The Toll Bridge

by Aidan Chambers

  ‘Name the day. I do house calls.’

  ‘Don’t call me, I’ll call you.’

  ‘You’ve no heart.’

  ‘Nothing against you or anything.’

  ‘Forget it, chuck. Not my lucky night is all.’

  He pecks me on the cheek, the rough male kiss of blankets, allows his hands to linger before saying, ‘No hard feelings!’ and fades away.

  It’s all happening. You can’t say I lack for excitement or that I don’t see life stuck out here in the middle of nowhere. Would I have had better luck on the grand tour?

  Back inside, Adam is starting yet another game, the remaining participants behaving like nine-year-olds going on seven. Those who have dropped out are mostly draped around the edges of the floor engaged in whatever other party games have taken their fancy. Playing at experimental physiology being the popular choice.

  Tess grabs my hand. ‘Come on, you can partner me for this one.’

  Game two. The Ping-pong Ball.

  The boy stands. The girl kneels down in front of him, puts a table-tennis ball inside one of the boy’s trouser legs and works it up with her fingers from the outside until she reaches the crotch over which she manoeuvres the ball and then lets it fall down the other trouser leg. The winner does it the fastest. Naturally, everybody goes as slow as she can.

  Like mere pastime stories, this game creates a lot of excited anticipation at the beginning, has an extended middle with plenty of sexy high drama that climaxes in sometimes unexpected thrills, after which it ends with a quick denouement.

  This evening there are predictable actions, reactions and dubious dialogue, especially during the crotch scenes.

  Tess and I went third. She is busy crossing my crotch and making a meal of it to considerable encouragement and applause, coming at me from front and back at the same time, when Gill appears in the front row of the stalls, sober and ominous and travel-weary.

  I don’t see her straightaway because I have my eyes screwed shut. I am thinking of a butcher’s slaughterhouse, as a matter of fact, in an effort to control my privates by taking my mind off what is happening to them. So Tess at last finishes with my crotch and the ping-pong ball is dribbling down my other leg when I open my eyes with relief only to find Gill glaring at me. Even then I don’t react immediately. My first thought is that she is an hallucination brought on by the multicult punch while having my bat and balls played with by someone other than myself for the first time since Gill and I were last together months ago. Only when it dawns on me that she is not gazing at me with the sloe-eyed Mona Lisa smile her face usually assumed during such activities, do I accept that she really is there, touchable flesh, spillable blood, and distinctly unhappy.

  4

  Outside in the road, where I hustled Gill, Tess following as it dawns on her who this is, I said:

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘I was invited.’

  ‘Invited?’

  ‘Me,’ Tess butted in, ‘I invited her.’

  ‘You? What for?’

  ‘Seemed like a good idea at the time.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Didn’t think,’ Gill said, stunned, ‘it would be such a big party.’

  ‘Wasn’t meant to be,’ Tess said, ‘just a bit of fun.’

  ‘So I saw.’ Gill looked at me then Tess then me again.

  ‘Nothing like that,’ Tess said.

  ‘Could have fooled me.’

  ‘Come on, you know what parties are like.’

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here? What are you two up to?’

  ‘Us two up to!’ Gill said. ‘Don’t you mean you two?’

  ‘I told you,’ Tess said, ‘it isn’t like that. Just a game.’

  ‘You planned this just to humiliate me.’

  ‘What the hell are you going on about?’ I said.

  ‘Shut up, you,’ Tess said. ‘This is between me and her.’

  ‘I’ve never seen you like this.’

  ‘I’ve never seen you like that.’

  ‘Look, Gill –’ Tess said.

  Heavy metal started pumping out of the house.

  ‘– I thought it would help him to see you –’

  ‘Help me?’

  ‘– I thought you wanted to see him.’

  ‘How would you know what I want?’

  ‘Your letters were –’

  ‘You’ve read my letters?’

  ‘Oh, merde!’

  ‘You showed her my letters!’

