Bridge 1

Prologue
Miracle

When the Johnson’s only child was ten years old, he was diagnosed with a fatal brain tumour. The little boy cycled through the allotments that lined the dual-carriageway, carved up vegetable patches and flattened flower beds. He stole a rake from one of the sheds. No one complained. His parents started a fund to take him to Switzerland, where there were rumours of new treatments. They went from house to house with an empty jam jar and photocopies of their son’s photograph, collecting donations.

Finally, however, their doctor informed them that time had run out. Their son’s only hope lay in an operation that, if he survived, would steal all movement from the left side of his body. The doctor told them that the boy would adapt. The mother wept and tried to return people their money.

The week before the operation, the family took their son to a faith healer. For twenty pounds she draped the boy in copper beads and pressed her hands against his temples. The parents demanded one last brain scan. The tumour was gone. There was a piece in The News of the World about it. They put the newspaper article in a frame and the landlord hung it by the back door of The Bull.

This was how the boy became Miracle. His life went on and he got older. He took a job as a farm labourer. He rented a cottage on Marchmount Street and planted roses under the windows. He bought a car. He never married (there had always been the suggestion that the brain tumour may have been hereditary). In the end, there was no one left to remember his real name, he was Miracle Johnson.

Fifty years after he had last sat in the brightly coloured Children’s Ward of the local hospital, Miracle left Bridge to visit a dentist. He wanted a second opinion. Unfortunately for Miracle, this dentist agreed with his own, Miracle’s teeth were beyond repair and he would have to be fitted for a false set. As Miracle drove back into Bridge a woman toppled from the footbridge and fell the twenty feet to his car. He couldn’t stop. The car lurched twice as it ran her over, the slightest of pauses between the front wheels and the back. Miracle turned into the slip road and pulled up on the grass verge next to the allotments. He vomited into the passenger seat of his car and then shifted back into gear and drove home.

That night he took his shotgun from its place by the back door and blew his brains out across the kitchen wall. It was a friend of the family, Maggie Cotton, who found him three days later. She cleaned up the kitchen and the car and arranged for a new tenant for the cottage, an artist looking for a studio on that side of the bridge.

PATRICK

Chapter One

You may as well come along with me; I’m going that way anyhow.

Bridge is not a difficult place to get to. You just follow the dual carriageway along until you get to the slip road. I suppose that problems arise from the lack of sign posts. They could be seen as confusing; at least that’s what the local council says. Bridge 5 miles. I guess I can see their point, but Bridge has got a bridge after all. A concrete footpath, linking the two halves of the town together. For pedestrians at least. If you want to move by car, truck or tractor you have to travel two miles down the dual carriageway to the roundabout and then back up the Western slip road.

But it’s the footbridge that you need to pay attention to. I’ve got to concentrate on the road, on the shifting of gears, the twitching of indicators and my hands at ten to two on the wheel. Anything not to think of that town, my birthplace, that’s rapidly approaching; of the two houses, one on one side, one on the other, of the road the bridge crosses. Anything not to count the soft snores of my broken father sleeping in the back seat. Anything not to pass under the shadow of that footbridge where it all started.

***

Go back thirty years and turn right on to Bridge’s bridge. Just a little further and then you’ll see me. Right up on that concrete platform in the crook of the overpass, the he that was me: one hand scratching; the other tugging at an unfamiliar navy school jumper, brand new, but already made ragged at the cuffs.

You’ll see me standing in front of Smiler – who you’ll probably recognize – everyone who uses this footbridge does. You probably won’t even pause to read the tattered cardboard signs that he pins up around him on the railings. They keep the wind off, or so he told me. You’ll have your change ready for him. I’m glad you’re that type of passer-by. Just wait for me first: cliché of a little boy, with his sweaty pennies in his out-stretched hand, as if he is about to feed them to some exotic animal.

But, now you’re watching me, and you don’t see her fall either.

***

My mother died when I was four years old. She was walking me to school over the concrete bridge. She handed me some coins to give to the homeless man, who habitually begged on the platform at the top of our side of the bridge. I dropped her hand and she felljumpedfelljumpedfell off the edge and into the moving traffic. This is my first memory.

Before this, or so I was told, my father had worked at a local university teaching History of Art and Art Theory, but I only ever knew him as an artist. He wanted to be close to his children, he said, after such a tragedy. He took a studio, an old workman’s cottage, on the other side of the bridge, where he could work while we were at school and from which, as was his intention, he could be back in time to meet us at home for hot dinners and cheerful family evenings. Sing-songs round the piano, homework quizzes at the breakfast table, family jokes that ‘you had to be there’ to understand. We were to have the model father.

He had cut himself out, a sharp silhouette on clean white paper, and Mab and I were the figures that folded out of him. Hand in hand we stood. The last figure, the fourth, had been a little ragged, a little stained, and she had been snipped cleanly away. So we hung either side of my father, the blunt cut stumps of our fingers unable to grasp. The model family.