The Broken Bridge Read online

  One day it stopped raining, and Ginny and Dawn played outside with two sheets of hardboard. They stood on one and put the other one down on the wet grass ahead of them, and then stepped onto that and put the first one down in front, and so on. They mustn’t touch the wet grass or they’d be poisoned and die, but there at the side of the field the grass was long and bent over the boards, so they were both poisoned and dead many times. Then they reached the tree at the edge of the woods where the person had been cut with the knife, and Ginny whispered all about it in Dawn’s ear. Her hair smelled funny. Dawn began to cry. She told Maeve when they went in for their dinner, and Maeve hit Ginny, crack, on the leg. Ginny was so surprised she could hardly breathe.

  Another time she climbed onto Maeve’s bunk when Maeve wasn’t there, and found a little door. Ginny thought it would open onto the roof, but when she unclicked it she found a little cupboard there, hanging above the bunk like a tiny room. There was a bottle and a glass, and some cigarettes, and Maeve’s makeup, and two books. She and Dawn put on some lipstick and pretended to smoke. They didn’t light the cigarettes, but Maeve found out anyway and smacked them both. Cigarettes had a nice smell, but they made Dawn cough, so she had to breathe very carefully. Ginny lay in her top bunk and held her breath for Dawn as long as she could, listening to the thin beat of Maeve’s cassette recorder through the folding partition, and the hissing of the gaslight, and the steady drip of rain from the dark leaves bleeding onto the roof.

  DAD CAME HOME at half-past ten that night. Ginny was waiting for him, and as soon as she heard the car turn into the lane she went to the fridge, intending to get out a can of lager for him; but there were none left. When he came in, looking exhausted, he dropped the car keys on the table, kissed her, and kicked off his shoes. She felt tender and protective. What could she do to look after him?

  “Make us both a cup of cocoa,” he said. “I’m worn out.”

  She took it through to the living room, where he was sprawled in his armchair, eyes closed. There was a Mozart piano sonata playing on the stereo.

  “Here you are, Dad,” she said. “Don’t go to sleep.”

  He sat up and took the mug from her. She sat on the sofa with hers. The windows were open because of the heat, and behind the music she could hear the wide silence of the night, different from the narrow silence of the house. The floor lamp lit the side of his head, throwing his eyes into shadow and emphasizing the line from his nose to the corner of his mouth, so that he looked older and almost haggard. He sipped his cocoa, a child’s drink, an old person’s drink, and she wondered what it would be like when he was an old man and whether he’d have someone to look after him if she wasn’t there. She loved him a lot, she thought.

  “How was it?” she said.

  “Grim. Difficult. The hospital, the undertaker business, that was straightforward enough. Seeing the boy…I hadn’t realized what a mess everything was in….”

  Not knowing what he meant, Ginny couldn’t say very much. And just now, seeing him as tired as he was, needing her help, she couldn’t ask all the questions she was aching to ask. The mess he’d referred to: who’d left things in a mess? The boy’s mother? And surely she must have a family—someone to organize funerals and things without Dad having to do it? No; she couldn’t ask. She sat there keeping him company, finishing her cocoa, looking after him, reinforcing him. He was all she had.

  —

  But she didn’t sleep. Next morning being Sunday, she wasn’t needed at the Dragon, so she lay in bed till late, half dozing, half thinking back to when she was very young, trying to remember, trying to catch the little scraps of life before they vanished back into the darkness.

  There was a trailer; she was certain of that. They must have had a vacation in a trailer, she and Dad, but it can’t have been much of a vacation, because all she remembered was rain, an incessant drumming on the roof, moisture everywhere, damp sheets…and some delicious shiver of fear, she had no idea why: secrets, and murder, and horror. But it wasn’t real. It was safe, it was a story, she could enjoy it.

  Her grandparents—Dad’s mother and father—she couldn’t enjoy them. No murder there, but the atmosphere of their house, that strange time she spent with them…How she’d watched through the glass panel of the kitchen door as Grandma hit Granddad, and seen him turn away in pain, begging her to be quiet, and how she, Ginny, had felt sick and faint with unhappiness.

