The Toll Bridge (11 page)

From cleaned-up neglect in which I could do as I liked, the house was transformed into a swirl of throat-clogging decorator's dust, a derangement of tools and gear, a rubbish tip of builder's waste, an echo-chamber of banging and sawing and the manic thump of Radio I without which apparently neither the chippy nor the bricky could function. As neither could they without mugs of coffee and cans of beer it was my job to serve up at regular intervals, like every hour, during the day.

By the Wednesday of the second week ABG (After Brown-and-Greasy) I was on my own again, left to paint the entire building inside and out, two undercoats and one gloss, ceilings and all. (Have you ever painted a ceiling? Even with non-drip it's murder.) It would take, I reckoned, four weeks' solid slog. Certainly till well after Christmas.

4

Mid afternoon, Thursday of the second week ABG. A clouded glowering day but dry, and warm enough to work outside, painting the roadside living-room window frames. There'd been very few tolls since early morning, even fewer than usual; and no movement on the river, the holiday boats being all laid up by this time of year. Even Bob Norris hadn't called.

Feeling lonely, abandoned, hard-done-by, I was brooding in the flat-headed way you get into (well I do anyway) while doing a monotonous physical job all by yourself when I spotted a movement in the house. I had to press my face close to the glass to see clearly, for the room was gloomy. The toll-bridge ghost, I thought, stupidly. But no, and yes, there he is, Adam, large as life, standing at the table, scoffing bread and chicken bits left over from my midday meal.

‘Hoi!' I shout and bang on the window. He turns, sees me, waves, turns back to his – my! – food.

I rush inside, and confront him from the living-room doorway. ‘What the hell d'you think you're doing?'

He flashes The Grin. ‘How d'you mean?'

‘Don't start that again.'

‘What?'

I point the paintbrush I've forgotten is in my hand. ‘Eating that!'

He drops the food as if he's suddenly been told it's poisoned. ‘Sorry! Thought it was leftovers.'

‘It is. Oh, never mind. Finish it now. What've you done with the boat?'

‘Boat? What boat?'

‘
The
boat.
Our
boat.'

Mouth stuffed full again, he shakes his head, frowning.

‘Christ! The boat you took.'

He swallows, which somehow at that moment seems the most insulting thing he could do. ‘Me? Don't know nothing about a boat. Walked here along the river from the pub. A bloke bought me a drink. Wanted me to go with him. Do him a little favour. Offered fifty quid. But I'm not that desperate.'

‘But you took it.'

‘Would you turn down a free drink?'

‘The boat. Three weeks ago.'

‘What? No, not me, sorry.'

‘Course you did! When Tess and I got back, after you'd caused the trouble at the Pike, you'd gone. Disappeared. With our boat. With other stuff as well, you might remember. Including my clothes. The ones you're still wearing, I think. God, what a mess they're in. Where the hell have you been?'

He's staring at me blank-faced. Not even The Grin.

‘What're you on about?'

‘The boat, dammit!'

‘Somebody else, mate, not me.'

‘Jesus, I don't believe this!'

‘Well, they could have. You don't know, do you?' He's suddenly very agitated, distressed, as if he's just woken up and doesn't like what he's found. ‘You weren't here, were you? You've just said you were out. You didn't see me go, did you? So how d'you know I took the boat? Anybody could've done it. So I took some stuff. What's a bit of food? And these clothes, well . . . Anyway, I don't know nothing about no boat. All right?'

‘Tell that to Tess. See if she believes you. It's her dad's boat as it happens. She'll be here in a minute.'

As suddenly as he'd turned sour he's his usual self again – or what I thought then was his usual self: laid back, smiling that annoyingly
handsome smile.

‘You're dripping,' he says.

Jackson Pollock squiggles cover the floor at my feet, expressionist doodle of my feelings while I've been standing there.

‘Shit!' I scrub up the mess with the cloth I keep ready for the purpose, not yet having learned the trick of painting without dribbling.

‘Want a hand?' Adam says when I'm upright again.

