Stonemouth

FOR MY FAMILY

WITH THANKS TO ADÈLE, MIC, RICHARD, VICTORIA,

GARY, URSULA AND LES

FRIDAY EVENING

1

Clarity.

That would have been good.

Instead, a cold, clinging mist. Not even mist; just a chill haze, drifting up the estuary. I’m standing fifty metres above the Firth of Stoun, in the middle of the road bridge, at the summit of the long, shallow trajectory it describes above the waters. Below, wind-stroked lines of breakers track up the firth, ragged creases of thin foam moving east to west under the steady push of the breeze; each wave forming, breaking, widening, then collapsing again before new crests start to rise amongst their pale, streaked remains, the whole doomed army of them vanishing like ghosts into the upriver blur.

Traffic moves on the northbound carriageway behind me; cars tearing, trucks rumbling and thumping over the expansion joints on the road surface. About half the cars and most of the trucks have their lights on as the evening, and the mist, close in.

I look up at the north tower of the suspension bridge, a double H shape rising another hundred metres into the murk, its grey flank stitched with little steady red lights. At the top there’s a single aircraft beacon producing sharp bursts the blue-white of a camera flash. The mist smears each pulse across a whole grey tract of sky.

I’m wondering how well the cameras up there can see through the haze. I’ve been standing here for a couple of minutes, looking like a prospective jumper for all that time. Usually by now a wee yellow van would have been sent along the cycle track from the control centre at the south end of the bridge to come and make sure I’m not thinking of Doing Something Stupid, which is what people still seem to say when they don’t want to say what they mean, which is Kill Yourself, or Commit Suicide.

Maybe cutbacks mean they’ve turned off the cameras, or there are just fewer staff to check the monitor screens, or they’re sending guys out on foot or on a bike to save fuel. Which, by the time they get to the right place, would probably mean the poor, terrified, hesitant wretch has already gone, to become just another streak of foam on the waves below. There are a lot of exits like that off the bridge but they rarely get reported because every time one is publicised there’s a handful of copycat suicides within the week. Which makes you wonder what these pitiful tribute artists would have done otherwise: taken pills, dived under a train or somehow soldiered on, too mired in their hopeless lives to think of a suitable way out for themselves?

Amongst us kids, growing up here, the story — delivered from the mouths of dads and big brothers who worked either on the bridge or for the coastguards, or just those who claimed to know about such things — was that the fall didn’t kill you; it just smashed all your major bones and knocked you out. If you were lucky, you drowned before you regained consciousness; if not, you got to thrash about as best you could with two broken arms and two broken legs before you drowned, unable to hold your face above water even if you’d changed your mind about dying in the meantime.

Or maybe you’d tied yourself to something heavy. That made it more definite, and you just vanished beneath the waves. We scared and excited each other with this sort of thing, attracted and repelled by anything grisly, like most kids. Though watching somebody getting beheaded on the web sort of had a greater immediacy, you had to admit.

Upriver, from here, you ought to be able to see the old road crossing and the rail bridge, five kilometres away to the west where the river narrows, and closer still you ought to get a good view of the Toun itself: the old and new docks, the retail and commerce parks, the dark central cluster of church spires and towers, and the peripheral scatter of pale high-rises in the housing estates, but the view dissolves into the mist before any of this is visible.

I look down at the waves again, wondering what Callum’s last thoughts were as he fell towards the water, and whether he died without waking up, or had time to suffer. I suppose every class at every school, every year at every school, has a first person to die — suicide, road crash, whatever — just like there’s a first person to get pregnant or father a child and a first person or a first couple to get married. Callum wasn’t our first death but he was our first suicide.

Our first death was Wee Malky, long ago. Well, not just our first death; something worse, in a way, but … well, it’s complicated.