By eight o’clock he had driven nearly forty miles, far enough from the bridge, he hoped, for the usual tourist places to be unaffected by scores of stranded people seeking rooms. In a village called Aberarder he knocked on the door of a bungalow with a Vacancies board swinging from the sign that read GLENDARROCH BED AND BREAKFAST and explained to the landlady that his plans had been disrupted, he’d been turned back from going farther north and had been on the road nearly all night. He even managed to make a joke of asking, if it could be managed, for breakfast and bed, in that order. She was sympathetic; she’d been up half the night herself, watching the news. He ate ravenously, showered, and fell asleep in an overheated, immaculately floral bedroom. In the afternoon he went out and found a camping and outdoor supplies shop, where he bought new jeans and work shirts, T-shirts and socks, a jacket and boots. He ate early in a pub and returned to the Glendarroch, where he watched soccer on the tiny wall-mounted television, lying naked on the glassy nylon quilt. Before he fell asleep, he realized that his face was tired and tight, because he had been smiling.
The next day he drove back up through Netherloch. He parked the Land Rover at the Highland Bounty Mini-Mart again, noticing and thinking it odd that the store was closed on a Saturday. As before, he walked the three miles to the bridge. The area around it was still crowded with spectators, and there were now several radio cars and two TV mobile broadcast vans parked just beyond the barricades on the road. He could see that down by the bridge approach a pontoon holding winching gear now reached from the bank almost a quarter of the way across the river. Men were walking up and down on it, directing the lifting of twisted, dripping hunks of steel and concrete onto a salvage barge moored alongside. Some dinghies and a couple of boats were tied up at the pontoon, close to the bank. Farther out he saw two pairs of divers flipping into the water from two launches midstream, and he could see that work was under way across the river, too. A smaller pontoon had appeared, and the industrial wasteland next to the opposite bridge approach was being razed by bulldozers. Engine noises from both banks rose into the air and met in a swirl of sound overhead.
Close to where he stood, chain-link fencing was going up in place of the crowd barriers and police cordon tape, and he asked one of the men at work on it where he would find the office. He was directed to a mobile unit parked on the far side of the approach road. A man stood smoking at the entrance, and another man waiting inside turned and stared as Ron stepped in. The place was airless and muddy and smelled of sweat and warmed-up plastic. Two men in shirtsleeves sat behind a cluster of desks, one young and slight in a way that marked him out as the junior. Both had wads of paper in front of them, and the older one was arched back and swiveling in his chair, speaking on the telephone. On the wall by his desk was a board with a year planner and a postcard that read “A Man Without a Woman Is Like a Neck Without a Pain.” Ron stood at a respectful distance.
The man in front of him was talking in halting English to the younger man behind the desk; after a while he called in the second man from outside, wrote down some figures for him, and after protracted translation, both signed some papers and left. The young man now had his head down writing; the older one was gazing upward with the telephone at his ear, listening with obvious exasperation.
Ron stepped forward. “Excuse me, I’m looking-”
The young man looked up. “Skills?”
“Construction. General building. Transport, mainly.”
“Transport? HGV? Excavators? Got rough-terrain experience?”
“LGV. And PCV. Just… driving. I’ll do anything. Don’t mind heavy work.” Ron paused. “I just want to help.”
The man handed him an application.
“Pens over there,” he said and motioned toward a narrow ledge at one side of the unit. “Answer all the questions, mind.”
Ron took his time, turning his back as he took the card of the Glendarroch Bed and Breakfast from his pocket and copied the details down under “Address,” and in brackets wrote “temporary.” He covered his prison years with a lie about working for a contractor in Spain, with names and places he’d long ago memorized for precisely this purpose. He handed the form back just as the older man finished his call and turned to his colleague, running his hands through his hair and groaning.
“Nae fucking use, Davey. There’s naebody else to try till Monday. They’ll have tae fucking swim.”
“It’s a difficult situation, Mr. Sturrock.”
Mr. Sturrock glanced over at Ron’s application, lying on the desk. “Transport? Can he drive a fucking boat?” he asked his colleague, sourly. He looked at Ron. “Eh? I’m a couple of guys short. I’ve eighteen men from Inverness starting this side eight o’clock tomorrow and I’ve naebody to get them over. Don’t suppose you can handle a thirty-foot boat with an outboard, son?”
The young man shook his head over Ron’s application. “Doesnae say so here, Mr. Sturrock,” he said.
“I can, I’ve worked boats,” Ron said recklessly. “Never thought to put it down, it was a while ago. Fishing, harbor boats. A thirty-footer’s no problem.”
Mr. Sturrock stared at him. “You kidding me?” He paused. “I’m no’ talking fucking barge holidays on the Norfolk Broads, mind. Have you got your ICC?”
“Doesn’t need an ICC,” the first man said. “He’s UK. Have you got your NPC?” He scanned the form. “No, well, you won’t, you’re fifty. Have you got NPC equivalent?”
“Not on me. But I could send for it,” Ron said. He could prevaricate over it for a while, if need be.
The two men looked at each other. “He has to be qualified, Mr. Sturrock. NPC, or equivalent,” the first man said.
“Aye, Davey, but we’re desperate here. If we give him a wee tryout now and he’s okay,” said Mr. Sturrock, “that’ll get us by for tomorrow at least. Alan’s down at the boat now, he can give him a go and see how he handles it. See what I’m saying?”
“Mr. Sturrock, he has to be qualified.”
“Come on, Davey, you want to spend the rest of the day trying to get somebody else frae fuck knows where?”
“I’m just trying to be thorough.”
“I’ve worked boats on and off since I was fifteen,” Ron said.
“But there’s the local knowledge,” the young man said, pulling a thick sheaf of papers from the desk and turning up the right page. “You’d need to familiarize yourself with ‘local seamarks, local traffic practices, mud banks, shoal waters,’ ” he read. “You’d have to ‘demonstrate knowledge of heights of tides, neap and spring tides and tidal streams, and local safe landing places according to differing weather conditions.’ ”
Ron nodded. At least not every term he’d just heard was unfamiliar. “It would be a matter of learning the local conditions. And being always safety-aware,” he said. “I learn fast.”
“Aye, and nobody else we could get at this fucking notice is going to have local knowledge either, are they?” Mr. Sturrock said. “And he’s qualified. Aren’t you, son? Mind you, I’ll take experience over a fucking certificate any day o’ the week,” he said, looking hard at Ron. “Paperwork to follow, eh? We just need a copy for the file here. You’ll get your paperwork in to Davey here right enough, won’t you?” He turned to his colleague. “I’m not paying eighteen men to stay idle for the sake of a wee bit of paper when I’ve got an experienced guy standing in front of me. Send him on down, and if Alan says he’s okay, put him on the day rate. Write down ‘paperwork to follow’ and we’re covered.”
The younger man shrugged and Mr. Sturrock smiled, and Ron signed.
I slept and slept, and I fell into dreams like long, perilous ruts, channels of movement that swept me along helter-skelter, not in pursuit or escape from anything I could name but with some formless, looming jeopardy present all around and above me. I slept all that night and for spells the following day, and if when I woke I saw or heard Silva nearby, stepping into the trailer or tinkering and fetching outside, I felt as though she was permitting me these collapsed hours as kindly as if she had put me to bed herself and told me to close my eyes and rest. I would come to, and lie there, slowly calculating the passing of seconds against the beating of my heart (would my baby have a beating heart yet?) while my waking thoughts began to tick once more to the rhythm of the day, of which, thank God, a little less would remain. The shaking that had been going on inside me since I walked out of the Invermuir Lodge Hotel abated. As I began to feel steadier, my sickness eased somewhat.