Morag Joss - Among the Missing aka Across the Bridge

He saw me glance past him through the window. As if remembering what I was there for, he pushed his cup aside and looked at his watch.

He said, “There isn’t much time. Come outside. Anna, stay here a minute and be a good girl.”

He stepped down from the trailer; I followed. He was in a hurry now, but Anna scrambled after us to the door and wailed to be lifted down and kept near him. He got her boots on again and buttoned her into her coat.

We walked all around the car. He kicked at the tires and peered in the windows, and he tried all the doors and inspected the trunk. When he asked to see the engine, we had to fish out the manual and look up how to release the catch under the hood. I could tell he knew no more about car engines than I did.

When he’d finished looking, he said, quietly and without surprise, “Rental car. You steal it? You come to sell me a car that’s not yours?”

“I need some money, that’s all. You said no questions.” I turned away, pretending to cough, so he wouldn’t know that my voice trembled and my eyes were filling with tears.

“Okay, you didn’t steal it. You rent it. And this-” he tapped with his foot on the license plate-“this is the real number?”

“Yes.”

He blew out his cheeks. “Okay,” he said. “So. If you sell, you have to tell them car was stolen. Because you are a thief.”

“No. Yes. I know.”

“So if I buy, I need to change the plates, maybe change the color. So I pay less for car.”

“I need three thousand,” I said, without thinking. I was guessing; it sounded like enough to ask, enough to change Col’s mind.

“Maybe. Maybe not so much. It drives good? I need to drive it. If it drives good, I pay. No receipt, no documents.”

“How much?” I asked. “How do I know you’ve even got any money?”

He glanced at Anna, who was absorbed, digging a pebble out of the tread of one of the tires. Turning from her, he produced an envelope from inside his jacket. He drew out just enough for me to see the top edge of a wad of banknotes.

“I got money.” He stood watching my face as I tried to control another wave of tears. I had begun to tremble. I was horrified at myself, bartering a car that wasn’t mine for money to keep a baby. How flimsy it was proving to be, the border between the kind of person I was before this, whose life had never strayed off the path of the conventionally law-abiding, and the kind of person I was turning into; it was terrifying to learn how irresistible, how effortless was my descent. Could I have offered in mitigation of my wrongdoing the plea that I had no choice? Of course I had a choice. Having taken it upon myself to judge that the legal destruction of my baby was the greater and truly unacceptable wrong, I was choosing to break the law. But I was not acting out of principle in pursuit of a finer moral good. My reasons, circumstantial, quite possibly hormonal, were a clumsy, misshapen clump of love, need, fear, and in the end, self-interest. I was going about getting what I wanted.

“Okay, listen. You’re selling me rental car, you need money that bad. I need a car. For my wife. For a surprise, big surprise for her, big difference for her life.” He gave me a hard grin. “So, smart lady? You need the money, you owe it somebody?”

“I just need it. No questions.”

“Okay, right. No questions. We go now to drive car around. If car okay, we agree price, I pay.”

I shivered. “Okay.”

He went back inside the trailer and brought out a heap of bedding. He arranged it in a mound on the backseat, then lifted Anna on top of it and began to fiddle with the seat belt.

“That’s not very safe,” I said. “Small children are supposed to have those proper car seats when they go in cars.”

He clicked the seat belt in place and straightened. “Do I ask you for help? What can I do about it right now? You keep your mouth shut!”

Anna started to flail. “Jee-raff! Papa, Jee-raff!” she said and burst into tears. Stefan returned to the trailer and brought back her giraffe.

“You will get her a car seat, won’t you?” I didn’t care that I was making him angry. “You’ve got to get her a car seat so she’ll be safe.”

“You drive it back up the track,” he said, getting in on the passenger side. “Any damage then you don’t blame me.”

I drove very carefully up the track and stopped at the top, and we swapped places. He turned the car toward Inverness, nudging it back onto the road nervously, unused to having the controls on the right and possibly to driving at all. Anna dropped her giraffe and began to bounce and squirm on top of her heap of bedding in the backseat, and he spoke to her sharply, in their own language. I retrieved the giraffe for her, and she pushed it into her mouth; her eyes began to close. In silence Stefan drove us past the service station and onto the roundabout as if to turn left across the bridge, then reconsidered and swerved round to drive straight ahead, to the outskirts of Inverness. The traffic grew heavier, and it unnerved him. A couple of miles farther, cursing under his breath, he made a complete circuit at another roundabout and headed back the way we had come. At the bridge roundabout, he took us back onto the Inverness road, where he picked up speed. Then he turned back in the same place as before.

“Car okay?” I asked, and he nodded.

“I go back to service station now,” he said.

But when he pulled in, he shook his head and inched past the rows of parked cars. “Too many cars, too many people,” he said. “I don’t stop here.”

At the far end of the car park, just at the start of the entrance ramp back to the road, a disused track jutted off to the left toward the ground near the bridge, the wrecked and abandoned place I’d seen from the window of the café.

“More quiet here,” he said, turning the wheel. The track crossed an empty field and then opened out onto a vast stretch of cracked concrete where factories or warehouses had once stood. He stopped the car. We got out into a terrain of piled-up rubbish: lumps of masonry, rusted metal spars and gutters and old window frames, warped boards, buckled machinery, shattered glass, and heaps of what looked like sodden old clothes. In the distance a man shuffled out from a broken shed clasping what looked like a piece of carpet around his shoulders like a cloak. Without seeing us, he wandered away in the direction of three or four plumes of smoke rising from behind a half-demolished wall.

“Bad place. Junkies,” Stefan said, glancing in at Anna asleep on the backseat. “Hurry up. Bad place.”

“Do you want it or not? If you want the car, you have to pay me. Now.”

“First I need promise. I need favor,” he said. “No, not a favor. For both of us.” His eyes were anxious. “I have to change license plates. It’s okay, I can do, there’s a guy I know. So you don’t tell police the car is stolen straightaway. You report the car later, okay? Wait till I got new plates. Wait till six o’clock.” He looked at his watch, then pointed back to the service station. “Up there you can get the bus. You go in bus to Netherloch, you say you left the car in Netherloch. The bus comes there soon, fifteen minutes.”

“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?”