The Toll Bridge

by Aidan Chambers

a crotch-stained pair of women’s tights,

  a pungent jock-strap,

  a once-white sock,

  an almost shredded T-shirt,

  a pair of brand-new ultra-maxi-brief frilly knickers,

  half an A-cup bra,

  two used condoms,

  a rash of joint and cigarette butts,

  two slippery empty bottles of sunflower oil,

  various pat-cakes of unrecognizable coagulated gunge limpeting on furniture, floor, walls, and ceiling,

  a black close-toothed blonde-hair-clogged comb,

  a necklace of lurid plastic beads, a muddy right-foot Reebok,

  a blood-stained handkerchief with hand-stitched marigolds decorating its scalloped edge,

  a scrunched packet of weary jelly-babies,

  an empty tube of KY,

  the joker from a pack of cards.

  (That’s all I can remember.)

  From among these icons of a fun-filled evening, I rescued my books, radio, own clothes (those still in a state worth rescuing), bedclothes, kitchen and toilet gear, etc. After that, sweeping, washing, mopping, dusting, polishing, reorganizing. Returning the place to myself.

  Then returning myself to myself. Wash, shave, change of clothes, breakfast.

  By nine o’clock tolls were interrupting progress as the Saturday early shoppers went through.

  Checks on Adam every fifteen minutes monitored no change. Deep heavy-duty sleep.

  All this achieved by keeping my mind in neutral.

  Nine thirty, at the table, breakfast just finished, coffee mug in hand as I took five minutes off before making an attempt at getting Adam inside, Tess walked in.

  [– Let’s tell the next bit together, then we can get in everything we both knew.

  – You just want an excuse not to have to write anything!

  – Hard fromage! He’s guessed! But it would be better that way, admit it.

  – Wouldn’t work.

  – Yes it will, you just want to give up all that I-ing all the time. You’re such a bloody narcissist!

  – Rubbish.

  – Yes you are. You like nothing better than staring at your navel all the time. And you’re possessive.

  – Stop bossing. Just for you, I’ll give it a go.

  – Good. But we keep it simple, none of your male-order stuff like those titles and numbered sections and everything all very ordered and in charge, and literary crossword puzzles and quoting from poets nobody reads and stuff like that. You’re not writing a novel, for God’s sake. This is going to be right to the point, OK?

  – Conditions already! Keep it simple! Dear God, it’ll be only words of one syllable next. Afraid of the dictionary, are we? Afraid we might come across a word we don’t know? Afraid we might have to think a bit?

  – Go!]

  Tess and Gill walked to the bridge together. The two girls had arranged beforehand how they would behave. While Gill waited outside, Tess would discover whether Jan and Adam were there.

  When Tess came into the living room Jan was facing her across the table, his hands wrapped round a mug of coffee. Image of so many Saturday mornings. Except this morning he looked desperately exhausted.

  But as soon as he saw Tess, all Jan’s weariness and the anger he felt for what she had done during the last three days evaporated. The very sight of her was enough to revive his spirits.

  Stopped in her tracks by the sight of Jan, Tess suddenly felt confused, all her determination draining away, surprised by the strength of her feelings at seeing him again, as if they had been parted for years.

  They gazed at each other for a long moment, neither saying anything, both aware of the moment’s significance, knowing beyond a doubt for the first time that each was irreplaceable to the other no matter what, each satisfying in the other some essential need, and each unable therefore to do anything but pay the eternal toll of friendship: forgiveness of the other’s failings. It was a sweet moment that could have lasted for ever, neither would have minded, a sublime kind of knowledge that was a strange new pleasure.

  But the spell was broken by a car approaching the bridge.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ Tess said and went.

  When she returned a mug of coffee was waiting. Tess sat and avoided Jan’s eyes by looking round the room.

  ‘Quite a clean-up.’

  ‘Needed it.’ Intending to be genial, Jan heard himself sounding accusatory. Tiredness talking. He cleared his throat and braced himself in his seat. ‘Back to normal.’

  Tess smiled warily. ‘Your normal.’

