Among the Missing Read Online Free PDF Page A

past-sell-by groceriesfrom Vi’s, and if I heard your voices as the rumble of evening traffic on the bridge died away, I would be able to count this one as another day that had let us stay together. Another day done and it still hadn’t all come to an end, a day that would let the same day, with luck, come again tomorrow. A good day was one when nothing got worse.

I didn’t go as far as Inverness.
    The road from the hotel followed the river for several miles. I switched on the car radio and drove, singing along raucously with one song after another, refusing to cry, trying to drown out Col’s words in my head. From time to time rain fell, not in spiky drips like English town rain but in milky currents that wet the air with cold, gusting sprays. Between showers, and seeming more liquid than the rain, sunlight poured down through gaps in the clouds onto the rocks and larch and pine trees across the steel-bright river. When my throat was so tired I could hardly make a sound, I turned the radio off and kept driving. Just as, when my father was dying, I used to absorb trivial details while waiting for bad news—every stem and leaf on the wallpaper in the doctor’s office, every stain on the floor by his hospital bed—I concentrated now on the sunlight, how it spilled over the landscape into refracting pools of sharp, unfiltered silvers and russets and greens. This was not my country, and I was glad I could numb myself with touristic gawping; I felt no tug of ancestral pride, found nothing revelatory or significant in its beauty. I traveled with the lulling detachment I might have felt thumbing through racks of postcards.
    There were dozens of places to pull the rental car off the road and admire the views, and I stopped often. In some of them there were souvenir vans festooned with tartan flags and pennants, blaring out disheartening bagpipe music over the roofs of parked cars and caravans and food stalls. Sometimes I loitered, reading billboard warnings about forest fires and litter and threats to wildlife, watching people come and go, all of them in pairs or groups, never alone. I saw a family of seven disgorgethemselves from a camper van and claim a damp picnic table; the mother and grandma spread plastic bags over the benches, the dog crawled underneath and lay down. The last of the four lanky children ran back to the van for a soccer ball, and a loud, hazardous game began at the side of the car park. The father got in the queue at the burger van and began a long relay of shouts to the others. He brought an armful of boxes back to the table, and the children darted into place, mauling the packaging, snapping open cans of explosive drinks, pushing torn-off lumps of pizza and burgers into their mouths, feeding the dog with their fingers. I made my way back to the car. I wanted to get away from them, from my envy of their messy, uncomplicated pleasure, and from the shame they aroused in me. I had married a man who shunned the very idea of that noisy, easygoing acceptance within families; surely I must be at heart the same kind of person. I was at the very least someone who would consider aborting a child rather than be abandoned by its father.
    But I have no choice, I said to myself, as if the family at their picnic were challenging me. I have to stay married to him. He is all I have.
    After that I stopped only in deserted places. I would turn the car onto shoulders choked with scrubby thickets of undergrowth and into roadsides filled with sagging piles of gravel and sand heaped there for highway repairs. I parked and wandered for a while in the rubble-strewn forecourt of a boarded-up and derelict service station until from an outbuilding came a hissing, spiteful-looking cat and two scraggy kittens.
    Still some way before Inverness, I felt sick again and pulled over. I got out of the car to feel the rain on my face and breathe in its cold-water scent; there on the roadside, at the top of a bank of fields sloping down to