Morag Joss: Among the Missing aka Across the Bridge

So we would chuck pebbles and call across the river to the birds, we’d make childish jokes, make love, pull on each other’s hair, play clap-hands with our daughter. Sometimes I was afraid our whole life was getting to be like a silly guessing game we were both secretly sick of. But still I hoped it could last. We needed it to keep going long enough for an answer to come.

The bus will be along soon, I said. Give me your phone. Here’s mine.

Just another of our little survival rituals, swapping phones so I could plug each of them in, every few days, under the counter at Vi’s, and that morning also a way back from the dangerous subject of how to go on living.

You walked me up the track to the road and a bit of the way along, until Anna got heavy. After you turned back, I watched you for a while, walking away. The noise of the road and the bridge traffic was too loud for me to shout out to you, and so I turned, too, and set off to the bus stop at the service station.

We’d got another day started, I thought. And if in ten hours or so I stepped off the bus and walked back along the road and down the track, my long shadow cast behind me, carrying a bag of past-sell-by groceries from Vi’s, and if I heard your voices as the rumble of evening traffic on the bridge died away, I would be able to count this one as another day that had let us stay together. Another day done and it still hadn’t all come to an end, a day that would let the same day, with luck, come again tomorrow. A good day was one when nothing got worse.

I didn’t go as far as Inverness.

The road from the hotel followed the river for several miles. I switched on the car radio and drove, singing along raucously with one song after another, refusing to cry, trying to drown out Col’s words in my head. From time to time rain fell, not in spiky drips like English town rain but in milky currents that wet the air with cold, gusting sprays. Between showers, and seeming more liquid than the rain, sunlight poured down through gaps in the clouds onto the rocks and larch and pine trees across the steel-bright river. When my throat was so tired I could hardly make a sound, I turned the radio off and kept driving. Just as, when my father was dying, I used to absorb trivial details while waiting for bad news-every stem and leaf on the wallpaper in the doctor’s office, every stain on the floor by his hospital bed-I concentrated now on the sunlight, how it spilled over the landscape into refracting pools of sharp, unfiltered silvers and russets and greens. This was not my country, and I was glad I could numb myself with touristic gawping; I felt no tug of ancestral pride, found nothing revelatory or significant in its beauty. I traveled with the lulling detachment I might have felt thumbing through racks of postcards.

There were dozens of places to pull the rental car off the road and admire the views, and I stopped often. In some of them there were souvenir vans festooned with tartan flags and pennants, blaring out disheartening bagpipe music over the roofs of parked cars and caravans and food stalls. Sometimes I loitered, reading billboard warnings about forest fires and litter and threats to wildlife, watching people come and go, all of them in pairs or groups, never alone. I saw a family of seven disgorge themselves from a camper van and claim a damp picnic table; the mother and grandma spread plastic bags over the benches, the dog crawled underneath and lay down. The last of the four lanky children ran back to the van for a soccer ball, and a loud, hazardous game began at the side of the car park. The father got in the queue at the burger van and began a long relay of shouts to the others. He brought an armful of boxes back to the table, and the children darted into place, mauling the packaging, snapping open cans of explosive drinks, pushing torn-off lumps of pizza and burgers into their mouths, feeding the dog with their fingers. I made my way back to the car. I wanted to get away from them, from my envy of their messy, uncomplicated pleasure, and from the shame they aroused in me. I had married a man who shunned the very idea of that noisy, easygoing acceptance within families; surely I must be at heart the same kind of person. I was at the very least someone who would consider aborting a child rather than be abandoned by its father.

But I have no choice, I said to myself, as if the family at their picnic were challenging me. I have to stay married to him. He is all I have.

After that I stopped only in deserted places. I would turn the car onto shoulders choked with scrubby thickets of undergrowth and into roadsides filled with sagging piles of gravel and sand heaped there for highway repairs. I parked and wandered for a while in the rubble-strewn forecourt of a boarded-up and derelict service station until from an outbuilding came a hissing, spiteful-looking cat and two scraggy kittens.

Still some way before Inverness, I felt sick again and pulled over. I got out of the car to feel the rain on my face and breathe in its cold-water scent; there on the roadside, at the top of a bank of fields sloping down to the river, the air was mixed with a sharp, shelly, salt wind blowing in from the coast. Below me, the estuary flowed along, white-flecked and bright under a sudden patch of clear sky. To the east about a mile downriver, a bridge arched across from the city to the north shore, black and permanent against the smoky, distant blues and grays of the horizon where water and sky melded at the start of open sea.

The nausea passed, and to stop myself thinking about the baby, I unfolded the road atlas over the trunk of the car and began to trace the contours and place names dotted along the route I had followed, incredulous that the mountains and swaths of forest, the concrete and steel bridge and the river running beneath it could have transmuted from the actual, touchable, physical vastnesses before me into printed lines and shapes on a map. I stared at the page now softening under spattering drops of rain and felt, strangely, that it should have been the other way round, that really their first existence must have been as scribbles and marks in ink on paper, and only then, abstracted and set down, had the land risen up and taken form out of nothing more than the idea of itself, to amass and flow and come alive with air and light, and sprout crops and trees and bridges, and teem with creatures. And I longed to apply the same sense of impossibility to the surely still notional little lump of ectoplasm generating inside my body; if I disallowed any connection between that act of cellular multiplication and a real baby, maybe it wouldn’t become one, a terrifying, wondrous, real one. Maybe an abortion wouldn’t be necessary, maybe I wouldn’t have to make a decision at all. Maybe by the simple force of its mother’s incredulity, a putative human being could be so belittled and denied as to be fatally discouraged from coming into existence. Suddenly I was filled with horror that this might be so.

I folded the map up and got back in the car. I waited for a while, observing time flickering along by the numbers on the dashboard clock and wondering how long I could stay like this, enclosed and contained, halted. I wanted to arrest any further forward momentum in time or space; although stranded on the edge of a road with traffic thundering by and looking down on a river flowing fast and deep toward the sea, I was, however improbably, in the only place of safety and stillness I had. As long as I remained there, I could put off my next move, which, whenever it came and wherever it led, would take me nearer to my decision, whatever that was to be. For the future must have its location; if I refused it that, if I just didn’t turn the key in the ignition and go forward, if with every thought and breath I reduced the baby inside me to less than baby, to mereness, to nothing, perhaps I could will it not to be. I wanted its end to be painless and unknowing and without violence, and afterward I wanted to be left quiet and unnoticed. I wanted to be left alone to carry on living as before. How could it be that I would afterward suffer the loss of something I had never quite had?