Among the Missing aka Across the Bridge

me was that I was not and never had been the woman tourist probably trapped in a rental car in the middle of the river. Nor did I feel I was really tricking either of us to imagine that this had happened to some other woman tourist; watching Silva dart around cleaning and tidying for them, I told myself that her certainty of Stefan’s and Anna’s safety was more to be relied upon than an assumption that they had been in the car. Suppose just after I left them Stefan had taken Anna to the service station for lunch? Then the car might have been stolen from the roadside. Or the man who had changed the plates that afternoon might have been driving it. Silva knew her husband best. Sharing her faith in him to stay alive was the only way I could spare myself the distress of believing them lost. It was also the only way I could help her.

And she was helping me. She asked me more and more, and I began to talk more easily, building my new history bit by bit as from her questions came my answers, like little blocks appearing in my hands that I could turn and consider to see where they fit, and set in place, one by one. After I lost my house I had spent three months in a hostel trying to get a job, until I had to leave. Then I had taken the bus all the way up to Inverness because I had two spinster cousins there. We hadn’t been in close touch, but I’d met them a few times when I was younger. They would be elderly by now, maybe frail and glad of my help in the house; I’d been thinking I could even move in with them. At least they wouldn’t turn me away while I got settled. As I told it, the story gained credibility for me; even though before I said all this the idea had never existed, it did now. I wanted Silva to think it brave and commendable of me, making a fresh start in the north of Scotland, closer to family. I did not want her to think me desperate or degraded. But then, I told her, despising the rise in my voice, it turned out I’d been sending the cousins Christmas cards for years and all for nothing (though I had to admit I hadn’t had one from them for some time). When I got to their address, they had long ago moved away. Nobody had even heard of them. The young couple living in the house now were very nice to me and had agreed to keep my luggage in their garage until I got myself organized. I’d been looking around Netherloch for shop or bar work and a roof over my head when the bridge went down and I’d got stranded without enough money on me for a hotel, and then I had got sick.

Silva looked at me with cool, curious eyes. It was possible she didn’t believe a word of it, but as long as she didn’t say so and as long as she let me stay, maybe I didn’t need her to. Whatever was true or not true, known or unknown-cars plunging off a collapsing bridge, Colin, the baby, Stefan and Anna, other people trapped and drowned-the fact was I could not bear to think of any of these things for more than a few minutes at a time.

In return she told me about Vi’s shabby little store and how Vi was drunk a lot of the time and how she put up with it because it meant cash, no questions about work permits. Vi hadn’t even asked exactly where she was from; she didn’t care.

“She sometimes says ‘your lot,’ but she doesn’t even know who she means.” Silva shrugged. “To her I’m just foreign. Just as well.”

I remembered Stefan’s demand that I ask no questions and how, when I did, his cold, pinchy face had softened.

“I don’t know where you’re from, either,” I said.

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. We went first to Greece and then Italy. Anna was born in Italy. We got to London, then we had to go to Glasgow. There were bad things. Things went wrong. So we came here.” She looked at me seriously. “We are better than this, we are not people who choose to be like this, Stefan and I. We used to have a place, a proper life. We are getting things better, soon we will be away from here. We will have our life again.”

She sighed and got up. A while later she made tea and we ate some bread and jam, and I had another nap.

So the day passed. Whenever she grew restless, she went off alone along the riverbank toward the bridge, or up to the top of the track, where, she told me, she just watched the traffic going by. When she wandered away, I stayed awake, watching over the place and keeping the fire going. We went our separate ways, both waiting for Stefan, each believing she was looking after the other. Later I heated a pot of water and cooked some rice, and when she came back we made a kind of stew with tomatoes and beans. As the afternoon began to fade, she set off again for the service station. Stefan and Anna might be there, she said, or most probably she would meet them on the road.

On Monday I got up early, before six. It was cold inside the trailer and the air was pale and empty. I dressed quickly and brushed my hair. When I put away the brush, I banged the cupboard shut on the wall above Annabel’s head, which woke her up.

“I have to get going,” I told her. “I need extra time. Maybe there’s a bus up to Netherloch and over the little bridge and I can get to work that way.” I hesitated. “Stefan knows I won’t be here. He’ll come and find me at work. So-”

“Do you mean-do you want me to-”

“Stay. You can guard the trailer. Go back to sleep.”

I got to the Highland Bounty at twenty to ten, more than two hours late. It was raining and the shop was locked up but the outside lights were on. Probably they’d been on all night after Vi went across to her place at the back. It was a horrible cottage, with water-stained walls, behind a scraggy hedge and a garden nothing more than dead grass. I banged on the door and waited. There was brown moss sprouting at the base of the water pipe. The rain was cold on my head.

I had to stand back when the door opened and the smell spilled out, the thick, salty smell of the stuff Vi ate, those pots of flakes she just poured boiling water into, and the smell of dirt, as if she kept sweating dogs in there with the windows shut. But she didn’t have any pets, she just never cleaned.

“Vi, I’m sorry I’m late, I had to get a bus to Netherloch and then I walked.”

Half of her face appeared round the door. Under the orange-shaded ceiling light in the hall, she looked hardly human. She couldn’t get her mouth to work properly.

“I’m not dressed,” she managed to say. There was some scrabbling behind the door, and then one hand and a dry-looking arm covered in yellow nylon appeared. She shook the bunch of keys and a bag of coins at me.

“Here, don’t keep me out on the doorstep! Go and open up.”

I took them and went back across the tarmac, unlocked the shop, and turned on the lights. I opened the cash register and emptied in the coins, switched on the radio, and wiped down the counter with the spray and a paper cloth. I rubbed the old words off the sandwich board sign and wrote on both sides, OPEN MILK SOUVENIRS GROSERIES ICECREAM, and I carried it outside. Then I swept off the steps and emptied the litter bin. I mopped the floor near the door, and then I lit the kerosene stove in case Vi came in later. She couldn’t stand the cold. By this afternoon she’d be at the vodka just to keep the cold out, or so she said, earlier if she couldn’t sit in the hot fug around the stove.

The shelves were full of gaps. I restocked them and put on the kettle, then I wrote a list of things Vi needed to get from the Cash & Carry when she was sober enough to go. I poured a mug of tea and took it across. I rapped on the door, opened it, and called out that I was leaving it on the hall mat for her. I heard the toilet flushing upstairs.

Then I walked back slowly in the rain. I didn’t mind being at work, but today, with you still away, I didn’t know where to find the energy. The day had only just begun, and already my strength for any more of it was leaking away. Whatever I did it felt like dragging about a heavy load on my back, and for what? If all it came to was this, trying to get through as a person alone, how could I face it? I asked you. I felt sick with loneliness, sick to my heart of simple, ordinary things that only I was there to notice: water drops landing in the puddles in the tarmac, the greenness of the wet roadside in the rain, the aroma that would meet me when I stepped inside the shop of wrapped bread and fire lighters and tea dust. I had never needed you more.

But you were coming back. Somehow I would have to wait out the day in the wobbly heat haze from the stove, listening to the grating of the freezers and the tinking of the turned-down radio and watching the weather outside strike rainy shadows off the Peg-Board walls and racks of empty shelving. And go on waiting, if I had to, for as long as it took.

When I came around the corner to the front, there was a Land Rover parked outside. Two men in work clothes were in the shop. One of them was Ron.

“Hello, Blondie,” he said, smiling, dumping tea, instant coffee, and sugar on the counter. “How are you? Had a nice lie-in?”