by Sarah Hall
They rounded the headland and the wind whipped up. A wide yellow estuary gaped before them; rusty streaks of orange ran up along the sides of the river. Below, the water looked so shallow that the brains of fish would have to be flat. Light shone patchily on the surface, turning the water chemical green, bronze, aquamarine. And there was the viaduct – raised on stocky concrete legs, spanning the valley like a giant prehistoric centipede.
Kaaimans, said Zach, proudly, as if introducing an esteemed colleague.
Joe groaned.
Oh, man, I fucking forgot! Here we go again.
How many times have you crossed it? Becca asked.
He’s done it twice, said Zach. And I assure you, it was an ordeal for me both times.
You all right, Becs? asked Joe. We can go back if you want.
She said nothing. It was too late, it was all much too late. They kept walking down the tracks towards it. Becca ran some quick panicky calculations. The viaduct didn’t look that high. It didn’t look that long. Less than five minutes to cross, perhaps. Lower than Blackpool Tower, and she’d seen kids in the Greek islands making bigger dives off the cliffs, maybe. She squinted and focused on the train tracks and tried not to think about what would shortly be either side and below – air, nothing, the drop. The trick was not to look down, obviously, and to take normal, confident steps, like walking on any normal confidence-inspiring surface. And not to stop. Stopping was like admitting something bad. She’d made that mistake before on mountain ridges, pausing at a teetery bit only to get vertigo and seize up – knees, knuckles, brain, all functions in lockdown. Joe didn’t understand the feeling. It was a physical thing, like a migraine or stomach flu, hard to explain to anyone who hadn’t had it.
They approached the beast. Lizette was right, something about the viaduct was disturbing, diabolical even. The iron girders were gory with rust; rust was bleeding profusely out of the bolted panels and leaking down the concrete legs into the river. It was divided into two sections, a wider bit where the train tracks ran over collapsing lattices of wood, and a slender flying walkway attached by cantilevers to the main platform, with, Zach hadn’t lied, a handrail. The structure looked riven apart in the middle and waves could be seen rolling between. Zach stepped onto the walkway, easy-osy. Becca took a breath and followed. Commit, she thought, don’t think about it, commit.
We really don’t have to do it, Joe said. Becster?
She ignored him.
I don’t want you to freak out.
She said she’s fine, Zach said. He was ten feet out now and casually strolling along as if through a summer meadow.
Don’t want an episode, like on the Swartberg pass, Joe called.
That was your bloody driving! Becca snapped.
Zach turned round and laughed.
Too fucking right, hon. He drives like bees are up his arse.
He took his hand off the rail and swarmed his arms about, making a buzzing noise. Becca kept her head in a neutral position, not up, not down, and tried to hold everything loosely in her peripheral vision – the grey sky, the rolling tide, the lurid streaky sandbars. Zach was holding his backside and prancing about. She wanted to shout at him to hold the handrail properly, stop fooling about. She didn’t know how far behind Joe was – there was no possibility of her turning to see; forward gear was the only option.
Becs? Joe called.
She carried on walking, careful steps, balletic poise, denial of state. She was trying to remember the lyrics to ‘Mr Sandman’, but her mind was blank. All around was air, airiness. Beneath her feet the entire edifice of Kaaimans was corroding. There were ragged holes where rust had eaten through the metal, and some of the plates were missing – she had to keep stepping over gaps. The tide was playing visual tricks, rolling underneath, white-crested, fast, unmooring everything. The estuary was a series of chicaning rivulets. The wind got up a little, and she felt the giant structure vibrate and purr. Suddenly it made a hollow, horning sound, a kind of moan.
Jesus Christ!
She clutched the rail with both hands. Don’t stop. She carried on, half twisted, letting go only when she had to, and quickly groping for purchase again. Where was her comfort song? Where was any song she knew? Her nose was running, she could feel a slick on her top lip – no chance of wiping it. There was space everywhere, vast and open. She kept going. She was breathing faster, shallower, but she was moving. They’d nearly reached the middle of the viaduct.
Becs, everything all right? How’s it going?
