The Toll Bridge (26 page)

He groaned at my touch, which was reassuring.

‘Adam,' I cried, ‘Adam – what's happened? Adam? Adam! Are you OK? Are you all right?'

He groaned again, stirred, turning his face away.

A new imperative possessed me at once. To get him inside, out of the cold.

‘Wait! Don't move! I'm coming.'

Blood on my hand. And then standing at his feet on the side deck, holding the lamp over him. How difficult to lift him from that awkward space and down into the cabin. Help from the house? No lights. No noise. What time? Two thirty by my wristwatch. Could it be over already, an all-night glug like that? But anyway, there and back – He needed help now. Freezing. Blood.

He stirred again, trying to struggle to his feet, all his athletic animal ease gone. Awkward stiff angles, yet floppy, a puppet with its strings cut. He wouldn't make it. Might tumble overboard. He slumped to the deck again. I scrambled across the cabin roof to the side deck at his head, stood the lamp on the roof so as to free both my hands, and, taking him by the shoulders, lifted him into a sitting position, his head lolling against my shoulder, his cheek pressing against my cheek, the oily wetness of cold blood lubricating our skins.

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Why am I doing this? I asked myself again and again. Only because I knew him? What if he were a stranger, would I have left him to it? Who could, except some kind of psycho? Another of those human instincts? The law of the irrational. I hate doing something I haven't thought out and decided for myself I want to do. But how often is it truly by thought that we come to do things? I remembered the moment of
déjà-vu
when Adam first came to me. The assurance of the inevitable.

Whatever, there I was stuck with him. Again. There were also moments in the next ten minutes, which is what it took to manhandle him into the cabin and onto a bunk, and retrieve the lamp so that I could see what to do next, that I felt like a one-man Laurel and Hardy (a Laurelandhardy) in the scene where they try to deliver a piano up a long flight of steps. And remembering that saved me from losing heart or even my temper; only it also reduced me to laughter at the thought of how bizarre was my present predicament – another fine mess you've gotten us into – that I had to sit for a while till I recovered myself. I think I was near hysterical from exhaustion after the last forty-eight hours.

When I finally got Adam inside and could give him a close inspection I saw just how bad he was. His skin was putty-coloured and clammy, as if he were sweating chilled water. His breathing was shallow and quick. I tried his pulse, because people always seemed to do that when dealing with sickness; it seemed weak and fast, not a steady confident throb but more like a racing echo of a pulse. The gash in his forehead was neither long nor deep but blood oozed from it in alarming quantity quite out of proportion to its size, and was smudged all over his face so that he looked as if he'd been badly battered. Of course he was covered in muck. And he smelt awful. He'd vomited onto his clothes which were smeared with a rancid porridge of mud and blood and sweat and
puke that filled the air in the confined space of the cabin with such a sour stench that I gagged and had to retreat outside till I could catch my breath and prepare myself for the onslaught again.

This was one of the times when I wondered why I was doing what I was doing. And this time, I then thought, I'm not going to be defeated, it's only a putrid pong, after all, not a case of chemical warfare.

Back inside, I watched him closely for a few minutes, trying to assess the state he was in. He seemed to be drifting somewhere between unconscious and semi-conscious – groaning, moving a little but erratically, and not much aware of what was happening, as far as I could tell. When he wasn't trying to move, his body was a floppy dead weight. I said his name into his ear two or three times but got no reaction.

I guessed that somehow or other he'd taken a bang on the head and was suffering from concussion, not that I knew what concussion actually meant, only that anybody suffering from it had to rest and take it easy for a while. I knew from times when I'd banged my own head that it could make me feel sick, so I supposed a very bad knock might actually make you vomit. Also, Adam had been drinking the multicult punch pretty freely so that wouldn't have helped matters either. Maybe he was suffering from a hangover as much as from anything else. But what if he was really ill from something I didn't know about, like a heart attack or . . . or what? That was the problem. If I didn't know about it, I wouldn't recognize it! I suddenly felt utterly ignorant about everything to do with the body. Why didn't I know more, why hadn't anybody told me?

What I knew for sure was that I couldn't leave him lying there in that filthy condition. Somehow I had to clean him up and make him more comfortable. But how? There was no water on board so it would have to be river water. Somewhere, though, there ought to be a First Aid kit; at least that might provide a bandage and some sort of antiseptic for his wound.

