The Toll Bridge

by Aidan Chambers

  We hadn’t found wonderful Calvino then, more’s the pity, or we might have also known about Marco Polo in Invisible Cities, and you might have read that to us, which would have made a lot of difference to the way we thought about Adam’s dream. I’m thinking of this bit:

  Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

  ‘But which is the stone that supports the bridge?’ Kublai Khan asks.

  ‘The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,’ Marco answers, ‘but by the line of the arch that they form.’

  Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: ‘Why do you speak of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.’

  Polo answers: ‘Without stones there is no arch.’

  I think the thing we didn’t really understand was what Polo says to Kublai Khan. We didn’t understand yet that, yes, we are each individual stones, but that together we can make an arch. We hadn’t made that connection. We hadn’t bridged that gap.

  By the way, you really were painfully jealous of Adam and me, weren’t you! Perhaps you were so jealous that even now you find it hard to admit? Or is writing it a kind of confession? Come to that, isn’t this whole story a kind of confession? Or do I read it like that because I’m a lapsed Catholic from a family of lapsed Catholics? That’s what you’ll say, I suppose, never having been anything yourself but a lapsed atheist.]

  4

  One day a raven came to the bridge, perching on the peak of the toll-house roof, and returned day after day. Adam took a fancy to it.

  The raven would stand on the roof and peer around with its reptilian eyes, spying for food I expect, as it was winter.

  They are so impressively big are ravens, bigger bodied than a carrion crow, and armed with a long heavy beak set off by shaggy throat feathers that give them an evil predatory appearance. You can see why they get such a bad press. But Adam admired our visitor and would stand in the road and speak to it. Not the billing-and-cooing of sentimental animal lovers, as if animals were human babies of low intelligence, but in something that sounded like a foreign language, with its own rhythm and music and vocabulary. I can’t capture it in writing, it would look like gobbledegook. He didn’t speak loudly, either. There was the raven up on the roof, and there was Adam down on the road, and he would look up at the raven and mutter his animalian no louder than he would speak to someone standing right in front of him. You wouldn’t have thought the bird could hear. But it would turn to face him and stretch its cruel head down and fix him with its cold eyes and twist and cock its head as if listening hard to every nuance.

  Adam did this for four or five days in a row whenever he heard the raven’s coarse deep-throated croaking from the roof. I began to wonder if it was actually calling for him. He would go out and talk for two or three minutes and then come back inside. Nothing else.

  But on the sixth or seventh day he was there so long that I went to the window to see what was happening. He was standing in the middle of the road as usual, but this time holding his right arm up, gently beckoning with his fingers and murmuring his animalian so quietly I could hardly hear him from inside. He’s never, I thought, at once feeling fearful, he’s never trying to tice it down!

  But that is exactly what he did do. I’d only been watching for a few seconds when the raven swooped shockingly into view, the great black metre-wide fans of its wings throbbing the air, powering the bird round Adam’s head, once, twice, three times, while it let out a high-pitched metallic cry as it circled, Adam standing statuesquely still, until it came gliding in, claws extended, and clutched Adam’s wrist, where it settled, after a dodgy wobble back and forth till they both found the right balance. Then the two of them stood still, gazing into each other’s unblinking eyes.

  By now I had broken into a cold sweat. And the sight of that scimitar beak only a fist away from Adam’s eyes completely unnerved me. My knees buckled and I sat down on the windowsill, grasping the edge to keep me from falling. But I couldn’t stop looking.

  Adam waited for a while that seemed an age, murmuring murmuring, the tension so great I desperately wanted to pee.

  The pair of them remained there, the one talking, the other listening, for endless minutes. Then Adam began to move slowly, slowly, careful step by careful step, first in a wide circle, then in a straight line up the middle of the road onto the bridge for a few metres before turning and coming back again. All the time he talked his quiet animal talk. And all the time the raven stared at him, only occasionally looking away with a sharp twist of its head as if to assess the view.

  When they were near the house again, where I hoped he would launch the bird into the air and be done with his circus act, Adam paused for a moment. But then set off again, slowly, slowly, this time towards the front door.

  Dear God, I thought, he’s never going to bring it in!

  But he did. Step by step, and pausing every two or three steps, allowing the raven to take in what was happening, and talking his lingo all the time, calmly, lightly, soothingly, gradually edging his way through the door, and on into the living room, right past me, where I sat pressed against the window utterly speechless, every muscle paralysed though I could hear my heart thumping in terror and feel an effusion of sweat soaking my clothes.

  At last, reaching the centre of the room Adam gently turned so that he faced me and the door, and stopped, the bird twisting its head and stabbing its beak nervously in this direction and that, and Adam’s monologue the only sound.

  Could he have got away with it? Might he have kept the bird quiet until he had taken it outside again? We never found out because a car arrived just then. I was so spelled that I wasn’t aware of it coming. The first I heard was the noise of an engine outside the house. There was a moment when we all – Adam, the raven, myself – cocked our ears in its direction, Adam like me thinking, What now?, and the raven gathering itself for flight.

