The Toll Bridge

by Aidan Chambers

  By the Wednesday of the second week ABG (After Brown-and-Greasy) I was on my own again, left to paint the entire building inside and out, two undercoats and one gloss, ceilings and all. (Have you ever painted a ceiling? Even with non-drip it’s murder.) It would take, I reckoned, four weeks’ solid slog. Certainly till well after Christmas.

  4

  Mid afternoon, Thursday of the second week ABG. A clouded glowering day but dry, and warm enough to work outside, painting the roadside living-room window frames. There’d been very few tolls since early morning, even fewer than usual; and no movement on the river, the holiday boats being all laid up by this time of year. Even Bob Norris hadn’t called.

  Feeling lonely, abandoned, hard-done-by, I was brooding in the flat-headed way you get into (well I do anyway) while doing a monotonous physical job all by yourself when I spotted a movement in the house. I had to press my face close to the glass to see clearly, for the room was gloomy. The toll-bridge ghost, I thought, stupidly. But no, and yes, there he is, Adam, large as life, standing at the table, scoffing bread and chicken bits left over from my midday meal.

  ‘Hoi!’ I shout and bang on the window. He turns, sees me, waves, turns back to his – my! – food.

  I rush inside, and confront him from the living-room doorway. ‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing?’

  He flashes The Grin. ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Don’t start that again.’

  ‘What?’

  I point the paintbrush I’ve forgotten is in my hand. ‘Eating that!’

  He drops the food as if he’s suddenly been told it’s poisoned. ‘Sorry! Thought it was leftovers.’

  ‘It is. Oh, never mind. Finish it now. What’ve you done with the boat?’

  ‘Boat? What boat?’

  ‘The boat. Our boat.’

  Mouth stuffed full again, he shakes his head, frowning.

  ‘Christ! The boat you took.’

  He swallows, which somehow at that moment seems the most insulting thing he could do. ‘Me? Don’t know nothing about a boat. Walked here along the river from the pub. A bloke bought me a drink. Wanted me to go with him. Do him a little favour. Offered fifty quid. But I’m not that desperate.’

  ‘But you took it.’

  ‘Would you turn down a free drink?’

  ‘The boat. Three weeks ago.’

  ‘What? No, not me, sorry.’

  ‘Course you did! When Tess and I got back, after you’d caused the trouble at the Pike, you’d gone. Disappeared. With our boat. With other stuff as well, you might remember. Including my clothes. The ones you’re still wearing, I think. God, what a mess they’re in. Where the hell have you been?’

  He’s staring at me blank-faced. Not even The Grin.

  ‘What’re you on about?’

  ‘The boat, dammit!’

  ‘Somebody else, mate, not me.’

  ‘Jesus, I don’t believe this!’

  ‘Well, they could have. You don’t know, do you?’ He’s suddenly very agitated, distressed, as if he’s just woken up and doesn’t like what he’s found. ‘You weren’t here, were you? You’ve just said you were out. You didn’t see me go, did you? So how d’you know I took the boat? Anybody could’ve done it. So I took some stuff. What’s a bit of food? And these clothes, well . . . Anyway, I don’t know nothing about no boat. All right?’

  ‘Tell that to Tess. See if she believes you. It’s her dad’s boat as it happens. She’ll be here in a minute.’

  As suddenly as he’d turned sour he’s his usual self again – or what I thought then was his usual self: laid back, smiling that annoyingly handsome smile.

  ‘You’re dripping,’ he says.

  Jackson Pollock squiggles cover the floor at my feet, expressionist doodle of my feelings while I’ve been standing there.

  ‘Shit!’ I scrub up the mess with the cloth I keep ready for the purpose, not yet having learned the trick of painting without dribbling.

  ‘Want a hand?’ Adam says when I’m upright again.

  My instinct is to say no, just get out of here. But his incorrigibility, what my mother calls bare-faced cheek, makes me sigh and even smile, and in that short pause it suddenly occurs to me that he might be useful. So instead of chucking him out I say, ‘Why not. I’m taking any help that’s going. You owe me anyway.’

  ‘Great!’ He might just have been given a present he’s wanted for years. ‘Where do I start?’

