The Toll Bridge

by Aidan Chambers

  ‘So you admit it, after all, he is ill! And if he’s ill, you’re not being very responsible keeping him here, are you?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Wait till tomorrow. If he isn’t any better then, we’ll tell your dad and get a doctor. Promise.’

  ‘Another promise.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘One cancels the other out, so what are they worth?’

  Jan took a deep breath, dropped his arms, stared at Tess and said in a quiet placatory tone, ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Make it a game. Let’s be honest, you and me. That’s what makes us possible. It’s what I care about, the best thing we have together.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I want him here . . . I need him here . . . Don’t ask why yet.’

  Tess took that in before giving a scornful self-protective hoot. But she turned away and went back to her seat by the fire.

  Afraid that their noise might have woken Adam, Jan quietly opened the bedroom door and peeped in. Adam was lying on his side, back to the door. Impossible to see if he was awake, but he was very still so Jan closed the door and went back to Tess.

  After that they took care of the practical jobs: cleaning up the boat, returning it to its moorings, cashing up the week’s toll money so that Tess could take it home and give it to her father in the hope that this might forestall a visit tomorrow.

  Tess went off home at teatime, returning later with an extract about concussion jotted down from her mother’s home doctoring book.

  Identification: Pale clammy skin, shallow breathing, fast weak pulse; may vomit or pass water. Disturbance of consciousness may be so slight as to be momentary dizziness or so severe that unconsciousness continues for weeks.

  Treatment: Quiet, dark room, head low until consciousness returns, then raised on two pillows. No stimulants. In severe cases, bed for two weeks at least.

  After efficts: Usually none, except that memory is absent, and sometimes greater memory loss. Headache may persist, and occasion irritability, and lack of concentration, for some weeks.

  This so matched Adam’s condition that they were reassured. And Jan was quite cocky that, partly by accident, he’d administered the right treatment. They agreed Adam was suffering from a moderately bad concussion and that if they went on treating it properly there should be no serious after effects. Only the loss of voice continued to worry them but they decided it was probably safe to do nothing about it till next day.

  In the afternoon they had talked of spending the evening together huddled by the fire. Snow had begun to fall, big white feathery flakes that sidled lazily down from a leaden sky. But when the time came to settle themselves they both felt so drained, so weary, that the prospect of sitting by the fire talking to each other had lost its attraction. They wanted to be together, wanted to repair the damage, wanted comfort from each other, wanted to be encouraged and reassured, wanted in fact to be coddled, but neither yet possessed the knowing confidence, in themselves or in each other, to say so. And anyway, mistaking tiredness for signs of irritation – he had never seen her so exhausted before – Jan suspected Tess was fed up with him for leaving the party and, worse, for opposing her over Adam. Tess, for her part, mistook Jan’s silences for sullen resentment at what she had done in the house and at her springing Gill on him, when all his silences actually meant was that he was too beat to talk.

  So nothing of their real desires was uttered. Instead Tess said, ‘I’m dog tired,’ and Jan said, ‘Me too,’ and Tess added, ‘Perhaps I’ll just slope off home and flop out early,’ and Jan sighed and said, ‘Sure. See you tomorrow about twelve, OK? Give me time to work on Adam a bit,’ and Tess trudged off, torn between relief and disappointment and feeling deeply discomfited inside herself at the way the day was ending.

  Jan, when she had gone, sat staring into the fire. When he eventually came to, he damped the fire down for the night, used the loo, cleaned his teeth, locked the doors, put out the lights and undressed in the dark before slipping quietly into the bedroom. There he had left a candle burning for Adam should he wake and wonder where he was. He was still lying curled up on his side, but facing the door now. Jan bent over him to check he was all right and saw frightened wide-awake eyes gazing back at him, unblinking, large – hypnotic at that moment in their effect.