  ‘Look, piss off, will you, I didn’t ask you to come here.’

  ‘Thank you! Thank you very much! It’s only me you’re talking to – your girlfriend.’ Looking at Tess. ‘At least I thought I was!’

  ‘Typical male,’ Tess said.

  ‘Eh –?’

  ‘Yes,’ Gill echoed, ‘typical male. In the wrong so turn violent. At least you could say sorry.’

  ‘Hang on a minute, I wasn’t the one who started this.’

  ‘All everybody else’s fault, I suppose,’ Gill said.

  My head is exploding.

  ‘If you’d answered Gill’s letters –’

  ‘Instead of ignoring them –’

  ‘I tried.’

  ‘Excuses.’

  ‘Excuses.’

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake! Get lost, will you! Both of you. Just leave me alone.’

  ‘You said that before. And what do I find?’ Gill shouted – the music is very loud by now. ‘But all right, if that’s the way you want it. Two can play that game.’

  She turned and stalked into the house.

  ‘Now you’ve done it!’ Tess said. ‘Couldn’t you just have been nice to her, nothing strenuous, nothing too extreme, just ordinary everyday glad to see you stuff, I mean she is your bloody girlfriend after all . . . oh, Christ! . . . Merde!’ and after uttering a few home truths in my direction she sloped off into the house.

  I felt deeply furious and miserable and wanted to hit them both, hard. The old Adam. Or Cain, more accurately: mark of. Loud echoes of the old Glum enemy rumbled in my guts.

  I couldn’t believe all this was happening. Stared at the house. The FOR SALE sign crucified to the wall was defaced with luminous spray paint into PATHS FOR ALE. Heavy metal pulsed from the house. Sex-teased squeals and hyena laughter punctured the beat.

  They’d completely taken it over, polluted it, the place where I was recovering, stripping myself down, remaking myself, had been invaded, desecrated, defiled, raped.

  Suddenly I hated them.

  Yes, Gill, Adam, Tess as well.

  All of them.

  Paradigm of humanity.

  I hated their noise,

  their occupation of my space,

  hated their sprawl and splurge and clutter and mess.

  The splat of their lives.

  Hated most of all the pretended individuality of their slavish conformity.

  They were not me, nothing I wanted or wanted to be, everything I did not want. Defined by negatives. There was no way I was going back inside while any of them were still there. Trespassers. But there was no way I could get shot of them either, not in the state they were in by now. Worse still, the state I was in myself.

  I stood there trembling with impotent rage.

  What to do?

  Where to go?

  Nothing.

  Nowhere.

  Not with people.

  To hell with people.

  Nowhere where they’d find me.

  I crossed the road and leaned on the bridge and glared downstream, my mind a match for the pummelling noise behind me and the surging swirl beneath my feet.

  Just then a thin moon splintered from a bank of clouds, its mist-smeared light revealing the shrouded shape of a wintering cabin cruiser snugly tethered to the bank a couple of fields away downstream.

  Because he wasn’t there, Jan doesn’t know what happened next so I’ll tell it, but I’d better say at the start tha
t I’m not a writer, not like Jan is, he really loves it, anyone would have to, to work all day then come home and write most of the evenings, not to mention weekends. I have to prise him from his room if I want him to go out, and God knows when he gets to bed most nights. I’m bad enough, being addicted to watching videos in bed, I can still be at it, eyes glued at two in the morning, but if I go to the bathroom to try and break the spell he’s still there scribbling away. I think he’s only ever really truly happy when he’s writing, it’s the only time when he’s in focus – when he’s doing what he says he lives for.

  I envy him, because there’s nothing that’s like that for me. Well, sex of course, but that’s different, that’s because I’m human, it’s nothing extra, nothing special. What makes me happiest, as a matter of fact, is just life. I mean eating and sleeping and having sex and lying in the sun and playing tennis, and reading a really gripping book curled up on my bed, and being with friends, and wearing just the right clothes, and looking, just looking, at other people doing ordinary things, ‘watching the passing’ my grandmother used to call it. I completely lack ambition, I suppose, I’m just happy to be here and to enjoy what comes along.

