1 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 – he’s thin and lithe – 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, ‘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).
‘Who the hell are you?’ I shout, acting indignant while my fingers fail me with the switch.
‘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.
‘I don’t know you from Adam,’ I say.
He laughs. ‘Right 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.
‘Hey, hey, hold on a sec!’ I say. ‘What’re you doing?’
Sloughing his boots and jeans too, he says, ‘How d’you mean?’
‘I 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.
‘Frigging soaked,’ he says, as if this explains everything.
‘So?’
‘Fell in the river.’
‘What – cape and all? A wonder you didn’t drown.’
‘No, 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 – 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, ‘Any 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, ‘Sure. 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.
Around Christmas – God, the play-acting you have to do at Christmas! – the Great Depression set in. At first my parents put it down to anxiety about the coming exams. Teachers dismissed it as a side effect of being a year ahead of other people my age, plus tiredness – the price any over-achiever working hard enough in his final year had to pay for success. ‘Keep at it,’ they said, ‘you can relax in the summer.’
By Easter what my father called The Glums weren’t any longer patches of ‘being low’ now and then, but were a permanent monstrous misery. Even Gill, my girlfriend, started to complain. And she, egged on by Mother, harried me into seeing our doctor. Who tested for glandular fever, coyly referred to as ‘the kissing disease’ (negative), diabetes (clear), anaemia (full-blooded), and finally pronounced a chronic case of old-fashioned growing pains for which he prescribed a course of vitamin pills. One more boring routine to add to all the others.
Result: The Glums worsened, dragging with them clouds of lowering headaches that broke into sudden storming rages which usually ended in rows and me smashing anything smashable, preferably items of Mother’s favourite knick-knackery.
Otherwise, when not slogging through school work, I spent hours locked in my room brooding on the more satisfying aspects of being pissed off and the likely rewards of self-slaughter. Among which was the pleasure of taking others with me, especially Gill (spite: couldn’t leave her behind for others to get their gropers on) and the cheerier yahoos at school (revenge, there being nothing more infuriating when you’re depressed than other people’s high spirits).
One of the rows finally brought everything to a head. Exams over, nobody wanted to go on coddling this whingeing creep (except Mother of course). And Gill it was who finally flashed the storm that ended with me deciding I’d had enough. People disgusted me. I disgusted myself. I wanted out.
The way out turned up in the wanted ads. (Well, when you’re depressed you try anywhere.) Next after: Condom Testers Required – help a leading rubber company design next year’s chart toppers . . . (think of all the times you’d have to do it on command, tumescent or not) was this:
Young Person temp. toll bridge keeper
pvt. est. Mod. wage, few resp., free
acc. toll house. Gd refs nec. Box 365.
‘You’ll starve,’ joked Father, ‘you can’t boil an egg.’
‘Who’ll do your laundry?’ cried Mother. ‘I’ll be worried sick, you living on your own, no neighbours, no phone, anything might happen.’
‘You’ll be three hours away even by car,’ wailed Gill. ‘How are we going to see each other?’
‘What a mangy option,’ scoffed the lads.
‘Taking money from a few passing cars all day hardly sounds academically challenging,’ objected teachers. ‘If you want time out, go abroad, see life, gain some experience, don’t stick yourself away in a dead-end job in the middle of nowhere.’
‘I’ll learn to cook, I’ll do my own laundry, maybe it will be good for us to be apart for a while, I want a change from academic challenge, thank you – I want to be on my own and challenge myself and experience my life before I find out about other people’s,’ I said to scornful snickers, doubting glances, dour looks, exasperated eyebrows, huffings, puffings, and shoulders hucked against this perverse (Mother’s version was pre-verse) teenager.
3
Tarzan’s yodels woke me, followed by loud splashings from the river. My watch says six fifty, and Adam’s makeshift bed – a few cushions and a blanket on the floor – is abandoned.
He can’t be up already, can he, not after last night? And not in the river again?
I pull on my jeans and stumble to the back-door steps from where I can view the toll-house garden and the river.
Adam is clambering out of the water, glistening in the light of the morning sun filtered through a shrouding autumn mist. Shot from a TV commercial. Deodorant or Diet Pepsi.
A tree, its leaves turning paler shades of brown, droops over the water. From a riverside branch hangs a rope. I don’t remember seeing it there before. Adam, unaware of me yet, runs, grabs the rope, swings wildly to and fro, flinging himself higher and higher, the motion shaking from the tree a shower of dying leaves. When he is as far out above the river as the rope can carry him, he hollers his jungle call, lets go, and plummets, neat as a needle, feet first into the water. To surface seconds later, splashing and blowing and tossing his head and swimming briskly for the bank.
