Strangers on a Bridge

by Louise Mangos

  He met me off the train at Zürich Hauptbahnhof. The station was typically crowded, one of Europe’s major rail hubs. Travellers rushed in all directions, dozens of different languages echoing against the high roof. In the great hall beyond the boards announcing the train departures, wooden huts were opening their shutters for the imminent Christmas market.

  Gerry saw me first. I looked up to see him staring at me as I walked down the platform from my train, and a tiny frisson ran down my spine. This handsome young man was waiting for me. I brushed off my thrill as mere wistful remembrance of youth, the fleeting moment of feeling flattered by anybody’s attentions allowing me not to think about why I was really here.

  We skirted the top of the Bahnhofstrasse, avoiding shoppers ambling along the paths bordering some of the world’s most expensive real estate and boutiques, and walked towards the Limmat River. Before reaching the Fraumünster church we crossed the river on the Rudolf-Brun-Brücke.

  ‘Who was he?’ I asked, reading the plaque on the pale stone bridge.

  ‘The first self-appointed mayor of Zürich. In the fourteenth century.’

  Not merely a scientist, I thought. Gerry knew his history too. I relaxed a little. It was so refreshing to be away from the domestic routine, to be talking about something other than football schedules and dirty laundry. I didn’t often come to the city, and was enjoying the immersion in some urban culture. And I had to admit I was enjoying Gerry’s easy company.

  I wanted to reveal nothing of my own history. I was happy Gerry was content to talk about something neutral, be the tourist guide, and didn’t have a hundred questions about his father, although I knew they would come. He was being discreet, would know I was nervous after his previous visit to my home.

  ‘What do you do in the lab? What are you studying?’ I asked when his short history lesson ceased.

  ‘I’m a chemical engineer. Working on a sustainability project. We’re looking at the conversion of plastics back to oil.’

  ‘Oh! You should know I’m the recycling queen. It’s about time someone came up with a solution for all that plastic waste and over-exaggerated food packaging. Very admirable.’

  He turned and reached out his hand towards me. I half-flinched.

  ‘Even that fleece you’re wearing was probably made from recycled PET soft-drink bottles,’ he said, touching the brand label on my upper arm.

  I presented my shoulder, and watched his fingers rest briefly on the edelweiss embroidered there.

  The wind gusted up the river from the lake, whipping little white caps against the flow of the water. Seagulls steadied themselves on the air, and I pulled the zip of my fleece up to my neck.

  ‘Let’s get a coffee. There’s the Grande Café over here. We can keep warm,’ he said.

  Gerry took my elbow. A neutral touch, avoiding my hand. He was so relaxed, showing none of the tension I expected. I knew the questions about his father would come, but he seemed grounded, unconcerned, and his demeanour contrasted with the turmoil going on in my head. I clamped my lips together with my teeth and nodded, pulling away a wisp of hair that had blown across my eyes.

  I smiled at the waitress as she placed a cup of hot water in front of me. My rosehip teabag lay in a little porcelain dish on top of the cup. I tore the cover away from the bag on its dipping string, and dunked it into the water, watching crimson swirls mix like blood. Gerry looked at the heart-shaped pattern the waitress had created on the top of his cappuccino and stirred the frothy lines into a circle. I was inexplicably jealous of this tiny, endearing gesture the waitress had performed for Gerry. Waiting for my tea to cool, I twisted the wedding band on my finger.

  ‘I’m just remembering the first conversation we had outside my house when I discovered my father had been stalking you,’ said Gerry.

  The sudden mention of his father made me swallow as though I had a crust stuck in my throat. I wished we were still talking about Zürich’s architecture or plastic bottles.

  ‘I remember saying I didn’t believe I would feel remorse if he had thrown himself off the Tobel Bridge,’ he continued. ‘But the thing is, now I think I miss him. I regret some of the things I said. I guess time can do that to you. Soften the edges.’