  Jan returned her smile. ‘My normal.’

  Both were baffled. Having thought so much during the night about this meeting – how it would be, what would be said – it was not as either had imagined. Both also felt an intrusive urgency, Jan for Adam, Tess for Gill. But that intense moment of mutual recognition had come between what had been and what was, changing everything, and leaving each at a loss for words, tongue-tied, waiting on the other to bridge the gulf.

  Jan spoke first.

  ‘I need some help.’

  ‘Is it – can it wait a minute?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Gill. She’s outside.’

  ‘Gill! She’s still here? What’s she want?’

  ‘To talk to you of course.’

  ‘Not now. I need some help with Adam.’

  ‘Adam!’

  ‘He’s in a boat, it’s a long story, I’ll explain later, he’s had some kind of accident, his head was bleeding, it’s a cut, he was unconscious but he’s sleeping now. I’m not sure what to do, he seems OK, but would you have a look at him and see if you think we ought to fetch a doctor?’

  ‘Christ!’

  ‘I also need some help to get him into the house, it’s cold out there and there’s nothing in the boat – no heating or water or anything.’

  ‘God! But what about Gill?’

  ‘Can’t she wait?’

  ‘You don’t understand. She was attacked last night, during the party, under the bridge. It might have been Adam.’

  ‘Adam! Is she sure? I mean, she didn’t know him.’

  ‘He said his name.’

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘Can’t have been! What did he do? Was she hurt?’

  ‘Not physically. She doesn’t know what he was up to. She’s not sure. She was confused. It was dark and she was so upset already.’

  They stared at each other, appalled.

  ‘What now?’ Jan said.

  ‘I’d better get Gill. We can’t leave her hanging about out there. Anyway, she’s involved. She has a right to know what’s happened.’

  While Tess went for Gill, Jan visited Adam again, who was still flat out, hardly having moved for the last two hours.

  As Jan returned to the living room by the back door Tess and Gill came in by the front. There was an awkward pause as Jan and Gill scowled across the room at each other.

  ‘Hi,’ they said in inevitable comic unison.

  ‘I’ve explained,’ Tess said quickly.

  ‘He’s still sleeping,’ Jan said.

  ‘I’ll take a look,’ Tess said, and hurried off, glad to escape.

  Jan and Gill stood in silence contemplating each other, figures posed in a domestic still life.

  When the silence became unbearable Gill said, ‘We should talk.’

  ‘Tess won’t be long.’

  ‘But we must.’

  ‘Coffee or something?’

  ‘No! Thanks.’

  Unable to help herself, Gill closed the living-room door. Her letters were gone. She let out a gasp.

  Jan, knowing, said nothing but went to the fire, stirred it with a foot and laid on another log.

  Gill wandered round the room, inspecting it distractedly. Before, she had always poked about among the things in Jan’s room and he hadn’t minded, had rather liked it, in fact, as he had liked her caressing him while they sat and talked – playing with his hair, fiddling
with his ears, stroking his legs. He was one of those for whom physical contact, the language of the fingers, was a needed way of communication. But it was also a privilege of friendship. Handling his possessions was an extension of this tactile pleasure. Now he found Gill’s assumption of the privilege irritating. He wanted to tell her to leave things alone as he would have told a stranger. He knew that this was unreasonable: Gill was only continuing their relationship from where they had left off. It was he who had changed.

  ‘Why didn’t you answer my letters?’ Gill said with the sudden brusqueness of someone forcing herself, through clenched teeth as it were, to speak. Having got it out, she turned to face him.

  ‘What’s this about Adam?’ Jan said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing!’

  ‘Yes! No, not nothing. I don’t want to talk about that, I want to talk about us. You’re hurting me, you know that, do you?’

  ‘I don’t mean to. It’s just the way things are. Don’t know what to say.’

  ‘That’s a change!’

  ‘Is all this just because I stuck your letters on the door?’