This time he sees me as he climbs out, and stands beaming like a kid let loose after a bad term at school, slicking water from his face. Definitely deodorant.
I shiver and call, ‘Aren’t you cold?’
‘It’s a great game. Ever played it?’
‘No,’ I lie.
But why lie? I had played it – with Dad in one of his crazy moods when I was a kid.
Some memories are not for telling, I thought then, standing at the back door blearily clocking Adam and not knowing how wrong I was.
4
Adam followed me inside.
I hand him a towel while I wash. When I’m done, I go into the bedroom to finish dressing, and tidy up. I’m an obsessive tidier, inheritance from chronically tidy parents. (You can’t buck all of your upbringing. Being a tidier is one of the roles I have no choice about playing because it is written in my genes. During blue periods I resent it all the more for that.)
Coming back into the living room, Adam passes me on his way to the bedroom. We avoid each other’s eyes.
I set about making breakfast. Bread, honey, tea. Even now, I never bother with anything more than this, hating all the business of getting up in the morning.
Adam reappears, towel round his shoulders, still damp jeans and sweater in his hands. He lurks just inside the door. I can tell what he’s after, and am unsettled. Having put him up for the night, do I want to encourage him by giving anything more?
All the business of giving. When we argued about it I said, as most people do, that taking from people is what makes you beholden. But Adam said, no, if people give you a present, then as far as he was concerned there were no strings. They were paying for something he’d given them, even if he didn’t know what it was. But there’s another side to giving that we didn’t talk about because I only half sensed it then. Which is that giving to people puts you in their debt. I learned this because of Adam. Somehow, once you’ve given you feel obliged to give again, and to go on giving, and feel mean if you don’t. A kind of reverse emotional debt.
[TESS: This is male-order talk. Women don’t think about giving like that. I’ve noticed, as soon as you give a man something he wants to give you something back straightaway. I think it’s a power thing, as if receiving a gift were some kind of threat he has to neutralize at once or else he’ll be in a weak position. Seems to me that for men gifts are a kind of trade-off, which they’re not for women. We give without thinking of getting anything back. We do it all the time.]
5
I begin to wonder who Adam is. And what it is about him that worries me. Nothing dangerous exactly, nothing threatening. Something betrayed by the look in his eyes and the way he stands there, silently expecting help. What unsettles me even more, I decide, is that he makes me feel violent. I want to rough him up, hit him, chuck him out, anyway be rid of him. Why, why?
‘They can dry in front of the fire,’ I say, ‘if you get it going.’
He crosses to the hearth and dithers.
‘You don’t know about wood fires?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll do it.’
Last night’s ashes, under the powder of their grey deceiving surface, are still hot, quickly ignite a couple of twists of paper, the paper flames a few thin twigs which in turn soon set fire to splits of log.
Three months ago, I tell myself as the fire grows, I didn’t know how to do this either. And feel a kind of satisfaction I haven’t felt for a year or more. A pleasure forgotten that makes me smile, and glance at Adam, who is crouching beside me now, wanting the warmth. But he gazes into the flames with a fixed unblinking stare.
‘If you’d like something to eat,’ I say, weakened by his lost look, ‘there’s bread on the table.’
He doesn’t respond.
‘Adam?’
Nothing. I touch him on the shoulder. He recoils. His eyes, flicking into focus, widen as though in fright at seeing me beside him. I’m sure he is going to scream, but he catches himself, and smiles, grins rather, just like last night when I switched on the light, a fox’s grin, wide-mouthed, lips stretched, showing bright handsome teeth.
‘There’s bread on the table,’ I repeat, ‘if you want it.’
‘Ah!’ he says. ‘Right.’ Springs up, full of energy again, attacks the loaf and honey with a taking-it-for-granted greed that rekindles my anger, and makes me decide I don’t care who he is, I don’t want to know, I don’t want him here disturbing my life with the switchback emotions he stirs up, I’ve got to get rid of him as soon as I can.
6
A car horn sounds in the road. The postman with a parcel and a letter, the parcel addressed in Mother’s writing, the letter in Gill’s.
As the van drives off towards the village Tess Norris comes puttering along on her Suzuki 150, L-plate flapping. Two wheels cross without paying, but she always stops for a talk. Not that she’d pay anyway. Her father is in charge of the toll bridge and of maintenance on the estate. My boss, a joiner by trade and the sort of man who can turn his hand to anything. Tess is on her way to school, her last year, English Lit., French, and Maths.
‘Dad says can you manage without being relieved today? Urgent job at the hall.’
Her voice is muffled by her helmet and the putter of her engine. Her dark hazel eyes, all that’s visible of her face, rouse me the more for being framed by the mask of her visor. The rest is ambiguous in old black leathers with a red flash down the sides. And biker’s boots.
