They passed the Tourist Information Office, which was closed. Across the tarmac stood a café, also closed. Barker noticed a hand-written sign on the door: CAFÉ OPENS 10:15 A.M. The morning — it seemed so far away, beyond imagining. Glade came and stood beside him, pressed her face to the dark window.
‘They sell jam,’ she said, and laughed.
When you first step on to a suspension bridge you feel you still have some connection with the land. Gradually, though, you realise you’ve left one element for another. Earth’s gone. Suddenly there’s only air. And far below, of course, the water. Like something waiting. In the early sixties Barker used to cycle up to the Tamar Bridge at night, just him and a friend of his called Danny and a younger boy whose name he couldn’t now remember. For years, it seemed, he had watched the bridge being built; it had formed a kind of backdrop to his childhood. How thrilling, then, to be able finally to walk out to the middle, his mind sent flying by the tiny lethal bottles of Barley Wine that Danny used to steal from the off-licence. Looking west, he could see into the next county, the scattered lights of Saltash and Wearde. Along the east bank black-hulled barges would be lying in neat rows of three. To the south he could watch the water swirling round the stone columns that supported the old railway bridge, the patterns on the surface intricate and whorled, like fingerprints. He had spent hours on that bridge, always at night and always drunk, and he could still remember it shaking as the cars passed over it. There was something reassuring about the way it shook; it had reminded him of a voice reverberating through a body. This bridge was different, though. The sheer scale of it. The isolation.
To reach the bridge they had to climb a flight of wooden steps that scaled an embankment. When they were halfway up, a man appeared above them, outlined against the sky. The man was carrying a camera, and holding a small boy by the hand. Barker nodded at the man, but didn’t speak to him. At the top of the steps he turned right, past a series of huge, ridged concrete blocks. He paused, waiting for Glade to catch him up. Over his shoulder he could see the toll-booth, which, from a distance, resembled an aquarium, men moving slowly through its dingy, greenish-yellow light. As he walked on, with Glade beside him, the wind grew stronger, more deliberate, and he could feel the ground opening beneath his feet. Although the bridge weighed many thousands of tons, it felt delicate, almost fragile in the face of the great black emptiness that surrounded it. Those heavy cables stretching up towards the towers — if he looked at them for too long, he had the feeling he was falling. There was a railing, but it didn’t seem enough. You could be holding on and then it would give. He had the same feeling in dreams sometimes. In nightmares. It was all he could do not to crouch down, close his eyes. He looked at Glade. She was walking slightly ahead of him, strangely eager, as if she was on her way to something that she didn’t want to miss. He couldn’t predict her, not even from one moment to the next.
They were about a third of the way across.
One feature of the bridge that surprised him was the fact that the road was raised above the walkway. When a car passed by, his eyes were on a level with the dark blur of its tyres. He felt this might work in his favour. At first he had been worried that somebody might stop. He could imagine a well-meaning stranger leaning out of his car window and asking if they needed help. When he said no, the stranger might become suspicious. Might even report them. People are funny about people on bridges. And if the police came, of course, well, that would be the end of it. But because they were walking below the cars, and the light was going, he now thought it unlikely anyone would notice them.
It took half an hour to reach the middle. Glade was talking to herself — or she might have been singing, he couldn’t tell; he could see her lips moving, though he couldn’t hear her above the constant, muted whining of the wind. She seemed happy on the bridge. Sometimes she stopped and stared up at the huge, looped cables and her face filled with a breathless quality, a kind of awe, and he thought of how his own face must have looked a quarter of a century before.
All the way across he had been aware of the railing that stood between him and the river. He had been sizing it up, trying to determine the nature of the obstacle. In a way, he was taken aback by the absence of discouragement. He had expected something far more daunting. But there was no anti-climb paint, no barbed wire. Just a metal railing five feet high. Beyond it, a ledge or lip, no more than six inches wide. Beyond that, nothing. It seemed too easy. He stood still, thinking. The wind roared in his ears. The river gaped below. Was there something he had missed?
He turned round, looked both ways. No cars, no people. He took Glade by the arm.
‘We’re climbing over,’ he said. ‘Both of us.’
Her eyes moved towards the railing. ‘Over?’
He nodded.
She wasn’t sure that she could do it. Her skirt, she said. Her shoes. He would help her, he said. He would thread his fingers, make a step. Then he would lift her. He told her not to worry. He’d be there.
‘I used to climb trees when I was young,’ she said doubtfully.
‘This is the same thing,’ he said. ‘The same thing exactly.’ Glancing one way, then the other. Still no cars.
He kneeled. She placed a foot on his two hands and took hold of the railing. He caught a glimpse of the crease behind her knees, the long curve of a thigh. He almost gave up then. It would have been a kind of weakness, though. It wouldn’t have done her any good. They had reached their destination. There was nowhere else to go.
Still, he felt something collapse inside him, as if all the air had been drawn out of his body. I never want another day like this. Shaking his head, he smiled grimly. Everything he thought of now amused him. Who would he be remembered by? The man at the ticket counter? That woman on the tube? Would the Indian waiter remember him? Would anyone? His last moments lay in the hands of strangers.
A voice called out to him and he looked up. Glade was half-sitting, half-lying on the top of the railing. She clung on with her hands and knees, almost as if she was riding a horse bareback.
‘It’s windy up here,’ she said. ‘It’s very windy.’
‘I’m coming,’ he said.
He hoisted himself over the railing, feeling for the ledge with the toe of one boot. The metal was cold. He felt it bite into his fingers. The wind pushed at him with such force that he imagined, for a moment, that he was trapped in a crowd.
Then he was on the other side and reaching up for her. She slithered backwards, feet first, hair whipping into his eyes. Somehow he managed to guide her down, gather her in …
They were facing outwards now, into the dark. Their backs to the railing, their hands gripping the bars.
Wind filled his mouth each time he tried to speak.
He thought he heard a car go past. He couldn’t feel it in the metal of the bridge, though. It didn’t register. The sound of the engine blended with the wind.
If it was a car, it didn’t see them. Didn’t stop.
He tried to concentrate on the horizon, but sometimes there was a movement in the corner of his eye, a slow, blind movement, like some great creature turning in its sleep. The body of the river. Currents twisting ninety-eight feet down.
‘Are you afraid?’ he heard her say.
He looked into her face. Her pupils black, with discs of silver in the middle. Her hair blown back behind her shoulder, flattening against the pale metal of the railing. He thought of sticks washed by flood-water on to a drain and stranded there. He thought of stubborn things.
‘No,’ he said.
‘You look afraid.’