The Toll Bridge Read online

  Adam said, ‘He was spewing half the night.’

  ‘I’ll get up.’

  Tess said, ‘You might be better in bed. Was it something you ate?’

  Adam said, ‘We both had the same.’

  He was, as ever, the epitome of health, being one of those people who look tanned even in the dead of winter.

  ‘I’m all right.’

  They looked at me like mourners surveying a corpse.

  ‘Shove off. I want to get dressed.’

  ‘If you’re sure,’ Tess said.

  ‘I’m sure, I’m sure. Go!’

  They went, closing the door behind them. There was mumbling from outside before Tess’s bike started and drove off, not over the bridge, as it should have done if she were on her way to school, but towards the village. So I wasn’t surprised when Bob Norris turned up twenty minutes later in his van, Tess puttering along behind. By then I was sitting by the fire, feeling like Lazarus, nibbling half-heartedly on a piece of dry bread, which was the only food I could face.

  ‘Traitor,’ I muttered at Tess when she and her father came in with that apprehensive look people wear when visiting the uncertain sick. Adam, who had been outside taking tolls, tagged along behind.

  ‘What’s this?’ Bob Norris said in his foreman’s bantering style, which he hadn’t been using much lately. ‘Skiving, is it? Day off? General strike? Go slow? What?’

  ‘Inquisition followed by public burning, by the looks,’ I said trying to respond in kind, but it sounded more like accusation than joke. While I sat quiet I seemed fairly normal; as soon as I spoke, or worse, moved, I knew I wasn’t.

  ‘Haven’t lost your appetite, I see.’

  ‘Favourite breakfast, dry bread.’

  ‘Stomach is it? Bad chest, snotty nose, dizzy head?’

  ‘Flu, I expect. Nothing to bother about.’

  ‘Sick in the night though.’

  I glared at Tess.

  ‘Painter’s colic,’ Bob Norris went on. ‘Breathing those fumes for too long. Not enough fresh air. Not enough ventilation. Windows shut at night to keep out the cold.’

  ‘I’ll take a walk.’

  ‘You’ll do nothing of the sort. You’ll come home with me in the van. The wife’ll see to you. You need some time out of here and a day or two recuperating before things get worse.’ He turned to Adam, who was leaning in the doorway. ‘Can you cope without him?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Tess said, ‘I could stay and help. We’re not doing much at school.’

  Her father gave her a wry glance. ‘You’ve done your bit for today, girl. Best get going, you’re late already.’

  ‘Girl indeed!’ Tess stretched up, pecked a kiss on his unshaven cheek and said, ‘I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir.’

  ‘Eh?’

  And bending down, pecked a kiss on my cheek too. ‘O, flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified!’ I was too addled to remember what she was quoting. ‘Get well soon, dear Jan.’ And she clumped away in her biking boots. ‘See you, Adam. ‘Bye all.’

  Mrs Norris fed me bread and milk, a potion for sickly children I’d only ever read about in books, hustled me into the spare bedroom, and left me luxuriating between fresh-smelling pink flannelette sheets, a radio playing quietly, curtains drawn against the light, and firm instructions that I must sleep. A brisk good-humoured spoiling quite different from my mother’s all-consuming full-time attention.

  For the rest of that day I drifted pleasantly, cosily, in and out of sleep. In the waking times my mind played with memories of the past year and thoughts about my time at the bridge and about Mother and Dad and everything Dad had told me in his letter, and about Gill and me and my confusion about what I really wanted, and about Adam and Tess and the strangeness of everything, the unlikeliness of all life, the unrealness of its reality. For it wasn’t only because I was mildly ill that other people and life in general seemed such a puzzle, so surprising and beyond understanding, so unknowable, and yet so fascinating. So beautiful and yet so ugly too. In a less fevered way, that is how it was for me always and still is: the surprise and fascination, the otherness, the not-me of it all.

