The Toll Bridge Read online

  Leave it like that for now, OK?

  A Yard of Ale

  1

  ‘DON’T SEND IT,’ Tess said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s not you. Not how you really are. It’s mean.’

  ‘It’s how I feel.’

  ‘You feel mean?’

  ‘The way she goes on about love. I don’t want her here and I’m not going to lie.’

  ‘You don’t have to. All I’m saying is you should put it better. All this about persecuting trespassers – you’re talking about your girlfriend, for Christ’s sake! And not wanting to be reminded of the nice times you spent together, and telling her she’s asking stupid questions.’

  ‘Depends how you read it.’

  ‘So why show it to me? You asked what I thought. That’s what I think.’

  We were sitting drinking coffee at the toll-house table (which, persuaded by Tess, I’d sanded down to fresh wood during the last few days and then waxed), on the Sunday morning two days after Adam and Gill’s letter arrived. Sundays were free days, no tolls, a day off. It was ten thirty, and one of those bright still quiet autumn mornings when the sun’s warmth recalls high summer and the sky is a hazed blue. All the leaves die in Technicolor.

  Tess’s Sunday morning visits began as a duty chore, sent by her father to check I was OK, and became a regular habit we both enjoyed, looked forward to, though we didn’t tell each other this at the time. She always brought fruit or veg out of their garden or a slab of home-made cake, which she said, untruthfully, came from her mother, or something from the estate farm – butter or jam or eggs or cheese. Given the ‘mod wage’ I was trying to exist on, I’d have been pretty pinched without this help.

  I coveted her acts of friendship, they made me feel better, though I tried to hide this from her. But I did try to be ready with something for her so the gift-giving wouldn’t be one-sided. As I hadn’t much cash, at first the presents were usually objects I’d found and ‘treated’. Once a piece of wood I pulled out of the river that happened to resemble a fish, which I cleaned and painted with an eye and a mouth, and clear-varnished to give it a wet look. Once a George the Third silver shilling I dug up in the garden while clearing an overgrown corner, and buffed up bright.

  [– See what I mean about men and gifts! Not that I wasn’t pleased. It’s one of your nicer characteristics – you can be thoughtful when you don’t need to be. But I didn’t want anything back. You just didn’t feel comfortable receiving presents without squaring the account!]

  After a couple of weeks I started writing poems for her, comic verses to begin with, as a joke. Because of her studying English Lit. We had that in common. We talked about her exam books. One week I gave her a parody of a poem by Ted Hughes she’d found difficult, a pig of a poem about pigs. After that, without thinking about it, it seemed natural to write more serious stuff. I made up the lines while collecting tolls or working on the house or mucking about on the river, and wrote them down and polished them in the evenings. It filled the time and I enjoyed it more than I expected. Soon I was writing two, even three, a week. (When I read them now they make me cringe. How could I ever have thought them worth giving anyone! Two years is an age. But it got me started, and I haven’t stopped since. I discovered then that writing feels like a natural part of me: something I was born to do.)

  ‘So why show me her letter?’ Tess said, flipping it back across the table. ‘You’re going to be rotten to her anyway, aren’t you, whatever I say?’

  ‘No, I’m not! When I tried before, half the trouble was I didn’t know what I wanted to say. So I made up the sort of thing I thought she’d want to hear.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Oh, about this place, and what I was doing. But I hated it. It was all an act, nothing to do with what I really felt. Not that I was feeling anything much. Just getting through each day. You know how I’ve been. The Glums. I sure as hell didn’t want to write letters about that to anybody, Gill least of all. She knows about it anyway.’

  ‘You’re not so depressed now though, not like when you first arrived. You looked pretty bombed then, I can tell you.’

  ‘Couldn’t have stuck it without you.’

  ‘No, well –’

  ‘I spent a lot of time on that letter.’

  ‘Look, you really want to know what I think? Make up your mind whether you want Gill or not. If you do, write something more loving, because, honestly, if I was her, that letter would upset me a lot. But if you don’t want her, break it off, don’t keep her hanging on, hoping. It’s not fair.’

