heavier than river water and runs underneath it.
“In there? Wash in that?”
“It’s all right for washing. It’s not seawater. You have to wait awhile though,” I said. “I’ll kick out the fire and when the metal’s cooled down you get in.”
She looked round. “Get in? You mean here-out here? What about, I mean-”
“Where else? I do it all the time. You don’t have to if you don’t want to. I just thought you could do with it.”
“What if somebody comes?”
“Don’t be stupid. Who do you think’s going to come down here?”
I laughed, thinking of you coming back and finding her standing naked and dripping. She tried to smile, but there was a genuinely shy look about her. I didn’t think I had ever seen anyone older than me blushing before. How could she be embarrassed about her body, at her age?
I tipped out the clothes water from the basin on the ground and refilled it from the enamel bathtub.
“If Stefan comes I’ll make sure he doesn’t see you. I’m only offering. Of course you don’t have to.”
She managed to smile. “I’d love to get clean.”
“You’ll be okay,” I said. “There’s nobody here but us.” I kicked out the ashes of the fire with the end of my foot. “Wait till I’ve done this and then you can get in.”
When I’d rinsed and wrung out your things and hung them up, she pulled off her hat and ruffled her hair. It was thick and dyed reddish, and dark at the roots. She dipped a hand in the water. “Have you got any shampoo?”
“I’ll get it. You need to undress quick and get in right away. It cools down fast.”
When I came back, she was stepping into the bath and I saw I was right about her age. She was at least forty, maybe even old enough to be my mother. As she stooped and curled modestly into herself, her waist folded into a line just above her belly button, like a crease in a roll of dough, and the skin on her haunches looked dusty and neglected. She crouched and soaped herself, splashing water over her shoulders for the warmth, and her skin was wet and shining and bright white.
“Come on,” I said. “You have to be quick. My husband will be back soon.”
She stood up again and took the jug while I waited with the shampoo.
“Keep your mouth closed,” I said. “It’s not drinking water.”
She filled the jug and lifted it high in both hands to wet her hair, and as she raised her arms, her breasts swelled out, surprisingly firm and large and high. Her belly was rounded, as it would be at her age, but it looked hard, not soft. She tipped back her head and closed her eyes, and the water poured down, soaking her hair and face and neck. I watched it run in tiny branching trickles down her breasts; I saw beads form and hang and drop from her nipples, which stuck out like little carvings in polished red stone, the way they do. She was pregnant.
I handed her the shampoo and took the jug. She stood with her hands folded protectively over her stomach, and I rinsed the suds from her head with jugful after jugful of water, until it began to go tepid. By then she was starting to shiver, so I made her step into the towel I had brought and I sent her inside to get dry. And just as I did every time after Anna’s bath, I tipped out the water, picked up the jug and soap and shampoo and the pile of clothes, and followed wet footprints across the stones to the trailer. The stupid woman needed looking after.
Another day passed before Ron returned to the bridge.
Very early the first morning, he’d awakened in the cabin exhausted and cold, his mind stunned and somehow also stale from the shock of all that had happened. He knew he would barely be able to converse that day, let alone convince anyone he was strong and fit for work, and the floor was dirtier than he’d judged it to be in the dark; his clothes were heavy with damp and grime. He needed to steady himself and also get good and clean, he decided, before he went asking for a job. So he made his way back along the river’s edge and struck up the steep slope into the forest; across the patch of cleared ground he was now able to make out on the far side the remains of a track that took him, after another climb, up to the road. No traffic passed him but the roadsides were crowded with vehicles parked in all directions, abandoned the night before when their drivers calculated they could walk the three or four miles to Netherloch faster than they would reach it by car. From the Highland Bounty Mini-Mart he set off in the Land Rover, traveling inland.
By eight o’clock he had driven nearly forty miles, far enough from the bridge, he hoped, for the usual tourist places to be unaffected by scores of stranded people seeking rooms. In a village called Aberarder he knocked on the door of a bungalow with a Vacancies board swinging from the sign that read GLENDARROCH BED AND BREAKFAST and explained to the landlady that his plans had been disrupted, he’d been turned back from going farther north and had been on the road nearly all night. He even managed to make a joke of asking, if it could be managed, for breakfast and bed, in that order. She was sympathetic; she’d been up half the night herself, watching the news. He ate ravenously, showered, and fell asleep in an overheated, immaculately floral bedroom. In the afternoon he went out and found a camping and outdoor supplies shop, where he bought new jeans and work shirts, T-shirts and socks, a jacket and boots. He ate early in a pub and returned to the Glendarroch, where he watched soccer on the tiny wall-mounted television, lying naked on the glassy nylon quilt. Before he fell asleep, he realized that his face was tired and tight, because he had been smiling.
The next day he drove back up through Netherloch. He parked the Land Rover at the Highland Bounty Mini- Mart again, noticing and thinking it odd that the store was closed on a Saturday. As before, he walked the three miles to the bridge. The area around it was still crowded with spectators, and there were now several radio cars and two TV mobile broadcast vans parked just beyond the barricades on the road. He could see that down by the bridge approach a pontoon holding winching gear now reached from the bank almost a quarter of the way across the river. Men were walking up and down on it, directing the lifting of twisted, dripping hunks of steel and concrete onto a salvage barge moored alongside. Some dinghies and a couple of boats were tied up at the pontoon, close to the bank. Farther out he saw two pairs of divers flipping into the water from two launches midstream, and he could see that work was under way across the river, too. A smaller pontoon had appeared, and the industrial wasteland next to the opposite bridge approach was being razed by bulldozers. Engine noises from both banks rose into the air and met in a swirl of sound overhead.
Close to where he stood, chain-link fencing was going up in place of the crowd barriers and police cordon tape, and he asked one of the men at work on it where he would find the office. He was directed to a mobile unit parked on the far side of the approach road. A man stood smoking at the entrance, and another man waiting inside turned and stared as Ron stepped in. The place was airless and muddy and smelled of sweat and warmed- up plastic. Two men in shirtsleeves sat behind a cluster of desks, one young and slight in a way that marked him out as the junior. Both had wads of paper in front of them, and the older one was arched back and swiveling in his chair, speaking on the telephone. On the wall by his desk was a board with a year planner and a postcard that read “A Man Without a Woman Is Like a Neck Without a Pain.” Ron stood at a respectful distance.
The man in front of him was talking in halting English to the younger man behind the desk; after a while he called in the second man from outside, wrote down some figures for him, and after protracted translation, both signed some papers and left. The young man now had his head down writing; the older one was gazing upward with the telephone at his ear, listening with obvious exasperation.
Ron stepped forward. “Excuse me, I’m looking-”
The young man looked up. “Skills?”
“Construction. General building. Transport, mainly.”
“Transport? HGV? Excavators? Got rough-terrain experience?”
“LGV. And PCV. Just… driving. I’ll do anything. Don’t mind heavy work.” Ron paused. “I just want to help.”
The man handed him an application.
“Pens over there,” he said and motioned toward a narrow ledge at one side of the unit. “Answer all the questions, mind.”
Ron took his time, turning his back as he took the card of the Glendarroch Bed and Breakfast from his pocket and copied the details down under “Address,” and in brackets wrote “temporary.” He covered his prison years with a lie about working for a contractor in Spain, with names and places he’d long ago memorized for precisely this purpose. He handed the form back just as the older man finished his call and turned to his colleague, running his hands through his hair and groaning.
