There’s a name, I can tell that much. Begins with C. Hard to make out – Cathie? Callie? Carrie possibly? And clouds of felt-tip hearts, all bleeding in the rain.
*
You can see the bridge for miles from land or water. Not that I’ve been out on the open sea, but that’s what they say. Even at night, it’s a line of light threading the dark.
Seems to have been here forever. Weird to think I’ve been around longer than it has. Ferry, that was the only way over before. One of those dodgy-looking ones, an open deck with room for a couple of cars. Down there, near where the reed bed is. Didn’t run in bad weather. Couldn’t. Miles to drive round. We used to come down to the foreshore to watch when we were kids. Cranes hoisting each section from the tugs as though they were weaving webs in the air.
I’ve no idea how it stays up. Something to do with suspense, with tension? Robin would know, could explain. Holy High-Wire, Batman!
The red lights glare at the top of each tower, to show you it’s there, in the dark, if you’re up that high. Or that low, I suppose. Whatever. You wouldn’t think it, but they’re hollow, the towers, enormous organ pipes sinking into the seabed. Put your ear to one you’ll catch the echoes of the waves, howling quietly.
They say it won’t ever be paid for, the bridge. Just the interest piling up year after year after year, an impossible, irredeemable debt.
There is a toll, one way. You have to pay to drive out of the city. No charge for pedestrians. If you walk across, the bridge causes more wear and tear on you than you do on the bridge.
*
I’ve taken to stopping by her every day. I don’t bother saying anything anymore. I lean and stare, as she does. It’s easier. Comfortable, almost. Companionable, like. It’s such an effort to keep moving. I could stay here all day.
On the bank, the home side, the reeds bend and lift, bend and lift, dark then light. We had a cat, when I was little. The softest, silkiest creature. Puts me in mind of her fur, those reeds. Didn’t come in for breakfast one morning. And that was that. She became an absence. Not there, but not gone either, not properly, if you get my drift. We never did find out what happened. Feared the worst. I cried for days. Inconsolable. I still catch her, sometimes, slinking, in the corner of my eye.
I stand and watch the reed bed moving. I hold my breath, try really hard to hear. But the sound can’t carry over the traffic and the wind and the thrum in the wires. If I could, if I could hear it, touch it, stroke it, I fancy it might be purring.
*
There’s been an accident. Right next to us. Traffic cones, tattered red-and-white tape flick-flacking, blocking the way, the pavement glittering blood red. Crunch and crackle under my feet. A smashed bike light. It does get slippery sometimes, treacherous. Patches of black ice where condensation’s dripped from the cables.
Care. You must take care. Constant care. A split second, that’s all it takes. You don’t have to jump. It’s easy enough to fall. Let yourself keep falling.
*
When she does turn towards me, her hair’s webbing her face so I can’t see her eyes.
She’s got one of those name necklaces. Gold squirling across her throat. Callie? Yes, Callie, not Cathie or Carrie. They’re for her, the flowers. In memory of her. She’s gone. She must have gone. Still, here we are. Me and her, stuck halfway across the bridge, above the deep, blank, unreflecting sea. Me and my ghost.
*
The cables hum overhead. Hmm. Hmmmm.
Ready to snap.
*
I had a puppet when I was little. The screws fixing the strings would swivel undone. Ever so slowly. Then the strings’d get all knotted up, arms and legs sticking out at weird angles. Devil’s own job to untangle it all.
My body’s coming loose.
Look, this is me, trying to lift my hand, but it just hangs there.
*
I’ve always been here, on the bridge, suspended between bank and bank.
*
We could step out onto that vast shimmer, me and Callie, stride right out east, right out straight, all the way to where the sea meets the sky.
What happens if you reach it? The horizon. Topple clean off the edge? Slam into a brick wall, the back of the stage?
Nothing. That’s my guess. Nothing at all. Nada. Nichts.
Nowt. Nothing.
The wind cuts right through you this high. It bites, really bites. Like a shark.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s the only thing holding me up.
*
There’s a gap in the traffic.
The road’s empty.
Some incident somewhere.
Can’t hear it anymore, can’t feel it, that rush, can’t feel it inside me, the speed, the vibrations, the motion.
*
7.43.
How long’s it been flickering like that? The light? That warning light at the top of the tower?
*
7.43
*
Callie’s climbed onto the railing. She’s holding out her hand.
*
… and the waters roar and rise and crack and gape and curve and wall and tunnel and away the seabed stretches disclosing all that was once and is lost the plastic the plastic the dumped bycatch torn nets rusted hulls the skulls of sailors the ribs of whales the broken rudder rotting timbers dragon prow fallen warhammer home abandoned stone axe the broken pot smothered fire drowned bones of mammoths stumps of uncountable forests the petrified footprints the melted ice the huge jaws the giant claws the spiralling shells the spiralling the bed the bottom and the waste and the nothingness of the world …
*
Callie walks out onto the seabed, into the tunnel of water. Her footprints tremble behind her, before the sand lifts to fill them, sucks them away.