  How strange, though, that they’d never been in touch again. Perhaps Rhiannon was right and they’d quarreled with Dad; perhaps that was what families did. But they were the only relatives she had. No cousins, no aunts or uncles, and her mother’s side of the family were as good as mythical: a wealthy family in Port-au-Prince. She and Dad hadn’t needed anyone else, though. They were self-contained. They shared jokes and housework and vacations, and he told her about his work and she told him about her drawing, and even though he’d shared his bed with the breakfast ladies, she knew that they were temporary and she was permanent….No, the two of them were self-contained, a perfect relationship, father and daughter: nothing could be better.

  And now she had to share it with a brother.

  And there were only a few days left before all that world of sharing, all that grownup friendliness and intimacy, vanished forever.

  How could he? How could he not tell her all these years—let her think she was the only one? How could he do it?

  Stupidly, she began to cry. Hating herself for the selfishness that paid no heed to this lost brother, Robert, this bereaved boy coming among strangers, she sobbed into her pillow like a child.

  —

  Dad was out when she got up. Avoiding me, she thought. She had some cornflakes, looked in the Arts section of the Sunday paper to see if there were any interesting exhibitions coming up (not that she could get to them, but reading about them was something), and then went down to the harbor.

  It was another still, sunny day, the best summer for years, perhaps forever. It might have been a blessing, Ginny thought; on the other hand, it might have been the greenhouse effect. It might mean that everyone was going to die. In the short time they probably had left, however, it was good to wander along by the estuary looking at the old wreck whose ribs stuck out of the mud at low tide and at the trim little yachts at anchor, to wave at the old porter in the station feeding the cat, to hear Angie singing from the kitchen of the Yacht Club and wave at her through the open door; and to go on down to the edge of the water and, just out of curiosity, take the path that led to the house on stilts by the little railway bridge, where Stuart was staying.

  He’d said to come and see him, so she felt no inhibitions about climbing the ladder onto the veranda that ran all the way round the house, and knocking at the door, despite the fact that the porthole windows were still curtained.

  After a minute or so the door opened, and Stuart stood there, wearing black boxer shorts and nothing else, fit and lean and silky-skinned, dazzling, glamorous, and sleepy. She handed him the Sunday paper the delivery boy had left at the top of the ladder.

  “Ginny!” he said. “What’s the time?”

  “It’s coffee time,” she said. “Sorry if I woke you.”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Come in.”

  The door opened directly into the living room. The atmosphere was close and warm and smelled of something she could only think of as maleness. But there was nothing here to threaten her or make her shy; even nearly naked, Stuart didn’t do that. He was beyond being sexy, in Rhiannon’s terms, probably because he was so impossibly grown up and handsome, and yet at the same time he wasn’t kind, either, if kind meant safe and dull. Ginny felt teased and challenged by something not quite human, something between a frank, innocent animal and a powerful, mocking god.

  “Open the curtains,” he said. “If it’s coffee time, I’d better make some. It’ll taste better than Andy’s.”

  The room was shipshape, just like the cabin of a yacht. The portholes were edged with brass,
and a ship’s clock and a barometer hung side by side on the white-painted wooden wall, and altogether they might have been at sea.

  “Can I go on the roof?” she said.

  “Help yourself.”

  There was a wooden ladder up from the veranda, and the roof itself was decked with planking. Ginny stood at the railing and looked out across the estuary and the Yacht Club from this unfamiliar viewpoint. I’ve always wanted to see this house, she thought, and now here I am. I must be lucky. I can make things happen by wanting them….

  She smelled coffee and climbed down the ladder.

  “I love this place,” she said. “I’ll buy it when I’m grown up. And live here.”

  “What’ll you do for a living?”

  They were sitting on the edge of the veranda, the planks already warm under their thighs, the oily water nosing about below them among the reeds, around the little red dinghy, between the wooden piles.

  “I’m going to be a painter.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m good at it. Because when I look at things, I think automatically about how I’d draw them, how I’d paint them. And…also my mother was a painter. Was going to be a painter. So I’m carrying on for her.”

  “The lady from Haiti? They have a lot of painters there.”