  At which second the car’s horn blew and the raven took off, seeming in one spread of its wings to fill the room. Instinctively, I threw myself onto the floor and lay there, curled up as tightly as I could and shielding my head with my arms while the bird blundered and buffeted around the room, squawking loud angry croaking cries and banging into walls and ceiling light and furniture, such a confined space being far too small for it to achieve proper flight. Adam ducked and dodged as it flayed about his head, its wings raising a draught that swirled up clouds of dust and caused the chimney to backfire, sending wood smoke billowing into the room. In seconds the place looked and smelt like a dungeon in the bowels of hell during an attack from an avenging angel.

  In the middle of this confusion the car must have driven off, at any rate it wasn’t there a few minutes later when everything was under control again. Probably the driver took fright at the noise, which must have sounded like ritual murder, and decided he was better off out of it.

  After beating about for I don’t know how long, time being now a commodity I’d completely lost sense of, the raven careered headfirst into a wall, fell onto the back of the armchair, clutched at it wildly, dug its claws into the upholstery, and found itself perched there, ruffled, agitated, defensive (that cruel beak stab-stab-stabbing) and the room suddenly silent again.

  Slowly the swirls of dust and smoke settled to a haze. And as if to mark the time a lone black feather floated lazily down from the ceiling, coming finally to rest at Adam’s feet.

  He by now was hunkered half under the table watching with a satisfied smirk as if this were the very scene he had hoped to create.

  From my exposed position flat on the floor I muttered, ‘What the hell do we do now?’

  ‘Hush,’ Adam said. ‘Keep still.’

  And he started talking his beastspiel again. I thought, This time it won’t work. But it did. Slowly, oh so slowly! His patience was impeccable. I remember thinking, How can he be so calm and patient at a time like this when normally he’s such an unpredictable volatile fidget? Which only goes to show how little I understood Adam or my
self or human nature in general.

  With delicate care he approached the nervous bird, coaxed it after repeated attempts onto his arm, and then half-step by half-step eased his way across the room and through the living-room door and at long last through the outside door and into the road, where for a moment he stood still, the pair of them again like a sculpture, ‘Boy with Bird’, before he raised his arm, and the raven launched itself cleanly into the air and flapped off, soaring into the sky, repeating as it went its deep-throated cry in farewell.

  Once the bird was out of sight the tension broke. The relief was almost as unbearable.

  I stormed outside yelling, ‘What in hell’s teeth d’you think you’re playing at! You must be crazy! You could have lost an eye! That was just about the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen anybody do! You’re mad! Never do anything like that again, d’you hear! Never!! Jesus!!!’

  Adam grinned at me as I frothed.

  ‘And don’t stand there grinning!’ I blathered on.

  ‘It was fun.’

  ‘Fun! You call that fun!’

  ‘Sure. Gave you a thrill as well.’

  ‘Me!’

  ‘You loved every minute.’

  ‘I did not!’

  ‘Yes, you did. Look at you, you’re shaking with excitement.’

  ‘I’m shaking from anger, you great steaming ape, that’s why I’m shaking.’

  He raised his hand to run it through his hair, that irritating tic whenever he was excited. It was then that I saw blood soaking through the arm of his sweater.

  ‘What’s this?’ I said, catching hold of his hand.

  ‘Nothing.’ He tried to tug his hand away, but half-heartedly.

  I eased the sweater back. Blood was oozing from torn flesh just above his wrist.

  ‘Christ, its claws must have dug into you! Thank God it missed the vein. We’d better see to that.’

  He allowed me to lead him to the sink where I cleaned the wound and dressed it as best I could with strips of cloth torn from a T-shirt. Doing that calmed me, maybe for the same reason that the raven calmed Adam.

  ‘Why the hell did you do that?’ I said quietly as I worked.

  ‘Just to see if I could.’

  ‘Well, I hope that’s all the proof you want.’

  ‘Till I think of something better.’

  ‘Not while I’m around, if you don’t mind. The beak on that bird! You could easily have lost an eye. One peck – And look at your arm. It’s a mess.’

  ‘Worth it though,’ he said.

  5

  ‘Hey!’ Tess called out.

  We turned from our work. Her camera clicked.

  ‘Not again!’ I said. ‘How many more?’

  She was taking photos for an optional course on photography at school. She’d chosen the toll bridge as a topic, photographing it regularly for six months. At the beginning she thought it would just make an interesting subject, a study of stones and water and people and the effect on them of weather and the changing seasons. She called the finished portfolio ‘Tolling the Bridge’.

