Iain Banks - The Bridge

My mouth is dry. The woman reappears at the bedside, wearing a dark coat. She stands looking down at the man, then bends and kisses him on the forehead, smoothing some hair away from his brow as she does so. She picks a bag up from the floor, and leaves. I switch the set off.

There is a phone on the wall of the kitchen. The noise is there, not quite regular, perhaps a little faster than before.

I leave the apartment, take a lift to the train deck.

It is foggy; lights make yellow and orange cones out of the thick vapour. Trams and trains pass, hooting and clanking. I wander along the walkway on the outside of the bridge, hand on the tall rail at the walkway's lip. Fog blows softly through the girders; foghorns sound from the hidden sea.

People pass by, mostly railmen. I smell steam within the fog, and coal smoke and diesel fumes. In a railway workers' shed, uniformed men sit round tables, reading papers, playing cards, drinking from large mugs. I walk on. The bridge shudders beneath my feet, and a crashing, grinding, metallic noise comes from somewhere ahead. The noise echoes through the bridge, reflecting from the secondary architecture, bouncing through the fog-curdled air. I walk through a dense silence, then the foghorns sound, one after another. I hear trains and trams nearby slowing, stopping. Ahead, sirens and klaxons burst into life.

I walk by the very edge of the bridge, through the glowing fog. My legs ache again, my chest throbs dully as though in sympathy. I think of Abberlaine; the memory of her ought to make me feel better, but it does not. It was in a haunted apartment; the ghosts of that mindless noise and that nearly unchanging picture were there all the time, a hand's notion away, a switch-turning away, probably even when I first kissed her, even while her four limbs gripped me and I cried out in terror.

The trains are silent now; nothing has passed me in either direction for some minutes. Klaxons and sirens compete with the baying foghorns.

Yes, very sweet and good indeed, and I would love to dwell on that fresh memory, but something in me will not let this happen; I try to recreate the smell and feel and warmth of her, but all I can recall is that woman calmly brushing her hair, looking into an invisible mirror and brushing, brushing. I try to remember the way the room looked, but see it only in black and white, from up in one corner, just one bed in the clutter, and a man in it.

A train heads past me in the fog, lights flashing, heading towards the still-wailing sirens.

What now, anyway? Oh, more, much more of the same, that freshly sated part of my mind says; nights and days of that, weeks and months of that, please. But what, really? Another distraction, something else besides lost libraries and incomprehensible aircraft missions and faked dreams?

Either way, any of the ways, I can't see much good coming of it.

I walk on, into the rolling mists, into the gathering noise of sirens and shouts and crackling fires of a train wreck.

I see the flames first, rising through the fog like thick, quivering masts. Smoke rolls like a solid shadow in the mist. People shout, lights flash. Some railwaymen pass me, running, heading towards the wreck. I can see the rear of the train that passed me a few minutes ago; it is an emergency train, loaded with cranes and hoses and hospital cars. It moves slowly down the track, disappering behind the freight cars of another train two tracks away, nearer me; the first few freight cars are normal, still on the rails, but the next three have come off, their wheels lying in the metal troughs at the edge of the rails, neatly caught, as the bridge designers intended. The carriage beyond these lies diagonally across the tracks, its axles straddling a rail each. After that, each succeeding car is more damaged than the one before. The flames still rise ahead; I am near to their source, I can feel the heat beating through the fog onto my face. I wonder if I ought to retrace my steps; I'm probably not wanted here. In the fog it is confusing, but I think I am near the end of this section, where the bridge narrows like a distended hour-glass on its side, down to the bridge-within-a-bridge which is the linking span.

Cars are spilled across the tracks here, where the network of points leads the tracks within the main section of the bridge towards the funnel-neck of the linking span, where only a few lines cross to the next section. The heat on this side of the crashed train is quite fierce; jets of water from the emergency train on the far side of the wreck arc over the burning freight cars, hissing on their stoved-in wood and metal frames. Railmen with extinguishers move to and fro, others are unrolling canvas hoses and connecting them up to hydrants. The flames roll and shudder; the fires hiss as the water hits. I keep on, walking faster to get away from the heat of the flames. Water runs in the wheel troughs and draining channels of the deck, steaming as it goes beneath the pounding heat of the flames, adding its own vapour to the fog and the rising black smoke. Something has caught light above where the train burns, and drips molten fire onto the furnace of smashed cars below.

I have to put my hands to my ears when I pass one of the sirens, wailing away into the fog from a post by the track side. More railmen scatter past me, shouting. The fire is at my back now, roaring into the cluttered girder space. In front, the smashed train lies on its side, crumpled and askew, thrown across the tracks like something dropped from above, like a dead snake, the frames of the broken cars its fractured ribs.

Beyond that another train, larger and with long, windowed carriages rather than low slab-sided freight cars. Men swarm over its torn surfaces where they merge with the long, still solid shape of a freight locomotive, its snout buried in one of the tall carriages. I see people being pulled from the wreckage. Stretchers lie by the track; more klaxons and horns sound nearby, obliterating the foghorns below. I am halted by the sheer manic energy of this desperate scene, watching the rescue operation. More people are brought, moaning and bloody, out of the passenger train. An explosion bursts from the wreckage behind me; men run towards this new scene of catastrophe. The wounded are being taken away on stretchers.

'You!' One of the men shouts at me; he is kneeling by a stretcher, holding a woman's bloody arm while another man ties a tourniquet higher up. 'Give us a hand; take one end of a stretcher, can't you?'

There are ten or twelve stretchers by the side of the tracks; men run up and ferry them away, but many people are left lying, waiting their turn. I step over the rail, from walkway to trackside, go over to the stretchers, and help a railman carry one. We take the first stretcher to the emergency train, where medical orderlies take it from us.

There is another explosion in the wrecked freight train. When we come back with the next casualty, the emergency train has been moved back up the track, away from the danger of explosions; we have to carry the stretcher with a moaning, bleeding man on it two hundred yards to the end of the freight train, where orderlies relieve us. We run back to the passenger train.

The next casualty may well be dead already; he pours blood as soon as we lift him. We are directed by a railway official, told to take him not to the emergency train but to another train further down the track, in the opposite direction.

It is an express, held up by the crash and taking some of the victims on board before ferrying them to the nearest hospital. We take the stretcher on board. In what looks like a soft-class dining-car, a doctor is going from victim to victim. We put our bloody charge down over a white tablecloth, splattering blood, as the doctor reaches us. He presses down on the man's neck, holding it; I had not even noticed that was where the blood was coming from. The doctor looks at me; a young man. He looks frightened.