Morag Joss: Among the Missing aka Across the Bridge

A long way down, the ground leveled out into an area of water pools and grimy rock and reeds strewn with jetsam and river debris. Ice lay in patches under fallen trees. The tide was out; the river ran along some distance away, and upriver, almost out of sight, was a disused jetty sticking up from a shining field of mud.

Set on a patch of cleared ground under some trees a long way from the river was an old trailer with plastic sheeting over its roof. Amid the encroaching dereliction, it was still clearly a home; it looked tidy and well kept. Laundry swayed on a washing line fixed between one corner of the trailer and a tree. A bucket and broom, a plastic bath and picnic chairs, some large plastic toys and water containers were stacked neatly along the side. Nearby was an ashy fire pit set inside a circle of rocks.

I got out of the car and waited in the freezing wind for him to make his way down. We were quite a long way from the road now and well below it, hidden by a thicket of frost-bound undergrowth. On the far side of the river, the thickly wooded land sloped steeply all the way to the shore. It was hard to tell how wide the river was until I saw a frail-looking wooden hut set into a curve in the bank and a white rowing boat moored to a little jetty nearby, both standing out brightly against the silvery whorls and eddies of the tide. All at once I understood what I was seeing on a human scale, and then I saw that the wind in the pinewoods around the hut was restless and quick; branches jerked and trembled with none of the dreamy enchantment of swaying trees seen from a distance. And I thought, if someone were to appear from the door and walk down the jetty to the boat, I would be close enough to call out, and she might look up and see me standing and waving, offering as clear and perfect a picture to her as she did to me. I looked downriver to the bridge, maybe a mile away, arching over from the city to the forest side. I walked a few yards down the shore. Now, closer, I could hear above the shirring of the water a stately, faint thrum from the traffic crossing over it, and carried by the breeze that blew across, there came an eerie, soft booming that I supposed had to do with the disturbance of air through the steel spans stretching up into the windy sky.

Suddenly there was a rattle of stones and a shout behind me. I turned in time to see the man struggling to keep his balance, sliding sideways on the slope of loose rocks and puddles. Falling, he let go of the child, pushing her away from him so as not to squash her under his weight as he toppled. I ran toward them. The child was a rolling bundle of unraveling clothes and wrappings, and I reached her just as she began to scream. The man tumbled several feet and landed heavily, letting out a long cry just as the child screamed again. She wasn’t hurt, but she was frightened and indignant, and when I picked her up, she was so puzzled she stopped crying abruptly to stare at my face. I saw her eyes register that she didn’t know me, and then she writhed in my arms and took a deep breath, ready to roar her head off. I jounced her up and down and smiled and chuckled, and turned her around so she could see her father getting to his feet.

“There, there, little one, there’s Papa, ooh, look, oops-a-daisy! Silly Papa! Look!” I crooned, and the child gave me another assessing look before she burst out wailing, stretching her arms out to her father. He came toward us breathless, unsmiling. I handed the child over, but he had hurt his arm or shoulder and winced under the weight of her.

“Oh, here, I’ll hold her for you,” I offered, and tried to draw her to me again, but she curled up crying into his chest and he took two long steps back. He spoke a few words to her in a foreign language I couldn’t identify, then cast me a pained look and nodded toward the trailer. “I can manage that far,” he said.

At the trailer door, the child scrambled down without a word, plonked herself on the bottom step, and lifted up first one foot and then the other to her father, holding on to her socks while he pulled off her boots. Inside, he unwrapped her from her layers while she craned round, staring at me. She clambered up onto the window seat and settled herself into a nest of soft toys, pulling a rubbery-looking giraffe onto her lap, and the end of its tail into her mouth. The wall above her head was covered with pictures in crayon, some wild, colored scribbles that had torn the paper, and some done by an adult for a child, of cats and houses, flowers and boats and birds. She kept watching me, no less suspiciously. She was beautifully and magically the image of her father: the same curly, slaty, blue-black hair, the intense gaze from strikingly clear blue eyes, long, fragile hands. The man, nursing his wrist, nodded to me to sit down, and as I took the place beside her, she raised her eyes and smiled at me. I looked away. She made me nervous, more nervous than he did. Her beauty was close to overwhelming, but it wasn’t so much her beauty as her physical, breathing existence that moved me. I was sitting close enough to reach and touch her hair, and a few hours ago I had been almost ready to rob myself of even that small gesture toward my own child.

“Hello,” I said, turning to her. “And what’s your name?”

“No names,” the man said. We both looked at him. “Better we have no names, okay?” he said, a little more gently.

The child poked one finger at her chest and said, “Anna.” She beamed at me and then pointed at her father. “Papa!”

There was a pause, and then Anna declared her name again, and then the man laughed and he shook his head. Anna and I laughed, too. I hesitated, and then I said, “And what’s Papa’s name?”

I saw at once I had made a mistake. There was another pause, tighter than before; the man looked suddenly terrified and angry enough to hit me. Then Anna stretched out her giraffe toward me and said carefully, “ Jee-raff . Anna, Papa, Jee-raff… ”

He took the giraffe and waggled it at her, then thrust its head at her and cuddled it into her neck so it tickled. She tried to grab it, giggling and squealing.

“Okay, okay, Anna,” he said, letting it go and looking at her, and then at me. “Okay, so what? I’m Stefan.”

Whatever it was that had caused him to be so tense, his daughter released him from it as if she had let go of a bird trapped in her hands. She was sucking again on the fronded tail of the giraffe and staring at her father. She already knew something about adoration, but she didn’t have an inkling of her power. She didn’t understand that just the sight of her fingers flexing and pointing at a stranger’s face and her voice experimenting with a stranger’s name could do this. She made him believe that nothing else mattered, that he could handle anything. He sank down on the seat on the other side of the trailer, leaning gingerly on the table.

“You hurt your arm,” I said. “Let me see.”

When I asked him to make a circle with his wrist, he hissed with pain.

“Can you move your fingers?” I asked. “Can you bend your elbow?” He could, but when he tried to turn his forearm, the pain shot up and down between elbow and wrist. The redness of his hands had got worse since we came inside the trailer, and they were now mottled with blue, and he was shivering. He might have been quite ill; at the very least he was frozen, and probably shocked by the fall.

“You need a hot drink,” I said.

He wiped his uninjured hand across his face and didn’t reply. I got up and moved to one end of the trailer where there was a double gas burner. I filled a small saucepan with water from a plastic canister, lit the burner using a box of matches on a shelf, and set the pan on it. I opened cupboards and found grassy-smelling herbal tea bags of some kind. I decided that he needed sugar but there didn’t seem to be any, so when the water was poured, I stirred in some honey. As he drank, the trailer filled with balmy, hay-scented steam, like when the sun warms leaves and wildflowers after rain. The fumes reminded me of the kind of summer day almost impossible to imagine looking at his sore, pinched hands while, a few feet away outside the trailer, the air splintered with cold and the river ran past swollen by the wintery, dark flow of melted ice.