Among the Missing aka Across the Bridge

stomach felt empty yet queasy; I had to get my body moving and I had to get warm.

I retraced my steps to the service station. Traffic was moving past on the road again, but the car park was still full. I saw no police vehicles and, when I paused at the entrance to look around, no police officers. Inside, the concourse dormitory was waking up to serene piped music and the smell of frying. People dazed from sleep were moving slowly here and there among those still sleeping, and cleaners quietly mopped floors and pushed trolleys and wiped surfaces, trancelike in the warm, stale air. The washroom was a mess, out of soap and paper and towels, but I managed to run some hot water in a basin, and I splashed some on my face, which warmed it without getting it much cleaner. When I came out, the cafe was open. I was relieved to see there had been a changeover of staff, and once I was quite sure I couldn’t see anybody who had been there yesterday, I joined the others already lining up for food. New supplies had been found from somewhere. I ate a big plateful of sausages and beans, and I drank my tea so fast I scalded my mouth. Almost as soon as I’d finished I felt sick, and went outside to get some air. People were leaving in a steady stream now; I watched them as they walked past me, talking into phones, getting in their cars and driving away. They were all expected home.

I was not like them anymore; the “I” I had been could never again be expected home, or call anyone to say how late she’d be. That woman was dead. Not one single person, not even the most primitive, empty shelter on the planet, waited in anticipation of her presence. Nowhere in the world was there a cupboard or a shelf holding a single object of beauty or practicality belonging to her that she would ever see or use again. Even last night’s cardboard, if it had dried out enough by nightfall, would tonight be drawn around another body or tipped onto the fire.

In Portsmouth there had been a man I sometimes saw in a particular spot in the shopping center car park, a stinking recess near the doors to the stairwell on Level C. Most days he was there hunched in a heap of rags, drinking or asleep; sometimes I saw him heaving himself up or down the stairways. He never begged, but I used to drop him a coin as I went past. I suppose he was chased away from his refuge from time to time; he would disappear for a month or two, then drift back. And always, lying in his filthy nest or shuffling around the place, he would be guarding four dirty shopping bags. Always four. I suppose he replaced them as they wore out, but he always had four, clutched in both hands in a tangle of strings. What could be in them that was so precious, I used to wonder: spare shoes, a quarter bottle of booze, a lucky rabbit’s foot? Now I thought I understood why he haunted the place and why he guarded his bags as if they contained gold bullion. He wasn’t just afraid they would be stolen. In a life eked out on a patch of concrete, he was holding off the final shame of destitution, an existence that carried no trace of who he was; for as long as he occupied the same patch of concrete, and was custodian of four bagfuls of the talismans and gadgetry and keepsakes that made that life his, he was a person, not a feral animal. Though he no longer had his own roof or so much as a bed or a chair, he still had his place and his “things.” He still owned a few of those nuggets of significance or usefulness or whimsy that accrue in even the poorest of lives.

But I no longer had even the poorest of lives. I had no life that I could lay claim to. In less than a day, I had discovered what perhaps should have been obvious: in ceasing to be the person I was, I had lost more than my life as Col’s wife. I had lost something even more crucial than her home to go to, an enclosing place to be at night, her belongings: I had lost the possibility of journey’s end. However meager it might have been, the life I had discarded had been the nearest I had to a compass, a fixed point recognizable as mine that I could travel from or toward. All that lay ahead of me now was a wearying and arbitrary moving on, in perpetuity. Being no one, I had no reason to be anywhere, and I had not expected such a falling off of purpose.

Had it not been for the baby I would have despaired, and for the baby’s sake as well as my own I had to decide what the hell I thought I was doing. Twelve hours ago I had walked away from my life, yet I was still less than ten miles from it. What was wrong with me that I felt anchored here? Something had been overlooked, something had me in shackles. I was behaving as if I still had hopes of having the baby with Colin, as if nothing he had said was real enough to have a bearing on what would happen now. I had to get away before I started to consider asking him to forgive me. I had to start believing that, after what I had done yesterday, I even deserved my baby.