  Lying there in the Norrises’ spare bedroom, gazing dozily at the wallpaper covered in big-patterned dark green vine leaves entwined with huge bunches of ripe red grapes, and at the family knick-knacks neatly grouped on every flat surface, and at the furniture – heavy dark-wood dressing table and matching wardrobe, cane bedside table, wooden milking stool, ancient Windsor rocking chair with bright red cushion – most of which must have come down from generations before, solid and brightly polished as a freshly opened conker, my own deep confusions about myself became all the more disturbing, and I wished that somehow I could belong to the settled, ages-old certainties that the Norrises lived by. But knew I never could, and maybe only wanted to now in a fit of sentimentality brought on by painter’s (melan)colic.

  Among the knick-knacks one especially caught my eye, an object so strange, so unlike any of the others, that I had to get out of bed to pick it up. The size of a small mug, it was crudely hand-made of mud-red clay with a stubby almost straight handle across the top so that the thing was like a small pottery bucket. But for carrying what? Raised from the surface of the mug, to each side of the handle, was a plump face, one solemn and stern and clean-shaven with pursed lips, the other moustached and goatee-bearded and smiling mischievously. The faces were framed by ringlets of hair falling like twined snakes behind the ears – large ears on the stem man – and were circled by a crown, as if both faces belonged to one head.

  I knew as soon as I picked it up that this weird antique must have something to do with the god Janus. And as I caressed its pitted cracked sandy surface, and with a delicious shock found that the pad of my thumb and the tip of my index finger fitted exactly into the hollows where the potter had pressed the ends of the handle into the rim of the vessel, I felt a kind of awe, as if some magnetic power emanated from this ancient piece of crudely shaped clay and took me into its possession. I was suddenly afraid the holy pot might break or even crumble to pieces in my hand, yet did not want to put it down, wanted to keep it with me, hold it to me, hide it on me. I actually had to suppress a strong desire to steal it.

  Ever since that moment I have been able to understand the magic power of sacred objects. I cannot explain how the magic works but I no longer scoff at anyone who believes in it.

  At midday Bob Norris came to see me, bearing a bowl of Mrs Norris’s vegetable soup and a chunk of brown bread. He spotted that I’d placed the Janus on the bedside table where I could look closely at it while I lay in bed.

  ‘Like it?’ he said.

  ‘Very much. How old is it?’

  ‘Roman-Egyptian, circa first century BC – about two thousand two hundred years old. Know what it is?’

  ‘Something to do with Janus?’

  ‘One face is Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and fruitfulness and all vegetation. He bestows ecstasy and is also the god of drama. They used to worship him with very sexy goings-on. The other is Satyr, a goat-like man who drank a lot and danced in the procession behind Dionysus and chased the nymphs. Bit of a randy devil.’

  ‘Quite a pair.’

  ‘And they make Janus, the god of gates and doorways and bridges and of beginnings in general because when you go through a door or cross a bridge you enter something new, a different place. That’s why the Romans made January the first month of the year. For them he was the god of gods, coming even before Jupiter. He’s very very ancient, one of the true gods who was worshipped long before Roman times. They took him over and made him into their own, the way they took over Christianity and turned it into an Imperial religion.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound as if you like the Romans much.’

  ‘I don’t. Totalitarian fascist bunch of thugs.’

  ‘But what was the mug for? Not for drinking out of, surely? You can’t get your nose in.’

  ‘It’s not a mug, it wa
s used for carrying a prayer. When you went to the temple, you bought one, probably from a stall outside, along with a small strip of lead. You etched your prayer into the metal, bent the strip in two so that no one else could read it, put the prayer into the pot, then took the pot into the temple and stood it on the altar as a kind of supplication to the god.’

  ‘Looks like a pretty down-market example, this one.’

  ‘Does, doesn’t it. Made in two halves, each pressed into a mould then joined together, I should think, wouldn’t you? Quickly done. Their equivalent of cheap mass-production probably. You can see the join where the two halves were stuck together, the potter hasn’t even bothered to smooth it off, and there’s pitting on the surface of the faces where the clay wasn’t pressed into the mould firmly enough.’

  ‘And the handle! It looks like the sort of thing we used to roll out with modelling clay in infant school.’

