Morag Joss - Among the Missing aka Across the Bridge

But the worst terror was that Stefan and his daughter hadn’t come back. They hadn’t come back and the woman in the trailer didn’t know why, and I had not been able to tell her. I had sold him the car and now I had money to keep my child, but where was hers? I turned toward the lights of the service station.

It was thronged with people, but hunger forced me inside. I had to hope that although my face might appear in the papers and on television as one of the dead, it would be a wedding photograph, the only pictures Col had of me. I was surely unrecognizable now as the person who’d smiled into the camera that day. My face was grim under the wreckage of makeup and stinging from cold and the blows and scratches of the struggle in the trailer. My hair had been curled and adorned with ludicrous turquoise feathers on the day I got married; now it was shorter and darker, and most of it was hidden under a flat woolen hat. Nobody would link a smiling photograph with this wretched woman shuffling along in a cafeteria queue. I bought what was available, coffee and a muffin, and took them over to a table, which I had to share. There was a television suspended from the ceiling tuned soundlessly to the bridge news, and I ate and drank with my eyes raised to it, avoiding contact with the three other people at the table. I kept my cup up close to my face and let the coffee steam rise and warm my skin in between sips.

By now the service station should have closed for the night, but it was staying open for the people who were stranded. Extra plastic chairs had appeared, and people were bedding down on car blankets and jackets and coats all over the floor. Some appeared to be sleeping; others were talking and drinking doggedly, doing puzzles or playing cards, trying to control children. From the games arcade came ceaseless zooming and firing sounds and the unfettered, giddy yelps of teenage boys. A woman dozed in a wheelchair near the door to the ladies’, half-hidden by the fronds of a huge artificial fern. Every table in the cafeteria was full, although the serving counter had been stripped of everything except tea and coffee in foam cups. In the shop, people were buying up the last of the chocolate and sweets and magazines, but the queues had lessened because there was nothing of much use left; untouched piles of Frisbees and celebrity memoirs stood out among the emptied shelves and racks. Although the place was thronged, there was a pall of numb, anxious quiet that perhaps hangs over all refugees.

I was wondering what to do, hoping I might find a space on the floor somewhere away from others and out of the freezing gusts from the doors, when four police officers came in, two men and two women. They didn’t seem to have any particular job to do; there was no disorder to bring under control. The manager and a younger sidekick joined them, and after a few minutes of talk, swinging on their heels and looking around, they drifted off, patrolling the mass of sprawling bodies. Several people went up to talk to them, with questions or complaints, I supposed. I watched all this from behind a book rack in the shop. When it began to look as if the police were settled in for the night, I knew I couldn’t stay.

Outside, the temperature had dropped further. I needed to find shelter somewhere. I made my way around the back and followed the fence into the darkness at the far corner of the car park, where I found again the opening to the abandoned track I’d driven down with Stefan and Anna twelve hours before. Only twelve hours? It seemed-in a way it was-a lifetime ago. Ahead of me I could see the flames of several small fires burning among the wrecked buildings on the wasteland; to my right, I could see the glow of arc lights over the bridge abutments and the flicker of helicopters in the sky. I walked past the first straggly piles of debris at the sides of the track toward the fires, on through broken glass and old cans, mounds of rubble and discarded tires, piles of ripped roofing felt, wiring, and cable. Parts of wrecked cars rose in heaps around me; broken office furniture and rotten carpet jutted up from buckled and vandalized dumpsters. I was far enough from the traffic and the service station to catch the cold tang of the estuary, mixed with the smell of damp fields and rust and a sullen overlay of smoke. I reached the corner of a derelict brick shed and edged my way along the wall to the next corner until I could see a barren stretch of cracked concrete that must once have been the floor of a factory or warehouse. At its far edges I could make out the jagged remains of half-demolished walls. There several bonfires burned, and in their cloudy, yellow light the stooping silhouettes of people moved to and fro, passing bottles, lifting sticks into the flames, collecting from the ground anything that might make shelters for the night. Beyond them the black estuary glittered with the sweeping lights of helicopters, the air thudded and shrieked with propeller noise and sirens. Under the gleaming sky, a great, desperate agitation was in progress, but here the faraway wails were an unreal music, part of the rushing-by of a world miles from this encampment among the scrub and banks of litter where human beings hunkered down to get through the night, staring into dying fires.

I crouched down and watched. About a dozen people squatted or lay in aloof, solitary hovels of cardboard and rags, arranged in a haphazard outer ring as close to the warmth and light as they could get, but several feet from one another and a safe distance from the elite little groupings of twos and threes nearest the fires. Among these, proprietorial squalls would break out over a swig from a bottle, a cigarette, a package of food. From time to time the air fell silent, as if everyone had fallen asleep or retired to his own thoughts, and then there would be cries and scuffles again, sometimes the sound of breaking glass or a hallucinatory insult or misunderstanding, for sly demons came and went among these people. To some of them, the smoky sky was alive with specters that could enter through the space between blinks of their eyes and whisper tormenting messages inside their skulls, goading them into outbreaks of itching or howling or whimpering fear. One man sat upright, staring round with crazed vigilance and batting away phantom attackers with his empty bottle.

I got up carefully and foraged at the farthest edges of the light. No one turned from the flames to look at me. I found some plastic and cardboard in a heap against a ruined wall, and I dragged an armful across the concrete and set it down where I could feel a little warmth but would not be presumptuously close to the fire. The dark mounds around me shifted from time to time through the smoke, coughing, rearranging their coverings. I saw the smooth lifting of the burning dots of cigarettes, the red flares as they were inhaled. Nobody spoke. I went back, found some frayed sheets of bubble wrap and brought them to my place on the ground. I arranged a kind of sleeve of cardboard, and pulled the bubble wrap around myself. There I lay, my hand clasping the money in my pocket and my body wrapped as china is against the breakages that occur in transit through this world. I fell asleep.

I dreamed of a man who was taking me in the silver car on a hazardous journey. We drove through puddles that turned into lakes, we splashed miraculously out of them again and lost the road under a blizzard of snow, but on we went, because our destination was a place where I was to give a performance of some kind in front of a lot of people. I allowed myself to be taken, keeping silent about the only thing I was sure of, which was that I had nothing to give the audience, nothing to merit their attention or applause. I walked to the center of the stage and waited for their disappointment. Then I was standing under a tree and I had no excuse for my reticence to offer all the reproachful people walking by, save the one I spoke as they went past. I can’t give you anything because I am going to have a baby, I said, and although they kept on walking, they knew this was the truth and they forgave me.