  She was right, I knew.

  We sat in silence, me avoiding her eyes and feeling myself losing my grip and slithering back into that dark craggy pit I’d been clawing my way out of these last few weeks, even beginning to think I might have escaped. But no. Like the nightmare when you’re fleeing from some murderous maniac, you turn to look behind, see nothing, he’s gone, you breathe at last, and turn back relieved, and there he is, right in front of you, overwhelming, unavoidable, his axe coming straight at your head – and you wake up in the nick of time.

  Depression, and I’m a first-hand expert, gets treated in two ways. Either you’re told you’re sick, and given pills to dull the effects by stupefying you into silence so that you stop getting on everyone’s nerves, or you’re told you’re a malingerer, a wimp, who ought to pull yourself together and stop moaning, because there’s a lot of people in the world who are worse off than you.

  There is a lunatic fringe as well, a school of Holy Joes who tell you depression is a sin, a wilful wallow in self-pity which any decent Christian atheist ought not to indulge in – as if depression were a punishment for being a narcissistic wanker.

  Having suffered from it for most of my seventeenth year I can only say it never seemed to me to fit any of these diagnoses. It always seemed more of an affliction, like having a hand go out of action for no good reason so you can’t do all sorts of everyday things you usually do without thinking, and have to put up with this temporarily useless limb flailing about, knocking things over and thumping people, causing trouble and embarrassment. While at the same time you’re being slowly strangled (because your throat seizes up), and your guts chum like a sewage tank in labour (because you’re worried sick about all sorts of minor problems that suddenly seem like major catastrophes), and your mind endlessly turns over the evidence of your complete failure as a human being until you’ve not a particle of willpower left to make yourself do anything except stare into space.

  In my opinion depression is a disease caused by thinking too much about all the things you can only do well if you don’t think about them at all.

  ‘Look,’ Tess said, standing up, ‘it’s a lovely day, there won’t be many more like it this year, what are we doing sitting here? Let’s take the boat upriver and I’ll treat you to a drink and a sandwich at the Fisherman and Pike. I’m rich, would you believe!’

  2

  Tess went out to prepare the boat while I tidied up. She came back chuckling.

  ‘There’s a boy on the bridge playing Pooh-sticks.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know – dropping sticks into the river, then running to the other side of the bridge to see which one comes through first. Don’t you remember? Winnie-the-Pooh.’

  ‘Oh, that.’

  ‘Dad used to play it with me when I was a kid.’

  ‘So what’s funny about a kid playing it now?’

  ‘Well, he’s not exactly a kid, he’s about our age and he’s by himself, and –’

  ‘Let him. It’s my day off.’

  ‘He’s having fun. I felt like joining in.’

  I went to the window which gave a view along the bridge.

  Adam, stood precariously on the parapet, a piece of stick in each hand which he drops with exaggerated care at the same instant, jumps down, races to the other side, leaps onto the parapet with breathtaking aplomb – and in my sweater and jeans, both the worse for his wear.

/>   ‘Hey!’ I shout uselessly and sprint out of the house, Tess calling after me ‘What’s up?’ and following to the door.

  Adam sees me coming and waves a greeting as to a friend he’s been waiting for.

  ‘What about my clothes?’ I shout as I approach.

  The affable smile fades. He jumps down. ‘Eh?’

  ‘You’re wearing them!’

  He looks at himself. ‘Oh, these.’

  ‘Why didn’t you change before you left?’

  He frowns.

  ‘I need that stuff. My only spares, you see.’

  ‘Right, sure.’ He smiles suddenly, his handsome cheeky grin. ‘I’ll change now. That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘You’d better come in.’

  Tess is waiting at the door.

  Wanting to head off friendly exchanges, I say, ‘This is Tess. He’s Adam.’

  ‘Adam,’ Adam repeats as if prompted. ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi,’ Tess says.

  ‘The visitor on Friday,’ I say with warning emphasis.