  What then happened seemed, even at the time, like an inevitable natural culmination of all that had gone before. Suddenly sitting up, Adam flung his arms round Jan, clinging like a child frightened by a nightmare. Jan’s immediate impulse was to push him away, but before he could recover from his surprise enough to do this, a deeper instinct took control and he was hugging Adam as resolutely as Adam was clinging to him, one hand stroking the feverish skin of Adam’s back, the other holding Adam’s head firmly against his own, and he was murmuring a kind of litany, ‘It’s all right, it’s OK, I’m here, I’m with you, you’re safe, we’re alone, there’s no one else, don’t worry, it’s all right.’

  They remained like this for a long time, until the tension in Adam’s body was soothed away and he relaxed the urgent fierceness of his embrace. But still he held on, and when at last Jan tried to ease his position Adam gripped tightly again to prevent him letting go. Not that Jan wanted to. The satisfaction he felt was so complete and, he acknowledged to himself, so long desired, that he wanted it never to end.

  After a while he became aware of the icy cold of the room chilling the exposed parts of their bodies. Reaching out with a hand, he fumbled for the duvet which he pulled over them as he and Adam shuffled down into the bed, rearranging the mesh of legs and arms till they lay comfortably wrapped together.

  Soon afterwards Adam began breathing the heavy rhythms of deep settled sleep, and Jan heard through his bones the slow primeval pulse of Adam’s heart. For a few more minutes he revelled in the press of Adam’s body against his own, the warm moist fusion of skin on skin, the touch of his fingers caressing the firm contours of Adam’s limbs, and he thought: Now I am myself, will never want more for myself than this. Then he too drifted into his first dreamless, peaceful, surrendered, reviving sleep since the start of his headaches and the onset of The Glums.

  Jan was woken by the cawing of the raven. For a moment he drifted in that blissful limbo before consciousness fully returns. Then the raven croaked again and everything came instantly back. He was suddenly aware of being alone, and not in his own bed either, but Adam’s, and of the duvet irritatingly tangled, and of the dim grey miserly early morning light, and the chilly, slightly fetid, damp-fingered air in the room, but also of a warm glow inside himself as from embers hidden at the heart of a night-banked fire.

  Anxious about Adam, he struggled to his feet, groaning at the stiffness of his body, the ache in his muscles, and pulled his clothes on fast, gritting his teeth against their icy shock. He thought fleetingly of his centrally heated room at home (home?) and was pleased with himself for not regretting it even at that moment. He wanted to be where he was, was glad of it. Of course he knew this surety was for Adam; and knew in his bones it could not last long and that its end might be painful. But in the longing of the moment he didn’t care. Nor did he yet know the reality of such a pain, never having suffered it before. Knowledge of consequences, after all, depends on at least a little experience of them. Sensing the possibility isn’t enough, which is why it is so hard to learn anything that matters without living at least a sliver of it.

  Adam was standing stock-still in the middle of the road gazing up at the toll-house roof where, Jan knew, the raven must be perched. He was holding out his right arm and making clucking noises with his tongue and saying, as he might to a child, ‘Come on, come on down, duck duck duck, come on then.’

  Thank God, Jan thought, he’s talking!

  But there was something pathetic about the sight. And when Jan appeared the raven took off, flapping away over the bridge. Adam turned on the spot, arm still raised, following the bird’s flight. Dressed only in his (Jan’s) tattered sweater
and distressed jeans, no socks or shoes, he paid no attention to Jan but went on staring after the raven, even when it dipped out of sight behind a parcel of trees a field away on the other side of the river. The previous day’s snow had vanished. The trees were bare black bones.

  Jan waited a moment before saying as lightly as he could, ‘Talking to the birds!’

  There was a long pause before Adam said, ‘It wouldn’t come.’

  ‘No . . . Maybe, you didn’t speak the right language.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Adam said, an edge of mimicry in his voice, ‘and maybe it never happened.’

  ‘It happened. And your voice has come back. That’s the main thing. Come inside. You’ll freeze to death out here.’