  ‘Have you put your finger inside?’

  ‘Mine fits exactly!’

  ‘It does? My goodness! Mine’s too big.’

  ‘Weird sensation.’

  ‘Wonderful.’

  ‘Fingers abolishing time.’

  ‘Aye, and space. One thing’s for sure – the man who made this doesn’t have a headache any more.’

  We smiled and nodded at each other, acknowledging the kinship of understanding.

  At four thirty, full of fizz, Tess brought up tea and buttered scones along with news that Adam was slogging away at the house and enjoying it all so much he hadn’t stopped to eat anything so she was going back to cook something for them both. They were having a ball, I could tell just from the grin on her face.

  I said, ‘I’ll come.’

  ‘No you won’t, Mum won’t let you. The place reeks of paint, you’d be ill again straightaway.’

  ‘I’m still coming.’

  Tess went to the door and called out, ‘Mum, he says he’s going back to the bridge.’

  Which brought Mrs Norris pounding up the stairs. ‘Oh no he isn’t. You’re staying where you are, young man, you’re staying here tonight, so compose yourself to it.’

  Tess was ushered away, bedclothes were efficiently tidied, Janus returned to his place among the other knick-knacks, the whole room given a critical survey and the door firmly closed. Leaving me to my unwilling isolation and the torture chamber of my imagination, which for the next few hours was filled with gradually more agonizing fantasies in which Tess and Adam performed with enthusiastic gusto all of the sexiest Dionysian dramas in my then, I must admit, not very extensive repertoire.

  I sizzled with desire, sweated with jealousy, prayed to Janus to set me free, groaned with frustration and pique. I was like a lone spectator who, locked in an empty cinema, is forced to watch a film specially made to reduce him to a state of lust-racked blither. And the really ridiculous thing about times like that, the thing I always laugh about later, is that you do it to yourself. You are your own jailer, your own film-maker, your own torturer. The fantasies are your own. It’s your own imagination that invents them and your own will that lets it happen and your own mind that puts the show on. You could stop it at once if you wanted to but you don’t because it gives you some sort of twisted satisfaction. And it’s my belief that there’s a side to the human race that loves plodging around in this kind of dart. Sometimes we like to be right up to our necks in it. Sometimes people even drown in their own psychic shit.

  A film fantasy can’t go on forever but the fantasies inside your head can and then other people call you mad. Maybe my feverish fantasies drove me a little mad that night. In the end I could bear them no longer. I had to know what Tess and Adam really were up to. And in my place, my sanctuary, dammit! I had to be there with them. So I got up, dressed as quietly as I could, mumbled a prayer to Janus to protect me, and stole down the stairs, feeling like a burglar in reverse. The noise of the TV, which the Norrises were watching in their living room, covered any give-away sounds.

  Outside, I ran all the way to the bridge. Arrived panting so hard I stopped to recover my breath when I came in sight of the house. My inclination had been to burst in before they had a chance to stop whatever it was they were doing. But while I caught my breath, a deeper, stranger desire took hold of me. I wanted to see them as they were, on their own, without me. As a kid I was always wondering what other people did when I wasn’t there. Maybe because I knew I had a secret life of my own which I only ever let show when no one else was around, I supposed that other people were like that too. And I felt a consuming desire to know what those private selves were that parents and relatives and teachers and friends hid from me. So I would sometimes steal around, peeking in at windows or snooping at doors in the hope of discovering those hidden selves revealed.

  I had not done this for years, however. Had even forgotten that I used ever to do it. Now, as I recovered my breath, that childhood desire overwhelmed me again. The fun of observing people when they are completely unaware of being watched, the nervous excitement of it – the same excitement that experimental scientists must feel, and Peeping Toms as well, I guess.

  I checked that no vehicles were approaching before padding quietly up to the house. The bedroom was dark but the living room was softly lit by low table lamps that hadn’t been there before, one each side of the fireplace.

