1 1
ONE DAY WE were painting the bedroom when we heard a noise like the sound of drunken children echoing up the approach road. We dropped our brushes and rushed outside, janitors ready to do a Horatius.
But there was no need of defence. Along the road came a party of about twenty Down’s people. Four of them were in wheelchairs. One, a young man who was singing loudly in a strange tuneless falsetto, had no legs.
They weren’t drunk on anything but happiness because they were having a trip out on a sharp, frosty, sunny December day. Five or six caretaking adults were sprinkled among them, shepherding them along and tending to the chairborne.
This patter of humanity strode, wobbled, limped, danced, skipped, hopped, rolled in well-behaved disarray towards the two of us, as we stood by habit in the middle of the road outside the toll-house door.
‘Hello! Hello!’ unembarrassed voices called as they approached. ‘It’s Timmy’s birthday. Happy birthday, dear Timmy, happy birthday to you!’
Timmy was the legless young man.
‘This is a toll bridge,’ one of the minders said. ‘It’s very old.’
‘As old as Timmy?’
‘What’s a toll bridge?’
‘Dong, dong, dong.’
‘You have to pay to cross.’
‘Do we have to pay?’
‘I haven’t no money.’
‘Timmy doesn’t have to pay, does he, not on his birthday, do you, Timmy?’
We were surrounded, our hands taken and caressed, our arms stroked. Faces beamed at us, some dribbling, others open, all glad to see us as if coming upon friends.
‘You’ve been painting,’ a girl said to me.
‘There’s a notice that tells who has to pay.’
‘Where, what does it say?’
‘I’ve no money today.’
‘I like painting. I like the smell. Painting smells like you.’
‘Well, it says “Four wheels twenty pence. Lorries and trucks fifty pence. Two wheels and pedestrians free.”’
‘What are pedestrians?’
‘We are pedestrians.’
‘Where are you painting? I’d help but it’s Timmy’s birthday and we’re taking him out. He’s eighteen.’
‘Pedestrians are people walking.’
‘Eighteen means you’re grown up. I’m fifteen.’
‘Four wheels pay,’ Adam said, finding his voice and giving in
kind. ‘Two legs go free.’
‘We’ve two legs.’
‘We go free.’
‘Timmy’s on four wheels though.’
‘So is Janice and Rachel and Jason.’
‘Oh, Jason, you have to pay. Twenty pence!’
‘Do I?’
‘And Janice and Rachel.’
‘Not Timmy though, eh, it’s his birthday.’
‘But he’s on four wheels. We had to pay to cross the Seven and it was my birthday that day. They didn’t make allowances.’
‘Allowances.’
‘It doesn’t mean wheelchairs, does it?’
Adam said, ‘No, no. I’ll tell you the rule. It’s like this. Four wheels pay. Two legs go free. No legs get paid.’
‘Get paid!’
‘Where does it say that?’
‘What – you pay Timmy?’
‘And Rachel and Janice and Jason,’ Adam said, ‘because they can’t go on two legs.’
‘They can sometimes.’
‘But not today,’ Adam said.
‘Not that far.’
‘There you are, Timmy,’ Adam said, pulling coins out of his pocket. ‘That’s your fare for crossing the bridge. And are you Rachel? OK, that’s for you. And Janice. And Jason.’
There was an alarming cheer from the pedestrians.
‘I needn’t have legs if you don’t want me to.’
‘We’d better be getting on,’ called one of the minders.
‘We have to be getting on,’ several voices ordered.
‘What are you painting?’
‘How much did he give you, Rachel?’
‘We could come back this way and get some more.’
‘What’ll you spend it on?’
‘I’ll save it.’
‘Bye.’
‘You smell lovely. You could come with me if you like.’
‘Come on, Sarah. The man’s busy.’
‘Kissy kissy.’
‘Dong, dong, dong.’
Back inside, Adam grabbed his brush and slashed and slashed at the wall. Paint flew.
‘Hey, steady, man, steady!’ I shouted, guarding my eyes with an arm. ‘What’s up, what’s the matter?’
He waved his brush towards the bridge and the dying sound of the Down’s party. ‘That’s the matter! That!’ A different Adam. The other Adam: the one only in the eyes before, now in this angry, violent moment all of him. ‘The sodding rotten unfairness of it.’
‘Being born like that?’
‘Not their frigging fault. Didn’t ask to be born. Life! Bloody life!’ He hurled the brush down and left the room. There was brittle silence for a few minutes before I heard him filling a glass at the sink. I got on with the painting. When he came back he was Adam again and calm.
I said, ‘At least they seemed happy.’
‘Happy? Yes, sure, really happy. A laugh a minute.’
‘Life is unfair. You knew that already.’
‘Just let’s get on, OK?’
