Among the Missing (31 page)

I remember the first few days only as a time when I thought my throat was blocked with stones and I wanted my heart to stop. Every beat of it hurt me. I tried to stop breathing. I wanted my lungs to choke, I wanted to sink to the bottom of the river and be with you, not that that made sense, even to me. Of course I knew you were no longer there, for they had lifted you, poor drowned souls, out of the water.

Yet the river is, for me, where you were and now will always be, down under the water, your faces calm and your skin as clean and white as shell. You do not perish. Slowly, patiently, you blink your eyes, and your dark, curling hair still grows, and all day long the river current plays with it, spinning it in wafts around your shoulders. You let the water turn you this way and that, and your hands rise and fall, your fingers open and close. You are waiting for me now just as I, since the day you disappeared, waited for you. This is why I will not go far from the river.

Other people are waiting, too, official people. They are waiting for
someone to come and tell them who you are, and to bury you. And I can’t, because the official people have got rules. They are holding behind their backs all the rules they have for people like us, and as soon as they knew I didn’t belong here, they wouldn’t let me near you. There are laws, they will say. They wouldn’t let me bury you, and they’d send me back, and then I would be farther away from you than ever.

So, soon they will have to bury you without your names, and I won’t know where. But at least you—no, not you, only the discarded shells of you they brought to the shore—will lie together, and not far away. I will stay nearby and go on talking to you every day, and every day I will watch the river for a runnel in the tide, a flicker of light, a wave feathering the surface that will tell me you are waiting.

I have heard them since I was a child, but I never felt before now the truth of them, those fairy tales of mortal people who step off dry land leaving not a single footprint, drawn to the sea or a lake or river for love of a lost one who has been taken and transformed into an underwater spirit. But the oldest stories turn out to be true, at least in this: the vanishing from sight, the yearning of the one who waits for the beloved who is never coming back. An old story, my love, is what we are now, and all we have.

Annabel and Ron try to take my mind off all this. They think it is not good for me to spend my time wandering between my bed and the river. They think I talk to myself. Ron thinks I should go back and work for Vi again, Annabel doesn’t, but she doesn’t know what I should do instead. I don’t want them to worry so much, especially not Annabel. I want her to think I am beginning to recover.

Meanwhile she is very kind, and Ron would do anything in his power to make me comfortable, and it is calming to know I am not wholly alone. I am grateful for them. If they were not here, there would be no reason not to go mad. Annabel herself is growing heavier and slower by the day, and there is a certain calm in that for me, too. She is stupidly content. She does not know I am waiting for her baby just as much as she is. She does not know her baby is my reason to stay alive a little longer.

I wasn’t so out of touch with reality as to want to give birth in the cabin, without help. I knew I would have to see a doctor eventually. I wanted to be the one to choose when, that was all. I would go when I felt ready. For months I’d imagined it as if I were watching myself in a film, enacting the scene where I present myself to a jovial doctor with some story about being new in the area, and my bump would be routinely examined and we’d make arrangements about the delivery.
Well done, Mum, you’re doing fine, we’ll expect you at hospital when Baby decides to put in an appearance!

Now I could see it might be more difficult than that. I needed time to prepare myself, but there was no hurry. By the middle of August, the northern summer had begun to give way to autumn, but still I had no proper sense of time passing. Across the river on dry days now the combines were at work in the fields, raising clouds of pale dust in long, straight rows. I went for walks under rainy skies, grateful for a new sharpness in the wind off the water, utterly content. I don’t know where my complacency came from unless from pregnancy itself—some merciful, hormonal muffling of the very idea of risk—but I was sure everything was fine. The baby was growing and kicking, and didn’t millions of women give birth every day? There was nothing to worry about. There were times when I was tempted to give up on the idea of the doctor and just let nature take its course. I had ages to go.

It was worth putting up with Silva nagging me about it, and about everything else, to hear her talking again, or so I thought. At least she had come far enough out of her torpor to care about something. Besides, nothing upset me much. I felt safer than I had ever felt in my life,
attuned to my body’s accruing weight, its rhythms, even to its small lapses and betrayals; I swelled and sweated, I gasped with heartburn, the veins on my legs bulged like coiled worms. I had to pee a dozen times a day, and I could no longer lie flat on my back. But I accepted everything that was happening to me. I marveled at the willing, aching vessel my body had become for the child, whose size was now quite tremendous, and I gave myself up easily to its nightlong pummeling under my ribs. I was happy.

But unlike me, and although there was no reason for it, Silva was edgy all the time. At the cabin she watched me constantly, and although she cared about the baby, she wasn’t kind to me. Her attention was scrupulous but disapproving, as if the baby needed her guardianship because it was being born to a mother too hapless to deserve it. And she was full of opinions, all of them superstitious and most of them closer to witchcraft than to midwifery: I mustn’t stand for more than half an hour (as if I wanted to) because I’d draw blood from the baby’s brain; I shouldn’t cut my hair because the baby would be born with weak hair. I suppose I was touched, but nonetheless her scrutiny was wearing, and if I objected mildly to any of it or took a shade too lightly some silly piece of advice, she got angry. I learned to overcome the urge to laugh her concerns away. There was some respite when she went off on her wanderings along the river, but when she returned she would be more dogmatic still, with plans for more unpleasant, almost punitive little rituals that I would have to undergo. I lay with my feet pointing to the ceiling, I inhaled bitter, steaming concoctions of boiled leaves for lung strength. All, of course, for the baby’s good. Often the cabin seemed unbearably small, yet when Ron came there would always somehow be more room, not less.