  “Yeah,” Ginny said, “primitives. Peasants. I know about them. But she wasn’t like that. I can’t be, either. See, once you know about Picasso and stuff, Matisse, all the modern painters, well, you can’t pretend to be a peasant who’s never seen them….You’re stuck, really. You can’t go back; you’ve got to go forward. My mother, she was studying art properly, like I’m going to do.”

  “European art,” said Stuart.

  Ginny was silent for a minute or so. There was a question in what he said, and he didn’t need to make it any plainer than that; it was exactly what she’d been trying to describe to Andy, and it was his problem with the black kids in Bristol: looking black, sounding white.

  “Stuart,” she said, “d’you think there’s a difference between European art and, like, African art?” But that wasn’t what she wanted to ask. Before he could reply, she went on: “I mean, I know of course there is. The subject matter’s so different. I mean, in European art all the faces are white ones, all the landscapes are places in England or France or Germany or somewhere, but it’s not just what the painting’s about….”

  “I remember seeing a painting once,” said Stuart, “a picture by a Chinese artist who came to England. It’s a landscape in the Lake District. And it doesn’t look like England at all, it looks completely Chinese, with the mountains sticking up out of the mist, just like they do in classical Chinese paintings.”

  “Ah, right,” she said. “But that’s different again. He was seeing it in a Chinese way, that’s all. He had a tradition that he belonged to.”

  “And you haven’t.”

  “That’s right! It’s not as simple as making pictures of black people in a sort of fine-art way. Anybody could do that. A white painter could. I need to find a way that’s different….”

  “African?”

  “I’m not African, either. I’ve seen African sculptures, you know, ritual masks, that kind of thing. They’re really strong, really powerful, but I can’t…relate to them. I don’t know what they mean. All that ancestor stuff…I mean, I’ve got English ancestors too, haven’t I? It’s no good saying like my ancestors were African, so I’ve got to go back to my roots….It was my English ancestors who sold my African ancestors into slavery. Where does that leave me? Am I innocent or guilty or what?”

  “You can’t go back,” Stuart said. “You can only go forward. You can’t forget, either. You have to use everything you know.”

  “That’s right! That’s just what I mean. I can’t pretend to be a Haitian primitive.”

  “You’ve never been to Haiti?”

  “No. What’s it like?”

  “It’s in a bad way at the moment. It’s been in a bad way for years. Poverty and corruption and violence…It’s pitiful.”

  Ginny said nothing. Words like “poverty” and “corruption” sounded like white people condemning black people for being uncivilized and savage, and she was uncomfortable about that. On the other hand, he’d been there, he’d seen it.

  “What’s voodoo like?” she said.

  “It’s a real religion. It’s not just drums and zombies. There’s a whole family of gods, and they come to life. I’ve seen them.”

  “They come to life?”

  “They take possession of the worshippers. They enter your head, and you behave like them, speak like them, walk like them. You can recognize them at once.”

  He told Ginny about the gods and goddesses, the loa: about Agwé, the lord of the sea, and Ogoun, the fiery war god and politician, and Damballah, the serpent god. He told her about Erzulie, the goddess of love, who loved luxury and music and perfume and who wore three wedding rings, one for Agwé, one for Damballah, one for Ogoun; Erzulie, who gave and received love, and whose visitations ended in tragic boundless weeping for the shortness of life, the faithlessness of men.

  But the loa who caught Ginny’s attention most was Ghede, the god of the underworld. He was a joker, a trickster, and as she listened, Ginny imagined him with the face of Andy. Stuart told her that once in the 1920s Ghede had taken possession of dozens and dozens of men at once, and they’d all marched to the National Palace dressed in top hats, tail coats, and dark glasses, demanding money. The president had had no choice but to give it to them: what was a president beside the god of the underworld, especially when he appeared in dozens of copies at once? That’s a story for Andy, she thought delightedly. But there was another side to Ghede the joker. He was also known as Baron Samedi, the lord of death, of skulls and bones and tombs; he haunted cemeteries and cross-roads; it was through Baron Samedi that zombies were brought up from the grave….

  Ginny listened, transfixed. Africa was too far back, but Haiti came closer as he spoke; the gods began to stir into life. Seeing how interested she was, Stuart drew some elaborate curly designs, including a heart surrounded by lacy swirls and spiky ornamentation.