2
Like the early morning, when we were on our own together the evenings were a problem for a while. Reading: I liked it, Adam didn’t. He could settle to nothing for very long, except TV. Obsessed with old movies. Watched them tranced, sitting square to the screen only an arm’s length away. Nothing distracted him, not moving about, not singing, not asking a question, not fetching logs, not washing up with a clatter, nothing except standing in front of the set, which I once did and never did again because his reaction was ugly. I thought for a second he’d flatten me.
So he was happy enough when there was an old film to watch. He’d be there sometimes well into the early hours, long after I’d gone to bed; and next morning he’d be fresh as a spring lamb. Sleep, for him, was like food – he didn’t need much, would snack when he felt like it. Often we’d stop work for a drink and he’d fall asleep for ten minutes and wake up ready for work as soon as I made a move. Though I always felt that he was still aware while he was asleep of what was going on, as if he were watching through closed eyes. Like a snoozing cat.
I’m not like that at all. Seven hours a night, and I hate cat-napping during the day. Don’t like old movies either, and am easily distracted no matter what I’m doing, reading especially. Reading is an essential part of my life, basic as breathing, eating, sleeping, crapping. Without it for more than a couple of days I feel my mind dying. More than just my mind. My soul dying. If soul means what my dictionary says: the essential part or fundamental nature of everything, the seat of human personality, intellect, will and emotions.
This was something Adam could never understand. Five or six days after he came to stay, clearing our stuff out of the bedroom, Tess helping, he said:
‘What d’you want all these books for?’
‘There aren’t that many,’ I said.
‘A hundred and eight,’ Tess said. ‘I counted.’
‘I’ve over a thousand at home.’
‘Glad we’re not painting your place,’ Adam said.
‘Bookworm . . .’ Tess said.
‘Chewing his way through paper.’
‘. . . Bibliophile.’
‘What d’you do with them all, once you’ve read them?’
I said, ‘For a start, you can do more with books than you can with people, judging by the way you two carry on – or don’t carry on as it happens. Here, grab these.’
‘Go on then,’ Adam said as I piled books into his cradled arms, ‘tell us. What can you do with books you can’t do with people?’
‘Not another of your games, for God’s sake, not while we’re doing this.’
Tess said, ‘Go on, tell him. I’ll start you off. You can read them, which,’ she added pointedly to Adam, ‘is certainly more than you can do with some people.’
‘You can write in them,’ Adam said. ‘I’ve seen him do it. Bloody vandal.’
‘Buy them.’
‘You can buy people,’ Adam said.
‘Sell them, then.’
‘You can sell people as well. Seen it done. But why not sell these, Jan? We could have a party on the proceeds.’
‘Hasn’t he told you? He doesn’t like parties.’
‘Must be defective, poor sod.’
‘It’s what comes of biblioboring.’
‘We should do something about that.’
‘Educate him in everyday life.’
‘You’ll do no such thing,’ I said.
‘Use them to hold things up,’ Tess went on, ‘like wonky table legs.’
‘And hold things down. But you can use people for that as well.’
‘If you’re lucky,’ I said.
‘Give them away as presents,’ Tess said.
‘Burn them to keep the place warm.’
‘Fascist,’ I said.
‘Cover up nasty cracks in the wall,’ Tess said pertinently.
‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ I said. ‘They don’t play up the way people do.’
‘Or get ill,’ Tess said.
‘Or puke,’ Adam said.
‘Or cry,’ Tess said.
I said quickly, ‘Or eat or drink or nick your clothes or take holidays or sleep or poop or doublecross or answer back or desert you when you need them or want to be paid or take the huff or need decorating or get The Glums or have a menopause or murder or torture or fight wars –’
‘Sometimes cause them,’ Tess butted in.
‘– or do anything except look attractive while they wait for you to do whatever you like with them, like read them. OK – is that enough for now, can we get on?’
‘I’m knackered after all that,’ Adam said. ‘I thought books were supposed to be relaxing.’
‘And while we’re on the subject,’ I said, ‘we’ll have to do something about you and the telly and me and reading, unless you want to go into exile in the basement every night.’
‘Why?’ Tess said. ‘What’s the matter?’
That explained, she said, ‘Easy. I’ve a set of headphones I used when I wanted to watch the telly at home and nobody else did. Now I’ve one in my room I never use them. Adam can borrow them, so he can watch while you read.’
‘Brilliant,’ Adam said.
‘Only takes feminine lateral thinking.’
‘You can go lateral for me any time.’
‘I said thinking.’
3
One evening towards the end of the decorating there was nothing on TV that Adam wanted to watch and Tess dropped in bringing some beer she’d filched from the fridge and we were talking about sleep because when Tess arrived Adam was slumped in one of his sleep-snacks and I was reading a story about a dream, which comes into this story soon.