  ‘Finish the window I’m working on. It’ll soon be too dark to see properly. While you’re doing that, I’ll get some more wood for the fire. And listen –’ He’s taking the brush from me. Pongs like a hedge-bottom. Can’t have washed for days. ‘Do me a favour –’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘If you decide to disappear again, leave the brush behind, will you? I can’t afford to pay for a replacement.’

  ‘I’m not going nowhere,’ he says. ‘Not me. It’ll be nice and toasty in here tonight.’

  I don’t reply, didn’t say, ‘Who says you’re staying here tonight?’ or ‘You’ve got another think coming, mate’ or any of the things my guts want me to say. Instead, I smile to myself and go down to the woodstore for logs. If this mutt likes painting so much, I think to myself, then let him. The more he does the sooner the job is finished. Then I’ll chuck him out and get back to normal again. Tess calls me Janus so Janus I’ll be. To guard bridges maybe you have to be. To guard yourself, come to that.

  But I didn’t know what I’d let myself in for.

  5

  When you keep a bridge you develop a third ear tuned to listening for approaching vehicles. I knew the sound of Tess’s bike as well as I knew her voice; heard her coming over the bridge while I was splitting logs in the woodstore. (This was the half-basement under the house formed by the bank falling steeply down from the road to the garden-river level. The loo was in there too, and brass-monkey cold it could be in winter, as well as tools and other gear and the tin bath that’s used in a page or two.)

  By the time I’d lugged the laden log basket up the stairs into the house, she’s talking to Adam. I see them through the window. She’s taken her helmet off, which she never bothers to do unless she plans to stay a while, and is flirting her hair at him, and laughing, and giving him the eye.

  Adam is replying at full throttle with The Grin, The Hand Run Through the Hair, and The Pelvic Thrust. And they’re performing a slow-motion ring-a-ring-a-roses; the courting dance of Homo sapiens.

  I dump the logs and go out.

  ‘Have you asked him?’ I say.

  She doesn’t take her eyes off him. ‘He didn’t do it.’

  ‘You believe him!’

  Adam is preening. I’m sure The Grin has stretched round to the back of his head. The Teeth flash white semaphore in the dusk.

  ‘I remember now.’ She looks at me at last. She’s fizzing. ‘You were in the boat. I came out and talked to you. We decided to pick blackberries. You climbed out and off we went, but you didn’t tie up. I expect it just floated away.’

  ‘So it’s my fault now!’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean that. I should have noticed.’

  ‘Oh, thanks! Maybe you should have noticed that I’d already tied up before you came out.’

  ‘You had?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, well, I don’t remember. And what’s it matter. Listen, I was just saying to Adam –’ She turns, they do a Grin-Giggle-Hands-Through-Hair-Eyeballing-Pelvicthrusting exchange, and then she looks at me again. ‘I’ll nip home, have tea and come back about seven, OK? We can talk then.’

  But does not stay for an answer.

  ‘Good thinking,’ Adam says.

  ‘See you,’ Tess says, and winks at me as she passes.

  [– I know you’ve got to tell this story the way you remember it, but this last scene just isn’t right. I wasn’t the way you describe me at all. I was never that flirty. I know you’ll tell all the embarrassing details when the time comes, but at this point I do
n’t recognize myself And if you get me wrong here, aren’t you likely to get me even more wrong later when more important things are happening?

  I know people remember the same events quite differently. And I know you’re trying to tell what happened to Adam and Gill and me and yourself the way you saw it then, rather than the way you think about it now, but still you can’t tell it only like that, can you? Well, yes, you can but that will give a very distorted view of us.

  You’re always going on about how one person’s understanding of anything is only part of the truth – how no one ever really knows everything, or ever knows enough. So how are you going to get more than your own partial understanding of what went on between all four of us into your version of our story?

  What I know is, in case you go on getting me as wrong as you just have, I reserve the right to tell my bit of the story in my own way at some point.]

  6

  As we watch Tess putter away, the stink of hedge-bottom twitches my nose.

  ‘Look,’ I say, ‘you’re not ponging the place out again. Before we eat you’re having a bath.’

