The Toll Bridge (2 page)

Around Christmas – God, the play-acting you have to do at Christmas! – the Great Depression set in. At first my parents put it down to anxiety about the coming exams. Teachers dismissed it as a side effect of being a year ahead of other people my age, plus tiredness – the price any over-achiever working hard enough in his final year had to pay for success. ‘Keep at it,' they said, ‘you can relax in the summer.'

By Easter what my father called The Glums weren't any longer patches of ‘being low' now and then, but were a permanent monstrous misery. Even Gill, my girlfriend, started to complain. And she, egged on by Mother, harried me into seeing our doctor. Who tested for glandular fever, coyly referred to as ‘the kissing disease' (negative), diabetes (clear), anaemia (full-blooded), and finally pronounced a chronic case of old-fashioned growing pains for which he prescribed a course of vitamin pills. One more boring routine to add to all the others.

Result: The Glums worsened, dragging with them clouds of lowering headaches that broke into sudden storming rages which usually ended in rows and me smashing anything smashable, preferably items of Mother's favourite knick-knackery.

Otherwise, when not slogging through school work, I spent hours locked in my room brooding on the more satisfying aspects of being pissed off and the likely rewards of self-slaughter. Among which was
the pleasure of taking others with me, especially Gill (spite: couldn't leave her behind for others to get their gropers on) and the cheerier yahoos at school (revenge, there being nothing more infuriating when you're depressed than other people's high spirits).

One of the rows finally brought everything to a head. Exams over, nobody wanted to go on coddling this whingeing creep (except Mother of course). And Gill it was who finally flashed the storm that ended with me deciding I'd had enough. People disgusted me. I disgusted myself. I wanted out.

The way out turned up in the wanted ads. (Well, when you're depressed you try anywhere.) Next after:
Condom Testers Required
–
help a leading rubber company design next year's chart toppers
 . . . (think of all the times you'd have to do it on command, tumescent or not) was this:

‘You'll starve,' joked Father, ‘you can't boil an egg.'

‘Who'll do your laundry?' cried Mother. ‘I'll be worried sick, you living on your own, no neighbours, no phone, anything might happen.'

‘You'll be three hours away even by car,' wailed Gill. ‘How are we going to see each other?'

‘What a mangy option,' scoffed the lads.

‘Taking money from a few passing cars all day hardly sounds academically challenging,' objected teachers. ‘If you want time out, go abroad, see life, gain some experience, don't stick yourself away in a dead-end job in the middle of nowhere.'

‘I'll learn to cook, I'll do my own laundry, maybe it will be good for us to be apart for a while, I want a change from academic challenge, thank you – I want to be on my own and challenge myself and experience
my
life before I find out about other people's,' I said to scornful snickers, doubting glances, dour looks, exasperated eyebrows, huffings, puffings, and shoulders hucked against this perverse (Mother's version was pre-verse) teenager.

3

Tarzan's yodels woke me, followed by loud splashings from the river. My watch says six fifty, and Adam's makeshift bed – a few cushions and a blanket on the floor – is abandoned.

He can't be up already, can he, not after last night? And not in the river again?

I pull on my jeans and stumble to the back-door steps from where I can view the toll-house garden and the river.

Adam is clambering out of the water, glistening in the light of the morning sun filtered through a shrouding autumn mist. Shot from a TV commercial. Deodorant or Diet Pepsi.

A tree, its leaves turning paler shades of brown, droops over the water. From a riverside branch hangs a rope. I don't remember seeing it there before. Adam, unaware of me yet, runs, grabs the rope, swings wildly to and fro, flinging himself higher and higher, the motion shaking from the tree a shower of dying leaves. When he is as far out above the river as the rope can carry him, he hollers his jungle call, lets go, and plummets, neat as a needle, feet first into the water. To surface seconds later, splashing and blowing and tossing his head and swimming briskly for the bank.

This time he sees me as he climbs out, and stands beaming like a kid let loose after a bad term at school, slicking water from his face. Definitely deodorant.

I shiver and call, ‘Aren't you cold?'

‘It's a great game. Ever played it?'

‘No,' I lie.

But why lie? I had played it – with Dad in one of his crazy moods when I was a kid.

Some memories are not for telling, I thought then, standing at the back door blearily clocking Adam and not knowing how wrong I was.

4

Adam followed me inside.

I hand him a towel while I wash. When I'm done, I go into the bedroom to finish dressing, and tidy up. I'm an obsessive tidier, inheritance from chronically tidy parents. (You can't buck all of your upbringing. Being a tidier is one of the roles I have no choice about playing because it is written in my genes. During blue periods I resent it all the more for that.)

Coming back into the living room, Adam passes me on his way to the bedroom. We avoid each other's eyes.

I set about making breakfast. Bread, honey, tea. Even now, I never bother with anything more than this, hating all the business of getting up in the morning.

Adam reappears, towel round his shoulders, still damp jeans and sweater in his hands. He lurks just inside the door. I can tell what he's after, and am unsettled. Having put him up for the night, do I want to encourage him by giving anything more?

All the business of giving. When we argued about it I said, as most people do, that taking from people is what makes you beholden. But Adam said, no, if people give you a present, then as far as he was concerned there were no strings. They were paying for something he'd given them, even if he didn't know what it was. But there's another side to giving that we didn't talk about because I only half sensed it then. Which is that giving to people puts you in their debt. I learned this because of Adam. Somehow, once you've given you feel obliged to give again, and to go on giving, and feel mean if you don't. A kind of reverse emotional debt.

[
TESS
: This is male-order talk. Women don't think about giving like that. I've noticed, as soon as you give a man something he wants to give you something back straightaway. I think it's a power thing, as if receiving a gift were some kind of threat he has to neutralize at once or else he'll be in a weak position. Seems to me that for men gifts are a kind of trade-off, which they're not for women. We give without thinking of getting anything back. We do it all the time.]

5

I begin to wonder who Adam is. And what it is about him that worries me. Nothing dangerous exactly, nothing threatening. Something betrayed by the look in his eyes and the way he stands there, silently expecting help. What unsettles me even more, I decide, is that he makes me feel violent. I want to rough him up, hit him, chuck him out, anyway be rid of him. Why, why?

‘They can dry in front of the fire,' I say, ‘if you get it going.'

He crosses to the hearth and dithers.

‘You don't know about wood fires?'

‘No.'

‘I'll do it.'

Last night's ashes, under the powder of their grey deceiving surface, are still hot, quickly ignite a couple of twists of paper, the paper flames a few thin twigs which in turn soon set fire to splits of log.

Three months ago, I tell myself as the fire grows, I didn't know
how to do this either. And feel a kind of satisfaction I haven't felt for a year or more. A pleasure forgotten that makes me smile, and glance at Adam, who is crouching beside me now, wanting the warmth. But he gazes into the flames with a fixed unblinking stare.