Adam perked up, of course, the second Tess came through the door and they joshed around, which they always did, flirting, that evening cracking suspect puns on being laid out and having a lie down and being wide to the world and heavy breathing and how thrilling a good zizz was, and when they’d got through with that Tess said they’d done something on sleep in biology the year before. They’d had to record their dreams as soon as they woke up in the morning (most of the time, of course, they hadn’t dared tell the truth so they made them up) and they’d done experiments with REM (rapid eye movement – the wobbling of the eyes under the lids which happens when people are dreaming), and we nattered on about all that and the meaning of dreams and why they are so weird, till Adam suddenly said,
‘What I want to know is why I wake up just about every morning with a whacking great hard on.’
‘You do?’ Tess said, leaning forward, agog.
‘Like a broom handle.’
‘Because of sexy dreams?’
‘Not always. Happens quite a lot when I haven’t been dreaming about anything.’
‘Or not that you remember when you wake up.’
‘Me too,’ I said, no less than the truth, but rather so as not to be left out. ‘Didn’t they tell you anything about that in biol?’
‘Grief, no! They only talk about sex in Human Relations and they didn’t say anything about early morning erections then, only about Aids and not having babies.’
‘What about your brothers,’ I said, ‘don’t you know about it from them?’
‘We’re not the kind of family where the men lie around with their dingers on show, if that’s what you mean. And you know my mum, she’s pretty open but she wouldn’t go much on talking about erections.’
‘Well, all I know is I wake up stiff as a bat,’ Adam said.
‘Ready for a good innings,’ I said.
‘A big score, you’re telling me.’
‘Boys!’ Tess said with mock scorn. ‘Sex mad.’
‘Unlike girls,’ Adam said, ‘who aren’t, eh? They don’t have nothing like that, I suppose.’
‘What, like early morning blooming of the nips or clutching of the clit, that kind of thing?’
‘Very elegantly put,’ I said.
‘To be honest, yes.’
‘You do?’ Adam said, himself agog now. ‘There you are, then, it isn’t just us.’
‘Another of the uncontrollable pleasures of growing up, you mean. Like acne.’
‘I enjoy it more than acne,’ Adam said. ‘All you can do with acne is pick it.’
‘Easier to get rid of as well,’ I said.
‘Oo – you don’t, do you!’ Tess said, this time demonstrating shocked innocence. ‘Not that I know what you’re talking about, of course.’ And we all laughed.
‘But here, listen,’ Adam said. ‘I’ve been having a funny dream lately.’
‘Funny ha-ha or funny disgusting?’ Tess asked.
‘Funny how it makes me sweat. I’m coming along this road, not walking or running or in a car or anything, just sort of floating along, and there’s a bridge up ahead, not this bridge, just a bridge, a flat straight bridge, and as I come nearer I get more and more scared, I’m not sure why, because there’s something dangerous on the other side I think, that’s how it feels anyway, and I go slower and slower and all I can see is the bridge, nothing neither side, which is just a blur, and there’s nobody with me, I’m all alone, I feel lonely, and when I reach the bridge where the road becomes the bridge, there’s a yellow line painted across the road and I stop just before it and I can’t make myself go no further, just can’t move at all, can’t make myself cross the bridge, I’m stuck because of whatever it is I’m scared of, and I can’t turn round and go back because there’s something behind that I’m trying to get away from, I’m right stuck, and near freaking out, I’m breathing hard, and sweating, and . . . well . . . and, well, that’s the end of it really, that’s it, I’m stuck and I’m alone and I’m scared of something and I can’t cross the bridge.’
He’d even broken out in a sweat as he spoke. Tess and I said nothing, seeing how disturbed he was and not knowing what to say. The Ancient Mariner. It was as if the whole evening had been working up to this point, when Adam would tell his dream.
He fell silent, his eyes grasping us, expecting, wanting us to say something that would release him from his nightmare.
‘That’s it,’ he said after a while. ‘That’s all.’
Taking a deep breath, Tess said, ‘I wonder what it is on the other side that scares you?’
I said, ‘Maybe it’s nothing to do with what’s on the other side.’
‘What then?’
‘Dunno. Doesn’t have to be something on the other side, though, does it? Could be the bridge itself he’s afraid of. Or what he’s running away from. Or the yellow line. What does that mean?’
Tess said, ‘Does it have to mean anything? You’re always trying to find a meaning in everything. Sometimes things don’t mean anything, you know, they don’t have to, do they? They might just be there.’
Adam watching us like a spectator at a tennis match, closely assessing every stroke.
I said, ‘I don’t believe that. Everything means something. Everything is there for a reason. Nothing just happens.’
‘You’re an appalling intellectual, you know that, don’t you.’
‘Why do people use “intellectual” as an insult? What’s so bad about thinking? I enjoy thinking.’
‘All right, don’t let’s go into that now. What we’re talking about is Adam’s dream,’ Tess said. ‘Dreams have their own kind of logic, don’t they. They’re not like . . . I don’t know . . . like this happens, then that happens as a result, and then the next thing happens, and so on. They’re weird. Everything is jumbled. Things don’t seem to connect.’
