Among the Missing aka Across the Bridge

by Morag Joss

  I use one oar to steady the boat as best I can in the current, then I count to three, drop the oar, and throw myself at the rock. I land on all fours and hang on until I am able, carefully, to move one foot, then a hand, then the other foot. I crawl forward. It’s slippery, and I struggle to keep hold but not cling too close, lest I crush the child. I crawl to the middle of the rock and lie on my back for several minutes before sitting up and unwrapping him.

  His head drops back on his useless, flimsy neck; his eyes are closed. I feel his face with the back of my hand. It’s cold. I cradle his head and wail. I intended to take him with me when I drown, but now he’s dead, and his death pierces me to the heart. I clasp him to me, and from the riverbank Annabel screams again. Then he stirs, and before I know what I am doing, I am weeping and laughing and covering the top of his head with kisses. The little thing was asleep! He fell asleep against my breast, his face bloody and gluey with birth slime stuck fast to my skin. I wrap him up warm again and hold him close, and rock him back and forth. His mouth turns to my nipple, and he latches on and sucks. After a moment he tugs himself away from me, his mouth opens again and he screams. I hear Annabel’s voice calling back to him. I have failed him, for of course my breast is dry. I do not understand why it distresses me that I have nothing to give him. Just then a high wave hits the edge of the rock and rolls like a cold, wet cloth over it, soaking my legs. I do not understand why I lift him clear, taking care to keep him dry.

  Behind me there’s a scraping noise, and I turn just in time to see the tide nudge the prow of the little white boat clear of the rock. It clunks two or three times as it goes, then spins free and is borne away upriver. From the shore, Annabel pleads for her baby. Holding him tightly to me with one arm, I use my free hand to reach into my pocket for my phone. Another wave sweeps over the rock, and he cries and cries for his mother while the wind cuts into my back.

  Colin had called Ron and asked if they could meet up sometime on the evening of the day the bridge reopened. He had something to show him. Something he was doing for his wife and the baby.

  “What is it?” said Ron.

  “Tell you when I see you,” Colin said. “It’s nothing spectacular. Just want to show somebody, if that’s okay.”

  Ron agreed. He had no idea what, if anything, he might tell Colin about Annabel. I know a pregnant woman; that’s a coincidence, isn’t it? I know a pregnant woman, she turned up after the bridge fell down, maybe it’s your wife? Even supposing-supposing-Annabel was Colin’s wife, she must have had good reasons to stay away from him. What right did Ron have to interfere? And what would be the point, when the body of Colin’s wife was probably a clean skeleton at the bottom of the river, the boneless embryo of Colin’s child long disintegrated? That was what Colin-and he-had to accept. There was nothing he could say about Annabel that would not do more harm than good.

  He trudged down from the sleeper unit through the mud toward the jetty and the new walkway leading under the bridge. The construction site had been emptying for days and was now deserted and almost cleared; the casting sheds downriver had already been dismantled and removed, and massive crisscrossed ruts and divots of earth marked the departure of the heavy plant. Only a few huts remained; a dozen dumpsters were filling up. The sleeper unit was due to be removed on Monday, and then Ron would be fending for himself again, bedding down in the back of the Land Rover, waiting for the baby’s birth. He was still needed for a while to run the boat, for inspectors checking the new sections of the bridge, and for journalists, but soon he would be gone himself. Where to, he had no idea. He could form no picture of a future for himself that did not include Annabel and the baby and if necessary, he quite willingly supposed, Silva, too.

  The ground for the memorial garden, reached by the walkway under the bridge and stretching for an acre beyond it, had been pushed into a succession of improbable hollows and mounds and phony undulations. In the moonlight, it lay bare, whimsical and miniaturized; stone walls only inches high curved around elliptical flower beds full of bark mulch, and a path of crazy paving wound in and out, connecting places where the ground swelled randomly into small circles of cobbles. The path ended in a large and still unpaved circle overlooking the river. Nothing was finished, and nothing had been planted yet. The landscaping ended abruptly next to a padlocked and fenced enclosure full of upright saplings, their roots wrapped in sacking, and stacks of stone slabs and bags of sand. Ron turned and walked back the way he had come. He waited for Colin by the railings, where a flight of stone steps led down to a small landing stage; it was intended that visitors would be able to travel to the garden by boat from Inverness.

  The strobing headlamps of cars on the bridge above him hurt his eyes; below the railings, the night wind chopped the surface of the incoming tide. From this angle, almost under the bridge, he could barely see the service station across the river, but the place would be full. There was a reception going on there to celebrate the reopening. High sodium lights over the car park and petrol pumps cast an orange haze into the sky.

  Colin appeared, hands in pockets, and greeted Ron without a smile. “Hiya. Something going on over there, all right. I thought there would’ve been people over here, too,” he said.

  “Not much to see, yet,” Ron answered.

  “No,” Colin said, looking round. “You can see it better on the website. Come on.”

  Ron followed Colin back into the garden.

  “Here,” Colin said. They were at one of the places where the path became a circle before leading out and away again around the curve of another artificial hillock. “Here’s where it’s going,” he said. “Right here. I’m getting a memorial bench. She’s going to have a memorial bench with her name on it. What about that?”

  “That’s a great idea,” Ron said.

  “Sustainable hardwood, three hundred pounds,” Colin said proudly. “Expensive. They bolt them to the ground. Fifty for the plaque. And I’m sponsoring a rosebush for the baby, that’s another forty. Then fifty pounds a year after that for four years. All proceeds will go toward the upkeep of the garden.”