  ‘No, all this is not just because you stuck my letters on the door, though that’s bad enough. It’s not even just because you didn’t answer them, either. It’s about what those things mean. Can’t you see that? It’s about you and me and about you paying me some attention. Don’t you know how important that is to people?’ Tears welled in her eyes. She brushed them angrily away. ‘No one has ever hurt me the way you have. Never! It hurts so much I don’t know what to do!’

  Tears flowed again. Again she wiped them away. Took deep breaths.

  She turned impatiently from him, went to the front window pretending to look out at the bridge. Jan remained unmoving by the fire.

  After a while she said, ‘Didn’t mean to say that. Kept telling myself not to say things like that. It’s so boring saying things like that!’ She gave a little rueful laugh and slapped her thigh in frustration. ‘And I was determined not to cry. I don’t want to. I’m not trying to use it against you.’

  Jan, struggling with his own feelings, managed to say, ‘You know me well enough to know I don’t think like that.’

  She turned to face him again. ‘But I don’t seem to know you well enough to know why you’re hurting me the way you are.’

  Jan couldn’t look at her. ‘I’m not sure I know myself. That’s why I’m here, to find out things like that.’

  ‘Can’t we at least talk about it? Don’t I deserve that? Don’t you owe me that much?’

  Jan heard himself take in and let out the long slow breath of resignation.

  He nodded, unable to speak.

  His silence was broken by Tess shouting his name.

  For Tess, climbing apprehensively down the two narrow steps that led from the cockpit into the cold dammy gloom of the cabin, entering the boat felt like descending into a tomb.

  She clasped her hand over her mouth as she looked down at Adam’s unconscious pasty face and the blood-stained bandage wrapped like a sweatband round his head. He was breathing heavily through a gaping mouth, each breath rasping in his throat.

  There are moments that change people. No, wrong; try again. There are moments when people change. These moments are not isolated, not separate, not removed from the rest of life. They are not independent atoms of existence that suddenly break into your life for no reason. They are made, are created by the alphabet of your life – the ever-shifting phonemes of existence, which sometimes gather into concentrated patterns of such intensity, such unmistakable clarity and significance, that suddenly you know something about yourself, your own self, for the first time. Some hidden part of you enters your consciousness. Recognized, acknowledged, accepted, it becomes part of the you you know.

  This is how Jan thought later.

  Tess, overcome in the cabin at the sight of Adam, knew only the impact of the moment as the narrowing cone of the past few weeks, past few days, past few hours, past few minutes reached a concentration sharp enough to penetrate her soul.

  What phonemes spoke to her as she stood in the waist of the boat?

  Regret: limb-weakening, stomach-sickening

  Fright: bowel-loosening, nerve-jangling, sweat-making

  Pity: tear-inducing

  Disgust: fist-clenching, mouth-twisting

  Anger: breath-catching, heart-gripping

  And, counterpoint to these negatives, a positive that held them in play as the pulsing rhythm of a harmonic holds discords, the beat of the heart driving the flow of blood, she was also possessed by (God, how words fail us now!)

  Joy

  Gladness

  Exhilaration

  Zest

  As she endured this, Tess felt as if she were split in two: one part of her suffering regret and guilt and sorrow; the other dispassionate, detached, cool, observing the self who suffered and taking pleasure in it.

  How can I be like this? she wondered. Am I mad? Or sick? Or am I wicked? Evil?

  Tess did not know whether she believed in Evil – in an entity, an out-there presence or force. The Devil. Her mother did. But Tess regarded that as a hangover from her mother’s Catholic convent-school upbringing. Her father never used the word. She didn’t know whether he believed in Evil or not. He always avoided talking of such things. Right and wrong, yes, he talked about that. But never about Evil. She herself had never thought it mattered enough to think about. Yet here she was, using the word about herself! Was it her mother speaking in her?

  Tess had sometimes caught herself thinking and saying things that came straight out of her parents’ mouths. Just as she sometimes caught herself walking like her mother or using her hands like her father. Or, most disturbing, she’d look in the mirror and suddenly see not her eyes but her father’s, not her nose but her mother’s, and always her father’s wide mouth – his lips, their shape and length and thickness, and the odd little upward curve at the left-hand corner that made her look even when blank-faced as if she were smirking slightly, a feature that sometimes landed her in trouble with touchy teachers. How weird, she thought, to be such a mix-and-match product of your parents. And not only your parents but of all your ancestors back to Adam and Eve!