My instinct is to say no, just get out of here. But his incorrigibility, what my mother calls bare-faced cheek, makes me sigh and even smile, and in that short pause it suddenly occurs to me that he might be useful. So instead of chucking him out I say, ‘Why not. I'm taking any help that's going. You owe me anyway.'

‘Great!' He might just have been given a present he's wanted for years. ‘Where do I start?'

‘Finish the window I'm working on. It'll soon be too dark to see properly. While you're doing that, I'll get some more wood for the fire. And listen –' He's taking the brush from me. Pongs like a hedge-bottom. Can't have washed for days. ‘Do me a favour –'

‘Sure.'

‘If you decide to disappear again, leave the brush behind, will you? I can't afford to pay for a replacement.'

‘I'm not going nowhere,' he says. ‘Not me. It'll be nice and toasty in here tonight.'

I don't reply, didn't say, ‘Who says you're staying here tonight?' or ‘You've got another think coming, mate' or any of the things my guts want me to say. Instead, I smile to myself and go down to the woodstore for logs. If this mutt likes painting so much, I think to myself, then let him. The more he does the sooner the job is finished. Then I'll chuck him out and get back to normal again. Tess calls me Janus so Janus I'll be. To guard bridges maybe you have to be. To guard yourself, come to that.

But I didn't know what I'd let myself in for.

5

When you keep a bridge you develop a third ear tuned to listening for approaching vehicles. I knew the sound of Tess's bike as well as I knew her voice; heard her coming over the bridge while I was splitting logs in the woodstore. (This was the half-basement under the house formed by the bank falling steeply down from the road to the garden-river level. The loo was in there too, and brass-monkey
cold it could be in winter, as well as tools and other gear and the tin bath that's used in a page or two.)

By the time I'd lugged the laden log basket up the stairs into the house, she's talking to Adam. I see them through the window. She's taken her helmet off, which she never bothers to do unless she plans to stay a while, and is flirting her hair at him, and laughing, and giving him the eye.

Adam is replying at full throttle with The Grin, The Hand Run Through the Hair, and The Pelvic Thrust. And they're performing a slow-motion ring-a-ring-a-roses; the courting dance of Homo sapiens.

I dump the logs and go out.

‘Have you asked him?' I say.

She doesn't take her eyes off him. ‘He didn't do it.'

‘You believe him!'

Adam is preening. I'm sure The Grin has stretched round to the back of his head. The Teeth flash white semaphore in the dusk.

‘I remember now.' She looks at me at last. She's fizzing. ‘You were in the boat. I came out and talked to you. We decided to pick blackberries. You climbed out and off we went, but you didn't tie up. I expect it just floated away.'

‘So it's my fault now!'

‘No, I didn't mean that. I should have noticed.'

‘Oh, thanks! Maybe you should have noticed that I'd already tied up before you came out.'

‘You had?'

‘Yes.'

‘Oh, well, I don't remember. And what's it matter. Listen, I was just saying to Adam –' She turns, they do a Grin-Giggle-Hands-Through-Hair-Eyeballing-Pelvicthrusting exchange, and then she looks at me again. ‘I'll nip home, have tea and come back about seven, OK? We can talk then.'

But does not stay for an answer.

‘Good thinking,' Adam says.

‘See you,' Tess says, and winks at me as she passes.

[– I know you've got to tell this story the way you remember it, but this last scene just isn't right. I wasn't the way you describe me at all. I was never that flirty. I know you'll tell all the embarrassing details when the time comes, but at this point I don't recognize myself And if you get me wrong here, aren't you likely to get
me even more wrong later when more important things are happening?

I know people remember the same events quite differently. And I know you're trying to tell what happened to Adam and Gill and me and yourself the way you saw it then, rather than the way you think about it now, but still you can't tell it
only
like that, can you? Well, yes, you can but that will give a very distorted view of us.

You're always going on about how one person's understanding of anything is only part of the truth – how no one ever really knows everything, or ever knows enough. So how are you going to get more than your own partial understanding of what went on between all four of us into your version of our story?

What I know is, in case you go on getting me as wrong as you just have, I reserve the right to tell my bit of the story in my own way at some point.]

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