‘I’ll be OK.’
‘Want anything?’
‘A loaf and a jar of honey.’
I thumb at the house. ‘Visitor.’
‘Male or female?’
‘Male.’
‘Thought you were a hermit.’
‘Invited himself.’
‘Oh yes! I’ll have a look this after.’
‘Be gone by then I hope.’
She taps my parcel with a black-gloved hand. ‘Weekly survival kit?’
‘What else?’
‘Mummy’s boy!’ She laughs and revs. ‘See you.’
‘Cheers.’
7
The hardest part, I’m finding, of telling this story – one of the hardest parts – is not only getting everything in, but getting everything in in the right place. Maybe this is the right place to explain about Tess.
I first met her the day after I arrived, just at the moment when I was wondering what the hell I had done. The day before, still high on adrenalin, the empty, damp bleakness of the house hadn’t mattered, had even seemed just what I wanted. Satisfactory neglect. All the clutter of home left behind, all the suffocating stuff I’d grown up with cut away at last. Room to think. Make everything the way I wanted it, starting from scratch. From scratch with the house, from scratch with myself.
‘You’ve not brought any bedding and such,’ Bob Norris said. ‘Told you at the interview that you’d need it.’
‘I’ll be OK for tonight.’
‘I could fetch a few essentials from home to tide you over.’
‘I’ll be OK, thanks. You said I’d have a couple of days to settle in. I’ll go out tomorrow and buy what I need.’
‘Must like roughing it. But I suppose you do at your age.’
I spent a miserable night. Couldn’t get the fire going, not knowing how to deal with a damp chimney or a wood fire, filled the house with choking smoke instead. Sandwiches, brought from home, tasted like cold dishcloth and gave me indigestion. An apple, to follow, only increased my hunger. All there was to drink was water because I didn’t have tea or coffee or any of the everyday things you usually take for granted. By the time I hit bottom about ten o’clock, admitted defeat, and walked to the village, the shops were shut of course, and at the pub door I suddenly felt such an idiotic mess I couldn’t face the questions I knew the locals would ask. (The toll bridge and its fate were headline gossip I could have guessed even if Bob Norris hadn’t already told me.) So I trailed back to the bridge and curled up as best I could in the only easy chair, hoping sleep would bring tomorrow quickly.
But I had reckoned without the night noises of a lonely riverside house, and without my own nervousness. Not the nervousness of fright, I wasn’t scared, but the nervousness of being on my own for the first time in my life and of not knowing. Not knowing what caused the noises or why, not knowing if the skitterings across the floor were made by mice, whether the flitterings in the roof were birds roosting there that might invade my room, whether the ceaseless slurge of water passing under the bridge, sounding so much louder, more powerful, in the night, seeming to fill the house, meant the river had broken its banks and was flooding the place.
Once my mind is fixed on something I can’t bear not knowing about it. So whenever a new sound caught my attention I got up to find out what caused it, which meant any warmth I’d managed to cook up, huddled in the chair, escaped, and I came back, usually little the wiser, chilled again, wearier, and narked.
In the way it often happens after a bad night, I fell asleep at last when dawn came, a smudged grey light that morning. And was woken, the next minute it seemed, the room bright with sun, by Bob Norris rattling at the door and calling my name, my mouth like a sewage farm, my body gutsick, painfully stiff, and my mind confused, not remembering where I was.
Bob laughed and teased, not taken in by the show of cheerfulness I tried to put on, and left me to pull myself together while he stood outside taking the few early morning tolls. I washed, brushed my teeth (still didn’t need to shave more than twice a week), changed into fresh underclothes and shirt. But though this helped me feel physically better, the thought that already I had laundry to do and no one to do it for me and no washing machine to throw it into, finally made me face what I had brought upon myself.
All night long I’d told myself I was bound to feel strange at first, I’d soon settle down, get used to the place, make myself comfortable. But the sight of dirty clothes lying on the crushed old armchair in that bleak slummy room zapped any remaining particles of confidence and I wondered what the hell I was doing there.
Which was the moment when Tess walked in, carrying a bulging plastic bag and a blanket. Not, this first time, on the way to school, it being a Saturday, nor dressed in her biking leathers but in a loose white shirt and baggy washworn jeans and tennis shoes, a mane of lush jet-black hair framing the firm outlines of her face.
