After another while the sirens faded, as if all the panic were somehow being placed at a distance. The cars on the road were empty. I decided I would go in and make some tea and see if I could fiddle with the radio dial and get the news. I picked up the man’s bag of groceries and took it inside to keep safe for him in case he came back.
Soon afterward Vi returned. She was sober now, and scorched-looking, as if what she’d seen had radiated a kind of blast that had burned off the drink in her. Her sandy, dry hair had frizzed up in corkscrews, and her eyes were small and hot under her stiff straw eyebrows. She’d been up to the top of the falls, she told me, high enough to see down the estuary to the ruined bridge.
“There’s a whole bit gone right out of the middle,” she said, talking fast, bringing her hands together and opening them wide again. “Disappeared. Torn right away and in the river. And there’s loads of cars went with it, they don’t know how many. Cars with folk still in them.”
I had never heard her talk so much. Disaster had made her lively. The river was choked with wreckage: girders, concrete, tarmac. She had seen the roofs of cars and an upended truck. She hadn’t seen any corpses, but people were dead in the water, people were missing. The roads on both sides of the bridge were closed. Up at the falls the man in the checked shirt had been getting news and police reports on his phone, and he told her that on this side of the river the police would be stopping all the traffic coming down from the north to Inverness and diverting it past the broken bridge. Everything would have to come all the way along here on our little road, seven miles inland, and cross the river by the little stone bridge at Netherloch. Then from Netherloch, the traffic would have to travel the seven miles back again, right down the riverbank on the other side to the end of the estuary at Inverness.
“Oh, think of the people,” I said. I realized I was crying. “Those poor people.”
“It’ll be pandemonium,” Vi said. “Pandemonium. Detours from here to Inverness, it’ll add hours, you wait and see.” Her voice was greedy. She was thinking of all those cars crawling past outside, all those drivers, bored and hungry and thirsty. She was trying not to look pleased.
“I mean the people in the water,” I said. “The drowned people.”
“Aye, right enough, but now what? That wee bridge at Netherloch’ll never cope, it couldn’t even take two wee vans going past each other, never mind they great big trucks.”
I remembered the first time we went there. I remembered the little bridge, made of dark gray stone like the rest of Netherloch town. It had a shallow arch, and curved recesses on each side. For people to step out of the way of carts and horses, you told me. It must have been built hundreds of years ago. Or to stand fishing, I said. Or set up stalls, selling things. People set up markets on bridges, don’t they? It’s where you can wait and catch customers, while they’re going across. We stood there a little longer, but I don’t remember what we said after that. It was one of those conversations that did or didn’t have an ending, like seeing a puff of smoke in the sky that drifted away and you weren’t sure if you saw it go or just noticed later it had gone. It didn’t matter.
Just then more sirens started up, and we went to watch at the window. The sound came nearer. Three or four vehicles with blue flashing lights swept past in the direction of Netherloch.
“See?” Vi said. “That’s them going in to set up the detours. Pan-de-bloody-monium.”
It was getting dark, and soon from down the road another blue flashing light appeared and drew nearer, traveling slowly. Behind it, a pair of white headlamps followed, growing round and glaring. More headlamps flickered behind in a long, moving necklace of lights winding up from the Inverness bridge. Soon the traffic was juddering nose to tail all along the road outside. We waited.
“I might have kenned,” Vi sighed. “Nobody’s stopping. Once you’re in a queue like that, you stay in it. Nobody’s going to pull off just for sweeties and a drink and lose their place.”
She went over to the counter and rummaged underneath it. She poured out the dregs from her bottle and raised the glass toward the window. “Pandemonium. Break your bloody heart.” She tipped her drink down her throat and, swaying a little, turned to watch the traffic again. “It’ll be a different story in Netherloch. Folk pouring into a wee place like that, oh, they’ll do fine, ta very much. Mind you, it’ll bring in all sorts.”
“I like Netherloch,” I said.
Vi turned her gaze from the window. “Your lot don’t go to Netherloch. It’s for holiday folk.”
“I’ve been once or twice.”
“There’s nobody in Netherloch these days. It’s for holiday folk now,” she said firmly. “None of your lot there.” She made it sound as if Netherloch had escaped a pestilence. I felt my eyes fill with tears again and I moved away to the door, where all the tourist stuff was laid out, and began tidying up the shelf with the pottery Loch Ness monsters and bookmarks. Over my shoulder I could feel her thinking about what she’d said, wanting to balance it with something less unkind. I saw that in her, sometimes, and a look that told me she was sorry for the way she was.
“Well, anyway. Where is it you stay again? Over the other side, isn’t it? You’ll be a while getting back tonight,” she said. “All that traffic all the way up to the wee bridge and all back down the other side.”
“There’s still the stock at the back to put out,” I reminded her, and got the pricing gun and the order sheet from under the counter. Vi looked at the clock.
“No, on you go,” she said, taking them from me. “You get going. Walk up to Netherloch and there’ll be police there, they’ll help you out. There’ll be other folk needing lifts most likely. I doubt there’ll be a bus tonight.”
As I went to get my bag and jacket, I heard her open the cash register. When I came back, she was leaning over it, gripping the sides with her hands.
“There’ll be nobody in this weekend. I can’t be paying out to mind an empty shop.” She looked up. “Don’t come in till Monday, okay? You’d struggle to get here anyway, all that bloody big detour.”
She started thumbing through the few bills in the register drawer. It was Thursday. Maybe she’d forgotten she was due to pay me on Friday. I had less than five pounds in my bag. I didn’t know how we’d manage the weekend, never mind that I was supposed to work Sunday and now she didn’t want me in, so I’d lose that money as well.
“I could make it. I could get here,” I told her. I stood there for a while, hoping at least she’d pay me what I was owed.
“Not worth it. Could be we won’t get a summer season at all,” Vi said, banging the drawer shut again. Then she gave me a kind of wave and lurched back to her place by the kerosene stove. I think she meant it partly as an apology, but mainly she wanted rid of me.
“Come in Monday. I’ll pay you Monday,” she said and closed her eyes.
That made me feel a little better. If she wasn’t settling up now, it must mean she really did want me on Monday. She wasn’t telling me I hadn’t got a job anymore.