  ‘Good,’ Adam said, but turned and went into the house. Leaving Adam to brood, less anxious about him now he was talking again, Jan revived the fire, prepared breakfast, which he made more substantial than usual, boiling the last of the eggs because he thought Adam would be hungry and anyway needed nourishment. While he was busy Adam stalked about, the restlesss, angry, desperate, defeated, slow, irritating tread of a caged animal.

  They ate, Adam wolfing his food, hardly noticing, saying nothing, eyes avoiding Jan, who, eating very little in small bites, struggled to keep more than his thoughts to himself, for what he wanted most was to reach across the table and take Adam’s hands in his own. But intuition – his newly trusted guide – warned him that Adam would shy away from such intimacy.

  He thought: I’ve never been faced with anything like this before – somebody of my own age who is so unhappy. But I recognize the look. I’ve felt like that. He’s badly hurt and I can help. What matters is that I treat him decently. As far as I’m concerned – me myself and what he does to me, what he means to me – I need to work that out on my own for myself and honestly face the truth of it.

  Wondering what to do, he remembered Tess sitting with him when he was in the pit of The Glums those few weeks ago that seemed at this moment like so many months ago. Her sitting with him, knowing that all she could do and what he most needed was that she be there with him – enough just by being there, physically there and not fussing, not harassing him with busy helpfulness, but simply waiting with him till he was ready for more and then providing the energy, the willpower, the impetus he needed to live eagerly again.

  How wise she had been, how truly loving, how truly a friend. And why? Why had she given herself to him in that way? Had she been utterly unselfish? Was there such a state as utter selflessness? He doubted it.

  What he did know was that he was not so unselfish in wanting to help Adam. There was, if nothing else, a physical reward. Till last night he had never known the power of physicality. Not cock-pleasure, but satisfaction of the body. Flesh and bone on flesh and bone. And the gut-felt, beyond-thought need of it. His argument with Adam about gifts came to mind.

  He cleared away the breakfast things, brought a book, allowed himself to move his chair to Adam’s side of the table so that he was in reach should Adam want him, and there settled down to read with whatever patience he could muster. I am Janus, he thought, guarding the bridge, biding my time. Dually watchful. Of the other, of myself. Of outer, of inner. Of my him, of my her. Constant ambivalence, happy ambiguity.

  Ten, fifteen minutes went by.

  Then Adam said in a sudden rush, ‘Last night . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m not gay.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t mind, just, I’m not.’

  ‘Didn’t think you were.’

  ‘Didn’t want you jumping to wrong ideas, that’s all. Didn’t want to disappoint you.’ He attempted a smile.

  ‘I wasn’t. It’s OK.’

  ‘Don’t know why I did it. Never done nothing like that before.’

  ‘What’s wrong with having a cuddle?’

  ‘Well – it just happened, that’s all.’

  ‘You’ve had a rough time. Wanted some comfort. I was the only one around. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Didn’t seem too surprised.’

  ‘Maybe I needed a cuddle as well.’

  Adam said nothing.

  Jan said, ‘And I’m here if you want any more.’

  They sat in silence again. The fire crackling, an occasional vehicle crossing the bridge, the constant muffled surge of the river, never as loud inside the house during the day as it seemed during the night. Listening with pin-drop extra sharpness, Jan realized how much he had come to love the river and its ever-present noise, its slip and slide, its shifty moods, its always-the-same never-the-sameness, the hidden mystery of its opaque uncertain depths, its changing colours, the vein of it flowing through the countryside, and he remembered the holiday he and his father spent along this very reach, when he was twelve, the last wonderful week of his childhood, when each evening after their day’s boating, his father read aloud from The Wind in the Willows, the book that had been the favourite of his childhood, and still Jan vividly recalled the passage that came at the end of their first exciting day, when Mole asks Rat whether he really lives by the river and Rat replies, By it and with it and on it and in it. It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It’s my world and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing. Lord! the times we’ve had together! Whether in winter or summer, spring or autumn, it’s always got its fun and its excitements, and he had thought how glorious that was, and in his father’s face was the look of a boy the age of Jan himself, and for a strange moment he felt as if he and his father were the same age, boys together sharing this riverbome holiday without any adults to harbour them, and the next day they rowed their dinghy and Jan caught a crab just as Mole does in the episode his father read out that evening, while they giggled till tears ran and hugged each other and said what a day they’d had, and next day, his father, still in his boyhood mood, tied a rope to a tree overhanging the river and showed Jan how to play Tarzan just as Adam had his first morning at the bridge and Jan had said he had never played it for fear of what he might have to admit if he said yes and told all.