  ‘Yes, Dad,’ Adam says. ‘Lead me to the water.’

  There was no bathroom complete with all mod cons, only one of those galvanized tin tubs, wider at one end than the other, like a man-sized sardine can without a lid. Or a coffin, depending on your mood. You see them in old photos of working-class houses, where they’re usually hanging on the wall outside the back door. The Road to Wigan Pier through D.H. Lawrence country. The toll-house tub was kept in the basement, had to be carried up to the living room when needed, where it had to be filled by using a length of hosepipe from the only hot tap in the place, which was at the kitchen sink.

  There was an immersion heater in a tank in the roof above the sink, but as I had to pay for the electricity out of my piffling wage, I used it as little as possible. An electric kettle was enough for ordinary purposes, or, better still because it cost nothing if the fire was in, an old iron cauldron Bob Norris had given me, which I kept simmering on the hearth.

  Two or three times during my pre-Adam weeks Mrs Norris took pity and persuaded me to have a bath in their house. ‘I’m sure it’s easier than all that palaver, and you can give yourself a good soak,’ she said and, laughing, ‘You must look like a man half drowned in his coffin sat in that affair.’ I’ve always liked Mrs Norris. She has the knack of being kind without making you feel obligated or done good to.

  If I hoped all the palaver of bathing would put Adam off staying more than a night I was wrong. He revels in it like a kid in his play pool. And makes about as much mess.

  While I clear up the painting gear from where he’s dumped it (labourer now even to my own labourer, I grumble to myself), he prepares a place in front of the fire, lugs the tub up from the basement, strips, then ponces about with the length of hosepipe, obscenely camping up a weird song which he’s learned from God knows where.

  ‘Old Roger is dead and gone to his grave,

  He, Hi, gone to his grave.

  They planted an apple-tree over his head.

  The apples grew ripe and ready to drop,

  He, Hi, ready to drop.

  There came an old woman of Hippertihop,

  He, Hi, Hippertihop,

  She began a-picking them up,

  He, Hi, Hippertihop.

  Old Roger up and gave her a knock,

  He, Hi, gave her a knock.

  Which made the old woman go hippertihop.

  He, Hi, Hippertihop.

  He . . . Hi . . . Hip . . . hip . . . hippertee . . . hop!’

  Funny, raunchy, lightly done – I can’t help watching and I can’t help laughing. Even though a part of me wants to stop him – for I didn’t like the way he was taking my place over, turning it into a kind of theatre for himself.

  Of himself would be more accurate. What fixed me was, yes, his energy and the comedy of his randy send-up of this silly song (which I only discovered afterwards is a nursery rhyme – God, the things we stuff into children’s heads!). He’d make an amazing actor, the kind who compels attention all the time, not just because of his talent, but because of his unpredictable personality, the game he plays of pretending to act a part which is actually a disguise for revealing a truth about himself. Yet at the same time he’s so crafty in displaying the disguise that the audience are never quite sure whether they’re seeing the character who belongs in the play or the actor himself.

  It was then, that evening, that I was won over by Adam. Won over to him I mean. Yes, sure, for a while I kept up a pretence of not wanting him around, but it was only pretence. Another pretending, this time as self-protection. From that evening on he fascinated me. As I watched him perform I felt he was ruled by some deeply hidden, risky secret. And I wanted to know what it was.

  7

  When he’s done, and we’ve cleared up the mess he’s made and I’ve cooked beans on toast, we sit either side of the table, Adam’s skin still glowing.

  ‘Look,’ I say, ‘there’s some things we better sort out.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like I don’t know anything about you.’

  A suspicious look while he shovels beans, his fork in a fist-grip.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Yes, if you’re staying. No promises though.’

  ‘Cautious bugger.’

  ‘Cautious maybe, anal screwer never. For a start, what’s your name?’

  ‘. . . Adam!’

  ‘But Adam what?’

  ‘Adam in the back seat. Adam in the hay. Adam on the kitchen table.’

  ‘Groan. I meant your last name.’

  ‘Haven’t made my mind up yet.’