  Some of my friends ask why I let Jan stay with me, he can’t be much fun they say, but they don’t see the best of him because he’s so private. Writing Adam’s story has something to do with his hiddenness. I think it’s a story about himself, maybe a declaration. I’m not sure. But what I am sure of is that he needs me to be here, or rather he needs to be here with me. Not that I do much for him. I don’t do his laundry, for instance, and he feeds himself (and me as well) most of the time, and being an inveterate tidier he tends to do most of the house cleaning. In fact, he doesn’t make any demands, I wish he would sometimes because it’s nice to be asked to do things for a friend, but he never does, I have to suss out what he wants and then offer or just get on and do it. I’ve talked to him about it, of course, we talk about everything, which is another reason why I like him so much (love him, I suppose), and he goes on about imposing on people, hating to feel that someone is doing something for him only because they have to, or worse, because they’ve been manipulated into doing it, emotionally blackmailed.

  [– Aren’t you supposed to be telling what happened after I left the party?

  – I’m going to, be quiet, please.

  – And you’re the one who says she doesn’t like writing!

  – It’s just the way it’s coming out.

  – You never could tell a story.

  – Rubbish, there’s more than one way to tell a story.]

  The first day I saw him, standing in the toll-house living room, he looked like the ghost of a ghost. Bony-thin to the point of wispy, blenched, miserable, those big, gripping, hard, grey-green eyes red-rimmed and bleary and staring at me with a mixture of fright and defiance. So first it was the eyes that got me and then later, as he picked through the stuff I’d brought and the eyes were busy elsewhere, it was the hands – long-fingered, thin-boned, talking hands. (I have a thing about hands, I love them, I think they’re one of the most beautiful parts of the body, but I can’t stand people with ugly hands, especially short stubby fingers and fat palms.)

  I thought he was just weary after a bad night and nervous in a new place. But I soon realized he was ill. I don’t think he remembers how bad he was. He’d go for a whole day without eating and say he wasn’t hungry. Then in the middle of the night he’d scoff all he could find and next day he’d sit around staring at the blank walls refusing to say anything.

  He’d also do weird things like spend ages standing on the bridge staring down at the river. I even found him there one day in the rain soaked to the skin. There was a kind of dottiness about his behaviour that sometimes made me want to shake him hard and tell him to snap out of it. Mum said he was like somebody grieving, but who for or what for?

  One way and another, what with Dad keeping him steadily busy and Mum coddling him a bit and me being with him, after a month or so he was sleeping and eating properly, and looked much better, less wispy, more there. And he always read a lot, even when The Glums came over him again, crushing him down, which happened every few days. He could be awful then, saying bitter destructive things if you made him talk to try and lift him out of The Pit. I soon learned not to try and cheer him up but just to sit with him, letting him read or stare into space. Being there was all the help he needed, I think, but he never said so, though afterwards, when he was properly recovered, he did.

  I suppose that’s when our friendship really began, which has always seemed kind of odd to me – that a friendship should begin with the bad times and not with the good ones. While he sat there suffering, it was then we felt we recognized each other, knew each other, without explaining or talking about it, and knew that whatever happened we would always be a pair. Complementary. Life companions. Regardless of who else in the future we loved or lived with or kept as friends. We’re still like that, and though it always looks to other people as if it’s Jan who needs me, I need him too, only what he does for me doesn’t show so much. He sustains me in the way I need just as much as I sustain him in the way he needs, and we both know it, so what does it matter what other people think?

  By the time Adam turned up Jan was much better. The wraithiness had vanished, he’d filled out nicely, his skin was clear, his eyes not crazed any more. His hands, roughened from the work he’d done, were even more beautiful. He’d persuaded me to chop his hair very short because he said it would be easier to keep right that way, and though it was ragged it suited him, adding a slightly dishevelled severity to his lean looks. Mum said he reminded her of a novice monk, and it is true, he is a bit monkish. And innocent unworldly too – he doesn’t quite understand what makes the world go round, though he likes to think he does.