  Adam goes into the living room. Tess rolls her eyes at me in a mock swoon. I poke my tongue at her. She follows Adam. I go into the bedroom for his clothes, intending to call him in to change. But before I can, I hear Tess say, ‘We’re rowing upriver for a drink and a sandwich. Want to come?’

  Adam says, ‘I’m skint.’

  ‘My treat.’

  ‘Well . . . sure, thanks! I’ll row if you like. Pay my way.’

  ‘Great.’

  What! I think – first my clothes, now my Sunday. What’s going on here, what have I done to deserve this?

  I join them.

  ‘Adam’s coming with us,’ Tess says with the forced cheeriness people adopt when they know they’re going against what you want and are pretending it’s all right.

  ‘Your clothes are in the bedroom,’ I say, ignoring her.

  ‘He’s not going to change, is he?’ Tess says. ‘You know what boats are like. Ours anyway. He might as well wait till we get back.’

  ‘Why didn’t I think of that!’ I say and stalk out ahead of them.

  3

  In the leaky old clinker-built dinghy only just big enough for the three of us, Tess has the tiller, and I’m beside her in the stern facing Adam who is rowing. Our legs interleave. Adam pulls us upstream with steady effortless strokes. His body has an animal perfection in its proportions, the neat way all its parts fit together, the easy relaxed way it moves, beautiful to watch, very sexy. Tess can’t take her eyes off him, which hurts me with a double jealousy – of that animal body, and of its effect on Tess – so that I resent Adam’s disturbing presence more than ever.

  But being rowed in a boat on a calm river on a warm morning has a soothing effect. Soon I’m lulled, as I remember being lulled as a little boy, by the lazy motion of the boat, and begin to take pleasure in Tess’s body squashed up against mine, and Adam’s slow, rhythmic movements, and the in-out plashings of the oars, and the glazed autumn colours of the river bank.

  I think: I ought to be glad of this, ought to be giving myself to it, not begrudging, not grinding my guts with jealous resentment.

  After a while, curiosity getting the better of her, Tess asks, ‘Where are you from, Adam? Not from round here.’

  He shakes his head. ‘Up north.’

  ‘Thought so from your accent.’ She looks at me, askance. ‘Two of a kind.’

  She waits. Adam takes two more strokes but he adds nothing. ‘On holiday or something?’

  ‘Something.’

  ‘A job?’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘How come?’

  He takes another stroke, watching his right-hand oar rise, skim, plunge. ‘They chucked me out.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Parents. Well – my dad.’

  ‘Chucked you out?’

  ‘Hasn’t got a job himself. And I’ve two sisters still at school.’

  ‘But chucking you out!’

  ‘We didn’t get on either. Kept having rows. I’m better off out of it.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Couple of months ago.’

  ‘Poor you!’

  He shrugs. ‘I get by.’

  For some reason I don’t believe a word of this but I can see Tess does. He gives her that smile, but his eyes have a wary look, observing the effect. A look that bothers me. For a moment someone else inhabits those eyes, not the boy with the foxy grin.

  4

  The pub is packed with a Sunday crowd of junior yuppies from the posh commuter end of the village vying with university undergrads from across the river for the quickest-wit-of-the-year award and pretending not to pose. We manage to order with difficulty, being obviously members of the shoddier classes if not definitely under-age untouchables.

  While we wait for our sandwiches a cohort of noisier undergrads challenges a squad of yahooier yuppies to a yard-of-ale competition.

  ‘What’s that?’ Adam asks.

  Plastic aprons to protect the yuppies’ designer informals and the undergrads’ unwashables are handed across the bar while a barman decants two and a half pints of beer into a metre-long glass tube with a bulb at one end and a trumpet-flared opening at the other.

  Tess tells Adam, ‘They have to drink all the beer from that thing like a glass hunting horn, which is called a yard-of-ale. They have to drink it at one go without spilling any, which is pretty hard to do. The one who does it the quickest and spills the least is the winner.’

  ‘Cruel!’ Adam is fascinated.