I watched her sleeping. I knew her exhaustion was real as soon as we were inside the trailer because the first thing she did was pull off her boots. Nobody who’s planning to attack and rob you would do that. She crawled onto the bed, and her eyes were closing even before she had shrunk herself away into the covers. Soon her shivering stopped, but she lay for a long time with her eyes closed before she fell asleep. So I watched her sleeping out of wariness that I knew there was no real need for, but wariness was a habit with me.

She wasn’t clean, but I also knew about that. I knew the hopeless filth of people accustomed to months without hot water and soap and a proper, safe space to be undressed and attend to themselves. I’d seen plenty of that on the journey to here, and after a while that loss of pride doesn’t wash off at all. It wasn’t the same as the swift, dismaying layer of dirt on someone like her, unable to wash for a single day and a night.

And in fact there’s a third way homeless people go, and that’s the labored cleanliness of people like me, encamped in run-down places, condemned buildings, damp trailers, people who will lug buckets and light fires to heat water and scrape their skin raw and wear their clothes out with scrubbing. We’re the ones who are terrified that the dirt and shame that encroach on illegal lives might touch ours. She wasn’t like that, either. She was used to keeping clean easily and had never thought that having the means to do so might be a luxury. She was stained by sudden and brief deprivation, and as I watched her sleeping, I wondered why.

My name isn’t Annabel. But at that moment I needed a new name and I hadn’t until that instant thought what it would be. I still wasn’t thinking when I blurted out Anna. My mouth opened in a panic and produced a sound almost involuntarily, and it was a natural pair of syllables to utter in those circumstances, I do believe that. I didn’t choose to say it. But it was the obvious association to make, stumbling toward the trailer with Anna’s mother’s arm around my shoulder, her kind, sad face looking at me like that. And although it was also unthinking-and not a piece of deliberate and hasty disguise-to add the -bel, it was also necessary, for the time being, to conceal that I knew anything about her daughter and Stefan. I would have to go into it all later, but I knew I was about to collapse. I had to get inside and lie down, and I couldn’t start to explain it then. But of course there was more to it than that.

My mother died of a particular sorrow, which was that she took the life of a child. In a drawer in our house there was a photograph of the child, a baby girl. In the picture were also the child’s mother, Marjorie Porter, holding a cup and saucer, and my mother, Irene, with her teacup on her lap and one hand on the crucifix in the hollow of her throat. At the time Irene was forty-one, a year younger than I am, come to think of it. The women were in deck chairs on a patch of grass in a back garden; the ground around them was studded with floppy clumps of lettuce and lined by long fringes of carrot tops. In the background through a fence you could see the next-door garden sprouting the same rows of vegetables, the same pointed towers of bean plants climbing up bamboo frames; these were clearly the gardens of neighbors who shared packets of seed and swapped cuttings. A curl of smoke rose from a cigarette that rested in an ashtray on a kitchen chair beside the women. Next to the chair stood a man in suspenders holding a garden sieve up to his face and laughing through the mesh into the camera. His face couldn’t be seen very well, but he was certainly my father.

What was also certain was that they were in the Porters’ garden and not ours, for there on a rug in front of Marjorie was five-month-old Annabel, all baby jowls and bandy baby legs and puffy baby feet, wearing ballooning, frilly pants and a sundress and bonnet. Marjorie’s face as she looked down at her child was weary, eternal, transparent; motherly love had opened her out, and had also laden her forever with its ballast of implications: responsibility, fertility, continuity, and all their warm, perplexing weight, their proud, dull glow. Even knowing what was about to befall her, I envied her that. (At the time I still had the photograph to look at, I believed I would never have a child myself.) The picture had captured her in new motherhood, before all this knowledge had reduced her to mereness, to that dumpy, overlooked category of numberless, undifferentiated mums. Actually, on that day, in her sleeveless dress and lacquered beehive hairdo, she looked less maternal as well as a whole generation, rather than the actual sixteen years that separated them, younger than my tightly permed and dirndl- skirted and still childless mother, whose sharp, wing-framed spectacles had caught a ray of sun and trapped her eyes as though behind small, blazing mirrors. Marjorie’s husband, Mr. Porter, whose first name I never knew, must have taken the picture. It was probably his cigarette in the ashtray.

The strangest thing about any old photograph is it is all containment, all ignorance. My parents and Mrs.