The Toll Bridge (24 page)

I thought he was just weary after a bad night and nervous in a new place. But I soon realized he was ill. I don't think he remembers how bad he was. He'd go for a whole day without eating and say he wasn't hungry. Then in the middle of the night he'd scoff all he could find and next day he'd sit around staring at the blank walls refusing to say anything.

He'd also do weird things like spend ages standing on the bridge staring down at the river. I even found him there one day in the rain soaked to the skin. There was a kind of dottiness about his behaviour that sometimes made me want to shake him hard and tell him to snap out of it. Mum said he was like somebody grieving, but who for or what for?

One way and another, what with Dad keeping him steadily busy and Mum coddling him a bit and me being with him, after a month or
so he was sleeping and eating properly, and looked much better, less wispy, more
there.
And he always read a lot, even when The Glums came over him again, crushing him down, which happened every few days. He could be awful then, saying bitter destructive things if you made him talk to try and lift him out of The Pit. I soon learned not to try and cheer him up but just to sit with him, letting him read or stare into space. Being there was all the help he needed, I think, but he never said so, though afterwards, when he was properly recovered, he did.

I suppose that's when our friendship really began, which has always seemed kind of odd to me – that a friendship should begin with the bad times and not with the good ones. While he sat there suffering, it was then we felt we recognized each other, knew each other, without explaining or talking about it, and knew that whatever happened we would always be a pair. Complementary. Life companions. Regardless of who else in the future we loved or lived with or kept as friends. We're still like that, and though it always looks to other people as if it's Jan who needs me, I need him too, only what he does for me doesn't show so much. He sustains me in the way I need just as much as I sustain him in the way he needs, and we both know it, so what does it matter what other people think?

By the time Adam turned up Jan was much better. The wraithiness had vanished, he'd filled out nicely, his skin was clear, his eyes not crazed any more. His hands, roughened from the work he'd done, were even more beautiful. He'd persuaded me to chop his hair very short because he said it would be easier to keep right that way, and though it was ragged it suited him, adding a slightly dishevelled severity to his lean looks. Mum said he reminded her of a novice monk, and it is true, he is a bit monkish. And innocent unworldly too – he doesn't quite understand what makes the world go round, though he likes to think he does.

That business with the estate agent, for instance. What got up his nose as much as anything is that B-and-G was so obviously a turd, and what's worse a not very clever turd, and Jan can't understand why people were taken in by him. Jan can't see that people admire the B-and-Gs because the B-and-Gs of the world are clever in a way Jan isn't – they're clever with cunning and self-confidence and at knowing how to manipulate people's whims and fancies. They appeal to people's weaknesses. They know that most people are impressed by flash cars and designer clothes and exotic holidays and the extravagant signs of money and power.

Neither does he understand the way sex works, doesn't see that the B-and-Gs play that game too. Most people's brains aren't in their heads, they're in their crotches. So the B-and-Gs aren't oddities, they're typical. Jan is the oddity, that's the fact, and he gets upset and angry because he doesn't want the world to be the way it is and can't understand that most people don't mind, they actually like it the way it is. People revel in their weaknesses, it seems to me, and admire those who become successful by exploiting weaknesses. Their own and other people's.

Jan wants people to live up to something better than they are. Mostly, they never will so he's bound to suffer for the rest of his life. He's like someone who lacks a protective layer of skin. Every brush against the world hurts. Life will never be what he wants it to be, he'll never quite understand why, other people will always think him a little odd, so he'll never quite be accepted. And, if you want to know, I think his depressions started when this began to dawn on him. Which is why, in my opinion, he came to the toll bridge, to be on his own while he sorted it out. And he was running away too, of course, which was obvious to everybody except himself.

Jan ran to the toll bridge and Adam ran into him there. Two runaways colliding, and the story gets more complicated to tell now because I come into it, like a third particle colliding with the other two.

Yes, it's true, I did have a thing about Adam. From first sight I fancied him. His earthiness, his utterly relaxed, unbothered attitude to life. He wasn't very tall but was supple and beautifully built. I mean, he just oozed sex. But from the very first sight of him I felt that inside him there was a vulnerable, almost frightened boy. Don't know how I knew this. Intuition, I suppose. And perhaps something in his eyes. Didn't think about it. But the mix was irresistible.

Something else made the situation even more sensational, something Jan didn't know because he couldn't see it, being part of it. I mean the two of them together.

Like sea against cliffs, hills against sky, each heightened the quality of the other. Emphasized the other's being and beauty. And each was beautiful, I don't know how to describe it, when you see it you know it, and it has as much to do with personality as it has to do with body.

Anyhow, I admit I let myself be carried away. There I was with these two males, one who made me think and talk like I'd never
thought and talked before, and one who I fancied like crazy. And both of them needed me. How could I resist? Why should I? That day Jan was sick from painter's colic arrived like a gift and I grabbed it.

Adam was playful and full of jokes and bursting with energy. I was lusty and insatiable and I didn't care. I never now smell new paint in a room without remembering that day, feeling it in my skin, in my flesh, in my nerves and on my tongue again, and the rough texture of the blanket spread on the bare boards of the floor and the tang of woodsmoke in my nose and the tingle of heat from the fire as we lay beside it and the slip of sweat between us and its salt taste and the sound of the river outside and our blood surging inside as though both might engulf us at any moment and sweep us away, and best and most remembered, the feel and touch of his hands and his kissing and biting and the excruciating pleasure of it.

And then the bittersweet after-taste of melancholy, with Adam beside me dead to the world though I longed for him to hold me and give me his eyes and his mind as he had given me his body and not to drift away and drown in sleep.

In a while I covered him with a blanket and stole away home along the river bank through the empty dark, glad to be alone, glad to be myself in the dank winter night.

