Rupert Thomson - Soft

A girl beside him, murmuring.

‘Is that where we’re going?’ she asked.

The two-pronged tower that stood at the north end of the bridge rose out of the surrounding darkness like the horns of some huge animal, the red lights glinting, jewels embedded in the bone.

Barker nodded. ‘Yes.’

He realised that if they approached the bridge by the main road they would have to pass a manned toll-booth. Thinking it might be wiser to remain unseen, he led Glade down a curving cycle-path on to a smaller, two-lane road. They walked beneath a flyover, their footsteps echoing off the walls.

Before too long they reached a notice that said HUMBER BRIDGE COUNTRY PARK. Barker stood still, looked around. Two or three lorries, but no sign of any drivers. The wind had risen. The trees that had been planted to divide one section of the car-park from another were being thrown about in the wild air above his head, their leaves tinted yellow by the strange, dim streetlights.

They both saw the phone-box at the same time. Glade turned to him, her lips parted, her fingers lifting towards her chin. What harm could it do, he thought, now they were almost there?

‘OK,’ he said.

Inside the phone-box he gave her a handful of loose change. She dialled the number, then stared into the darkness, biting her lip. He was standing so close to her that he could smell her hair.

When the hospital answered she asked for Ward 15. Barker only heard one half of the conversation that followed: ‘How is he?’ and ‘Really? On Thursday?’ and ‘Give him my love.’ It seemed that her father was asleep, and couldn’t speak to her. While Barker waited for her to finish, he read the small framed notice above the phone. Instructions, warnings. Codes. You could call The Falklands from this lonely car-park. You could call Zaire.

‘So how is he?’ Barker asked when she had replaced the receiver.

‘He’s comfortable.’ She frowned. ‘They always say that.’

‘Anybody else you want to ring?’

She shook her head.

Outside again, they began to walk. In the absence of any cars, the fat white arrows painted on the ground looked pompous, absurd, but also faintly sinister. Behind his back, trees swirled and rustled in the wind.

‘You could have called your boyfriend,’ he said after a while.

‘I haven’t got one,’ she said, ‘not any more.’

‘Is that why you don’t wear any rings?’

‘That’s not why. And anyway, he didn’t give me any rings. He didn’t give me any jewellery at all.’ She spoke with a kind of wonder, as if she had only just realised.

‘What did he give you?’ Barker asked.

‘Tickets.’

‘Tickets?’

‘Plane tickets.’

Barker nodded, remembering. ‘To New Orleans.’

‘Once.’ Her face floated towards him through the grimy yellow light, floated somewhere below his shoulder, and she took hold of his elbow. ‘How did you know?’

It was something he couldn’t possibly have known, of course, but looking into her face, he saw that she wasn’t disconcerted, not in the slightest. Not suspicious either. Only curious. She was waiting for his answer, whatever it might be. He had the feeling that she would accept almost anything he said. Because of who he was.

‘Someone must have told me,’ he said.

She smiled, as if this was exactly the kind of answer she had expected, then she nodded and walked on.

They passed the Tourist Information Office, which was closed. Across the tarmac stood a café, also closed. Barker noticed a hand-written sign on the door: CAFÉ OPENS 10:15 A.M. The morning — it seemed so far away, beyond imagining. Glade came and stood beside him, pressed her face to the dark window.

‘They sell jam,’ she said, and laughed.

When you first step on to a suspension bridge you feel you still have some connection with the land. Gradually, though, you realise you’ve left one element for another. Earth’s gone. Suddenly there’s only air. And far below, of course, the water. Like something waiting. In the early sixties Barker used to cycle up to the Tamar Bridge at night, just him and a friend of his called Danny and a younger boy whose name he couldn’t now remember. For years, it seemed, he had watched the bridge being built; it had formed a kind of backdrop to his childhood. How thrilling, then, to be able finally to walk out to the middle, his mind sent flying by the tiny lethal bottles of Barley Wine that Danny used to steal from the off-licence. Looking west, he could see into the next county, the scattered lights of Saltash and Wearde. Along the east bank black-hulled barges would be lying in neat rows of three. To the south he could watch the water swirling round the stone columns that supported the old railway bridge, the patterns on the surface intricate and whorled, like fingerprints. He had spent hours on that bridge, always at night and always drunk, and he could still remember it shaking as the cars passed over it. There was something reassuring about the way it shook; it had reminded him of a voice reverberating through a body. This bridge was different, though. The sheer scale of it. The isolation.

To reach the bridge they had to climb a flight of wooden steps that scaled an embankment. When they were halfway up, a man appeared above them, outlined against the sky. The man was carrying a camera, and holding a small boy by the hand. Barker nodded at the man, but didn’t speak to him. At the top of the steps he turned right, past a series of huge, ridged concrete blocks. He paused, waiting for Glade to catch him up. Over his shoulder he could see the toll-booth, which, from a distance, resembled an aquarium, men moving slowly through its dingy, greenish-yellow light. As he walked on, with Glade beside him, the wind grew stronger, more deliberate, and he could feel the ground opening beneath his feet. Although the bridge weighed many thousands of tons, it felt delicate, almost fragile in the face of the great black emptiness that surrounded it. Those heavy cables stretching up towards the towers — if he looked at them for too long, he had the feeling he was falling. There was a railing, but it didn’t seem enough. You could be holding on and then it would give. He had the same feeling in dreams sometimes. In nightmares. It was all he could do not to crouch down, close his eyes. He looked at Glade. She was walking slightly ahead of him, strangely eager, as if she was on her way to something that she didn’t want to miss. He couldn’t predict her, not even from one moment to the next.

They were about a third of the way across.

One feature of the bridge that surprised him was the fact that the road was raised above the walkway. When a car passed by, his eyes were on a level with the dark blur of its tyres. He felt this might work in his favour. At first he had been worried that somebody might stop. He could imagine a well-meaning stranger leaning out of his car window and asking if they needed help. When he said no, the stranger might become suspicious. Might even report them. People are funny about people on bridges. And if the police came, of course, well, that would be the end of it. But because they were walking below the cars, and the light was going, he now thought it unlikely anyone would notice them.

It took half an hour to reach the middle. Glade was talking to herself — or she might have been singing, he couldn’t tell; he could see her lips moving, though he couldn’t hear her above the constant, muted whining of the wind. She seemed happy on the bridge. Sometimes she stopped and stared up at the huge, looped cables and her face filled with a breathless quality, a kind of awe, and he thought of how his own face must have looked a quarter of a century before.

All the way across he had been aware of the railing that stood between him and the river. He had been sizing it up, trying to determine the nature of the obstacle. In a way, he was taken aback by the absence of discouragement. He had expected something far more daunting. But there was no anti-climb paint, no barbed wire. Just a metal railing five feet high. Beyond it, a ledge or lip, no more than six inches wide. Beyond that, nothing. It seemed too easy. He stood still, thinking. The wind roared in his ears. The river gaped below. Was there something he had missed?