I thanked her and got in the back. I was just cold and tired, I assured her, and gave her some story about my car breaking down and leaving it at the roadside because I preferred to walk rather than wait for rescue with the roads so jammed, but I’d underestimated the distance to Netherloch. She told me I had no chance of getting a room there for the night, the radio said the town was packed out. I’d do better going on to Inverness with her, however long it took. We crawled along; the two girls fell asleep, and to avoid conversation I pretended to as well, turning my face to the window and keeping my eyes half-closed.
It was only when I saw the lights of the service station up ahead that I realized I was returning to the trailer. All the hours I had been walking, I had been holding tight to myself a belief that Stefan and Anna were among the people who’d got out of the river alive. But I had to make sure they were safe. I had to talk to Stefan. He had lost the car that had cost him all the money he had, and I couldn’t alter that, but I had to divide the money with him. I would explain why I couldn’t part with all of it; as a father, he would understand. But I wanted to give him half of it back, to ease his loss. I made excuses to the woman about needing a bathroom and got out at the service station.
I walked back to the broken gate and down the track. The trailer was dark and shut up. There was nothing strange about that, I told myself. They might not be back yet; they could be still in one of the temporary first aid stations near the bridge. Or they might be in hospital, as a matter of routine. Of course they wouldn’t be here. I felt foolish, staring through the dark at the closed door. I imagined it opening and Stefan appearing at the top of the steps, looking suspicious and puzzled until he recognized me, and then I realized what an odd sort of rescuer I must look. Sweat was running down my body and through my hair, and I was shivering. Nausea swept over me again, as it often did when I was hungry. But my hand thrust in my pocket was clutching the envelope with the money; pleasure was welling up inside me as if I had already seen the relief on Stefan’s face. Of course there couldn’t be anyone inside the trailer, but I walked carefully across the stones, up the steps, and knocked on the door.
Nobody came. I waited, and the nausea grew worse. I tried the door handle. It opened into blackness and silence, and I was afraid, yet I wanted to go in. The night outside was suddenly no place to be; I needed walls and a roof, I needed shelter even if only this: precarious, thin, leaking. I stepped up into the doorway and peered inside. I could smell the soapy, vinyl smell from yesterday and also the bitter tang of cigarettes. Nothing moved, but in the darkness I knew there was something warm and alive. My heart was thumping like knuckles against the back of my ribs, bone against bone, and I took a breath to say something, but I doubled over instead, and retched. My mouth filled with saliva and bile. I spat on the floor, and as I was trying to stand up straight again, a flashlight snapped on. Instantly its beam lurched away and upward, and I felt it come down hard on my head and shoulders, and then a hand was hauling me upright by the hair. A woman’s screams filled the trailer, the flashlight fell with a clunk, and its beam played jaggedly on her kicking feet and jerked over the ceiling and walls. I was trapped. I couldn’t get out of the trailer or away from the screaming. Then the slapping and punching started.
I couldn’t speak. Even if I could have explained, or got any words out at all, she wouldn’t have heard. Fists and arms and feet were flying in a rolling beam of light, and through the screams she was spitting out words over and over, telling me to get out, go away, leave her alone. I held her off as best I could until, shielding my head, I managed at last to stand up straight and face her. I was taller than she was. I stopped her next blow by grasping her wrists.
“Stop! Please stop! I didn’t mean any harm,” I said. “I’m sorry. It’s okay. Please! Please-”
My voice cracked suddenly. The woman stopped screaming and stared at me, and then she burst into tears. I wanted to say more, but I couldn’t. Keeping hold of one of her wrists, I scooped up the flashlight at my feet and shone it at her. In the shaking light, her face was colorless and stricken, the long blond hair sticky and matted to her scalp.
How could I comfort her? How could I dare offer comfort? “Please, don’t. Please. I’m sorry,” I said.
We were stock-still for an instant. My grip on her wrist loosened. She wrenched her arm free and backed away. The foldaway table and pullout bed behind her, the blankets dragged to the floor, a heap of clothes, were now caught in the glow of the flashlight. She was alone. Part of the ceiling had curled away, exposing a web of saturated fibrous stuff from which water was seeping into a bucket on the floor.
“You tramp! You filthy tramp! Get out of here, get out now! Get out!”
She lunged forward, shoving me toward the door so hard I stumbled and fell. Then she sank back into the dark mass of bedding and hid her face in another burst of weeping. I scrambled to my feet and ran from the trailer.
I climbed as fast as I could up the track, and when I reached the top I collapsed on the ground, coughing bile and fighting for breath. After a while I managed to sit up, and I stayed there, trying to drag in a proper lungful of air and stop the shaking in my legs. I was exhausted and sick from lack of food. I had nowhere to spend the night. I had no name. Which terror should I face first: being hungry, pregnant, homeless, or nameless?
But the worst terror was that Stefan and his daughter hadn’t come back. They hadn’t come back and the woman in the trailer didn’t know why, and I had not been able to tell her. I had sold him the car and now I had money to keep my child, but where was hers? I turned toward the lights of the service station.
It was thronged with people, but hunger forced me inside. I had to hope that although my face might appear in the papers and on television as one of the dead, it would be a wedding photograph, the only pictures Col had of me. I was surely unrecognizable now as the person who’d smiled into the camera that day. My face was grim under the wreckage of makeup and stinging from cold and the blows and scratches of the struggle in the trailer. My hair had been curled and adorned with ludicrous turquoise feathers on the day I got married; now it was shorter and darker, and most of it was hidden under a flat woolen hat. Nobody would link a smiling photograph with this wretched woman shuffling along in a cafeteria queue. I bought what was available, coffee and a muffin, and took them over to a table, which I had to share. There was a television suspended from the ceiling tuned soundlessly to the bridge news, and I ate and drank with my eyes raised to it, avoiding contact with the three other people at the table. I kept my cup up close to my face and let the coffee steam rise and warm my skin in between sips.
By now the service station should have closed for the night, but it was staying open for the people who were stranded. Extra plastic chairs had appeared, and people were bedding down on car blankets and jackets and coats all over the floor. Some appeared to be sleeping; others were talking and drinking doggedly, doing puzzles or playing cards, trying to control children. From the games arcade came ceaseless zooming and firing sounds and the unfettered, giddy yelps of teenage boys. A woman dozed in a wheelchair near the door to the ladies’, half-hidden by the fronds of a huge artificial fern. Every table in the cafeteria was full, although the serving counter had been stripped of everything except tea and coffee in foam cups. In the shop, people were buying up the last of the chocolate and sweets and magazines, but the queues had lessened because there was nothing of much use left; untouched piles of Frisbees and celebrity memoirs stood out among the emptied shelves and racks. Although the place was thronged, there was a pall of numb, anxious quiet that perhaps hangs over all refugees.