  That business with the estate agent, for instance. What got up his nose as much as anything is that B-and-G was so obviously a turd, and what’s worse a not very clever turd, and Jan can’t understand why people were taken in by him. Jan can’t see that people admire the B-and-Gs because the B-and-Gs of the world are clever in a way Jan isn’t – they’re clever with cunning and self-confidence and at knowing how to manipulate people’s whims and fancies. They appeal to people’s weaknesses. They know that most people are impressed by flash cars and designer clothes and exotic holidays and the extravagant signs of money and power.

  Neither does he understand the way sex works, doesn’t see that the B-and-Gs play that game too. Most people’s brains aren’t in their heads, they’re in their crotches. So the B-and-Gs aren’t oddities, they’re typical. Jan is the oddity, that’s the fact, and he gets upset and angry because he doesn’t want the world to be the way it is and can’t understand that most people don’t mind, they actually like it the way it is. People revel in their weaknesses, it seems to me, and admire those who become successful by exploiting weaknesses. Their own and other people’s.

  Jan wants people to live up to something better than they are. Mostly, they never will so he’s bound to suffer for the rest of his life. He’s like someone who lacks a protective layer of skin. Every brush against the world hurts. Life will never be what he wants it to be, he’ll never quite understand why, other people will always think him a little odd, so he’ll never quite be accepted. And, if you want to know, I think his depressions started when this began to dawn on him. Which is why, in my opinion, he came to the toll bridge, to be on his own while he sorted it out. And he was running away too, of course, which was obvious to everybody except himself.

  Jan ran to the toll bridge and Adam ran into him there. Two runaways colliding, and the story gets more complicated to tell now because I come into it, like a third particle colliding with the other two.

  Yes, it’s true, I did have a thing about Adam. From first sight I fancied him. His earthiness, his utterly relaxed, unbothered attitude to life. He wasn’t very tall but was supple and beautifully built. I mean, he just oozed sex. But from the very first sight
of him I felt that inside him there was a vulnerable, almost frightened boy. Don’t know how I knew this. Intuition, I suppose. And perhaps something in his eyes. Didn’t think about it. But the mix was irresistible.

  Something else made the situation even more sensational, something Jan didn’t know because he couldn’t see it, being part of it. I mean the two of them together.

  Like sea against cliffs, hills against sky, each heightened the quality of the other. Emphasized the other’s being and beauty. And each was beautiful, I don’t know how to describe it, when you see it you know it, and it has as much to do with personality as it has to do with body.

  Anyhow, I admit I let myself be carried away. There I was with these two males, one who made me think and talk like I’d never thought and talked before, and one who I fancied like crazy. And both of them needed me. How could I resist? Why should I? That day Jan was sick from painter’s colic arrived like a gift and I grabbed it.

  Adam was playful and full of jokes and bursting with energy. I was lusty and insatiable and I didn’t care. I never now smell new paint in a room without remembering that day, feeling it in my skin, in my flesh, in my nerves and on my tongue again, and the rough texture of the blanket spread on the bare boards of the floor and the tang of woodsmoke in my nose and the tingle of heat from the fire as we lay beside it and the slip of sweat between us and its salt taste and the sound of the river outside and our blood surging inside as though both might engulf us at any moment and sweep us away, and best and most remembered, the feel and touch of his hands and his kissing and biting and the excruciating pleasure of it.

  And then the bittersweet after-taste of melancholy, with Adam beside me dead to the world though I longed for him to hold me and give me his eyes and his mind as he had given me his body and not to drift away and drown in sleep.

  In a while I covered him with a blanket and stole away home along the river bank through the empty dark, glad to be alone, glad to be myself in the dank winter night.

  But I learned something from what happened later: Never to be taken but ever give. Never to be one but ever two. Never to be possessed by another but ever possess myself.