I got up to make a cup of tea. Instead of switching on a lamp, I turned on the television, for its flickering light rather than the actual pictures, and I kept the volume off. It wasn’t until after I had filled the little kettle from the bathroom tap and come back to plug it in that I took any notice of what was happening on the screen.
I was watching trembly pictures of a man with a fishing rod standing by a river. He was showing off and smiling. He turned to the water to cast, concentrating for a moment or two, sideways from the camera. The picture swung up to the top of the rod and back down; the man grinned and cast again. It was an amateur video; it must have been one of those programs of supposedly hilarious home video clips and in a minute there would be a mishap: he’d fall in the river, a gull would land on his head, something like that. But in the instant before I turned away, the man’s body jolted and his knees buckled. He turned abruptly upriver and dropped the rod. When he spun round a second later to look at the camera, his face was frightened and bewildered. Then he was shouting and waving his arms, and he ran off out of the frame. The camera swung away; the picture tilted up, zigzagged, and hit darkness, and then it began to jerk irregularly and very fast, up and down. Black bars broke across the image; the person with the camera was running through trees. When the picture settled, it was trained on the water. It focused in, silently, on the distant bridge.
The bridge I had crossed that day was untying itself from the earth. Its taut steel curves were loosening, its angles unfolding and turning slack. Cables were swaying and bending out of the sky, curling down and inward and falling in cast-off tangles into the water. Around and underneath them, all across the river, cars careered off the tilting road and sent up white explosions of foam as they hit the surface. I turned up the sound; now the cries of the man with the fishing rod mingled with creaks and a hollow roaring from the bridge and the coming-and-going groan of the wind, or perhaps it was not the wind but the breathless rasps of effort from the man who kept hold of the shaking camera when all he must have wanted to do was turn his eyes away and weep. But he held on, and then came the high squealing and tearing of tons of breaking masonry and steel. The uprights supporting the bridge spans tottered stiffly toward and away from one another. With awful slowness they, too, crashed one by one into the river, and the road, tipping and sagging some more, in a slow, rolling twist, disappeared under the water.
Then the image froze. From the bridge’s severed end, girders hung suspended in space and in time, not yet lethally collapsed. A car arrested in a nosedive toward the water hovered in midair, its occupants not yet trapped and drowned. There was a digital whirring. For a second or two, the video ran backward and speeded up like some ludicrously cruel comic caper; the car reeled back from disaster and jumped up onto the road. Then the screen went blank except for numbers racing in one corner. There was a flicker, and there again was the man larking about with the fishing rod, his face untouched by what was about to happen. Again he twice cast his line, started, turned, dropped the rod, shouted, ran. Again the stumbling camera followed until it broke through the undergrowth and fixed on the collapsing giant of the bridge, the breaking concrete, the buckled spans, ripped lengths of roadway and falling cars, the river boiling with debris.
And again. Unable to move, I stood and watched with the kettle in my hand. There he was, a man about to cast a line on a riverbank in early spring. And again, what happened instead. What happened next. This time the footage came with commentary from a news anchor in the studio, but of course it didn’t alter anything; the fisherman started, turned, dropped the rod, shouted, ran. The juddering camera followed. Voices cried out, the wind howled, cables snapped, concrete and steel tore, and the bridge went down. But I was finding out what I suddenly realized I needed to know, because this time the commentary gave a chronology, minute by minute, of what happened. I dropped the kettle, scrabbled in my bag for a scrap of paper, and wrote down all the numbers I could. When the pictures stopped, suddenly the strength went out of my legs and I sank onto the bed. With my hand shaking, I checked the timings and worked out the arithmetic.
Right up until a quarter to three that afternoon, traffic had been flowing as normal in both directions over the bridge. I had left Stefan and Anna at the service station before one o’clock. Stefan hadn’t said so, but the man changing the license plates would be sure to be in Inverness. There was no reason for Stefan to have crossed the bridge. They would have been driving into the city within minutes of my leaving them. There was no cause for them to have been near the bridge at all.
I kept watching. The amateur cameraman was in the studio now. The young man and his father-in-law, after a pub lunch in Inverness, had crossed the bridge themselves at twelve minutes past two. They had parked and gone down to the riverbank on the north side to record the first tryout with the new rod, a birthday present. The bridge began to creak and lurch at two forty-five, as his father-in-law watched in terror, turned, dropped the fishing rod, shouted, and ran. The young man followed, and his camera was on it within thirty seconds. By two forty-eight, three of the central bridge spans and the stretch of road between them, measuring over two hundred and seventy feet and bearing, the young man estimated, about twenty vehicles, had collapsed into the water. He contacted the news channel straightaway, and his video, “probably the only eyewitness record of the disaster,” was broadcast for the first time at ten minutes past four. Then they asked him what he had felt as he watched it all happen, and the young man broke down in tears.
I found myself crying, too, with a strange sorrow that was both impersonal and personal, for I cried for the strangers who were lost but also with relief for Stefan and Anna. They would be safe. By now the new license plates would be on the car, and all I had to do was get back to Netherloch and pretend I had just discovered that it had been stolen from the car park behind the school. But would anyone care, now? A bridge had collapsed and people were dead and missing; it was impossible to believe that the lies I was going to tell about the car could be of any real importance. Yet I had to go. Stefan was relying on me.
But Netherloch was only about seven miles inland from the estuary bridge, and the narrow stone bridge in the town was the next crossing place over the river. There was bound to be disruption on the roads. For the next hour I kept the television on for traffic news. The video of the catastrophe was replayed endlessly. At a quarter to six, I had another text message:
In nothr bar! Going for curry. Eat without me ok sorry
I lay back on the bed in the dark room. Reflections from the screen danced in muzzy patterns over my hands, folded across my stomach. In the next half hour the video was run another four times, with slight variations in the commentary as a range of people gathered in the studio to give their viewpoints. Then live footage appeared. In the background rescue teams with boats and helicopters and ambulances scrambled around under emergency lighting. A reporter in an overcoat stood on a roadside clutching a microphone and said that the number of vehicles believed lost in the water continued to rise. It was feared that it might never be known for certain how many, for in such strong tides and deep water, cars and bodies could be swept out to sea and never found. But, on a more optimistic note, nobody was giving up hope, the reporter said. Some people had made it out of their cars and swum through the freezing water to the bank of the river, where they were being treated on the spot for shock, exposure, and injuries. There was severe road congestion, and police were urging people to keep away. Anyone concerned for a loved one should stay by the telephone and not attempt to come to the bridge.