*
… the waste and the nothingness …
*
Waving.
*
A kittiwake screeches, arcs away and out to sea.
Waving.
*
I don’t mean to look back. I don’t want to. I can’t see the point.
*
Movement. Down on the foreshore. That’s what’s caught my eye. Someone waving. Someone small.
A child?
No, not so tiny. Just so very distant. All I see is what they’re wearing, that dab of brightness.
*
They all look back, don’t they? In the old stories. No matter how much they’ve been warned, how many times. Like me checking my watch when I know it’s broken. You don’t mean to. Don’t want to. You can’t help yourself. It’s habit. Instinct.
*
A scarlet parka.
Same as the one I gave Robin last Christmas. It made us laugh.
The colour, you see, with the name?
It’s what we do. We make jokes together. Proper bad jokes, that nobody else would get. We laugh. We have laughed.
*
I’ve lost sight of Callie.
There’s too much, too much stuff. It’s just, just.
I can’t see her anymore. However hard I blink, my eyes won’t clear.
*
Fierce bird, a robin. Cool. Keeps singing all winter. Most birds don’t.
When the north wind doth blow. And we shall have snow. And what will the robin do then, poor thing?
Robin sings loudly every morning, in the shower. A terrible, out-of-tune, new-day happy song.
*
I’m on my own out here.
*
If you woke and the life you expected to find wasn’t there? Only absence? Could you keep singing? Would you keep singing then, poor thing?
*
Buzz!
*
The walls of water crest, and break.
*
Buzz! Buzz!
*
My cheeks are stinging. The tops of my ears are burning with cold.
*
Buzz! Buzz! Buzzzzzzzz!
Holy Tintinnabulation, Batman!
>
*
The surface of the sea settles back, smooth, concealing.
*
What is that? That buzzing?
Bees. The dead bees lifting, rising around my head, crowding as if I’m sweet with honey!
No. No. Don’t be daft. There. It’s been there all along, I just couldn’t put my hand on it. In my pocket.
My phone.
*
—You’re back. Thank God, you’re back.
*
I’ve not been paying attention. That tanker’s moved. It’s almost disappeared now.
*
7.44.
*
The second hand on my watch swoops, like a compass seeking north.
*
It’s hard work, changing direction, turning away from the middle of the bridge. Heavy-going. The jam must have cleared, the traffic’s picked up again. A constant stream. I’m facing into it this way, towards the further side, towards home.
The wind’s shifted. Coming off the land. Still blowing, mind, a right buffeting.
I put my hood up. Through the thick cloth, over the engines, under the hum of the wires, somehow, somewhere, soft as a lullaby, I can hear the rustling of reeds. I hunch my shoulders, brace, start walking.
LICKED CLEAN
SAMMY WRIGHT
He had a group of friends, male friends, and they would walk through town in neat shirts and sheepish bravado, carefully laughing at anything serious. He liked them, but he also didn’t like them. He sometimes wondered if they all felt the same way. Occasionally, he would find himself with just one of them, and the conversation stuttered awkwardly. Somehow, their friendship worked as a group, but individually, they had little to say to each other.
On their nights out, they would talk about women. They would egg each other on to approach women at bars, but rarely did so. There were certain women on their course, and in their halls, and in their wider circle, who they agreed were fit. They would talk about them with crude bluntness, undercut by fear.
When he kissed her, in the union bar, he knew he was transgressing in some way. He didn’t call her. He held off for a week. One night, after a few drinks with the boys, he walked home along the canal. The night was warm, and the weedy bank of foliage smelt rich and green and seedy. He texted her.
When she spoke about him, she often started with a criticism, proprietary, fond, qualified at the end with, ‘but
I do love him’. When he was with the boys, he tried to avoid discussing her, but when he did, his face went red. Sometimes, at night, when they lay in bed face to face, he felt himself dissolve into her. He found it hard to believe in both parts of his life at the same time – the days of unease and banter, the nights of quiet, overwhelming intimacy.
After university, he stayed in contact with the boys, but their friendship fell into a specific pattern. Once in a while they would all meet, for an occasion, or just an agreed night out. They would greet each other with loud cries. They would hug, backslapping. They would drink, and talk in mockery and reminiscence. Through the evening, he would sway from a deep glow of acceptance into an awkward sense of dislocation. When they parted, with more hugs, he had the sense of fulfilment after a difficult task completed with no injury.
Most of his life was with her. They constructed it together. A house, bought with a mortgage and a loan from her parents. Furniture, discussed, bought, admired, looked after. A shared calendar. He loved the quiet embrace of routine, and it seemed to both of them that what was between them was real.
At night, he dreamed of women he saw on the street, women with long legs and bright hair that tumbled on bare shoulders.
When he proposed to her, he did so with a deep seriousness. He cried. He felt that barely discernible doubleness, that he was both entirely in the moment, and also aware of how he would remember this moment. He knew they would both say how he had cried when they told the story, and they both did.
He cried again at the wedding. He believed in their life together. He believed he had made a good choice, and that she gave him what he lacked. He believed they were a good team. Deeper than that, he knew she gave him safety from having to pretend to be something he was not.
