Authors: Aidan Chambers
The Toll Bridge
Contents
Fed up with parents and friends trying to decide on his future, Jan attempts to escape the pressures of home by taking a job as a toll-keeper. Going to live in the country â alone in the house on the toll bridge â Jan hopes to find out who he really is.
At the toll bridge Jan meets Tess and Adam. Their friendship works well for a time, but they all have to face a turning point and for one of them this has a devastating result.
FOR ADAM
Take this as a gift. The only gift I can give you that might, one day, mean anything to you.
I've visited you often. You never know me, never recognize me, always treat me as someone you're meeting for the first time.
But soon I have to go away. Perhaps I shall never see you again. And who knows, one day it might all come back to you, everything that happened in the weeks we spent together. And if it does, what will you want to know? What will you ask? What will you think of me and Gill and Tess?
And what will you do? About yourself, I mean. That's the only important question. One reason why I'm writing this is to show you how you seemed to me, to us, how we thought of you.
As I write, I remember we once argued about gifts. There is no such thing as a free gift, you said. All gifts are a payment for something. I didn't agree. A gift is only a gift if it is freely given, I said. But maybe you were right. Perhaps a gift is always an exchange for something received. Or hoped for. Perhaps this gift is a kind of repayment for the life I live now. And perhaps by giving it I hope to quieten my conscience about leaving you.
Whatever the truth is, use (y)our story any way you like. Make of it what you will.
1
ADAM COMES TO
me like a ghost. For a moment I think he is a ghost. And as so many times afterwards he turns his appearance into a game. He pretends to be a ghost, but only when he discovers he has made a mistake.
Searching for a place to shack up for the night, he finds the little eight-sided house by the bridge, no lights, looking empty and dead, and thinks he is in luck. He does not know I am inside; and it is Hallowe'en.
He forces the door quietly. This gives him no trouble. The lock is old and weak, and he is strong. Even though he is not tall â he's thin and lithe â he sometimes seems to possess a big man's strength, which belongs to the hidden part of him, his mystery.
He forces the lock so quietly I do not wake. I have been living in the old toll house for three months and am sleeping well, which I did not while the place was strange and I was unused to being alone.
Having broken in he sees by moonlight the door he does not know leads into the only bedroom, where I lie sleeping, and decides to try this room first. Just inside is a creaky floorboard. He steps on it. The sound wakes me with a start. I sit up, see a ghostly silhouette against the moonlit window, and scream.
At which, â
Woo-whoo!
' he flutes and flaps his arms.
I really am scared, for a moment at least. And he, it is true, is an apparition, but of a kind I know nothing about. He also, he says afterwards, is scared, his
woo-whooing
and flapping arms a reflex action. So he acts the ghost and I act spooked, each of us acting in self-defence, each having taken the other by surprise.
I fumble for the switch on my bedside lamp, a bulb stuck into an old stoneware cider bottle stood on an upturned orange box (bottle
and box found in the basement that is a lavatory-cum-woodshed the day I arrived).
âWho the hell are you?' I shout, acting indignant while my fingers fail me with the switch.
â
Woo-whoo?
' he flutes again, this time more like an owl with stomach cramp than a haunting spectre.
I find the switch at last and we scrutinize each other, blinking in the raw light.
He is not exactly reassuring. Wet black hair hugging the round dome of his head. Foxy features smeared with mud, perhaps from a fall. Body draped in an ancient army combat cape, also muddy and the cause of his ghostly silhouette. Very wet and weary jeans poking beneath, and marine boots scarred from battle.
âI don't know you from Adam,' I say.
He laughs. âRight first time.' And pulls off his cape. Beneath which he is leaner than I expect, the cape having lent a false appearance of bulk. A tatty soggy sweater, rust-red and out at his bare elbows, hangs on him like a skin ready to be shed.
And shed it he does.
âHey, hey, hold on a sec!' I say. âWhat're you doing?'
Sloughing his boots and jeans too, he says, âHow d'you mean?'
âI mean here . . . I mean stripping . . .'
Half out of bed, intending to be more forceful, I see, now he confronts me in the nude, the kind of cock boys in shower rooms honour with surreptitious glances. I stay where I am, the duvet hiding my middle.
âFrigging soaked,' he says, as if this explains everything.
âSo?'
âFell in the river.'
âWhat â cape and all? A wonder you didn't drown.'
âNo, no. It was on the bank where I climbed out. I'm freezing.'
He turns his attention to the room, not that there's much to see. My bed â mattress on old iron bedstead. Lamp on orange box. Fireplace blocked off by sheet of cardboard. Books lining mantelpiece, river-rubbed stones for bookends. A few spare clothes hanging from a hook behind the door. Bare walls, long ago white, now a scuffed, geriatric grey.
Back to me, weighing me up, before he says, âAny chance of a kip?'
Given the obvious idiocy of taking in, like a feral dog in the middle of the night, someone I know nothing about, except he is
called Adam, has an enviable cock, and has just been careless enough to fall into the river, my second surprise of the night comes when I hear myself reply, âSure. Expect we can fix up something.'
2
But there was more to it than cock-and-bull. For two months I'd been living like a hermit. By desire, I mean, not accident or compulsion. Wanting to be on my own, having had enough of doing what was expected of me, of being what other people wanted me to be: Dutiful only son of ambitious parents. Conscientious student swatting to be good enough for university. One of the lads, doing boring spare-time activities so as to be sociable. Faithful boyfriend of ten months' standing (and not enough laying, if anybody ever gets enough). And the rest of the ratbag people call normal.
In fact, an actor playing roles in other people's plays. And I was fed up of performing. I didn't want to play at anything. Not son, schoolboy, friend or, come to that, lover. I just wanted To Be. And To Be on my own.