  My eyes widened as I stared at him across the table. It was as though he was deceiving me. Ten minutes previously, he had seemed a relaxed, happy-go-lucky young man, a dynamic student on a mission to make the world a better place. I would never have thought these ideas were going through his mind while he recounted snippets of the city of Zürich’s history. When I didn’t say anything, he continued.

  ‘There’s this thing going on inside me, Alice. I feel like my thoughts somehow led him to complete his suicide mission. I guess I’m trying to say I somehow feel guilty. Do you know what I mean?’

  I looked at him sharply. He kept calling me Alice. It was unsettling. He should have been calling me Mrs Reed. But I couldn’t tell him that.

  ‘No… Yes… I’m not sure, Gerry. I’m not sure what you mean when you say you feel guilty. You shouldn’t feel responsible. You shouldn’t blame yourself.’

  Although I’d thought I knew what I wanted to say if he brought up his father, all the scenarios I’d practised suddenly fled my memory.

  ‘Scientists aren’t religious people in general. In fact, relatively few Swiss people attend church. I guess we have nothing to fear. It’s the people who have so little in life that tend to follow a God,’ he said.

  Gerry looked out of the café window and I followed his gaze to the spire of the Fraumünster, strangely bright turquoise against the greyness of the autumnal sky.

  ‘You know when I told you I thought my father might have found peace by taking his life? Well, I may not be a religious person, but I keep thinking he might instead be locked in some kind of hell, a punishment for what he has done. People say God’s law is that it’s wrong to take one’s own life, that you will never be accepted into heaven.’ He paused. ‘There I go, talking about God again. I never go to church either. The last time was a high-school theatre production.’

  Gerry’s voice was becoming agitated. I squirmed in my chair as he continued.

  ‘But I believe nature didn’t intend for us to waste our precious lives. I believe we are only here on this earth one time and we should make the very best of things for ourselves and our families and the people around us. But those visions of eternal hellfire – I keep having these dreams…’

  I put my hand out, drew it back, then put it out again and touched his arm. He expected comfort. I should be giving it. But I didn’t trust myself to touch him. His green eyes glistened in the reflection of light from the window.

  ‘Tell me about him. About how he almost ruined your life too,’ he said.

  I took a deep breath, moved my hand away and leaned back a little, smoothing both my palms down my thighs under the table.

  ‘It started with the phone calls. In the night mostly. At first when he called he wouldn’t say anything, there was only silence, but I sometimes heard an intake of breath or a shift in his body, his clothes making a whisper of movement. So I knew someone was there. I suspected it was your father because he sometimes left messages on my mobile phone, and little gifts in the mailbox. Once when I caught the flu he talked to me, wanting to come and look after me. He insisted he owed me something, because I had saved his life. It was like an honour code. I could understand that at first, but things quickly got out of control.’

  I bit my lip, didn’t want to say too much, and thought I’d given too much detail already. But when I looked down at the table, Gerry reached across and took my chin gently between his thumb and forefinger. He lifted my face up to look at him. His touch seared my skin, left me temporarily speechless, but I could see he wanted to hear more. I rambled on, thinking this was simply a gesture of innocent concern.

  ‘He took to waiting for hours outside the house. He would appear in weird places while I was running. He worked out all my training routes. There was t
his one place he would frequent at the end of the farmer’s driveway. A kind of copse next to an old plum tree. One day I went there to see where he spent most of his day, and I was totally blown away by the fact that I could see right into our kitchen from there, the working centre of our home, where we all spent more time together than anywhere else in the house.’

  ‘Jesus, Alice, that’s so frustrating. I’m surprised you didn’t shove those pills down his throat yourself.’

  The blood drained from my face, and I felt beads of sweat prickling at my forehead. My gaze sank back down to the table between us. When I looked up again, Gerry was staring at me intently, his head slightly to one side with what I interpreted as sympathetic curiosity. As he saw my involuntary reaction, he looked at an invisible point over my shoulder and his hands pressed into the table. He smiled, leaned back, and changed the subject.

  ‘A marathon runner. I remember you told me when I first met you. I’m impressed.’

