The Toll Bridge (37 page)

Across the gardens I could see Aston-Adam working in his enclosure, standing on a crate, hammering a paling into the ground, the beginning of his fortification. Boy at play, young man at work.

I said, ‘I don't understand what's happening to him now, though.'

‘He came back in deep depression. His leg was in plaster of course. He couldn't be very active and needed quite a bit of nursing just to keep him physically healthy. For a few days he remained like that, a depressed immobile frightened angry patient. But then he began to withdraw completely into himself, would say nothing at all, and started behaving like a child.'

‘A kind of regression?'

‘Regression suggests something negative, or a going back, as if life were a linear journey, birth point A to death point Z. I don't see it like that.'

‘How then?'

‘We coexist as our
selves.
We are multiple beings. A mix of actualities and potentialities. One of the many things the so-called mentally ill have taught me is that we so-called healthy people are not very good at exploring our possible selves. Perhaps because we feel reasonably happy with the selves we are living. But perhaps we are the most imprisoned of all because of that. Whereas the mentally ill, being uncomfortable with their actual selves, sometimes explore their potentialities and find selves they like better and try them out.'

‘But surely with Adam, I mean Aston, it's another flight, isn't it? He's become what he was once before.'

‘Not quite. As a boy of eleven he couldn't have done what he's doing now as well as he's doing it. He's being eleven only as a seventeen-year-old young man can be eleven.'

‘But why eleven?'

‘Because that was the happiest time of his life, just before the onset of the bad feelings about himself, the feelings of powerlessness, of always being a loser, a failure, of never making it, and always being picked on, that ended with the murder. In that sense, the murder was
a mistake he couldn't correct. What do you do when you've made a mistake you can't put right?'

‘Start again?'

‘But you don't just go back to the point before you got into difficulties, you also use what you've learned from the experience of getting it wrong to help you get it right next time. We do that in everyday life all the time. Aston is doing it rather more dramatically and obviously, that's all.'

‘No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.'

‘Clever.'

‘Beckett.'

‘What?'

‘Quoting. Irritating habit. Samuel Beckett.'

‘Ah yes, well, he's right. The secret of a happy life.'

‘And the Crusoe stuff? How did that start?'

‘After he became eleven he was cheerful of course, and much more active. Instead of being withdrawn, he was quite a busy handful. He took no notice of his plastered-up leg. Paid it no attention. Just hobbled about regardless. So he'd have a plausible reason for it we told him he'd fallen out of a tree while climbing.'

‘What did you tell him was the reason for being locked up?'

‘He never asked. Perhaps the deep secret mind of his soul screened the question from his conscious everyday mind because it knew better than to let the question be asked.'

‘You mean, we only ask what we need to know?'

‘Something like that. Shall I go on?'

‘Please.'

‘In what we call the family room there are books and magazines. Among them was the comic-strip version of
Crusoe
that you saw. Aston became very attached to it. Acquired it as his own property, read it and read it, time and again. Not only that, he started talking about the story during his therapy sessions. When I realized this was more than a passing fancy, I bought him the copy he showed you of the original novel. He devoured it, every word. Began talking about Robinson, as he always calls Crusoe, all the time, as if he were alive and his best friend. He'd tell the story to anyone who'd listen.'

‘So he started to identify with Crusoe.'

‘No, no! You're missing the point. He doesn't believe himself to
be
Crusoe – that would be a kind of madness, and Aston isn't mad, not at all. As I say, Crusoe is his friend, a companion, someone he
admires and likes, who helps him through life, especially at a difficult time.'

‘So why
Crusoe
? Why that book?'

‘Now come on, don't leave all the work to me.'

‘Well – whatever the reason, you'll let him play it out? Build the fence and live like Crusoe and all that?'

‘We'll see, I expect so, if that's what he needs.'

‘Even sleep in his tent and everything?'

‘I doubt that he'll want to. You're quite right, it is a kind of play. A very serious game. You saw how he behaved. He knows what he's doing, takes it totally seriously, but knows he's playing, knows the boundary between the everyday real and the imaginary real. Both are real and he knows the rules that apply to each.'

‘But how long will it go on?'

‘Sometimes a phase like this doesn't last more than a few days, sometimes it can go on for years.'

‘And how will it end? Will he become his proper age again?'

‘I'm waiting to find out. It's like a story with an ending you can't quite predict. It might end the way you think it will from all the clues, or there might be a twist in the tail. Or there might be no conclusive ending at all, it might just stop, in the middle of a sentence even. It's my job to stay with the story and help him if I can while Aston works it out for himself. He'll devise his own ending when he's ready, which means when he's got everything out of the story – out of the act of telling it – that's useful to him. Then, perhaps, he'll move on to another story, try out another imagined real, another version of himself, become yet another Aston. Till eventually he may even become the person the deep secret mind of his soul wants him to be, and then we'll say he's cured, though all we'll mean is that he doesn't need me or anyone like me any more, because this story is enough to keep him going on his own. He'll be content with himself.'

One of the warders came up to us.

‘Wanted inside, doc. Darren trouble again.'

‘Be right there.' The doctor stood up and held out his hand. ‘Got to go, sorry. Duty calls.'

I shook his hand. ‘Is it OK for me to come again?'

‘If you like. If you need to. And not too often. It won't mean anything to Aston of course. But if it would make you feel better –'

‘It would. I mean, if he becomes the Adam who remembers me
again, I'd like to be there, if he wants – Well . . . you understand?'

‘I think so. You've also got a story to tell. Everybody has.'

The publishers gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint the following:

‘The Bridge' from
Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories
by Franz Kafka.

Copyright 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1954, © 1958, 1971

Schocken Books Inc. Reprinted by permission of Schocken Books, published by

Pantheon Books, a division of Random House Inc. English translation. reprinted by permission of Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd.

This translation first published in England in 1973 by Martin Secker & Warburg Limited,

14 Carlisle Street, London WIV 6NN. Copyright © 1934, 1937 by Heinr. Mercy Sohn, Prague.

Copyright © 1946, 1947, 1958 by Schocken Books Inc.

This translation copyright © 1973 by Martin Seeker and Warburg Ltd.

Aidan Chambers lives in Gloucestershire with his American wife, Nancy, who is the editor of
Signal
magazine. He divides his time between his own writing and lecturing which he does extensively in Australia, the USA and Europe. His provocative and challenging novels for teenagers and young adults have won him international acclaim.

Postcards from No Man's Land
is the fifth novel in what he perceives as a sequence; this starts with
Breaktime
, continues with
Dance on my Grave
, and carries on through
Now I Know
to
The Toll Bridge.

A sixth book is planned. Each novel stands on its own exploring a different aspect of contemporary adolescence.

BREAKTIME

DANCE ON MY GRAVE

NOW I KNOW

POSTCARDS FROM NO MAN'S LAND

THE TOLL BRIDGE

AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 409 01281 8

Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,

an imprint of Random House Children's Publishers UK

A Random House Group Company

This ebook edition published 2012

Copyright © Aidan Chambers, 1992

First Published in Great Britain

Red Fox 1992

The right of Aidan Chambers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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