Joe’s voice sounded far away. Good. She wanted not to hear him. Not to know he was there. But now Zach was turning around again. He was turning around like he had acres of room under his feet and he was walking backwards – backwards – so he could see Becca and Joe’s progress. Nausea rose in her – a sort of spastic fury. The idiocy! The carelessness! If she saw him fall, if he fell into the void, arms and legs flailing, tumbling and spinning, or if he fell still as a stone, dropping straight down, plummeting, then she would know exactly how it felt, she would feel the falling too. Kinaesthesia it was called – she’d had it before. A long time ago. When she’d seen someone go over the fence, on the grassy stretch near the abbey, on the crumbling cliffs … Or was it her, she was so small, she couldn’t remember, just what they’d told her after. That someone had jumped off the Plain, a woman. And Becca had been found down on the beach too. Had she fallen? Or climbed down, to try to find whoever had gone over? Not a scratch on her. But the tide was coming in and the hem of her dress was wet. She’d dreamt of it so many times.
And soon she would be falling again, down, down, onto the hard, wet, thumping sand.
Waves sluiced through the concrete legs of the viaduct. Wind flushed in from the ocean. The metal structure keened its mournful note again. Zach was walking backwards, like he didn’t care, like a man walking off the end of the world, ready to go. His face was peaceful, impervious.
Everything was loosening. Her grip. Her knees. The air. Even the viaduct was softening. The viaduct was floating free, and sailing on the wind. It was moving into the valley, into the river’s mouth. It was going to hit the hillside, and heave and tip and buckle. The adrenalin was going in Becca’s chest now, ping, ping, ping against her ribs … Her footsteps were getting clumsier; she couldn’t control her muscles. Something inside her head tilted and spilled and that was that. She held the rail tight with both hands, and stopped.
No. I’m. Not.
All around and underneath the view rushed and wobbled. The atoms of things were going wrong. Her eyes were flooding.
Zach paused. He was twenty feet away, maybe; it was hard to tell. She blinked tears out. He waved. Was he waving?
Becca, he called.
She shook her head.
No.
Becca. Nearly there. Yeah?
She was barely breathing and then breathing hard. She was producing involuntary sounds as she breathed out. Mewls. Lows. Zach scratched his head with his hat. Or was he waving again?
Becca, he called. Nearly there. Are you coming on?
She blinked more tears. A gull flew by, very close, black feathers in the crook of its wings. It held still against the wind for a moment, cocking its head this way and that, while everything rushed. Its eye was yellow with a red ring. Disgusting. It looked at her, knew what she wasn’t, then fell into a stoop towards the estuary. She shut her eyes, and felt the true, inglorious ride of the viaduct. It was gaining speed. Any moment now it would hit and tip and she would be falling, spinning away. She waited. She waited, for the slam, the blackness, nothingness, whatever dreadful thing was coming.
*
When she opened her eyes Zach was much closer – arm distance away. His hand was resting on the rail. His sleeve flapped in the breeze. He was talking softly, speaking Afrikaans, and then English. He didn’t look like himself. He was saying something about Lizette and the cave-dwellers. Something about Bibles. The words flew past Becca and disappeared. Zach stepped forward without making a s
ound. He was very close now. Don’t touch me, she thought, but he didn’t touch her. He was still talking. She couldn’t really hear, and she couldn’t understand him. He was saying something about Lizette’s dark habit, about getting down on her knees. He was saying things that didn’t make sense.
Some days it would be better if we were all gone. Ja? As dit net wou end kry …
The words blew away. Zach’s face blurred again. She blinked and it came into focus. Expressionless. He wasn’t really Zachary. He was some kind of agent. He took a slow step back. Between them was the sea. Waves kept coming, white-tipped, the same, the same, the same, as if the water was an amnesiac. All seas were a single sea, they all joined. The sea had made her dress wet. It was all right to be sad when someone died, that’s what her foster parents had told her, even someone you hadn’t known. Like the young woman who’d left the baby on the cliffs, before she jumped.