  It was not the lamps, however, that immediately caught my eye but Tess and Adam tangled naked on the floor in front of the fire. Hollywood TV soft corn. Much pawing going on and sucking and kissing and licking. More complete in range than in my fantasies. More surprising. More tantalizing. More fleshed out would be true to say. Fantasies depend, like everything else, on information. My experience of life so far hadn’t informed me all that well; and obviously I hadn’t read the right books. They were doing things to each other with fingers and mouths that were stunning news to me.

  For a while I watched with the amazement of an initiate secretly learning the mysteries of his trade. Till another kind of amazement grew beside it: amazement at my own reaction to the scene before me. For deep inside I was watching myself with just as great intensity as I was watching them. Observer observing himself. And what amazed me was that instead of anger or jealousy or resentment or envy or hard-on lust there came over me a calm – or maybe I ought to say a calming – satisfaction. I can only compare it to watching a close friend doing something he’s good at and doing it very well. You might wish you could do it well too while knowing that you couldn’t. But mainly you feel pleased for him, happy that he’s achieved the reward, the recognition, the satisfaction, the pleasure he wanted and deserved.

  Naturally I felt a little sad for myself too because this was the moment when I properly knew – when I accepted – that Tess was not, would not be, for me nor me for her. Not in the way she was being for Adam right there before me. I even wondered, as he entered her with a shudder of pleasure, whether she knew I was watching, whether she had expected I would find her doing this now, here in my room in my house, whether even by some trick she had planned it. Her way of forcing me to accept what she had told me about us was true. Ridiculous, of course. Another fantasy.

  I had not seen ‘sex’ happening between two people before. I don’t mean pretended sex between actors, nor played at by gropers at parties or in public places, nor the clinical demonstrations in sex-education videos at school, but the all-out sweatlathed juicegreasing bodysquirming limbtangled skingreedy gutmelting mindlost neoviolent reality. So I didn’t know by first-hand observation, much less direct experience, about its animalness. The exclusive bodiliness of it. The utterly absorbed uninhibited unselfconsciousness of those involved in it as they writhe self-absorbed, lost to the world around them, lost, in fact, just like the cliché says, in each other.

  As I watched I realized that I’d never achieved that state with Gill, never been mind-less, never been totally unselfconsciously absorbed, but had always been thinking about it, always been aware of what was going on, always observing myself do it, even as I
now observed them and observed myself observing them. An observer by nature, that’s me. Did this explain my confusion over Gill? But if it did, what did it explain?

  I also saw why there is so much talk about sex, why there are so many scenes about it in books and plays and films. Why it causes so much trouble, too. And why those who get it and those who don’t make such a fuss. And why there’s so much pretending about it – people pretending that they get it when they don’t, or pretending that they perform exotic contortions when actually they are as straight as a pencil. And why people who are born with sexy good looks get things easily.

  Not that I’m any exception. Adam breaks into my bedroom, scaring the wits out of me, but as soon as I see him stripped, with his foxy good looks and lithe neatly built body and his exceptional dick, I let him stay and sponge off me instead of kicking him out. Not just because the sight of him turned me on but because I’m human, and everybody’s like that. I didn’t think about it at the time. Animal biology made the decision for me. As I reckon it does countless times a day between people everywhere. The fact is we’re all succoured by sex, and some of us are finally suckered by it too.

  So I’m standing there for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, watching them, and watching myself watching them, and with a hard-on by then to be honest, making no effort by now to hide myself, when my bridge-keeper’s third ear alerts me to the sound of a vehicle I know approaching along the road from the village. Bob Norris’s van.

  He’s bound to stop, even if he’s on his way to somewhere else. Bound to see his daughter in flagrante delicto with a footloose horny yob he doesn’t trust enough to keep the bridge never mind screw his daughter, and me, who he counts responsible, standing outside doing a convincing impersonation of a dirty old man.

  I suppose I could – ought to? – have rushed inside, yelling a warning, and hustled the coupled pair out of the back door before Bob arrived. But I doubt if there’d have been time, for at that moment the final act wasn’t far from its climax, her on the floor under him, legs over his shoulders, locked together and going like the dappers, in such a state of pleasure that had I burst in they would probably have been beyond recall anyway.