The Snowbridge

　
It always seemed a longer route on the way home. That made sense; he was tired after a long day at the office. It was worth the imaginary extra half-mile, though, better than sitting on the underground train or a bus, gave him the chance to stretch his legs. And, in spite of tiredness, he seemed all the more alert to the scenes around him, a result perhaps, of being a worker in a windowless office of a hospital. He saw dozens of patients a day in wheelchairs or lying on trolleys, come five o’clock he was striding out like he was wearing seven-league boots.
Tonight he noticed how the blue cigarette smoke of the man ahead of him matched the evening colours of the air. He still slowed down though, hating smoke in his lungs. And those two beer cans in an over-crammed bin hanging lopsidedly on a lamp-post; their tops were like a pair of owlets’ faces peering from a tree hole nest.
When he got in the flat the first thing she asked was had he sent that letter?
‘I did, course I did. And before you ask, no, I did not post it in the pillar box at the corner because that is an honourable Japanese warrior and you do not go pushing letters into the mouth of an honourable Japanese warrior.’
‘Honourable! Did you know that the Japanese have a verb that means to test your new sword edge on a peasant met at a crossroads?’
Where had she come up with such a crushing question? He was stunned.
‘Is that so? That’s some verb.’ Playing for time he walked over to the window. She had already pulled shut the curtains. The sofa blocked the way. To save reaching, he picked up a roe deer antler from a shelf and used it to part the curtains.
‘You should have left that in the wood you found it,’ she said, ‘you know, deer eat them for the calcium. Some wee deer is wandering around that wood feeling under the weather because of you, not quite up to the mark, sick in the sitkas, coughing in the conifers.’
‘I should have kept that red deer antler I found, I wouldn’t have to reach so far.’
But he knew that reaching was exactly what he was doing. That was two in a row she‘d zinged back at him. Where was she coming up with this stuff? He peered into the gloomy evening at the back court of the tenement, the bins, the graffiti scrawled back wall of the pub. ‘ We need to leave the big city behind,’ he sighed.
She looked at his broad figure. ‘Talking of the ‘big city behind’ have you quit the gym?’
This was intolerable. He concentrated on the graffiti. ‘You know, I wouldn’t mind that graffiti so much if it was saying something. ‘Peace’, ‘End the War’, ‘Love Is the Answer’. She wasn’t listening, was already in the kitchen. ‘When I were but a radical lad I was out on the beer with a pal one night. I’d a can of spray-paint in my pocket that I’d pinched from an art supply shop, a beautiful shad of blue it was, and even the spray was different, the way it came out, gave the words another way of looking different to other graffiti. So, we’re in the High street and there’s this lovely space of wall between two shops and I said to Stevie to keep a look-out and over I go. He probably thought I was going to do a big anarchy sign, but I put ’ In the society that has destroyed all real adventure, the only adventure is the destruction of society‘. Took a while, especially given it was the High Street. And all cursive, much more attractive than capitals. Stevie was having kittens across the road, me taking so long. It didn’t survive long, though. That kind of challenging stuff never did. Not like that crap up there, been there years, probably will be for more. It’s just egoism, you see, a ’tag’ they call it, like a label on some stupid pair of jeans., no challenge to the power, the Man. So they let it sit up there for years, the Powers That Be. Hey I thought of a new one…’The best place to study twisted logic? Colig!‘. She didn’t hear , had zoned him out. She came out of the kitchen, pots bubbling on the cooker in the tiny space behind her. He turned from the window and she looked at his face. It was a face, she thought, that looked less lived in than slept in.
There was a river quite near the flat. When there was little traffic you could hear the water flowing. He could hear it one evening as he came home a little later than usual, the rush-hour past. He saw her leaving the tenement and turn into the park heading in the same direction as the river flows. It was immediately apparent to him that it was carrying her away. It carried her away a dozen or more times that month.
The gym classes she attended were in that direction, but he saw little evidence that she was shedding any weight, though he did not tell her so. One evening he followed her. She soon came close to the big Victorian building that housed the gym, but she did not go in. The man who walked up to her and clasped her in his arms prevented that.
Hold on, wait a minute, that can’t be right, that’s my wife! What’s going on? No,no, this is a mistake on my part. He felt a little faint. I must have missed her, that’s not her, they must have passed each other in the park and I followed the wrong one. Their paths crossed, that’s it, while I was round a corner or something and I picked up the wrong trail there, fella, the wrong scent, can happen to any tracker, soddin’ darkness, corners, bushes, lamps with no bulbs.
It was her, all right.