The worst days were the ones when I got ridiculously hungry. I could eat half a loaf of bread in minutes, impatient with the time it took me to spread the butter and jam, folding each oozing slice over and shoving it in my mouth, chewing as I spread the next. This put Silva in such a rage I would have to wait and gorge in secret when she was busy getting firewood or washing her hair outside in the tub, or had gone walking along the river. I could not explain to her the need to fill myself up in this way, the strength and pleasure it gave me, the floppy collapse in my mouth of bread slick with butter, the tingle of strawberry
syrup on the tongue. Afterward I would lie still and feel my stomach gurgling and squirting its juices and doing its work like the wondrous factory I now trusted it to be, transforming the heaps of food I had eaten into the bones, flesh, hair, fingernails of my baby. I thought of its face in the dark of my womb, blinking its wet eyes and smiling a sated, gummy smile.

Other times, I craved sugar. It would hit me suddenly, the need to crunch and suck on glassy grains of it, squeezing them through my teeth; some days I stole so much sugar I made my tongue sore with abrasions from working its sweet, scratchy crystals against the roof of my mouth. Then there were days when I needed sugar to slide around inside my mouth all smooth and golden and chewy, and I walked around salivating with a desire for soft lumps of toffee. Once I was so desperate I set about making some without a recipe, just melting and boiling up sugar with butter, and Silva lost her temper. She lifted the whole seething pan of it from the gas burner, carried it outside, and tipped it all out on the ground, shouting at me that it was bad for me, bad for the baby, a waste of gas, a waste of sugar, I had ruined the pan. Not even then did I do more than protest I hadn’t meant any harm. Actually I had already made up my mind to get Ron to bring me as much toffee as I could ever want. Silva need never know.

After that she wrote down her rules for my diet. She made a timetable with my hours all set out, for domestic tasks, periods of rest, gentle exercise. I wanted to laugh. She was rationing my knitting to an hour a day because, she said, pregnant women who knitted too much could produce confused babies. I went along with it, more or less. My days were all now so much the same, so uneventful and poised for this last period of waiting, that I didn’t care what I did. It hardly mattered that Silva wanted to shift me along from one activity to the next according to her notion of what was good for the baby.

In fact, it suited me to let her do the thinking. While time was of course stretching forward, I was basking in a dream that it stood still. Insofar as I bothered to grasp that everything was about to change, I was enjoying not knowing quite what to expect. I never once thought of pain, for instance. I had the dreamiest notions about breast feeding. I trusted myself to deal with these things naturally, when the time came. It was as much as I could do, day by day, to heft around this massive
body of mine and make sense of the idea that all it was, for the time being, was a vault for the round boulder of baby pushing harder and harder against its walls.

Still, eventually I said I should find a doctor and make arrangements. Silva was reluctant at first. I don’t think she wanted me to hear any advice that might compete with hers, or get the idea that anyone but she was managing my pregnancy. So, more for vigilance than support, she came with me.

I stood no chance of making it up the slope through the pine trees, so very early one morning Ron took us in the boat to the other side of the river, where he picked up the catering crew. Silva and I walked to the service station and waited there for a bus.

We were in the center of Inverness before half past six. It was a blowy, colorless morning, and the pavement at the bus station where we stepped off was dark and cold in the long, early shadow cast by high buildings; seagulls squabbled over discarded food wrappers blowing along the gutter. The air was brackish with the exhaust fumes of arriving and departing buses, and already the city was noisy with traffic. We hung around until the station coffee stall opened at seven o’clock, and we bought muffins and tea. There wasn’t a proper seat in the place, just a ledge, and the ground was littered with cigarette ends and stained with spilled drink and dropped food and urine. My back ached, and I kept yawning. The tea was both weak and bitter, and I said I felt sick and wished I was still in bed.

Silva told me to shut up. It wasn’t unusual for her to say that kind of thing, but away from the cabin it sounded harsh and different, a way of being spoken to that I should not have had to get used to. Still, I didn’t let it bother me. I remember gazing at her profile as she swallowed her tea and thinking how thin her cheeks were, how much more in need of a doctor she looked than I. I took her hand and whispered my thanks to her for bringing me. And then, although it hadn’t crossed my mind before, I told her that she would be the first to hold the baby. She turned with a gasp. Then she squeezed my hand and smiled, a shining smile full of delight that I had never seen on her face before and that revealed, perhaps, her delight in having me confirm something she had already decided.

We waited until nearly eight o’clock and then caught a bus to the
clinic, which opened at half past. Of course, we had had no idea how to find a doctor in Inverness, so Ron had done an Internet search for us and printed out details of the largest clinic in the city. It wasn’t in the center, but it had ten doctors, as well as nurses and midwives and other staff, and I hoped it would be busy and impersonal, too system-bound to probe into my circumstances. I didn’t want to be treated as a person, just as a container that might need technical help to empty it of its load of baby.

I was glad to see that the building was modern and low, an austere, small institution, its doors plastered with notices. Inside, we joined the queue at the receptionist’s window. When my turn came, there were several people behind me and within earshot. Silva kept turning and glaring at them.

“Yes?”

I opened my mouth and stalled. The receptionist had begun writing, and I didn’t like to speak to the top of her head.

“Hello,
yes
?” She looked up with a microsmile, no more than a twitch of the mouth.

“Sorry, yes, hello … I’ve just moved here,” I said. “I wonder if I—”

“You want to register,” she said, rolling herself a few feet back on her office chair and reaching into a filing cabinet. “Both of you?”