‘Is it all right to come in?’ she said, dumping the blanket on top of my laundry. ‘Dad asked me to bring you this stuff.’ She unpacked her plastic bag onto the muck-stained once-white pine table. Half-used packet of cornflakes, quarter of home-made brown loaf, jar of marmalade, bottle of milk, three eggs in a carton, quarter pound of farm butter, knife, fork, teaspoon, plate and mug, roll of paper towel. ‘Should see you through till you can shop.’ She looked me over as I stood gawping across the table. ‘I’ll give you a hand, if you like. You won’t know your way around yet.’
All I could think was: Shut up, go away, I don’t want any help, I’m going home, this is all a stupid mistake. What I managed to say was, ‘Thanks, sure, yes, I could do with some help.’
[– What you didn’t know at the time was that I was thinking: Why can’t this creep look after himself? What’s wrong with him? Why didn’t he sort himself out yesterday? Why should I spend my Saturday morning booby-sitting him? I’d planned to play tennis but Dad asked me to help because he was worried you might be disheartened and leave. Then he’d have trouble manning the bridge again. Did he ever tell you that you were the only applicant willing to take the job?]
So there I was that first Saturday morning, cold, hungry, aching, bog-eyed, wanting only, longing, to bolt back home at whatever cost of derision, but my way out blocked by this high-energy girl standing between me and escape like a jailer (which she was, after all, as she was only there to help keep me there).
This is how my friendship with Tess began, the first true friendship of my life. My closest friendship still.
8
I don’t think I believe in fate. Not if ‘fate’ means your future is planned, every detail, before you’re born. Nor do I feel singled out, not like some people say they do, not in any special way, not destined to be anything but ordinary, muddling through life, as most people seem to.
But that morning with Adam, three months after first meeting Tess, as she throttled away, disappearing over the bridge, I suddenly felt I’d been here and done all this before. I know what is going to happen next, but am not able to do anything to stop it – a weird sensation of having had, sometime in the past, a glimpse into this future, of having forgotten, and only remembering now in the very second when the future becomes the present.
I hadn’t experienced déjà-vu before. I’d heard people talk about it. But no one had said that it felt like a revelation. Suddenly the day seemed more alive, the air sharper, the light brighter, colours more colourful, objects more noticeable, more solid, more there. To tell the truth, as well as startled by it, I was a little frightened.
I turn towards the house, knowing I will turn in just this way. And walk inside, catching my hand on the doorknob as I pass, knowing I will catch it so but unable to prevent it. And find Adam, knowing I will, standing at the sink washing up the breakfast things, dressed in my only pair of spare jeans and my only spare sweater, sleeves pushed up above his elbows.
He will look sheepishly at me, I think as he looks sheepishly at me, and say, as he says, ‘Heard you talking to somebody. Thought I’d better put sommat on in case they came in.’
At which, as suddenly as it came over me, this spooky sensation, this knowledge of the future-past invading the present, leaves me. Disappearing into my unknown future again, like Tess disappearing just now over the bridge. I feel I’m tottering on the edge of the river, and must wave my arms to keep from falling. And that I’ve been given a glimpse of something important, something life-changing, only for it to be swept away before I can fathom what it is or what it means.
I’m trembling a little from the excitement as well as the fright.
Which Adam notices, thinks I’m angry with him, and says, ‘Was it OK, borrowing your stuff?’
Half an hour ago it wouldn’t have been, but after the déjà-vu his cheek doesn’t seem to matter because in some peculiar, inexplicable way, I know he has only done what he had to do.
I go to the fireplace and finger his clothes.
‘Your own things will be dry soon.’
The warmth is calming, a comforting encouragement to do what has to be done. I plant a thick unsplit log, one that will burn slowly, on the bed of glowing cinders, and add, ‘You’ll be wanting to get going.’
I stand and face him. He’s leaning against the sink, his ice-blue eyes watching, his arms crossed over my best blue sweater.
‘Look, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go, I’ve work to do.’
‘Work? What work? I thought this was a squat.’
‘No, no, it’s a toll bridge, didn’t you see?’
‘It was dark.’
‘Well . . . I collect the money.’
He thinks for a minute before saying, ‘I could help. I could spell you. You could have some time off. Many hands make light work, as the Chinaman said when the electricity failed.’
He flashes his wrinkling-eyed grin but I won’t give in.
‘Sorry, my boss wouldn’t allow it.’
‘Ask him.’
‘It’s not just that. I want to be on my own, that’s why I took the job.’
‘On your own?’
‘Yes.’
He shrugs, stares at his feet.
An awkward silence. The fire crackles behind me. With relief I hear a car approaching, go out, take the toll, come back inside.
Adam has gone. The back door stands open letting in a draught that is causing the chimney to backfire and fill the room with the heady incense of slow-burning wood. ‘Vanished in a puff of smoke,’ I say to myself.
I shut the door, glad he’s gone, and only then see his clothes still hanging by the hearth.