  Eve and evil! Dear God! No, not evil, whether Evil existed or not. A stupid idiotic muttonheaded cretinous moronic crapbrained grade-A fool perhaps, but not evil. And not sick. Just a doltbungler. Not mad. Just a pukefaceturdtwit. And enjoying it!

  She went on bludgeoning herself with words till the tears ran; and observed herself crying with pleasure. She was glad that all this could happen to her, she wouldn’t deny it, which was not mad nor sick nor evil but life, human life – being alive. Pleasure not at what she had done or what she was, but that she had done and that she was. The tears were merely an outward and visible sign that she wished for better than she had done and than she was.

  Perhaps it is in this attitude to herself that Tess differs most from Jan: she glorying in what she is, what life is, happy or sad, and, yes, bad or good, a born optimist; he suspicious of himself, sceptical of life, a born pessimist. Tess feels at home in the world, at home with it; Jan feels a stranger, a visitor only, uncomfortable with the world, alien even, someone waiting, bags packed, ready to leave.

  Foraging such thoughts, chastened in her soul, she wiped the tears away, before bending over Adam to give him a critical look.

  As her face came close to his, Adam’s eyes opened and he saw her.

  Tess stepped back, letting out a little gasp. Adam sat up, mouth gaping as if to shout, but no sound came.

  ‘It’s all right, it’s only me!’ Tess spluttered.

  Adam’s mouth moved as if talking fast but again no sound came. His eyes were wide and wild. He sprang to his feet, the blanket tumbling from him, but sat down again on the edge of the bunk as if felled by a blow, his face wincing with pain. He put a hand to his head, found the bandage, felt it with both hands, panic now adding to the look of pain.

&nbs
p; ‘Don’t move!’ Tess said. ‘You’ve hurt your head.’ And instinctively took a step towards him, but Adam scrambled away along the bunk until he was wedged against the bulkhead, glaring at her like a wounded cornered animal.

  Tess retreated to the cabin door, at a loss to know what do, jabbering, ‘It’s only me, Tess, you’ve had an accident or something, I’m not sure, but anyway calm down, it’s OK, I’m not going to hurt you.’ She heard herself laugh in the hysterical way people do when they’re frightened. ‘Should I get Jan? You’d probably prefer to talk to him.’

  She began to back out of the cabin. ‘Stay quiet. Put a blanket round you, you’re only in your – you’ll get cold, it’s freezing in here, you probably have concussion or something, I’ll just fetch Jan, hang on –’

  As soon as she was on the bank she started yelling Jan’s name.

  Jan came running. Gill followed as far as the steps outside the back door.

  ‘Something’s up,’ Tess said, meeting Jan halfway across the lawn. She was trembling. ‘He woke up and went crazy. I thought he was going to attack me.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’

  ‘It might be just because it’s me. You know – he might be scared of what will happen after last night. He might be all right with you, he knows you best –’

  In the cockpit Jan bent down to look into the cabin. Adam was hunched up in the far corner of the bunk, a blanket gathered round him.

  ‘Hey, Adam,’ Jan said quietly, cheerily, ‘it’s me. You OK?’

  No answer. Adam’s eyes, ringed with dark circles, blazed at him.

  Jan straightened up, looked at Tess watching from the bank, shrugged at her, bent to look at Adam again.

  ‘How’d you like to come into the house where it’s warm?’

  No reply. Jan stepped down one step into the cabin, Adam stiffened, Jan stopped.

  ‘Look, it’s all right, what’re you worried about?’

  He took another step.

  ‘I’m on my own.’

  Another step brought him to the cabin floor.

  Adam was shaking his head and making pushing-away movements with a hand. His mouth was working too but all that came out were gasping breaths.

  Jan said quickly, ‘I’m coming no further, it’s OK, I’ll just sit here, all right? Just want to talk to you.’