Morag Joss: Among the Missing aka Across the Bridge

Okay, what do you want me to do? You want my balls on a fucking plate?

Stefan, stop it. You’ll wake up Anna.

No, go on, tell me what to do! We can’t go back home, we don’t exist here, we can’t go anywhere else. So what’s the big plan, Silva? We go to your magic fucking cabin across the water, live in a fairy story, is that it? Is that the big plan?

You strode down to the river edge and started chucking stones into the water. We’d had this fight so many times, I knew enough to leave you for a while. I shivered inside the blanket and stared up at the stars. There were many sounds: the hiss of damp wood burning and the scrape of your feet on the shore, the plock of stones going into the river and the burr of traffic under the sky. I said your name, but you didn’t come back. I called out again, into the dark.

Stefan? Maybe I can get an extra job. Get more hours. We’d save that way. I might find something where I could take Anna, and then you could work, too. And anyway when the season starts you can work in the bar again, like last year, at the White Hart.

The noise of stones hitting the water stopped. You trudged back to me and sat down by the fire.

You can’t do any more hours. If we got the car, I could work every night. There’s loads of cabs in Inverness without licenses, they never check. I’d work the airport, clubs.

We were silent for a while, imagining it.

The weekends, guys coming off the rigs, they drink hard, they always need cabs. It’s good money. You could stay with Anna instead of working for that cow.

Oh, Vi’s all right. When she’s sober.

Your voice was very quiet, as it was when you were either really angry or lost in a dream. I knew it very well, the way you withdrew into yourself. You had begun to shrink a little, rubbing your face and sighing as though the rage in your brain was rising from the surface of your skin like a sort of dangerous, flammable vapor that had to be wiped away and expelled in slow, careful gusts. I took your hand and started to say something. I didn’t think you were really listening, so I stopped speaking, but you didn’t snatch your hand away. We sat like that in silence for a long time, moving only to put more wood on the fire. From time to time you looked at me as if you wanted to speak.

Suddenly you sat up very straight. Sssh, you said, and you stared through the darkness toward the river, cupping your free hand to your ear. Listen!

What? I squeezed your fingers tight. What is it? What’s wrong?

My heart started to bump. We’d heard about them, homeless vagrants wandering out from the shelters they’d made under the bridge, high on drugs, in gangs. We were at least a mile away, and there was no easy way along the riverbank, but it had happened a couple of times about three years ago, a couple of old caravans in a field near the service station had been set on fire. That was why you wouldn’t leave Anna and me alone at night last summer. You’d stayed on working in the bar, refused when they offered you the night porter job. If anyone found the track down from the road, we’d be okay, you always said, because you’d be there. We’d hear anyone in plenty of time to get away and hide. They wouldn’t know the riverbank as we did, and they’d be too stoned to think of staying quiet. We’d be okay.

But what if you were wrong? What if they’d been watching for hours from the darkness beyond the fire? I clutched at you. I was trying not to scream.

Stefan! Somebody’s there! Get Anna! Oh, God, Stefan, get Anna!

No, no, just listen. Anna’s fine. Listen to the geese, Silva, you whispered. Can you hear them? The geese?

I listened hard, waiting for any sound, the slightest sound, coming off the water. My eyes were watering from the smoke. All I could hear was the sounds of the fire and the traffic on the bridge.

The geese? No. I can’t hear anything.

Well now, you said in my ear, pulling me closer to you. Well now… That’ll be because they’re all fast asleep. As you should be, silly girl.

I pushed away from you, bashing at your shoulders, and you grabbed my hands and kissed them and started gnawing on my fingers, growling and mumbling. Just then there was a wail from the trailer. You looked round, but I got up instantly, pulling the blanket with me.

I’ll go. Don’t stay out long.

I left you poking a long branch into the fire. I was glad Anna had woken up, and to the sound of laughter. In a moment you’d come into the trailer to see that she was settling again, and the sight of her, asleep or not, would be almost the last stage of your restoration to yourself, and to me. At such moments I would often see tears on your face. That night, your love for her flooded your eyes.

The very last stage came later, after she was asleep again. It came like this. In the way I might casually happen to be first to reach a door and open it for both of us, I told you that I was sorry. It didn’t matter to me at all that I didn’t believe anything I’d said was untrue or that I didn’t think I had anything to apologize for. The assumption of blame wasn’t important, that wasn’t the purpose of it. It was a way of saying I knew that you wanted to forgive me but, much more, to forgive yourself, for the way we were forced to live. It was a way of letting you do both. Because then you took me in your arms and wrapped me in close against you, and with no more words we made love, fitting ourselves to each other’s bodies for each other’s consolation and for the glad familiarity of it, our slow, deep rocking together in the dark.

I was having a bath when Col returned from his kayaking, and he shouted through the door that he would wait for me in the bar. When I came down, he offered me a drink and declared with a little bravado that he would “join me” and ordered the same for himself, tonic without the gin, though usually he drank beer. He meant it as a kind of compliment, symbolically rejecting the notion of our incompatibility by rejecting a different drink, but the gesture was slightly too big for him. He sat and sipped his tonic, cowed by the formality between us. We had to be so careful. We exchanged tight remarks and little smiles, until I ordered him a pint, which he drank as if released from some sort of test. I watched him, not sure what I loved. But whatever it was in me he wanted, I did not want him to stop wanting it.

We ate early. Over dinner he drank a bottle of wine, which helped him, and we talked a little about his day on the river and about mine, supposedly in Inverness. We pared our stories down to safe generalities. I barely had to lie; I said I’d had an interesting time and had enjoyed seeing new places, and he didn’t ask any more of me than that. His lack of interest in my day was a courtesy, an offer to me to talk freely in the knowledge I would not really be listened to, so it was easy to reel off inane remarks about a day of vague impressions without being specific about locations or-the courtesy reciprocated-endanger him by bringing him anywhere near the orbit of my real thoughts. In return, when I asked him about the kayaking, I showed satisfaction with answers that were neither engaged nor precise. We ate in small mouthfuls, and every one was taken slowly, as an opportunity to push a little more of the evening behind us. But still, when we had finished, I was appalled at how much time was left to fill. Our bedroom, smelling of carpet cleaner and hot electric light, lay above us at the end of a musty hotel corridor. I had imagined, all through dinner, the hours of the coming night cramming themselves into its emptiness, lying in wait.