  Adam enjoyed being snapped enormously, camping up the poses if he got the chance, which Tess liked for a while, but when she’d had enough of it, would creep up on us and take us unawares. Early on, she persuaded Adam to perform his Tarzan act for her (not that he needed much persuading of course), which she shot in black and white from various angles – on and under the bridge, from the garden, from the back-door steps, from the river (she had to get into the water for these shots and nearly died of the cold), even from above in the tree itself It took three sessions during which I was required to act as general runabout and slave to the pair of them. Of course I pretended to be sniffy about this at the time but I have to admit the resulting pictures are my favourites, beautifully capturing the sense of movement and energy. (The school made Tess cut the sequence out of the portfolio before putting it on show with the work of the rest of the group because Adam was in the nude and Tess refused to crop away or cover with airbrushed shadows the full frontal naughty bits. Another example of how prissy puritanism still rides shotgun in certain sectors of the British social system. [– Compare and contrast in two hundred words the ‘page three’ popsies in the tabloid dailies and then write three hundred words in their defence, imagining yourself to be one of the dishy dolls.])

  6

  One drizzly morning a Range Rover stopped at the door. I went out to take the toll but already the driver, a young guy, incipient version of B-and-G, dressed in a cheap grey junior businessman suit and sporting one of those fluffy moustaches that grow on the faces of insecure post-adolescents who want you to think they’re older than they are, was hauling out of the back a large notice on a pole. FOR SALE, the notice said, and the usual details of agent’s name and phone number. Plus the inevitable emblem – not head of Greek god, nor flourishing oak tree, nor prancing black stallion but blue swallow in full flight. Why never anything nearer the truth, like a brace of money bags or a vulture picking on a corpse or a shark with a bloodstained mortgage in its teeth? Stupid question, really.

  What does puzzle me, though, is why we put up with such pollution of the mind. We go on and on about dodgy food and acid rain and nuclear radiation and other threats to our bodies but we don’t bat an eye at abuse of symbols or poison pumped into our minds by advertisers and other con artists, or foul emissions spewed out every day by, for example, so-called ‘news’ papers and politicians and TV’s self-appointed public opinionaters. What’s the point of a living body without a living mind to go with it? Nichts. All the evidence I need is here.

  The driver, studiously ignoring me, was carrying the sign to the corner of the house.

  ‘Has Mister Norris OK’d this?’ I asked.

  ‘And who might you be, squire?’

  ‘The toll keeper.’

  Sizing up the stonework for a place to fix the pole, he said, ‘I’m impressed.’

  He leaned the hoarding against the house, returned to the back of his Rover from where he was taking a claw hammer and a handful of round-head spike nails when he caught sight, as I did from following the line of his surprised gawp, of Adam, who must have come outside while our backs were turned, quietly taken possession of the hoarding, and was now casually bearing it, raised like a banner, towards the bridge.

  Speechless, the agent’s agent watched as Adam, reaching the middle of the bridge, lifted the hoarding over the parapet, hoyed it into the river, ran to the other side, watched it float through and swirl away downstream, after which, without casting a glance in our direction, he walked calmly back to the house and disappeared inside.

  Only then did the agent’s agent find his voice.

  ‘Who the hell was that?’

  ‘Him? Just my assistant.’

  ‘Your assistant!’

  ‘Now you’re impressed.’

  ‘What the shit does he think he’s playing at?’

  ‘Pooh-sticks.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Do return when you have obtained written permission to molest the building,’ I said with all the hauteur I could assume, and stalked into the house, quietly closing the door behind me.

  Adam was standing in the middle of the living room, clenched fist raised and pulling victory faces. We wanted to burst out but stifled ourselves in order to hear what went on outside for, there being no curtains, we didn’t want to spoil the effect by being seen looking out. Not that there was long to wait before a cruel slamming of car doors, over-revved engine and squealing tyres told us all we needed to know.

  A futile gesture but spine-tinglingly satisfying. Naturally, fluffy lip was back by noon, flapping an officious piece of paper in our faces and braying his FOR SALE sign to the wall with all the crucifying passion of a minion with a score to settle. Another episode in the comedy of rage.

  7

  After three weeks of painting and decorating I began to feel ill. Irritated lungs, runny nose and eyes, heavy aching head, dizziness sometimes, queasy stomach,
wanting to puke. This went on for a day or two, me thinking I was coming down with the flu, when one night I woke up and made it to the back door just in time. Soaked in fever sweat, freezing in the night frost and dark December air, I threw up till there was nothing left to throw and retching was itself a pain. When it was over I stumbled back inside, washed, drank a glass of water, stirred up the slumbering logs on the fire, and hunkered as close to the warmth as I could, shivering, sniffling, and miserable.

  Adam didn’t move. I resented that for a while, all my only-son reflexes, I suppose, conditioned to expect coddling and consolation. But as the spasm wore off I was pleased he’d stayed where he was. This was the first time since I came to the bridge that I’d been physically ill. It had never occurred to me that I would be. Now it had happened I felt suddenly vulnerable and was glad there was someone else in the house, but I certainly didn’t want him fussing over me, and suggesting remedies.

  Once I was warm again and the spasm was properly over, I felt so washed out and weary all I wanted was to crawl back into bed. Which I did, and slept so soundly that I didn’t wake next morning till I heard Tess’s voice saying my name. She was standing by my bed dressed in her biking leathers, Adam at her side.

  ‘Hello. Are you all right?’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Eight thirty. Is anything wrong?’

  ‘Just a bit queasy.’

  ‘You don’t look too terrific.’