still here?’
Joe wasn't going to answer that just yet. ‘You'll find so much about Saltburn has a darker side. It always has – throughout its history. From smuggling to suicide. It's not all creamy dreamy buildings, a jolly pier and a quirky funicular. The Ha'penny Bridge became a hotspot – or should that be black spot – for suicides. As a bridge builder, that's often what gets me most about suicides from bridges. Jumping from tall buildings is one thing; similarly Beachey Head – those structures, whether natural or man-made, are static – they go up and then they stop. There's a top, if you like, and a bottom – the emphasis is vertical and finite. But bridges, by default, are there to carry you. They dominate a different axis altogether. And it – well – it breaks my heart, actually, that some people can't see the other side. They are too lost to see there is a way across. That A flows over to B. That there's another side, another way. They walk along a little distance – and then they let go. In that moment, the bridge somehow fails its function and it fails them .’
‘The Clifton Suspension Bridge has the Samaritans’ number on each approach. I grew up in Bristol. Is that why it's gone, the Halfpenny Bridge?’
Joe shook his head and gave her a smile because she grew up in the shadow of one of the most seminal bridges of the world. She was currently all ears, all eyes and she hadn't noticed that Emmeline was testing the taste of coastal soil. He retrieved the child and hitched her onto his hip, not minding the grubby fingers exploring the bristles on his jaw.
‘No. Actually, that had little to do with it. From the 1960s the bridge started to need repairs, and then total refurbishment. It was going to be too costly to fix, but too dangerous to leave standing. So they demolished it.’
The way he said it made it seem so violent. Senseless, almost. Tess frowned. ‘What a tragedy.’
‘Sort of. It was 1974. The seventeenth of December – my tenth birthday. That was my party, that year, I suppose. My parents brought me down with my little gang to watch. It took four seconds, exactly, to reduce a hundred and five years of cast-iron beauty and engineering into a twist of tangled metal.’
Tess let it hang for a moment. ‘And that's when you decided not to be a doctor?’
‘That's when I decided I wanted to build bridges.’
She let Joe have his memory in private while she enjoyed imagining him as a boy, clothing him in her mind's eye in a ridiculous cliché of cloth cap and hobnail boots, shorts and a knitted tank-top. It made her giggle, which brought Joe back to the present and that returned Tess's focus to the here and now between them.
‘The view must have been so different – when the bridge was here.’
‘Spot on, Tess, spot on. The vista isn't the same. I mean, for purists, it's more natural today than it was for those hundred and five years. But I don't know – for me, that bridge enhanced this landscape aesthetically, never mind practically.’
They looked up the valley quietly. Seagulls bickered in a noisy scatter overhead. The sea breeze, south-easterly and quite strong, pestered one side of their faces, the sun the other. They had to squint but they stood there a while longer, still and thoughtful. Joe didn't tell Tess that, on his tenth birthday, building bridges became not just his chosen career but also a metaphor to serve as a life lesson. He didn't tell her this, just then, because he'd have to explain that the drive for it came from his parents’ disintegrating marriage. The one chasm, the only hostile space, the single seemingly untraversable rift that he'd been unable to bridge. The distance between them was never to be spanned.
And just then, Tess didn't tell Joe that she detected both strength and sadness in his story. That his silent thoughts had a heaviness that confronted her. But she did tell herself that she wanted to slip her hand into his. But then she told herself off
Joe wasn't going to answer that just yet. ‘You'll find so much about Saltburn has a darker side. It always has – throughout its history. From smuggling to suicide. It's not all creamy dreamy buildings, a jolly pier and a quirky funicular. The Ha'penny Bridge became a hotspot – or should that be black spot – for suicides. As a bridge builder, that's often what gets me most about suicides from bridges. Jumping from tall buildings is one thing; similarly Beachey Head – those structures, whether natural or man-made, are static – they go up and then they stop. There's a top, if you like, and a bottom – the emphasis is vertical and finite. But bridges, by default, are there to carry you. They dominate a different axis altogether. And it – well – it breaks my heart, actually, that some people can't see the other side. They are too lost to see there is a way across. That A flows over to B. That there's another side, another way. They walk along a little distance – and then they let go. In that moment, the bridge somehow fails its function and it fails them .’
‘The Clifton Suspension Bridge has the Samaritans’ number on each approach. I grew up in Bristol. Is that why it's gone, the Halfpenny Bridge?’
Joe shook his head and gave her a smile because she grew up in the shadow of one of the most seminal bridges of the world. She was currently all ears, all eyes and she hadn't noticed that Emmeline was testing the taste of coastal soil. He retrieved the child and hitched her onto his hip, not minding the grubby fingers exploring the bristles on his jaw.
‘No. Actually, that had little to do with it. From the 1960s the bridge started to need repairs, and then total refurbishment. It was going to be too costly to fix, but too dangerous to leave standing. So they demolished it.’
The way he said it made it seem so violent. Senseless, almost. Tess frowned. ‘What a tragedy.’
‘Sort of. It was 1974. The seventeenth of December – my tenth birthday. That was my party, that year, I suppose. My parents brought me down with my little gang to watch. It took four seconds, exactly, to reduce a hundred and five years of cast-iron beauty and engineering into a twist of tangled metal.’
Tess let it hang for a moment. ‘And that's when you decided not to be a doctor?’
‘That's when I decided I wanted to build bridges.’
She let Joe have his memory in private while she enjoyed imagining him as a boy, clothing him in her mind's eye in a ridiculous cliché of cloth cap and hobnail boots, shorts and a knitted tank-top. It made her giggle, which brought Joe back to the present and that returned Tess's focus to the here and now between them.
‘The view must have been so different – when the bridge was here.’
‘Spot on, Tess, spot on. The vista isn't the same. I mean, for purists, it's more natural today than it was for those hundred and five years. But I don't know – for me, that bridge enhanced this landscape aesthetically, never mind practically.’
They looked up the valley quietly. Seagulls bickered in a noisy scatter overhead. The sea breeze, south-easterly and quite strong, pestered one side of their faces, the sun the other. They had to squint but they stood there a while longer, still and thoughtful. Joe didn't tell Tess that, on his tenth birthday, building bridges became not just his chosen career but also a metaphor to serve as a life lesson. He didn't tell her this, just then, because he'd have to explain that the drive for it came from his parents’ disintegrating marriage. The one chasm, the only hostile space, the single seemingly untraversable rift that he'd been unable to bridge. The distance between them was never to be spanned.
And just then, Tess didn't tell Joe that she detected both strength and sadness in his story. That his silent thoughts had a heaviness that confronted her. But she did tell herself that she wanted to slip her hand into his. But then she told herself off
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