But I learned something from what happened later: Never to be taken but ever give. Never to be one but ever two. Never to be possessed by another but ever possess myself.

Jan didn't tell me till long afterwards about Dad seeing us. Thank God for that. Dad's never mentioned it but I realize now that it was about then that his attitude to me changed. For one thing, he became less physically affectionate. Before, he'd always been a hugger, liked to sit with his arm around me while watching telly. After, he became more distant, wasn't so spontaneous in showing his feelings. At the time I put it down to the strain he was under at work, but the real cause must have been seeing me with Adam that night.

The next day was the surprise party and that can't have helped either. Dad has always said I have a wicked streak. ‘My little devil,' he used to call me when I was small. When I got older, in my teens and not so cute any more, it irritated him, but by then it was too late, the mould had set. Parents should be careful which traits they coddle in their children. Cute can easily turn into crass. No one can ever escape
all her-history. (A Jan-type joke and a truth he finds it hard to live with.)

Not that having a surprise party and inviting Gill was only devilment. I really did think Jan needed to see her if he was to make up his mind about her. There were all sorts of things that made me think this.

For example, there were a lot more letters from her than he's mentioned. For a few weeks one came every day. At the beginning he read them all. But they upset him. He's said nothing about that. I got to know about it because one day after he'd been at the bridge about three weeks I arrived on foot after my bike had conked out, so he didn't hear me coming. I saw him through the living-room window, sitting at the table with a letter in his hands, tears streaming down his face. I rushed in of course and comforted him and eventually got out of him that the letters kept him feeling tied to everything he was trying to cut free of – his parents, his home, the school, the town. And what he felt were the demands Gill made – her wanting him so much, her clinging to him, which he said felt like being suffocated.

Anyhow, after that he stopped reading the letters. Now and then he'd try one just to see if he felt any different about them, but he never did. Instead he pinned them, mostly unopened, to the back of the living-room door where they accumulated, always with the name and address right way up, Gill's neat round schoolgirlish handwriting repeating Jan's name and address again and again as if for a school punishment. Then one day I decided the joke had gone far enough and started taking them down. Jan flew into a rage, yelling at me to stop meddling and treating him like a kid, I wasn't his mother, etc. etc. Very vicious and emotionally violent.

After that we didn't speak for two days.

But I've side-tracked. Back to the day of the party.

That morning I felt terrible. As soon as I woke it came over me what I'd done. For the rest of the day during school I reassessed my values in life, as only the self-condemned know how. I didn't exactly pray that if God didn't strike me down with everything from herpes to Aids I'd never do anything so foolish again, but nearly. Then, after school there was shopping for the party and the business of getting Jan out of the house and making everything ready, which took my mind off my worries. In fact, typical me, I went to the other extreme and over-compensated by throwing myself body and soul into the party.

Which party, I admit, went over the top, as usual once word
gets round, especially in an area like ours with a university in range. By the time Gill turned up the house resembled a scene in Caligula's palace during one of his more ingenious periods.

At any rate, Gill flipped into a kind of catatonic shock. After all those weeks of writing all those letters and not getting a kind word never mind a letter in return, and all the time being patient and understanding and making allowances, she arrives to find him apparently having his balls massaged by a black-haired hussy in the middle of a crowd of zonked spectators lolling about in various states of
déshabillé
and at various stages preparatory to coition, if not already at it.

[– Laying it on a bit, aren't you?

– Enjoying it.

– Wasn't quite that colourful, though, was it?

– Moderately hectic. Anyway, that's how it's come out, so however it was
then
, that's how it is
now.

– So much for history.

– History is only accepted fiction.

– Hey-up! That's not you!

– You mean, you don't think I'm clever enough.

– Come on, be honest.

– Caught you out for once! Read it somewhere. Can't remember.

– So much for memory.

– While memory holds a seat

In this distracted globe, remember thee!

Yea, from the table of my memory

I'll wipe away all trivial fond records.

– Oo, climb every mountain, chuck!]

The row outside the house sets my nerves jangling and jogs my worries and brings me back to my senses. This isn't my day, I think, wishing I'd never suggested the wretched party in the first place. Blame Jan, I tell myself, it's his fault for dithering. (When in doubt, transfer the guilt.)

I follow Gill inside after exchanging a few more ill-chosen words with Jan. But can't find her. The party has reached the slow-(e)motion phase already. Heaven knows what's been going the rounds. Adam isn't there either.

I begin not to care, nudge myself a space on the living-room floor
near the fire beside a friend from school who is sitting alone staring at the glowing embers (no one has enough wits left to put a fresh log on) while morosely brooding. She immediately starts to tell me about the loss of her boyfriend and bursts into tears and says she'd better slope off home because she doesn't want people seeing her like this, which she does, leaving
moi
on my
sola
again, not a happy girl, my turn to stare regretfully at the embers.

What happened next happened very quickly and at the time was very confused, anyway confusing.

After the row outside Gill had stomped back into the house, intending to grab her bag which she had dropped on the floor of the living room, and set off for home, or anywhere – she just wanted to get away. But her bag wasn't there (somebody had shoved it into a corner). That's when she saw her letters pinned up on the living-room door, and she flipped.

She ran out through the back door, where the outside light showed her the steps down to the lawn. Dashing down them, she slipped on their frosty surface and grazed her knee (she didn't even feel it at the time, we found out later). She then blundered onto the path that led her along the river bank and under the bridge.

There she stopped, breathless from distress and sensing she had come the wrong way and should go back. But she didn't want to go anywhere near the house again in case she met Jan or me. ‘I felt I'd be sick if I did,' she told me later, ‘I was so weary and angry at what had happened.'