  ‘Tell me again what you told me yesterday,’ Adam said.

  ‘About you being here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Jan retold the story, more shaped this time after yesterday’s rehearsal.

  ‘Don’t remember any of that,’ Adam said afterwards, ‘none of it. Doesn’t even sound like me.’

  ‘Want to see the photos again?’

  ‘If you like.’

  He pored over them, pursing his lips and shaking his head.

  ‘I’ve never decorated nowhere, don’t know a song like the one you say I camped up.’

  ‘How’d you know if you don’t remember anything even from before you came here?’

  Adam eyed him warily. ‘Just do, that’s all.’

  ‘Have you remembered something?’

  Adam lowered his head to the photos and withdrew into silence.

  Unable to sit still any longer Jan left Adam to his brooding and set about the housekeeping chores. Made the beds, tidied the bedroom, washed up the breakfast things, fetched wood for the fire, swept up ashes from the hearth. It was then he remembered Gill’s bag left by Tess behind the armchair. He took it into the bedroom, intending to stow it there till he was ready to return it.

  But in the bedroom curiosity got the better of him. And more: a desire to handle Gill’s belongings, to touch things that had intimately touched her.

  As he unzipped the bag and spread it open the familiar smell of Gill’s body breathed out, a mix of talcum powder, her soap (Cusson’s Imperial Leather), her favourite perfume (‘Penelope’ by Lauren, which she wore because Jan had given her a small bottle as a birthday present), and the faint musky tang of her sweat. His nose twitched and his mouth watered, and he felt an echo of her hand caressing him between the thighs, which made him feel suddenly very lonely.

 
He eased the crotch of his jeans and began unpacking. Conscious of his illicit behaviour, he treated each item with delicate fingertip care, laying them out neatly on the bed.

  Aubergine jumper.

  Breton-sailor-style T-shirt, one of his that Gill had ‘borrowed’ because she wanted something of his to wear.

  Two large sloppy T-shirts, one white with Shakespeare’s head on the front in black (bought on a visit they’d made together to Stratford) and a plain red one.

  Pair of washed-out pale blue cuff-frayed jeans.

  Three pairs of flimsy pink cotton panties.

  Flimsy halter bra to match (memories of the pleasure of removing it).

  Two pairs of socks: one pair pink; one pair white-and-red stripes.

  Traveller’s electric hair drier trailing the twisted snake of its umbilical cord.

  Orange and yellow polka-dotted hand towel.

  Mauve toilet bag with pattern of blue and yellow Matisse flowers containing:

  pink small-handled toothbrush,

  small tube of peppermint ‘Sensodyne’ toothpaste,

  Body Shop lipstick, mascara, lip balm, face powder, powder brush, little case of make-up like a child’s paint box, eye-shadow pencil,

  small bottle of Johnson’s Baby Oil,

  roll-on odourless deodorant,

  small bottle of Balsam shampoo,

  packet of six ‘Extra-safe, Extra-sensitive, Featherlite’ condoms – ‘gossamer thin for that intimate touch’.

  He held the packet of condoms in the palm of his hand, thinking of the message it bore of a time that might have been and Gill must have hoped would be; and remembering their times together before. Collision of past and present, of sight and smell and touch.

  He sat on the edge of the bed surveying Gill’s possessions, acutely aware as never before of the difference, the otherness of the female from the male: different other smell and texture, difference of weight, difference – he searched for a word, for a phrase that named the deepest, most different difference and found: density of being.