Becca’s hands ached from clenching the rail. They were grotesque and locked tight. With huge effort she straightened her fingers. Then she moved them a fraction along the rail. She pushed one foot forward and shuffled. Zach stepped away again as she moved. He was still talking, saying things she didn’t understand. Forwards and backwards; they were crossing together. It took a long time. Forever, or just a few minutes, she couldn’t tell.
The end of the viaduct was there, solid ground, a life – if she could get to it. She couldn’t hear Joe. Maybe he had turned back, or fallen, she didn’t care. She shuffled forward along the ruined bridge. The rocks and skirt of land were rising up to meet the metal platform, green bushes underneath, greenblue. Zach paused, then turned round and walked off the end of the viaduct, elegantly, as if dismounting a tightrope. Becca let go of the rail, half-stepped and half-dropped onto the rocky path and knelt. Her whole body was trembling, the tension dropping out in soft tresses. She wanted to cry properly, to curl up and howl. On the ground, the tiny orange flowers shuddered. How quickly death could pass over, and then it wasn’t believable anymore. She looked up at Zach. He was facing the other way, looking down the coast and drawing the reefer tin out of his pocket, Zachary again. She’d only known him two days.
Behind them, she could hear Joe cursing, calling Zach a boknaaier, saying that was the last time ever, ever he was going to cross Kaaimans and they could go back along the roadway even if it took two hours longer.
You all right, Becs? he asked. Saying a prayer down there?
She’s fine, man, let’s just have a moment, said Zach.
Good. I need one. Where’s the fokken dagga?
Becca sat at the side of the tracks and looked back at the viaduct. It curved across the estuary in a grizzled, rusty bow. It wasn’t that high, not as high as the cliffs at Whitby. The tracks disappeared round the headland. The sea rolled in, from far out, from someplace colder than she could imagine. A song began playing in her head.
Mr Sandman, bring me a dream …
· Luxury Hour ·
It was the last week of the season and the lido was nearly deserted. She arrived at the usual time, changed into her suit, left her clothes in a locker and walked out across the chlorine-scented vault. The concrete paving had traces of frost in the corners and was almost painful on the soles of her feet. Light rustled under the blue surface. She climbed down the metal ladder and moved away from the edge without pausing. In October, entering the unheated pool was an act of bravery; she had to remain thoughtless. The water was coldly radiant. Her limbs felt stiff as she kicked and her chin burned. At the halfway mark she looked up at the guard, who was sinking into the fur hood of his parka. Nothing in his demeanour gave the impression of a man ready to intervene, should it be necessary. She took a breath and put her head underwater, surfacing a few strokes later. She was awake now, her heart jabbing. She turned onto her back, rotated her arms, kicked hard. The clouds above were grey and fast. Rain later, perhaps.
She swam twenty lengths, then rested her head on the coping and caught her breath. The pool slopped gently against her chest. Light filaments flashed and extinguished in the rocking fluid. In summer it was impossible to swim, there was no space; the pool was choppy, kids bombed in at the deep end. Barely an inch between sunbathers. Not many came after early September. But the old couple with rubber caps she always saw in the morning were in the next lane, swimming side by side: her chin tipped high, his submerged. She followed in their wake. They nodded hello when she reached the deep end, and she smiled. She climbed out. Her breasts and thighs were blotched red with the chill and exertion.
In the changing room she tried not to look at her midriff in the mirrors, the crêping and the collapse. She showered and dressed, and went into the poolside cafe. It was busy as usual. There were prams parked between tables, people working on laptops and reading books. The debris of muesli, pastries and napkins was strewn about. On the walls were photographs from the thirties, pictures of young women diving from the high board – now dismantled – or posing with their hands on their hips. The grace, the vivacity, of another era: dark, lipsticked mouths, straight teeth, a kind of ebullient confidence. Their bikinis were high-waisted and scalloped. The scenes looked pre-industrial – open sky, a quality of light. The five-storey civic building opposite the park hadn’t been built. London had not yet encroached.
The man behind the counter leaned away from the growling espresso machine and predicted her order.
Latte?