  I breathed more easily.

  ‘I’m not sure what I’ll do for sports once the snow arrives. In previous years I was happy to put crampons on my running shoes and brave the elements when there was snow on the ground, but my ankle is still bothering me from… an injury. It’s weak, and I’m nervous about pacing on unsteady and slippery ground. Do you run?’

  I was relieved our conversation had turned to a more neutral subject.

  ‘Sometimes. If I have time. I used to play ice hockey when I was younger, and I like all winter sports. We are quite a sporting nation, the Swiss.’

  ‘A friend in the village, Esther, said she wants to take me cross-country skiing when the snow arrives. She raves about it, says if I love running, then I will love Langlauf.’

  ‘It will certainly keep you fit. It’s a great sport. I hope we get good snow this winter.’

  Gerry looked wistfully out of the window. His thoughts seemed to lie beyond the spires and neo-classical buildings lining the Limmat River, the modern glass blocks, and the web of tramlines strung across the city. His mind was on a distant, unseen mountain, and he suddenly appeared out of place in this urban environment.

  He looked back at me, and caught my studious stare. Before I could react, he leaned across the table to place a straggle of hair behind my ear. I retracted as he did this. The movement was tender, reinforcing his earlier touch to my chin, a parent taking a moment to fuss over his child. I thought this an oddly tactile display from a Swiss person. I blushed furiously and searched my handbag for my wallet to pay for the drinks. As I rummaged in the bag, the shiny stud on Gerry’s leather friendship band caught my eye.

  ‘Oh, I forgot! You left this at our house.’

  I held up the braided bracelet and he took it with a smile and put it in his pocket.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  We left the café and waited for a tram to pass before crossing the road to the bank of the river. A little girl dressed in a pale-pink fleece and fluffy bobble hat was throwing pieces of bread into the water. Ducks rushed back and forth on the swirling eddies for the morsels, and seagulls hovered above, hoping for more airborne crumbs. Their plaintive screeching seemed so out of place in this landlocked nation, thousands of miles from the ocean.

  We laughed at the flurry of birds, and it was as though our tensions had been left behind in the café. It felt good to laugh, and I shook my hair in the wind, realising I hadn’t felt so free for many months. Moving away from the birds, we crossed the bridge again and leaned against the stone balustrade. We watched the grey waters emptying out of the Zürisee, mesmerised by the eddies. I experienced a brief compulsion to throw myself into the river.

  ‘God, I just had that feeling I wanted to jump. Fling myself in,’ I said, without thinking.

  As soon as I’d spoken, I put my hand to my mouth, remembering Gerry’s father standing on the edge of a bridge. I worriedly searched Gerry’s face. He combed his fingers through his hair in the breeze and threw his head back to laugh. I took my hand slowly away and, before I could react, Gerry clasped his hand round the back of my neck and brushed his lips against mine. I closed my eyes.

  In a moment it was over. He released his fingers from my hair and was already looking across the river when I opened my eyes. My stomach turned to liquid fire, and blood rushed to my cheeks. I touched my lips with two fingers.

  He kissed me!

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘No, I… Entschuldigen. Sorry,’ he said.

  He watched the water, some memory, perhaps not me, causing him to smile. Then he turned and took hold of my arm, lifted my hand. He carefully placed the friendship band around my wrist and clicked the brass stud closed. The touch of the leather and his fingers on the skin of my inner wrist sent a shiver up my arm. I wanted to snatch my hand away, afraid of the sensations my body was involuntarily experiencing.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘Friends.’

  I pushed away from the railing, and shoved my hands deep in my pockets. Gerry companionably stuck an arm between my elbow and my side as I started walking, and the movement caused our bodies to bounce together. I stared ahead, knowing he was watching me. I concentrated on the path in front of me, and increased my pace towards the station. I finally took my hands from my pockets, if only to release his hold on my arm. I should be getting home. A chill wind whipped a crisp packet and an old tissue in a mini tornado in front of us.

