Across the Bridge by Morag Joss

have another bottle in there and I’d be locking up
tonight. She wouldn’t go at first, she said the house would be
cold. So I went over, and it was and also dirty, as always. I
switched on the gas fires and her electric blanket and bedside
light and then went back for her. I led her all the way to her
bedroom door, and I promised her I’d look after everything. I hoped
she’d fall asleep before she could start crying.
    Soon after that a family came in. They’d been to the Netherloch
Falls. There was a sulky girl chewing on a leaflet from there, and
their feet were muddy. I didn’t like them. It was a weekday, so the
children should have been in school. I made the man go outside with
his cigarette even though it was only in his mouth and not lit. The
woman asked if we had Internet access, and I told her no because
I’d seen her wiping her nose with her hands. She said what’s that
then, pointing at the sign outside, and I said it wasn’t working.
For all I knew it wasn’t. Nobody had logged on for a couple of
weeks. Then she shook out a rail of tartan scarves and tried them
all on, even though there was no mirror and they were only scarves.
After that she took a basket and went up and down the shelves
helping herself, digging in the deep-freeze and handing ice creams
to her children before she’d paid for them. I told them there was
no eating in the shop, so they hung around staring at me and
sucking and tugging at their ice-cream wrappers and fingering the
chocolate bars and playing with the key rings in the ‘Under £3’
tray. I’m sure they took some. The eldest one kept whining to her
mother about why wasn’t there a toilet and when could she get on
Facebook.
    After they’d gone, I sent you another message and told you what
they were like, but you were still out of range.
    Then it was quiet again for a while. A man came in, someone I
remembered seeing before. He came in now and then, always in
outdoor clothes like the men who ran the angling weekends or worked
in the forest, but he was always by himself and he was older than
most of them. Not that I could really guess his age. He had cropped
hair that I thought would be silvery-grey if it were longer. When
he brought his things to the till he smiled as if he knew me. I
noticed the colour of his eyes again, a bluish-grey like the colour
of water in winter, and there was a brightness in them, almost a
flashing, as if he had just caught sight of something startling,
not in me but in the air surrounding me. But he was friendly. I
remember thinking he was the first person I’d seen smiling since
Anna waved me goodbye that morning, and my face felt a little
unaccustomed to smiling back. I forgot how it showed, worrying all
the time. He said something I didn’t hear. “Sorry, what did you
say?”
    “Nothing, doesn’t matter. You were miles away,” he said, still
smiling. I laughed and started to ring up his shopping. “Yes, I
was. Sorry.”
    “Good place to be, sometimes. I think so, anyway.” The radio was
on as usual, and I also remember there had just been a commercial
break and a time check. That was how I was sure exactly when it
happened. Two forty-five. He’d bought milk, a can of beans, cheese
and tomatoes and bread, I remember that as well. “You’re not
Polish, are you?” he asked. “Where are you from, then?”
    “Me? I’m from miles away,” I said, and rang the till.
    “Well, that’s two of us,” he said, and we laughed in the way
people laugh when they want to show something doesn’t matter, but
it does. Then the first sound of it came. It rolled at us like a
shape, a dark colour, a giant boulder. Other sounds were squashed
under it: the radio, the ting of the register, my voice
counting out change. I stopped trying to count, and we stood
staring at each other, then I began to feel the noise as well as
hear it; it came from underground and rumbled up through my legs
and into my throat, and rattled the words I was trying to