Please.
There was an immaculate row of silver rings in his bottom lip. His head was shaved in a striped pattern.
Bring it over.
She took a seat by the window, in the corner, and watched the old couple emerge from the lido. Their stamina was far greater than hers – an hour’s swimming at least. They stood dripping and chatting for a moment as if unaffected by the smart breeze. The woman’s legs were strung with thin muscles. Her belly was a tiny mound under the swimming costume. The man had a buckled torso, a white beard. There was a vast laparotomy scar up his abdomen. They were the same height and seemed perfectly suited, even their red caps matched. She wondered if they’d evolved towards their symmetry over the years. Had they ever fought and lied? Had they slammed doors or posted secret letters? The couple parted and went towards separate changing rooms. He walked awkwardly, favouring one hip. In the pool he swam well. Occasionally she’d seen his sedate, companionable breaststroke morph into an energetic butterfly.
There was no one left in the lido. The guard rested his head on his hand, eyes closed, the whistle attached to his wrist hung in the air. The surface of the pool stilled to a beautiful chemical blue.
Her coffee arrived. She opened a packet of sugar. She shouldn’t be taking sugar – the baby weight was still not coming off – but she hadn’t ever been able to drink coffee without. She sipped slowly. The pool was hypnotic; something about the water was calming, rapturous almost. Time here, after swimming, always felt inadmissible to her day. She would linger, ignore her phone. Often she had to race round the shops to be back in time for the sitter. Luxury hour, Daniel called it, as if she was indulging herself, but it was the only time she had without the baby.
After a while she went to the counter, paid, and left. She began to walk home through the park. The breeze was strengthening, the leaves of the trees moving briskly. There were some kids playing cycle polo on one of the hard courts, wheeling about and whacking the puck against the metal cage. Dogs bounded across the grass. She passed the glass-merchant’s mansion and the old glassworks, both hidden under flapping plastic drapes and renovation scaffolding. The buildings were being converted into a gallery and she’d begun to wonder about applying for a job.
She’d hated the city when she and Daniel had first arrived. She’d missed the Devon countryside, the fragrance of peat and gorse, horses with torn manes, the lack of people. But it was what one did, for the better-paid jobs, for the culture; London’s sacrificial gravity was too strong. She’d hated the filth, the industrial claustrophobia, immoral rents. Discovering the park
had changed everything, and the nearby property was, just about, affordable – two-bedroom flats carved out of the modest houses of nineteenth-century artisans.
She passed through a rank of dark-trunked sycamores. Beyond was the meadow. Its pale brindle stirred in the wind, belts of grass lightening and darkening. The field had been resown after a local campaign by the Friends of the Park – she’d signed their petition. For a century it had been a wasteland. The horses used to pull the carts of quartz sand to the glassworks had over-grazed it. Dust, cullet, and oil from the annealing ovens had polluted the soil. Now it was lush again, there were bees and mice, even city kestrels – she’d seen them tremoring above the burrows, stooping with astonishing speed. It almost reminded her of home. What did people do without access to such places, places less governed, she wondered. Turn to stone.
There was a dry, chaff-like smell to the meadow; the grasses clicked and hushed. The enormous, elaborate spider webs of the previous month had broken apart and were drifting free. A man was walking down the scythed path towards her. She stepped aside to let him pass but he stopped and held out his hand.
Emma?
She looked up. For a second she didn’t recognize him. He had on a tie and a suit jacket. The planes of his face came into focus. The heavy bones, the irises with their strange uniformity of colour, no divisions or rings. He was a little older, his hair darker than she remembered, but it was him.
Oh, God, she said. Hi.
He moved to kiss her cheek. She put a hand on his arm, turned her face too much and he kissed her ear, awkwardly.
Do you still live around here?
Yes, I’m over on Hillworth. Near the station.
Nice area.
Yes, she said. It is nice.
The wind was throwing her hair around her face. She hadn’t properly washed or brushed the tangles in the changing room. She moved a damp strand from her forehead. It felt sticky with chlorine. He was looking at her, his expression unreadable.