Finding a First Aid box in a locker by the cabin door raised my spirits no end. And in a locker by the transom was a plastic bucket. So I opened the First Aid kit and put it on the table in the cabin, and then half-filled the bucket.

At which point, ready to start, it suddenly came over me in a wave of weakening fastidiousness that I'd never cleaned up anybody before. I didn't at all relish the idea of messing with another person's gunged-up body.

I stared at Adam, seeing him in a different light. Not as ‘Adam', but as a physical being made up of legs and feet and arms and various parts – fingers, toes – and organs with holes in them, and private nooks and crannies I'd never even seen before, let alone handled and washed and dried and closely inspected.

I began to shake and for a moment wondered if after all the best thing wouldn't be to fetch help. If there was no one in a fit state at the house, then I could run to the phone box in the village and call an ambulance. How long would that take? Half an hour? An hour? Would he be safe alone for that long? What if he came to enough to get up, and then stumbled into the river? And if I called an ambulance, think of the fuss there'd be afterwards. The hospital would want to know how he got into such a mess. The police. Bob Norris. Questions about the party. Trouble for Tess. Mayhem for me. I was supposed to be in charge. They'd hold me responsible, dammit! Maybe if I cleaned him up and brought him round, I could find out what had happened and if he really was in a bad way I could do something about getting him to hospital then.

Nothing else for it, whether I liked it or not, but to swallow my revulsion and clean him up and tend his wound as best I could. So where to start? With his face and head and the wound? Staunch the flow of blood? The First Aid kit included a packet of cotton wool. With a wad dipped in water I dabbed at the outer edges of his face, gingerly at first but with growing what-the-hell, I'll-never-finish-it-like-this confidence, wiping away the blood and muck. The First Aid kit also included a small bottle of antiseptic. I used some of that on a wad of cotton wool to clean round the edge of the cut, which really was quite small in fact. Then, with wincing delicacy, as if it might hurt me too, gently sponged the wound itself, at which Adam did stir and groan and flinch and try to push my hand away so at least I knew he was feeling something.

The antiseptic had the added advantage of scenting the air with something that smelt clean and healthy. But by then I'd grown used to the stink and was feeling quite proud of myself. I'd have fainted just at the thought of doing this only a few days before.

What next? Bind the wound. I readied the bandage, made a pad of cotton wool which I placed over the cut, then wrapped the bandage round his head a few times till there seemed to be enough to keep the dressing in place. To do that I had to keep lifting Adam's head. How heavy an unconscious head is, like a leaden stone! Alas, poor Yorick!
Heads I win, tails you lose. With his head tucked underneath his arm he walked the bloody tower. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. Lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm.

What stupid things come into your mind at such times. Yet not stupid, if you think about it. Pertinent and true in odd unthought ways. Is anything that comes into your mind ever arbitrary, ever meaningless?

That done, I was going to clean up his hands but realized he'd only mucky them again every time he touched his clothes, and besides, they would carry the muck to his face. Take off at least his outer clothing.

I sat him up and managed by a combination of rolling it up from the waist and easing it over his head to slip his putrid pullover off. My pullover, in fact – the best blue one he took with him when he first disappeared and he'd used ever since so that now it was stretched and sloppy which at least made it easier to get off. Next his boots. Then his pungent jeans. Leaving him in grubby white T-shirt and none too attractive blue Y-fronts. My T-shirt, my Y-fronts.

Covered with the only blanket, that was the best I could do. After which, the confined space looking a mess, my conditioned reflexes took over and I tidied up. The bundle of clothing chucked into a corner of the cockpit. The bucket emptied and stowed away. The First Aid box ready on the table in case of need. The wads of soiled cotton wool stuffed into the empty waste bin under the galley stove. I'd clean up properly when daylight came.

What now? Nothing, except watch and wait.

Very soon Adam seemed no longer to be drifting between unconscious and semi-conscious but to be sleeping. He was more ‘there' and also, strangely, more relaxed. Before, he'd been floppy but somehow struggling inside himself; now he wasn't floppy any more but together and at ease. His breathing was better, his skin less waxy, less pale and clammy. I tried his pulse: the beat was stronger and steady. I don't think I'd realized before that relaxation is a form of action, of
being
; that when you're relaxing you're
doing something
just as much as when you're walking or eating or reading or running the marathon. It's a particular use of energy.

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