Morag Joss - Among the Missing aka Across the Bridge

Ron let his breath out slowly. “We could all say that, mate.”

I think a lot about Col, lying here. Not anymore in the panicky, guilty way of a few months ago but with a strand of regret I follow right back to the day I chose to disappear, a day I now perceive as marked as much by regret as by catastrophe. Not that Col will be feeling that. I’m certain he is back sympathetically engrossed in the caregivers’ chat room, untroubled by ever having known me.

I think of our early days together, how to begin with I did not feel very much at all except embarrassment at living with a near stranger. But now I’m almost nostalgic for that early awkwardness, our misdirected attempts at endearments, my pursuit of some improved neatness in the arrangements of the house, his wordless, ritualized moves in bed. It touches me to remember the way every night he launched himself at me without speaking, his efforts to please, his mountainous heavings on and off. I forgive myself my mute acquiescence (I thought it sophisticated to have nothing to say at such times), which matched his lack of words. I can imagine the conversations we should have had, the conversations we lay so self-consciously not having afterward, in the dark, but our silence strikes me now as more like generosity tongue-tied than disappointment throttling itself before it can cry out.

Anyway, it will surely happen that one day I’ll be called upon to give some account to my child of its father, and by then words will have come to me and I shall have them waiting, as if written down and placed in an envelope, sealed and put by. I do not have them ready at present, but it will be years before I need them. When the time comes, I will know what to say, surely.

Ron comes into the cabin scraping his feet and dumps a heap of damp wood by the stove. This is what he does every evening; after he’s tied up the boat, he collects an armful of logs from the pile by the sawhorse he’s set up between the jetty and the cabin and trudges up with it and adds it to our store. He’ll make several more trips over the evening; against the thin cabin wall, on either side of the stove, an inner wall of logs is building up. It is shoulder-high already and rising in an uneven wave, and Silva keeps telling him not to make it much higher as we can’t stand on chairs to get logs down every time we need to stoke the fire.

“How are you doing today?” he asks me routinely, as he starts to stack the new batch of logs.

Silva appears from the kitchen with a knife in her hand. “She got too tired,” she answers for me. It so happens she is wrong; I was out of doors and out of her sight for over an hour, that’s all that too tired means. But I don’t contradict her, I just smile.

“I’m fine,” I tell him. “I went for a nice long stroll. I sat down and rested every five minutes,” I add, before Silva can lecture me again about drawing blood away from the baby.

She gives a snort. “Look at the color of her; she’s white like a sheet of paper. Ugh, don’t put that log on, it’s filthy. Don’t make it any higher there, the whole thing will fall over.” She returns to the kitchen, and Ron continues to stack.

When I’m resting here and watching him, I like to conjure animal faces out of the rings and whorls of the newly sawn log ends he puts in place: one looks like an owl, another is a baboon, another is a cat wearing spectacles. When this wall’s complete, Ron intends to start on the adjoining wall, and once that’s done he’ll replenish our stocks as they go down. Not only will we have good, dry fuel all the time, he says, but double wooden walls provide excellent insulation. It’s what they do in Norway, and there’s not much you can teach a Norwegian about insulation. I’m sure this is true, but of course as the wall goes up our room grows smaller. You might even say it’s closing in on us; it does smell blocked and earthy, with an end-of-year whiff that carries a note of decay. And the new wall is full of trapped, trembling insects. Whenever I lift a log to put on the stove, it comes away from the pile with a gauzy trail of tearing spiderwebs, gritty with rotting bark and mold and sawdust. Silva says mice will move in, and Ron laughs and says even mice need to live somewhere and at least the wood will stay dry enough to burn.

“So you are all right?” he asks, as he’s putting the last logs in place.

“Yes, I’m fine. I’m so lazy, I’m too heavy to do anything much,” I say.

“He was there again today, that bloke from Huddersfield. Colin. The bloke whose wife died.”

I pick up my knitting from the floor and fiddle with it. “How is he? Did he speak to you?”

“He says he’s going to keep coming. Every weekend.”

“What’s the point in that now the walks are finished? He should stay away.”

“There’s a point in it for him. They still haven’t found her. Have you ever been to Huddersfield?”

“No, never.” I haul myself up till I’m sitting on the sofa bed and I start on a row of knitting. “If I go for it, I think I could get this sleeve finished by bedtime.”

“Annabel, where is it you’re from?” Ron asks. He is breaking the rule. No matter that the rule is unstated, it has held us together for months. The rule is that the three of us ended up here by ways and means we don’t have to explain. Ron knows that.

“What does it matter?” I say. “I don’t ask you questions like that. I don’t have the right. There’s no need for me to know. And what about her?” I nod toward the kitchen, where the radio is blaring music. “Are you going to start asking her that kind of question? She’ll run a mile. You shouldn’t-”

Just then Silva walks in again, carrying a plate of bread. She looks tired in a way only a much older person should look. I can’t be sure what she heard or didn’t hear. She waits for me to finish what I was saying.

“You shouldn’t stack the logs so high. Silva’s right.” I put the knitting aside and get up. “I need to stretch my legs,” I tell them, and leave.

It’s too cold to stay out without another sweater, and in fact I am too tired to walk far. I go down to the jetty and look back at the cabin, its windows glowing with firelight, squares of soft yellow in the grainy, gray dusk. The baby’s weight makes me breathless. All I want is to go back inside, all I want is to carry on living by the rules that have served us well enough, but what awaits me in the yellow light is altered now. The door opens, and Ron steps out. I turn away and stare at the river, listening to his footsteps on the stones coming nearer and then the hard clump as he walks along the jetty and stands next to me. I am too angry to say anything.

He sighs, lifts a hand and strokes my hair. He is crying.

“He wants you back” is all he says before he unties the boat and climbs in, starts the motor, and moves off into the tide flowing down toward the bridge. I wait until I’m shivering before I go back to the cabin. Silva is coming out of the kitchen with three plates, and when I tell her Ron has left she thinks it is because she spoke sharply to him about the logs. She is peeved and irritable all evening. In truth she exhausts me. Later I go to bed, and although the baby kicks and kicks, I fall asleep. I’m glad I’m too tired to dwell on the strange truth that now that Ron may know who I am, I feel more unknown than ever.

She lies there. She lies there breathing with her mouth open while the stove burns low and the knitting comes apart in her hands, because her hands feel nothing, not the metal knitting needles that are hot from the fire or the stitches slipping off past her fat finger ends or the unraveling wool settling over the creases at her wrist. The hands don’t move. The fingers look boneless, like stuffed tubes; her nails are sunk into the tips like flat baby buttons pushed into dough. She’s on her back like a sleeping sow, her breath whistling in her throat, eyelashes twitching on her pink face. Her chest moves up and down, her breasts lift and collapse over her bulging stomach. Her giant bare feet look too lumpy to walk on. They still carry semicircular ridges across the fronts where the swollen flesh has bulged from her overtight shoes, which lie splayed and distorted on the floor beside her.