There! The curved apex of the narrow, crumbling bridge met with that of the picture. A step or two closer brought the two worlds into perfect alignment and he stood as still as he could on the spot where his dad had raised his old automatic camera to his eye, shutter-button pressing, light flooding through the opening aperture before it snapped shut again, a perfect exposure captured on delicate thirty-five millimetre film.
A child and their mother. The sense of an older sibling paddling nearby but out of shot. Sunlight in flaring white rays hitting the lens. Something that might possibly be a picnic sandwich clasped in the child’s chubby hand. The other hand obscured in the mother’s as she bends her head, pointing towards the bridge, her mouth open.
Had she been telling the child to ‘say cheese to Daddy’? He had no idea.
The mother’s arms and fingers are thin, her dress billowing and blue.
Within months she’d be gone and that child would search for her for the rest of his life, even when he wasn’t aware that’s what he was doing.
Jamie lowered the picture just an inch or two, his eyes fixed on the real world beyond it; the deepest, most innocent part of him willing with all his might for his mum to be revealed behind the fragile paper, still standing there at the foot of the bridge. But behind the photograph there was nothing but stones and shallow water and the summer night.
‘What was she like?’ Ally’s voice at his shoulder made him flinch like a man waking from a dream.
‘Uh, I don’t remember.’
‘There has to be something,’ Ally pressed.
He could hear the sympathy in her voice. He didn’t usually tell people things like that because he couldn’t cope with the sympathy. Sympathy didn’t help.
He looked again at the picture. ‘She was nice,’ he managed. ‘Restless, I think. Dad says she was funny and always running around doing stuff. And she was young. She was only twenty-seven here. My age.’
He tried to silence the sound as he swallowed. Hadn’t he cried enough? He didn’t want to do it here too.
‘She looks lovely,’ Ally said, a tiny bit closer.
A silent moment passed where Jamie made up his mind to share the few scraps of understanding he had of his mum, partially afraid that if he said them out loud they too might disappear.
‘My sister, Karolyn, can remember her better than me. She was six when it happened. She still wears Mum’s perfume, says it helps her remember.’
A little more silence.
‘What do you think that is, in your hand?’ Ally was getting a bit too close now. He didn’t want to bristle at the intrusion but it was his first impulse.
‘A sandwich, I think.’
Ally looked even closer, her head right by his. ‘I don’t think it is, you know?’
‘Well, what is it?’ This was the closest he’d come in recent years to being cross. He didn’t like it, swallowing it down.
‘I think it’s one of these.’ She pulled something from her pocket, wrapped in a bit of paper towel, letting it unfold in her palm.
‘Toast crust?’ Why on earth was she walking around with that in her pocket?
‘Aye. It’s for the faerie dog.’
He swung his head to look blinkingly at her. He wanted to tell her he hadn’t come all this way to play silly beggars. For a brief moment he considered announcing that he could make his own way back to town from here, she didn’t have to stay.
‘Faerie dog?’ he said dryly.
‘While I was changing into my boots, I grabbed the crusts from the kitchen. You have to bring something for the faerie dog when you come to the Nithy Brig. An offering.’
He looked once more at the picture, something triggering within him. Ally passed him the crust and as soon as it hit the palm of his hand and his fingers closed reflexively around it, he knew.
‘It was a crust,’ he said, around the lump forming in his throat.
Ally talked softly, helping him unfold the message that was coming through to him. ‘No tourist coming here in the last two hundred years would pass the brig without throwing their crust under it. Everyone round here knows the myth.’
He nodded, the world around him shifting, time slipping. He was moving towards the stone arch.
