Chapter 9 The Crossing

Wren got to the bend at twenty to ten on the Saturday, two hours later than she had meant to arrive. She had walked the south bank twice the day before with the water still lying over the deck, and she had stood in the reeds where the gravel shelved away, and she had not seen a single plank. That morning the Hales had gone back to its own colour, and the flood had left a pale seam of weed along both banks marking the height it had reached. The bridge stood up out of the shallows. Nine planks dry, two dark with the last of the flood, the west rope pulled tight where the water had dragged it and snapped it back. Wren stood at the east end with her hands pushed into her jacket pockets and looked at it in daylight for the first time. She had a whole map of the thing in her head, built out of nights, and daylight moved every part of it. The moss was greener than she had thought. The dark planks were not rotten at all, only wet. "Coming or not," said a voice out of the reeds. He came up the west bank with his sleeves pushed to the elbow, and the sun was on his face, and she discovered she had absolutely nowhere to put her hands. "You were early," she said. "I was at the mill." He stopped short of the deck and looked at the water, not at her. "Are you sure about this?" "No," Wren said. "Are you?" "Ask me at the far end." She laughed, and it came out much too loud for a Saturday morning on a river, and she shut it down with the back of her hand. He almost smiled. She wanted to be able to say later that he had, because at the time she could not tell. He sat down on the gravel and pulled his boots off and set them side by side, heels together, laces tucked in. She watched him do it and then did the same, and cold came up through the soles of her socks, and she made a noise about it. "You are going to be the death of me," she said. "You got your shoes off." "You go first." "I built half of nothing here." "You are the welder." She pushed at the first plank with two fingers and felt it move. "If it goes, you go in first. That is the deal. I have seen the mill." He went first. Nine planks of dry deck, and then the two dark ones, and on the second dark one he stopped flat and put his weight on his hands. "What," Wren said. "Fourth plank from the middle. It moves." He took his hands off it. "That is the one I have been thinking about. Not the water. That plank." "Then we go round it." "You cannot go round a plank in the middle of a bridge." "You can if the middle is missing." She got down on her knees beside him and put her palm on the wood. It was soft at one end, near the nail, and hard at the other. "Here. The rail has rotted through and somebody has laid a board across the two posts. The whole span is still standing. I think this deck is only holding the rail up." He looked at the rail for a long moment. "Get your foot off it," he said. She did. He put his heel down instead, once, hard, and the plank jumped a quarter inch in its socket, and the rail took the load and stayed where it was, and the two of them stared at each other. "Right," Wren said. "Rail first. Then deck." They went over on their hands and knees, four feet at a time, one on the rail and one on the sound planks, and it took four minutes and it was undignified, and when they got to the middle neither of them could speak for a while. The river ran clear two feet below the gap in the deck. "Right in the middle," Miles said. "Right in the middle." "You said a boat went past yesterday." "Before dawn. Two men in it. They did not even slow down." "Good." He wiped his palms on his jeans. "Then we go back and get our boots, and we come back in our boots, and we do it while the light is good. If anybody asks, we are checking the deck for the water board. Which is true, and boring." "You have thought about this." "I have thought about the fourth plank since Tuesday." They went back for their boots. They came back in their boots, and they stood at the two ends and looked at each other across the whole width of it, about nine feet, and neither of them started. "You first," Wren said. "No." "I said I was not sorry about the letter," she said. "In the bottle. That was nearly six weeks ago. I have been not sorry since and I would like to say it to a face." "It did not need a face." "It needed something I could look at while I said it." She took one step onto the deck. "Nine feet, Miles. I have walked further in a school corridor with a book in front of my face." He came on two planks later. He walked the way he did everything, slowly, with his weight low and his hands out, and when he reached the middle he stopped and turned around to face the way they had both come, and she understood that he wanted to see the two ends at once, the way you check a roofline from a ridge. They stood a foot apart in the middle of the bridge with the water running under them and the sun on the back of their necks, and neither of them said anything for long enough that a sedge wren went off in the reeds and Wren laughed again, properly this time, and Miles put his hand over his mouth to get his face under control. "You are bad at this," she said. "I have never had to be good at this." "You wrote me eleven letters." "I wrote them at two in the morning with a torch in the other room. I was talking to a plank." He took his hand away from his face. "I did not know what you sounded like. I had a version of you and it had no hands." "Does it now?" "Yes." He looked at her. "It has hands." She held hers out. He looked at them, and at her face, and then he took the left one in both of his, and his palms were hard and ridged with the calluses of torch work, and the skin across his knuckles had been broken so often it had grown back the colour of old glue. She ran her thumb across the worst of it, the ridge above his right forefinger, and watched him shut his eyes. "That is a burn," she said. "That is a burn." "You could have told me you get burned." "Would you have written back?" "I would have written back," Wren said, and he laughed, and the two of them stood in the middle of the bridge holding on to each other's hands, and the Hales ran over the stringers under their feet, and the morning went on around them doing what mornings do. They walked to the west bank, one at a time, and Miles showed her where the mill road came down to the water, and where his grandfather had kept a storm lantern hooked under the deck, which was still there, glass intact, wick trimmed short, and which neither of them lit. Then they walked back to the east bank, and Wren showed him the drowned willow and the place in the reeds where the water came up out of the bank after heavy rain, which was, she said, where somebody had drowned fifty years ago and never been found. "Sedgwick," Miles said. "My grandfather told me that. He said the boys went in after him and the water took him off his rope." He crouched and pushed a reed bundle aside and let it go. "He said the town never put a name on it. That is the whole of what the bend is." "Yet there is a bridge." "There is a bridge." He stood and brushed the mud off his knees. "Do you want to come out here tomorrow? In daylight? It is a twenty-minute walk and I have to be at the mill at seven." Wren looked at the eleven boards, and at the rail, and at the two sets of wet footprints drying on the gravel. "No," she said. "Not tomorrow. Do it in daylight for a week first. Let it get used to being looked at. Then we will talk about the dark." He picked up her boots and hers, and carried them down to the water, and washed the mud off them in the shallows, one at a time, while she stood on the bank and did not watch him do it and watched him the whole time.