Morag Joss: Among the Missing aka Across the Bridge

But when we were awake and up and dressed, you didn’t say anything to that suggestion. You swore a few times and stared at the trailer and then didn’t seem to care about it anymore. You set your mouth in a grim, thin line, and I didn’t get a happy word or a smile from you before I had to leave for work. You had been that way before, impatient to make it all different, angry about things you couldn’t change, furious with yourself for not giving us a regular life. But you had been getting angry more and more often, and for longer, and it was harder each time to bring you round. I didn’t really see that that was because what made you angry had changed. By then it was me you were angry with.

That day you wouldn’t walk me even part of the way up to the bus. You didn’t take Anna to say good morning to the geese, though they were lovely with the sun on their wings, and they landed so beautifully on the black rock in the river, hooting that low, rounded noise over and over like a thousand wheezy old organs in a fairground, so funny and also so sad a sound it was, like home, and sweet and faraway.

I slept badly and got up long before Col was awake. I didn’t want to speak to him, about the baby or anything else, so I left quietly and drove east from the hotel, as I had done the day before. That early in the morning there was frost on the ground and the grip of ice in the air, as if during the night winter had crept down from the mountains, pushing back the spring. A white fog obscured the hills and shoreline of the north bank of the river. I drove into swirls of it ahead of me on the road, and on either side it hung in freezing clouds under the bare trees and along the hedges.

I had meant to take a different route, striking north at Netherloch across the river at the small stone bridge there and continuing eastward up into the mountains above Netherloch Falls. I had been studying my map and had worked out a route following the road down through the forest on the north bank of the estuary, eventually crossing back to its south side over the City Bridge and entering Inverness. After a couple of hours wandering about in the city, it would not take me long to drive back westward to the service station.

But I didn’t cross the river. Overcome with weariness and nausea and fear, I stopped in a small car park on the south side of Netherloch, just before the stone bridge. I had got up far too early, trying, I suppose, to bring the day’s transaction nearer, because although I was a little shocked by how swiftly my mind had worked out all the details of what I was going to do, I was still very afraid. I was anxious to have it over with, one way or another, both dreading and hoping that it would all come to nothing. Maybe the man wouldn’t answer the phone. Maybe he wouldn’t show up, or I could take fright myself and reconsider the whole idea. Or I might not have to go through with it at all; my telephone could ring at any moment and it would be Col saying he was sorry, he’d made a terrible mistake. Please come back, he might say. Come back right this minute, we’ll spend the whole day together. I’ll look after you.

That was when I began to cry. The car park was one of those places for tourists, with green areas planted up with bushes and dotted with picnic tables, and there was nobody there. I sat in the car weeping noisily, tears pouring down my cheeks. With the engine turned off, the air was soon stuffy with the peppery, acrylic smell of car upholstery, and to stop myself feeling any sicker, I wound the window down. Cold, foggy air rushed in, and still I could not stop crying. I sank my face into my hands and rested my head on the steering wheel and cried, and cried.

When I raised my head several minutes later, feeling a bit calmer, there was a man watching me. The fog was clearing under the trees, and he was sitting at one of the picnic tables a few yards away, looking at me. He didn’t avert his gaze when he saw I had noticed him. Instead he got slowly to his feet and, with a sympathetic nod of his head, walked away. I wanted to be angry, and I should have felt foolish, but all I felt was that I had been not watched, but watched over. I stared after him. I couldn’t have described his face except for his eyes, which even from a distance had conveyed something light and clear. His head was heavy and square and covered with graying stubble; he was powerfully built and dressed in jeans and a black sweater. He climbed into a Land Rover parked in a space on the far side of some bushes and drove away.

I wound the window up and got the car warm, then I tipped back the seat and slept.

Later, I drove on from Netherloch, staying on the south side, retracing exactly my path of the day before. As before, I kept pulling off the road and loitering along the river, for I had decided against going to Inverness at all. The stopping places were quiet, and because of the fog there was much less to see.

I went again to the café at the service station and sat at the window. Across some fields to the east, near where the squat concrete pillars of the bridge approach studded the ground toward the river, lay a patch of industrial wasteland. Beyond it I could see cold spangles of light on the water. There was a strong breeze blowing across it, and the breeze was also rocking the bushes and bracken in the fields and lifting the fog out from the trees.

I waited, staring at my phone, until after it was time. When it rang, I didn’t answer. It rang a second time, and on the third ring I picked up.

“You’re supposed to call, you got a problem? Listen, you want to sell the car you call me in next half hour, okay? That’s all the time you got. You don’t call me back, I got other clients, okay? I pay cash, remember, good deal. You call me back.”

I had expected that the man would tell me to drive into Inverness, but when I dialed the number, and once I had assured him I was alone, he gave me instructions to drive back toward Netherloch.

“Go west along the river road. There’s a rest area a mile on the right. Slow down when you see it. Go past it two hundred meters more and there’s a gap in the trees and a gate. On the right, the river side. Pull off the road and stop at the gate. Wait there.”

I did as he said. I followed the road until I saw the rest area. It was where I’d stopped the day before. I bumped the car to a halt over stones and deep ruts on the shoulder opposite the gate. I was glad he’d told me not to go any farther. The gate was rusted and skewed and off its hinges, and a track stretching behind it was barely a track at all, just a narrow scree of stones and crushed branches dipping sharply down through undergrowth in the direction of the river. I waited, my heart thumping, with all the doors locked. Traffic rushed past, buffeting the car. Then I noticed a movement, and from the undergrowth at the edge of the track a figure appeared, a young man in jeans and a short jacket. His arms were clasped around a well-wrapped and heavy-looking bundle: the child. He was wearing a hat but no gloves, and as he came up to the fence, I saw his hands were raw and red. With some difficulty he hoisted the bundle higher up on his shoulder and motioned at me to approach. I started to get out of the car, but he shook his head and waved me back. Then he put the child down at the side of the track and beckoned to me again, and I understood that he wanted me to bring the car forward. He freed the gate and hauled it back, keeping hold of the child’s hand. I started the engine and turned the car, and he waved me on past him. When he’d closed the gate, he gestured at me to keep going, and I did, slowly and carefully, but scraping the car sides against branches as I went, sinking into ruts, skidding on the stones. He followed with the child in his arms. I had no idea where the track led or how I might get back up it again, with the car or not. But I had glimpsed his face and I had seen how he held his child, and though those were hardly reasons enough to trust him, I kept going, edging the car forward at barely more than walking pace.