  “And you’ll be able to come in the summer and sit here.”

  “Yeah. Won’t bring them back, though.”

  “But it’s a nice thing to do.”

  There seemed little else to say after that. The sounds of the bridge reached them as a rushing noise, like approaching weather; the bare, unplanted earth and the briny estuary smelled of winter. They wandered back to the river and leaned on the railing. Ron wanted to get away, and he wanted to get Colin away, too. A vandal-proof bench surrounded by a furze of low-maintenance, municipal shrubs; even with a wife’s name on it, just how was that “a nice thing to do”?

  “Your wife. Suppose she, if she-” Ron began, then hesitated. He nodded back toward the garden. “Never mind. It’s a very nice thing to do.”

  Colin blinked and sucked in a deep breath. “Thanks, mate. Fancy a pint, if you’re not busy?” he asked, with so much hope that Ron couldn’t refuse. They were on their way up to the Land Rover when Ron’s phone rang. It hadn’t rung for days.

  “Silva? What’s the matter?” He listened for a moment. “Christ. Oh, Christ. Silva!” He ended the call and began running down toward the jetty.

  “Come on! Hurry up!” he shouted to Colin over his shoulder. “Come on!”

  When they got to the boat, Ron set Colin at the prow with a flashlight. Then he turned the launch upriver, toward the cabin, straight into the flow of the still incoming tide.

  When I try to move, blood gushes from me. It’s hot and thick, and there is far, far too much of it. My eyes are streaming with tears so I can hardly see her, but she’s sitting on the rock with my baby bundled to her, and she’s got her head tipped toward the sky as if she’s looking up at the bridge. Lights streak across it, white in one direction, red in the other. My throat is raw with screaming. I can see the white rowing boat out on the water bright in the moonlight, a little silver thing rocking in the bla
ck and silver river. Then I see a wave wash it loose from the rock, and now it is spinning away with the rising tide. Now my child is trapped. My child is screaming for me, but when I try to stand up, my head spins and I fall back. My heart thumps all through my body, and there is another gush of blood. I scream again and roll myself over, and crawl down to the shore. The blood pours. Though I’m almost down on the ground, it tilts up, turns black, and hits my face.

  I open my eyes and manage to raise my head and spit some of the freezing grit out of my mouth. I hear a boat, a boat coming nearer and nearer, with the tide. There’s a darting light on the water. I know the sound of Ron’s boat. I hear his voice and want to call back, but with every breath I feel dizzy, and he wouldn’t hear me above the engine noise. He’s shouting to Silva. The river is swirling under me now as I lie on the shore. Somehow I drag myself to my feet and take a step forward. I scream and fall again into deeper water. The stinging cold steadies me, and I scream out again. Ron’s boat is on the far side of the rock now and I can’t see it, but he is on the rock, crouching down to her. She’s sitting in a flow of water, and he is taking the bundle from her arms. Another wave breaks over the rock and pushes at them. Silva slides away. I can’t see Ron clearly anymore. The boat’s engine surges wildly. I struggle to my feet again, ankle deep in water now, but I slip in the mud and can’t get up. I scream out again, and there comes another surge of the engine, almost out of control, and then the boat appears from around the rock, making for the shore. Ron is standing on the rock, and he has got Silva to her feet somehow and is holding on to her. The boat’s engine stalls. Then it stops.

  In the sudden silence, the light on the boat turns a giddy half circle as the tide catches the prow and spins the boat upriver. I watch it drift away from me, the light bobbing and fading. I glance back at the bare rock. A wave washes over it. Ron and Silva have gone. With the next wave, the rock will vanish under the tide.

  Then the engine coughs and roars, and the boat makes a crazy turn into a heavy wave. The light beam sways across the river and onto the shore. I close my eyes. For several moments, everything is quiet but for the chug of the boat and the running river. Blood warms the water lapping between my legs. The boat engine stops. I can’t scream, and I can’t open my eyes. I do not believe I shall open them again. I hear the splash of slow, wading steps coming toward me. I hear my baby’s cry, and I hear Col’s voice, calling out my name in the dark.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Kate Miciak at Random House for her unfailing encouragement and brilliant editorship of this novel.

  I thank also my two wonderful agents, Jean Naggar of the Jean Naggar Literary Agency in New York, and Maggie Phillips at Ed Victor Ltd. in London, for all their support, guidance, and skill.

  Dr. Nina Biehal kindly gave permission to print extracts from her work (with co-authors Fiona Mitchell and Jim Wade) Lost from View: A Study of Missing Persons in the UK. Thank you.

  While I worked on this novel I was a writer-in-residence at the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island, County Mayo, Ireland. My sincere thanks to the Achill Heinrich Böll Association for awarding me the residency, and to the hospitable Achill islanders who made my time there so much fun.

  And most of all, I’m grateful to my lovely daughter Hannah who, whenever she’s around, makes me laugh and makes me lunch.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MORAG JOSS is the author of several novels, including the CWA Silver Dagger winner Half Broken Things, which was also adapted as a film for U.K. national television. In 2008 she was the recipient of a Heinrich Böll Fellowship, and in 2009 she was nominated for an Edgar Award for her sixth novel, The Night Following. She is currently at work on her eighth novel, Our Picnics in the Sun, to be published by Delacorte Press.

  www.moragjoss.com

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