I was wondering what to do, hoping I might find a space on the floor somewhere away from others and out of the freezing gusts from the doors, when four police officers came in, two men and two women. They didn’t seem to have any particular job to do; there was no disorder to bring under control. The manager and a younger sidekick joined them, and after a few minutes of talk, swinging on their heels and looking around, they drifted off, patrolling the mass of sprawling bodies. Several people went up to talk to them, with questions or complaints, I supposed. I watched all this from behind a book rack in the shop. When it began to look as if the police were settled in for the night, I knew I couldn’t stay.
Outside, the temperature had dropped further. I needed to find shelter somewhere. I made my way around the back and followed the fence into the darkness at the far corner of the car park, where I found again the opening to the abandoned track I’d driven down with Stefan and Anna twelve hours before. Only twelve hours? It seemed-in a way it was-a lifetime ago. Ahead of me I could see the flames of several small fires burning among the wrecked buildings on the wasteland; to my right, I could see the glow of arc lights over the bridge abutments and the flicker of helicopters in the sky. I walked past the first straggly piles of debris at the sides of the track toward the fires, on through broken glass and old cans, mounds of rubble and discarded tires, piles of ripped roofing felt, wiring, and cable. Parts of wrecked cars rose in heaps around me; broken office furniture and rotten carpet jutted up from buckled and vandalized dumpsters. I was far enough from the traffic and the service station to catch the cold tang of the estuary, mixed with the smell of damp fields and rust and a sullen overlay of smoke. I reached the corner of a derelict brick shed and edged my way along the wall to the next corner until I could see a barren stretch of cracked concrete that must once have been the floor of a factory or warehouse. At its far edges I could make out the jagged remains of half-demolished walls. There several bonfires burned, and in their cloudy, yellow light the stooping silhouettes of people moved to and fro, passing bottles, lifting sticks into the flames, collecting from the ground anything that might make shelters for the night. Beyond them the black estuary glittered with the sweeping lights of helicopters, the air thudded and shrieked with propeller noise and sirens. Under the gleaming sky, a great, desperate agitation was in progress, but here the faraway wails were an unreal music, part of the rushing-by of a world miles from this encampment among the scrub and banks of litter where human beings hunkered down to get through the night, staring into dying fires.
I crouched down and watched. About a dozen people squatted or lay in aloof, solitary hovels of cardboard and rags, arranged in a haphazard outer ring as close to the warmth and light as they could get, but several feet from one another and a safe distance from the elite little groupings of twos and threes nearest the fires. Among these, proprietorial squalls would break out over a swig from a bottle, a cigarette, a package of food. From time to time the air fell silent, as if everyone had fallen asleep or retired to his own thoughts, and then there would be cries and scuffles again, sometimes the sound of breaking glass or a hallucinatory insult or misunderstanding, for sly demons came and went among these people. To some of them, the smoky sky was alive with specters that could enter through the space between blinks of their eyes and whisper tormenting messages inside their skulls, goading them into outbreaks of itching or howling or whimpering fear. One man sat upright, staring round with crazed vigilance and batting away phantom attackers with his empty bottle.
I got up carefully and foraged at the farthest edges of the light. No one turned from the flames to look at me. I found some plastic and cardboard in a heap against a ruined wall, and I dragged an armful across the concrete and set it down where I could feel a little warmth but would not be presumptuously close to the fire. The dark mounds around me shifted from time to time through the smoke, coughing, rearranging their coverings. I saw the smooth lifting of the burning dots of cigarettes, the red flares as they were inhaled. Nobody spoke. I went back, found some frayed sheets of bubble wrap and brought them to my place on the ground. I arranged a kind of sleeve of cardboard, and pulled the bubble wrap around myself. There I lay, my hand clasping the money in my pocket and my body wrapped as china is against the breakages that occur in transit through this world. I fell asleep.
I dreamed of a man who was taking me in the silver car on a hazardous journey. We drove through puddles that turned into lakes, we splashed miraculously out of them again and lost the road under a blizzard of snow, but on we went, because our destination was a place where I was to give a performance of some kind in front of a lot of people. I allowed myself to be taken, keeping silent about the only thing I was sure of, which was that I had nothing to give the audience, nothing to merit their attention or applause. I walked to the center of the stage and waited for their disappointment. Then I was standing under a tree and I had no excuse for my reticence to offer all the reproachful people walking by, save the one I spoke as they went past. I can’t give you anything because I am going to have a baby, I said, and although they kept on walking, they knew this was the truth and they forgave me.
You weren’t at the trailer when I got there, but I knew you were coming back. You were stranded somewhere, like everyone else that night, and you must have lost your phone. You took perfect care of Anna, always. I knew you were coming back.
First I told myself you had taken her out for a bus ride somewhere and got stuck in the traffic. When it got past nine o’clock that evening I knew you would be trudging toward me along the road, cold and tired, with her asleep against your back, her hair tickling your neck. I didn’t like to leave the trailer, but I climbed up the track to meet you, going quietly so I would hear the scrape of your feet or the rattle of the gate, your voice calling from up ahead that you were home at last. I didn’t go as far as the road, just to where I could hear the cars and see their headlights splitting the dark. I stayed back in the trees and waited and waited.
The traffic was moving almost as slowly as before. It was four hours since I’d walked from the shop down to Netherloch and got a lift with an elderly couple trying to get back to Inverness. They’d been to see his sister in a nursing home in Fort Augustus. The man had said nothing and the woman had tried to be nice, but I pretended I couldn’t speak English because I couldn’t have told her much that was true about me and I didn’t want to lie. They weren’t big talkers anyway. In two and a half hours we traveled six miles in silence except for the radio news and their soft remarks of despair, about the tragedy and the inconvenience equally. I got out at the service station and walked back so they wouldn’t see me set off down the track. It didn’t look like a suitable place for people to live.
I waited for you at the gate until I was so cold I either had to lie down where I was and burrow under leaves like an animal, or go back, and when I turned away and thought of the empty trailer I began to cry, and I couldn’t stop. When I got back, I threw myself onto the bed and lay sobbing, and after a while I lit a candle, as if it could make me feel less alone, and in a strange way it did. I think that’s why we light candles when we think of the people we really have lost, supposedly to God; we need to fill the emptiness of churches and the space their absence makes with small flames. By then I was warm again and I managed to fall asleep. It must have been hours later when I heard noises outside, feet on the stones and then on the trailer steps. I was up and nearly crying out for joy before I realized there was something wrong about it. If it had been you, you would have been calling to me long before you got to the trailer. For a moment I wondered if it was a deer. Then there was a knock on the door. My throat went solid. I tried to speak but my voice wouldn’t work. Then the door opened. Everything it is possible to feel at once-rage that it was some dirty, crazy stranger and not you and Anna, terror that she could just knock and walk in like that, relief that it was a woman and not a gang of men with knives-everything surged into hatred and I attacked her.