When he remembered his stag night, he shuddered.
*
They took three years before consulting a doctor. In that time their life had settled firmly into shape. They went on adventurous holidays, carefully planned. They upgraded things in their house. There was a scale of stuff, like a pay scale, that they felt impelled to move up. IKEA was at the bottom, followed by branded stuff bought at John Lewis, and ending in a few special things bought from designer outlets or antique shops.
In that time, the taking of a pregnancy test became a routine disappointment.
Her friends began to have children. They came for dinner, round, glowing, with the same conversation repeated. Due dates, names, nurseries. He was angry with her that she was so upset. He didn’t see why it mattered what they had. At least, he said he didn’t see it.
The boys took him out to let off steam. They drank steadily. He was the centre of things. They were gentler with him than sometimes. At ten thirty, they had some shots. At twelve, he was drunk, with a wild, whirling intoxication he’d never felt before. At three, he kissed a girl with tanned shoulders and fat knees.
In the morning, he could smell her still.
The third round of IVF worked. The baby was red and wrinkled, like all babies, but it moved with delicate shivers. He cried when it was born, because he expected to, but when they were back home, and he was holding his son, it seemed to him that if this was what he had been waiting for, it wasn’t enough.
When his son smiled, though, six weeks later, something very different happened. The love that struck him was so intense, and so impossible to measure, that he realised every other time he’d felt love was nothing.
And when his son was eighteen months old, and walking, he realised that, although he loved him, it still wasn’t enough. And so he left.
*
Their friends were shocked. She lived with a rage that bubbled out incontinently in every conversation. It pushed her into corners and held her under the surface of her daily life. She watched people, normal people, from the depths of anger, as from the bottom of a clear pool, holding your breath until your temples are hot and your chest tight and you rise and inhale fury, clear and fresh as air.
*
He got a flat. He furnished it cheaply. He had to. There was no money for branded goods, and he was happy with IKEA.
The boys settled into relationships. They seemed less embarrassed about it than he had been.
He had his son on alternate weekends. Two weeks was long enough for him to forget how to hold him, and increasingly, as his son grew up, this meant they rarely touched. They spoke about topics, or activities. They often had fun together. Sometimes it seemed to him that he had the best deal of anyone he knew. He watched other men, other friends, struggle with young children, and he revelled in the space he had to be himself.
When he remembered marriage, it was as a series of decisions not made by him. It seemed that everything they had been together was something decided by her, and he simply went along with it. But when he reached thirty-nine, he looked back at the last five years, and now it seemed to him that in her absence, all the decisions he had made were wrong.
*
He went out with the boys for his fortieth. They had a few drinks, but the night ended early. They all had families to go to.
*
A few weeks later, he met someone new. There had been brief flings before, two, three nights, seasoned with disappointment and selfishness. But this was more. His new girlfriend – that was what he called her – was lean and boisterous, with a streak of savagery that lit up a strange feeling of adulthood in him.
They drank together. They drank white wine in pavement cafes and kissed sweet-breathed vinegary kisses, arm in arm, on sunny benches. When they fucked it was akin to
wrestling. He saw himself, male, next to her. She smelt rich and female.
They moved in together, and the flat grew thick with rugs and fabrics. He had a gut, now, and he wore jackets over T-shirts. His son came to stay for a night or two every now and then. When he met the boys for a night out, they looked both old and young to him. They walked like men defeated. He had a swagger now, in his forties, he’d never managed when younger. He grew a beard.
*
One year they met at midsummer. He was forty-six. A picnic had been arranged, and for the first time in many years, they all gathered with their families, apart from him, of course.
He came with his girlfriend.
They met on a curl of the river. The grass was neat, down to the muddy edge. At one end of the green was a willow. Within the bounds of the willow tree, the rhododendron bushes, and a bank of laurel, the families let their children roam. Most were between four and eight. The parents sat on rugs, next to baskets, occasionally rising to intervene.
He lay back, his head on his girlfriend’s thigh. The sun was warm on his face, and he allowed himself to feel that he was happy.
Sometimes his eyes were closed, and sometimes they opened. He watched the boys. He had known them for twenty-seven years. It was hard to say when changes happen – when hair recedes, or grey begins, or a chin thickens – but they were all different. He looked from face to face. He imagined himself at nineteen.
His girlfriend rested a hand on his forehead. In the first few seconds it felt blissful, but then the weight and heat of it began to press down on him. He moved her hand away. The place where it had been felt different. They broke up later that day.
*
The first of the boys to die was Harry. They met, as they felt they ought to, in the pub afterwards. They sat carefully, guarding their solemnity. They were in their fifties, now. They were men, whether they felt it or not.
He looked across the table. Their faces were marked. They were not old men, not yet, but they would never have been mistaken for young. They talked, quietly. After a pint or two, the stories loosened into tearful laughter.
He listened more than he spoke. He listened to stories of Harry. Harry had two children, he had a wife, he was loved. He had a job, a home, hobbies. He was kind.
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