  ‘Oh, come on! Stop messing about.’

  ‘It’s true. Never knew my parents. Brought up in a children’s home. They made me leave when I was sixteen. So I reckon I can have whatever name I like. Nobody else cares a toss so what’s the odds.’

  ‘Well, how old are you now?’

  ‘Seventeen. Just.’

  ‘And what have you done since they chucked you out?’

  ‘Odd jobs and that. But I wanted to travel a bit so I come down here. Haven’t had much luck with a job though.’

  I gave him a long stare.

  ‘That’s not what you said before.’

  He didn’t look at me. Went on shovelling beans.

  ‘When?’

  ‘In the boat, going to the Pike.’

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘That you’d been chucked out of home by your father because you were always having rows and he was unemployed and you had two sisters still at school.’

  Now The Grin. The Teeth. The Eyes. The Unblinking Gaze.

  I gaze back, unblinking, unsmiling, daring him. ‘Not that I believed you.’

  ‘No? . . . Yes, well, I made it up, didn’t I.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t want everybody knowing your personal details. Never know who you’re talking to. People take advantage.’

  ‘Have I?’

  The Grin vanishes, leaving a blank-faced cold look, and suddenly occupying the eyes the other Adam, the one I’d always sensed behind The Grin – wary, troubled, a little frightened, the one who made me curious.

  ‘Not yet,’ the other Adam said.

  Then The Grin banishes him again.

  I say, trying to keep my own eyes steady, ‘Why should I believe the orphan story?’

  He shrugs, lifts his plate and, his eyes still on me, licks it clean.

  ‘Good, that,’ he says, putting the plate down.

  I scowl.

  He brazens it out. ‘Want me to wash up?’

  I don’t respond.

  ‘All right,’ he says after a long pause, ‘I’ll tell you. But you have to promise to keep it to yourself. I don’t want other people knowing. Not Tess, neither.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I just don’t, that’s all.’

  ‘Depends what it is.’

  ‘Nothing
bad. I just don’t want people knowing.’

  ‘Why me, then?’

  ‘Well, like you said, you’ve been OK.’

  ‘And you want to stay.’

  ‘Yes, well, that as well.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘Cross my heart.’

  He huffs and toys with his fork for a while, then sighs and says, ‘I was adopted. When I was little. A baby. They told me when I was eight. All this stuff about how it was better for me than for other kids because they chose me. Other kids – their parents just had to take whatever they got. They were all right, my parents. The people I called my parents. They were nice and everything. But I just couldn’t accept it. I hated being adopted. It felt like a disease. I wanted to know who my real parents were but they wouldn’t tell me. Said they didn’t know. When I was grown up, they said, I could try and find out for myself, if I still wanted to know. I hated them for that. I thought they ought to find out for me. I thought they ought to want to know for themselves. I mean, wouldn’t you – wouldn’t you want to know? Where you come from? Why they, why they got rid of you? Had to. Or wanted to. Or were made to. Sometimes that happens, doesn’t it, young girls, they make them give their kids away. Don’t they? Anyway, I kept asking, kept on and on, wanting to know, and them saying they couldn’t find out, weren’t allawed to find out. I didn’t believe them. This went on till I was thirteen, fourteen, and we started having fights about it. I’d shout, call them all the names I could think of, break the place up, do anything to upset them. I was only trying to make them find out. I ran away once, tried to, but the police caught me before I got far. I hadn’t planned it, just did it on the spur of the minute, so I bungled it. But that decided me. I planned the next time, every detail. Day, time, what to take, where to go, how to get there, how to cover my tracks, not leave clues, even disguised myself – dyed my hair, wore glasses, changed my clothes as soon as I was out of town. I reckoned they’d find out what clothes were missing and describe them to the police, thinking that’s what I was wearing. So I’d bought some things specially and stashed them in a hut and changed into them. I saved money for months. Read about living rough. Did everything I could think of to make sure I’d get away and not be picked up again. Just wanted to vanish. And then, when they’d forgotten about me, or given up, and I could move around openly again, then I’d find out about my real parents. And when I know that, then I’ll decide who I belong to. What my last name is. Who I am.’