  ‘Not often you see rubbish on these streets,’ I marvelled, knowing I had to speak, to break my mood.

  ‘Alice, forget about the rubbish. I need to talk to you again. I need to see you.’

  ‘Gerry, don’t. I… I have to talk about the rubbish. It’s keeping me grounded,’ I whispered.

  As my eyes inexplicably began to water in the wind, I smiled, and Gerry laughed.

  ‘The rubbish it is. The rubbish of life!’ he shouted rakishly, causing me to look around and see whether we had attracted any attention. My reaction confirmed that I was far from indifferent to his kiss.

  ‘I rather like seeing it, the rubbish,’ he continued. ‘Like a statement of something free in our rather constipated society, don’t you think? I sometimes have the compulsion to go out and join the secret graffiti artists along the sidings of the Hauptbahnhof. It’s one of the only places you can still see an increase in what you would call vandalism. I think it’s a beautiful statement, against all this stifled perfection.’

  I frowned. This young man was so unpredictable. The kiss forgotten. Or perhaps not.

  But it was imperative we both forget it.

  ‘It’s the very thing I have come to love about Switzerland,’ I said. ‘The cleanliness. Every time I visit my relatives and friends in England and see the chaotic traffic and struggling economy, the shabby houses and crumbling roads, I always breathe a sigh of relief when I step off that plane back in Zürich. It feels more like coming home each time.’

  ‘Do you think you will stay here? I mean long term?’ he asked.

  I had to believe this was all now small talk, that there wasn’t any hidden wish or meaning in his chatter.

  He kissed me!

  ‘There’s every possibility Simon will eventually be running the office in Zug. The boys are now pretty much fully integrated into the local school. Yes, I could see myself staying here. It’s a good life we have.’

  I didn’t feel like talking about Simon and the boys. I wanted to keep them separate from the little bubble I’d put myself into this afternoon. It was my fault. I still couldn’t forget Gerry was the son of Manfred, and having lived with his father’s presence for so many months, I now wanted to put light years between my family and anything to do with him, and that included his son.

  ‘I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your meeting me, Alice. I know you don’t want to hear this, but it has helped me understand better my own emotions about my father. It has helped me to find some peace in the fact that we, my mother and I, didn’t want to know anything about him. And yet, when we found out he had taken his life
, we both felt a little of the guilt someone might experience in our situation, even though we knew we had done everything possible for him, tried to help him. He might one day have driven us mad with his own version of insanity.’

  At the mention of the word ‘guilt’, my heart thudded and I quickened my pace towards the station. My throat was hot. As much as I was enjoying the company of this erudite young man, I knew I had to get away from him, aware his magnetism was proving dangerous. It was hard to focus. I was unsure whether the queasiness in my stomach was because he kept reminding me of Manfred, or because I might never see him again.

  We walked into the station from the entrance facing the Bahnhofquai, and the bustle of the Christmas market greeted us through the tall doors. People meandered through the market, interspersed with those rushing for their trains, and I glanced at my watch. There were still twenty minutes before my train was due to leave.

  ‘Do you have time to look?’ Gerry asked, as though reading my thoughts.

  I tipped my head to one side in uncertain assent, and he took my elbow, guiding me towards a stall selling spicy warm Gluhwein. The twinkling of a hundred thousand glass crystals on the Swarovski Christmas tree winked their reflections around the little wooden chalets of the market stalls.

  ‘Zum wohl.’

  Gerry clinked my plastic cup and for a horrible moment I remembered another time, another night, clinking plastic picnic cups, the ruby wine less sweet on our lips.

  My heart continued to thud until the train pulled silently out of the station. I stared out of the window across the complex spaghetti network of dozens of railway tracks. The grand buildings of the insurance companies and banks, with their old Napoleonic architecture, were slotted between ultra-modern blocks of smoked glass. The train picked up speed and, as it descended into an underpass, Gerry’s graffiti came into view, some freshly sprayed onto a recently poured concrete wall hemming in the tracks.