The Bridge by Higgins Jane

Author:Higgins, Jane [Higgins, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781770494381
Publisher: Tundra
Published: 2012-10-09T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24

So, a reprieve. Of sorts.

But the moment I showed my face outside I’d be gone, sent upriver to Gilgate, or worse. Contacting Fyffe was now a big problem. And urgent, because if she had seen one of Sol’s kidnappers down in the township we needed to get on that trail before it went cold. And if she heard I’d been sent up to Gilgate, she was likely to go it alone, or to act on that crazy plan of hers to hand herself in.

That evening the light turned pale and gray and snow began to fall. Watching it gust in flurries at the window, I hoped that it would keep Fyffe indoors for the time it would take me to reach her. Levkova pointed me to Max’s room. ‘You can sleep here. There’s a mattress but not many blankets, I’m afraid.’ She rummaged in a cupboard and handed me an old army coat. ‘This will help. Don’t worry about Max, he doesn’t sleep much these days, so you won’t bother him.’

She told me that he had been her assistant in active service years before, and a stalwart supporter of CFM since he was my age. Now he was dying – some kind of slow unpicking of his bones and muscles. ‘He has a lot of pain and we do what we can to get medicine. It’s not easy.’ He was sitting in the main room, a book on his lap, but his eyes were clouded over, as if they’d seen enough of the world, more than enough, and didn’t want to look anymore.

‘Long stories,’ Levkova said to me when he’d dozed off after a ramble about the Crossover – the mass expulsion of Breken workers from the city in ‘48. He’d been part of that. He was seventeen.

‘I don’t mind long stories,’ I said. And that was no lie. I didn’t know the stories every Breken kid had chewed on since they’d cut their teeth. What I did know was that Max’s story didn’t mesh at all with the history I’d been taught. The Crossover – the expulsion of workers and the closing of the bridges – yes, I knew about that. That’s when the gates were built, Cityside and Southside, on every bridge. But, as Max told it, there was a general strike leading up to the Crossover – a strike for wages. Not higher wages, just wages, rather than food and rent vouchers. I knew nothing about that. Or about the demonstrations and rioting that followed. Or about a massacre by city forces that ended it all. The survivors carried their dead back over the river. Every Crossing since then – like the one for Tamsin that Fyffe and I had seen – was an echo of that first one. Max was old and rambly, but he didn’t strike me as deluded or dishonest.

‘Well,’ Levkova was saying, ‘you are more polite than many. What about your own?’

‘My own what?’

‘Story, Nik. Your own story.’

‘Oh.’ I shook my head. ‘It’s short and boring.

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