in the freezer and handing out ice creams to her children before she’d paid for them. I told them there was no eating in the shop, so they hung around staring at me and sucking and tugging at their ice cream wrappers and fingering the chocolate bars and playing with the key rings in the “Under £3” tray. I’m sure they took some. The eldest one kept whining to her mother about why there wasn’t a toilet and when could she get on Facebook.

After they’d gone, I sent you another message and told you what they were like, but you were still out of range.

Then it was quiet again for a while. A man came in, someone I remembered seeing before. He came in now and then, always in outdoor clothes like the men who ran the angling weekends or worked in the forest, but he was always by himself and he was older than most of them. Not that I could really guess his age. He had cropped hair that I thought would be silvery gray if it were longer. When he brought his things to the register, he smiled as if he knew me. I noticed the color of his eyes again, a bluish gray like the color of water in winter, and there was a brightness in them, almost a flashing, as if he had just caught sight of something startling, not in me but in the air surrounding me. But he was friendly. I remember thinking he was the first person I’d seen smiling since Anna waved me goodbye that morning, and my face felt a little unaccustomed to smiling back. I forgot how it showed, worrying all the time. He said something I didn’t hear.

“Sorry, what did you say?”

“Nothing, doesn’t matter. You were miles away,” he said, still smiling.

I laughed and started to ring up his purchases. “Yes, I was. Sorry.”

“Good place to be, sometimes. I think so, anyway.”

The radio was on as usual, and I also remember there had just been a commercial break and a time check. That was how I was sure exactly when it happened. Two forty-five. He’d bought milk, a can of beans, cheese and tomatoes and bread, I remember that as well.

“You’re not Polish, are you?” he asked. “Where are you from, then?”

“Me? I’m from miles away,” I said and rang the register.

“Well, that’s two of us,” he said, and we laughed in the way people laugh when they want to show something doesn’t matter but it does.

Then the first sound of it came. It rolled at us like a shape, a dark color, a giant boulder. Other sounds were squashed under it: the radio, the
ting
of the register, my voice counting out change. I stopped trying to count, and we stood staring at each other, then I began to feel the noise as well as hear it; it came from underground and rumbled up through my legs and into my throat, it was rattling the words I was trying to say against my teeth as if my mouth were full of buttons. The man was trying to speak, too, but his lips just opened and closed. Then this underground roaring rose and grew into a jagged crashing and breaking over our heads. Vi came hurrying in from the house, through the back of the shop and heading straight for the doors.