Nadia

Flash fiction

The girl on the bridge caught his attention. It was gone midnight and the waters below were inky black. Truly Stygian. The girl had blonde hair and was wearing a red raincoat. She was caught in the light of a street lamp. He watched her peering over the parapet. The night sky was full of heavy scudding clouds and it started to pour down. As he watched the girl, he began to wonder what was she doing alone out here so late on the suspension bridge? She was maybe 30 yards away. He could see she was beautiful, a classic blonde with features reminiscent of a young Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Her profile revealed a face that might have been either blessed or cursed; it was a little on the gaunt side, an intense and exquisitely sculpted face with high cheek bones. There was a refined aloofness in it that was found in statues of goddesses such as Aphrodite and Persephone.

The rain was beating down now. The girl’s long blonde hair was soaked but she didn’t seem to notice. He wondered at this. Beautiful women tended to be fastidious about their hair. If she can’t get out of the rain immediately, a beautiful woman will open an umbrella, or someone will open it for her. He never carried an umbrella. He didn’t have to worry too much about getting his close-cropped black hair wet.

He was standing in an alcove that formed a kind of balcony in the bridge’s structure, huddled in his dark green raincoat like some gumshoe in a Dashiell Hammett novel. There was some shelter from the driving rain here. He wondered if he should go up to her and engage her in conversation. But he felt a little shy and, besides, he didn’t want to frighten her. A strange man appearing out of the darkness on a lonely bridge at night might well be alarming. Instead, he lit a cigarette, cupping the match against the wind in his large hands, and continued watching the girl. She was very easy on the eye.

He started to imagine how he might ask her out. He would take her to a fine French Bistro he knew. Wine and dine her, be suave and tell witty jokes. And if she liked dancing, he knew the venues. Jazz, mambo, or rock ‘n’ roll… he knew all the cool places. He saw them dancing into the small hours, then walking hand in hand through a blue dawn, and kissing on this very bridge at sunrise. All he had to do was approach her and get the ball rolling. In the space of a few seconds, he seemed to have mapped out their whole life together.

Then, it happened and, although he had been a champion sprinter at college, he hadn’t been able to run fast enough. That lack of speed would always haunt him. The girl climbed onto the parapet. His perception of time had slowed to agonising slow motion. She stood there, teetering, gazing down at the black water churning below her. ‘No!’ he shouted as he sprinted full tilt towards her. She turned her head, gave him a brief far-away look, and then stepped off into space, plunging to sink in the cold dark depths below.

He rushed to the parapet and looked over. It was a long way down to the water and he could see nothing but the implacable black surface of the swirling current. The river had swallowed her and would spit her out on a bank somewhere downstream.

He stood there, frozen, in shock and grief. Was it possible he had fallen in love and lost his love in the space of perhaps a minute? He tried to gather his wits and fumbled for his cigarettes. The packet fell from his hands. When he bent down to retrieve it, he saw a small moleskin notebook with a grey cover lying in a shallow puddle. He picked it up, brushed the surface wet off with his coat sleeve and put it in his pocket. It proved to be a journal of sorts. He kept it although he did of course report the girl’s suicide to the police. Later, in his flat, he pieced together the tragedy and its wounding fragments: the emotional shrapnel from an abusive father and a string of cold-hearted lovers, miscarriage, divorce, and depression that had fractured and extinguished Nadia’s will to live after just 29 years on the planet.