He moved across to his left, up onto the lawn of the museum, across the sights of the Lewis gunners of the war memorial. The blank-faced gunner seemed to aim directly at embracing couple on the steps of the Kelvin Hall which housed the gym.. He felt like climbing up there- tapping the soldier on the shoulder- feeding the belt of cartridges through as his mate opened up on the embracing couple, bullets spraying the Old Red sandstone of the Kelvin Hall which housed the gym which she was obviously, now, not attending at all. No wonder she wasn’t looking any slimmer. The lovers were walking away now toward the lights of cafés and bars he walked in parallel, onto the lawn in front of the museum and through the bare cherry trees. Walking with his head turned to one side, ignoring the hazard of tree, of flowerbed or wall, he thought the lovers looked like two strange dark fish in a greenish aquarium until he realized that he was looking through tear-filled eyes.
Over the next few weeks she grew happier and grew more morose. He asked her about it with an innocent air and she said it was all thanks to her great work-outs at the gym.
With the ‘gym’, you mean, ‘gym’ with an ‘I’ at the end, ‘gym’, as in ‘Jimmy’, he could see the words in his head, nonsense crowding out the need to think seriously. And anyway, he wouldn’t be called Jimmy anyway, no-one was anymore.
He began to delay his return from work on her ‘gym days’, would go for a pint, or two, or more than several. I’m going to the State Bar. I’m going to get in a state in the State Bar. I’m stating that I’m going to get in a state in the State Bar. I should’ve stayed in the State Bar. I should have state in bed. That’s the kind of nonsense that’s tired her of me. He had a couple more, drummed farewell on the bar-top and walked home. She’d only liked him in the first place, he had recognised, because she saw him as a broken person. He saw that when he met her ex-boyfriend and recognised another as someone he had known years before. Broken people. Maybe being with her had helped him become less broken and so less interesting. Maybe she had just grown up and got tired of the broken people she had around her, had gone out and found a normal functioning person. Someone he didn’t know, the kind of person he didn’t know, like the people who live in the houses you pass in trains, the houses that have turned their backs on the passing trains and their inquisitive passengers. How do they live, the people who are not me, how can they live? How do they live, the people in far away cars you can only see as moving points of reflected sunlight? He asked the opinion of the samurai post-box, but it just grimaced, he imagined that it was unimpressed by solipsistic passers-by.
It came to a head one night, the first night, the only night of heavy snow that winter. He was in the pub looking out t the street. Well, he couldn’t see the street because of the frosted glass that served as a barrier to vision; that old British custom that saves the impressionable passer-by from seeing into pubs and having their innocent, abstemious heads turned by the visions of bonhomie and jollity within. Or maybe it was the publicans’ idea to stop people seeing all the lonely losers. So he was looking out the top half of the window, the half frost-free at snow, which struck him as faintly amusing as he watched the snowflakes fall slowly by the hanging baskets of plastic flowers. An hour later he was walking home when he realised that she would be going to the gym in an hour or so. He reached their street and bought a newspaper then took up position across the street and down a few doorways from the doorway to their tenement. He inserted earphones and readied a tune on his digital music player, but did not start the little machine. He almost missed her by becoming absorbed in a story about people increasingly becoming allergic to fruit and vegetables. He imagined the street in a few decades. People might be stopping at lamp-post-like feeding-stations to suck on tubes of meat-like pap like some creepy race of two-legged ants as people became ever more alienated from their own planet. The thought was making him feel pretty sick when he noticed her leave. That would make him feel better, thinking of her and her lover. He folded his paper, turned on the music, and followed her through the snow. The tune was from a compilation of film themes, the one he played was from a spy movie from the ‘sixties;’ The Ipcress File.’ He could feel the cold and wet through the thin, cheap leather of his shoes, but that was alright, it made him feel even more like Harry Palmer.
They moved along the road past shops and restaurants spilling different neon colours onto the snow covering the pavements. She turned, as expected, and continued on to Kelvin Way and then right into the part of the park that lies between the university and the art galleries. The snow was getting deeper now and the colour of the light from the streetlamps had changed too, from the blue-white that seemed to complement the snow, to the orange light that seems especially designed to make you think there’s no world beyond the concrete and brick. He thought of how the snow, in his memory, would be whiter than it was here because snow is not orange, even though it is not white either, falling orange, lying orange, it was no less snow and no more or less the ‘right’ than the ‘wrong’ colour, but memory would edit the scene, shift the colour balance to a ‘truer’ rendition, white snow, maybe becoming blue as the darkness deepened.