  “These are vevers,” he said. “The priest draws them in flour on the ground before the loa come. This is Erzulie’s….Sometimes it has a sword through it, like this.”

  He drew another version. Ginny was enchanted by the prettiness of them, their mysterious delicacy.

  “Thanks a lot,” she said. “I’m going to go there one day. Find the rest of my family. I’m good at French already; that’s about my best subject apart from art. I don’t know about Creole, though.”

  “I should think you’ll manage. I’d like to see your paintings sometime.”

  “Right! Okay…”

  I’ll have to bring my brother too, she thought. Can’t leave him out. Nothing’ll be the same from now on.

  “What was your mother’s name?” Stuart asked.

  “Anielle. Her family name was Baptiste. Why?”

  “Just in case I see any of her paintings.”

  “Well, she was only a student, more or less….”

  “Have you got anything of hers? Any drawings or anything?”

  “No…No. Nothing. There’s nothing left. I don’t know why, actually. Dad might have kept something and not told me about it….I don’t know.”

  “There must be something still about. Things don’t just vanish; they stand around for years, and then people find them in the attic and sell them for a million pounds. There’ll be some of her work around somewhere, I guarantee.”

  Ginny looked up at him in surprise. He was right, and she’d never thought about it.

  “Yeah,” she said rather breathlessly. “Right! There must be. She wouldn’t have thrown it away, and he wouldn’t….”

  “We’ll keep our eyes open,” he said.

  She finished her coffee and left him to his Sunday paper.

  —

  Ginny and Dad agreed that since lamb was li
kely to make you radioactive, and beef to give you mad cow disease, pork was the only safe meat to have for Sunday lunch—until creeping pig fever was discovered anyway. So it was pork she found Dad taking out of the oven when she got home.

  “Hungry?” he said.

  “Yeah. Sort of.”

  “Who’s the man in the boat house?” he said as they sat down.

  “He’s called Stuart. Did you see me there, then?” She was surprised, as if he’d been spying on her.

  “I was looking at someone’s boat.”

  “Stuart’s a friend of Andy’s,” she explained.

  “Oh, that’s all right, then.”

  “Why were you looking at a boat?”

  “I thought we might get one. Just a dinghy to start with. To learn to sail, so that we can all, I don’t know, start something together. Instead of Robert having to fit into a lot of things that grew up without him.”

  She was silent, smothering a piece of meat with applesauce. It was probably a good idea.

  “Dad,” she said, “when Maman died, were there any paintings of hers left? Or drawings, or anything?”

  “No,” he said. “Very little, unfortunately. I suppose it went back to her family.”

  “What d’you mean, you suppose? Didn’t you have all her things in the house with you? Didn’t she leave them to you in her will or something? Or to me?”

  He said nothing, finishing his mouthful, going to the fridge, opening a new six-pack of lager, fetching a glass, pouring it, sitting down again; and something in his manner made her put down her knife and fork and watch him, apprehensive.

  “Ginny,” he said, “I was going to put this off for a while, till you were older, but there’s no point anymore. It’s too late, what with Robert coming….The thing is…”

  He took a deep breath. Ginny could see a pulse beating in his temple. He went on:

  “Part of the reason I didn’t tell you about Janet and Robert was that I’d have to tell you something else as well, the thing I was going to keep. Something about Maman. I should have told you years ago, but I never thought this other business would come up….The thing is that we were never married, me and Maman. I was married to Janet. That’s why I couldn’t…Anyway. I was married to Janet, and there was the child, Robert, and then I met Maman, Anielle. The one I should have married. Janet and I…well, it wasn’t working, it never worked. I was stupid, I was young. And then you were born. And then there was no Maman. So obviously I was…I had to look after you. There was no one else. I didn’t want anyone else to do it, I wanted you. And here we are, the two of us. If…Eventually…If she hadn’t fallen ill, then one day I’d have told you. I’m so sorry it was forced on us. There’s hardly time to take it in before he comes. Can you understand? So to answer your question about paintings and stuff…if there were any left, they were packed up and sent back to Haiti, back to her family. There was very little I had, except that photograph. Ginny, I’m sorry.”