  ‘Don’t they do it up your way?’

  ‘Not that I’ve come across.’

  ‘Round here they say it sorts out the men from the boys.’

  ‘Or the disgusting from the gross,’ I add, ‘the real aim being to see who spews up first.’

  A podgy yuppy, the kind of over-eager bod who’ll do anything to be thought a big man by his mates, has started the match off. He’s a third down and has gone too fast. The trick is to take it at a steady gentle speed, swigging rhythmically so you’ve plenty of breath for the worst part, which is at the end when you have to lean back far enough to raise the tube nearly upright in order to empty the last of the beer out of the bulb. By then your arms are tired, you’re just about gasping, and leaning back makes it very hard to swallow.

  ‘Easy . . . easy . . . easy!’ the yuppies chant, neo-soccer. The students whoop derisively. Both have the effect of over-exciting the already over-excited dolt. He raises the yard too fast. Beer floods out of his mouth, down his front, onto the floor, and puddles round his feet. As he gulps for breath someone rescues the yard. His clothes are soaked. The reek of body-warmed beer fills the room. His supporters mockingly commiserate; the students cheer. The yard is refilled as an undergrad is prepared by his seconds who camp up the boxing image – extracting the piss out of the whole business in general and of the yuppies in particular.

  Our sandwiches arrive.

  ‘I’m eating mine outside,’ I say.

  ‘Got to see this,’ Adam says.

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  Tess says, ‘I think I’ll go outside too.’

  ‘I’ll come in a minute,’ Adam says, not taking his eyes from the arena.

  5

  The tables in the garden were occupied so we sat dangling our feet over the stone-paved edge of the river bank where, in summer, holiday boats moor for visits to the pub.

  ‘For God’s sake, don’t encourage him,’ I said while we ate.

  ‘Why not? I like him.’

  ‘I told you – he wants to stay.’

  ‘He’d be fun. No one would mind.’

  ‘I’d mind. There’s something odd about him.’

  ‘Odd?’

  ‘The way he looks sometimes.’

  ‘You just don’t want any competition.’

  ‘Rubbish! Anyway, it doesn’t matter what you think, the toll bridge is my place, I’ll decide who stays there, thanks.’

  She laughed. ‘I’m going to
call you Janus.’

  ‘Who’s he when he’s at home?’

  ‘The Roman god? Well, pre-Roman actually.’

  ‘Don’t know any gods, I’m glad to say.’

  ‘You ought to know Janus, though. For one thing he’s the god of bridges.’

  ‘Terrific.’

  ‘As well as doors and passages and archways. And he has two faces. So he can see what’s coming both ways, I suppose.’

  ‘Or going, depending on how you look at it.’

  ‘You keep the bridge and you’re also two-faced, so I’ll call you Jan, son of Janus.’

  ‘Compliments now.’

  ‘Well, you are. In the nicest possible way of course.’

  ‘And what way is that?’

  ‘Take Adam.’

  ‘You take him, you’re the one who’s after him.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You say he’s odd but really you’re jealous because he’s more good-looking than you and because I fancy him.’

  ‘I get it – it’s the truth game.’

  ‘And you’re being two-faced about Gill, who you’re keeping on a string while making eyes at me.’

  ‘I like that! You don’t mince words once you start.’

  ‘I’ve been kind to you till now because you weren’t very well.’

  ‘But not any more?’

  ‘I reckon you’re about as normal now as you’ll ever be, don’t you, Jan dear?’

  ‘Prefer my proper name, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘You call me Tess. Just because I’m big-hearted enough to fetch your groceries from Tesco’s sometimes. Why shouldn’t I call you Jan? What’s sauce for the goose.’

  ‘Jan’s a girl’s name.’

  ‘It’s both, as a matter of fact. It means John in some languages. But when I use it it means a junior Janus who looks both ways at once and can’t make up his mind which way to go because he doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going.’

  There was a roaring cheer from the pub.

  ‘Sounds like a winner,’ Tess said.