As they neared the edge of the park he began to hurry, narrowing the gap in a shuffling run. Passers-by noticed, but it was still busy enough for everyone to assume there was no evil intent as he began to catch up with the woman in front of him; there were too many witnesses and anyway, he seemed more interested in the pieces of snow his boots kicked up in front of him, than the woman ahead. What determines the size of those chunks of snow? he wondered. His feet were the same size at each step and the snow of the same consistency, so why did the pieces come in different sizes? Or were they the same as they left his boot caps and only broke up differently? But why would they break apart differently? And what determines the size of raindrops? He realized she would soon be on the main road, but managed to catch up just as she was crossing Old Partick bridge.
‘Hey, wait for me, it’s me, wait a bit.’
’What are you doing out here? Has something happened?’ Have you been home or just in the pub again?’ her voice was muffled, he thought it the snow, but it was the earphones he still had in, though he music had finished.
’The music is over. I have no home. And alcohol is not the comfort it was.’
’So you’re teetotal? And homeless? And the music is over, is it? You’re covered in snow, you look like a snowman mugger. A snowman who mugs, I mean, not a mugger of snowmen.’ This irritating flippancy was, he realized, probably something she had picked up from him. At least she would carry his virus of quippery always.
’I’m just out for a walk in the snow, a little night music and a following of you to meet your boyfriend ‘Jym‘, as I call him, that’s Jim with a ’y’ not an ’i’ , since you say your…well, you get it.’
She leant back on the ornate, spiked iron fence that most people thought gave the bridge charm, but which he was always afraid was going to gouge out his eyes if he stumbled while walking over to look into the river. He always looked over bridge parapets, thought it a necessary thing, though afraid of spikes and stone walls that might crumble and pitch him downward. He reached out and held onto a spike, at least now he was sure exactly where the spikes were.
‘Yes, I’ve known for quite a while now. You and Jym. When I say ‘homeless’, it’s because we’re breaking up, aren’t we?’
She looked away, toward the bell-tower of the University, flood-lit but made ghostly by the curtain of snow.
‘ Did you know that John Betjeman called that a Victorian cake-stand?’ Of course he knew, he was the one who had told her! That and lots of other interesting junk. Of Joseph Conrad drunkenly pitching pebbles into the top hat held by a statue in George Square in a contest with Neil Munro, novelist and newspaper editor, stuff of that sort. Bet Jym didn’t have arcane knowledge like that at his fingertips. If he even had fingertips, probably made do with the knuckles he doubtlessly dragged along the ground.
‘I suppose you probably told me that. It’s something I think I’ll miss, but you can’t really base a relationship on curious facts, you know. Us being together is the most curious fact of all. I’ll ove out, I won’t stay with that view either, though it was better than us moving to some blasted heath with no-one else for miles, Christ I’d’ve done you in in a week.’
Well, if she was going to be like that.
’I’ll manage, thanks, I’ll find someone else, someone with better taste than you have.’
‘It took you long enough to find someone with as little taste as I have, but the best of luck.’
He did not want this to be it, thought of how each word we say to someone brings us one word closer to the last word we will ever say to them. She glanced toward where her new man must be getting impatient.
‘It’s an appropriate place to meet this, on a night like tonight.’
She turned back to him.’Why is that, then?.’
‘Well, this used to be called ‘the ‘Snowbridge’ at one time. See, the fences have gates in them that don’t lead anywhere. They would be opened during a big snowfall and the snow shovelled through into the river, when this was the main road, before they built that,’ he pointed to the big bridge a few metres downstream across which cars and buses still passed, ‘before this one was demoted to just a footbridge. That was when there were still lots of snow every year, not like now, just one or two days and nights of snow lying. There’s a line about that in French..‘where are the snows of yesteryear?’
She smiled. ‘When they opened the gates, it must have made angel’s wings in the snow.’ She used her arms to illustrate the gates’ sweep through the long-gone deep snow.
‘Maybe. Maybe they just opened the gates before it got that deep.’
‘No angels’ wings?’
‘Not then. Not now.’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘ I better get going. I’ll stay at my sister’s tonight. We can sort everything out tomorrow, next week, whenever suits you. You’ll be alright? No brooding?’
‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be right as rain. Cold, wet, rain.’ She walked off into the shadows. He looked down into the river. The Kelvin, he thought, from the Gaelic meaning ’stream of the narrows.’
The river was running swiftly, surface unbroken but for one spot by the bank, where an overhanging tree dipped a branch into the water. The current pushed the branch in a curve and when it could go no further, it swept back leaving a dark wake like the sweep of ink from a Japanese artist’s brush. Again and again the ink swept across the paper surface of the river only to be instantly erased.