‘Exactly. They have their own logic. And all logic has a meaning. So things do connect. What you have to do is puzzle out the logic by finding some sort of pattern to it, don’t you. Then the meaning becomes dear. Like poetry. Some poetry doesn’t seem to make any sense when you first read it, so you just keep on reading it and rereading it while you puzzle out what the logic is, the ideas, the images, the words, all the rest of it, till you find the pattern – how everything connects in a way you hadn’t noticed at first. I mean, that’s one of the things that’s so interesting about poetry, isn’t it, you know that.’
‘Sacré dieu!’
‘I’m only trying to explain how I think about dreams, that’s all. Look, I’ll give you an example.’
‘He’s off, Adam, here he goes.’
‘No, listen,’ Adam said, ‘I want to know.’
I went on, ‘As it happens, I was just reading a story about a bridge. I’m interested in bridges at the moment, not surprisingly.’ I fetched the book. ‘It’s a story called “The Bridge”. It’s by Franz Kafka.’
‘The guy who wrote the one about the boy who wakes up and he’s turned into a beetle?’ Tess said.
‘The very same,’ I said, finding the place.
‘Well then it’s bound to be weird.’
‘Want to hear it or not? It’s very short, won’t strain your powers of concentration.’
‘Cheek!’
‘Sure,’ Adam said.
‘OK, here goes:’
I was stiff and cold, I was a bridge, I lay over an abyss; my toes buried deep on one side, my hands on the other, I had fastened my teeth in crumbling day. The tails of my coat fluttered at my sides. Far below brawled the icy trout stream. No tourist strayed to this impassable height, the bridge was not yet marked on the maps. Thus I lay and waited; I had to wait; without falling no bridge, once erected, can cease to be a bridge. One day towards evening, whether it was the first, whether it was the thousandth, I cannot tell – my thoughts were always in confusion, and always, always moving in a circle – towards evening in summer, the roar of the stream grown deeper, I heard the footsteps of a man! Towards me, towards me. Stretch yourself, bridge, make yourself ready, beam without rail, hold up the one who is entrusted to you. If his steps are uncertain steady them unobtrusively, but if he staggers then make yourself known and like a mountain god hurl him to the bank. He came, he tapped me with the iron spike of his stick, then with it he lifted my coat-tails and folded them upon me; he plunged his spike into my bushy hair, and for a good while he let it rest there, no doubt as he gazed far round him into the distance. But then – I was just following him in thought over mountain and valley – he leapt with both feet on to the middle of my body. I shuddered with wild pain, quite uncomprehending. Who was it? A child? A gymnast? A daredevil? A suicide? A tempter? A destroyer? And I turned over to look at him. A bridge turns over! And before I fully turned I was already falling, I fell, and in a moment I was ripped apart and impaled on the sharp stones that had always gazed up at me so peacefully out of the rushing waters.
Silence. The fire burned our faces.
Adam stirred, flexing himself as he did sometimes after a film he’d specially liked.
‘Great!’
‘You liked it?’ Tess said, surprised.
‘Is that all of it?’
I nodded.
‘Let’s have a look.’
Tess and I watched as, like a boy with a new toy, Adam pawed the open page and pored over the words, too.
‘I’ll have a read of this later on.’ He looked up, smiling. ‘I’m too slow for it now with you two watching.’
‘But what does it mean?’ Tess said.
He shrugged.
‘But you like it?’
‘Sure. You can kind of feel what it means.’
‘There you are,’ I said to Tess, ‘he’s a natural. He really knows how to read. Don’t struggle with it. Just let it happen. Right? And don’t snort at me. What do you think it means?’
‘Oh no, you’re not getting out of it that easy!’ she said, laughing. ‘I know you. You’ll get me to say something stupid off the top of my head, having just heard the thing for the first time, and then you’ll come up with something clever, because you’ve read it half a dozen times and been thinking about it for days! You’re like Bishop at school, he does that, and it’s not fair. It’s easy to be clever about something when you’ve had plenty of time to work it out and the other person hasn’t.’
‘I’ve only read it once, just before you arrived, and I haven’t a clue what it means.’
‘Then why did you read it to us? Not just because we were talking about dreams and Adam told us his. That’s too simple for you.’
‘I really do want to know what you think. I’m not playing games, honest.’
‘All right, I’ll believe you though there’s many who wouldn’t. All I can say is that it seems to me to be a typical male fantasy about sex and failure.’
Adam said, ‘How d’you work that out?’
‘Let’s have a look.’
Now it was Tess who pored over the pages. Adam watched as you watch someone who knows how to do something and hope by watching to learn the trick.
‘I mean,’ Tess said after a while, ‘all this about being stiff and lying over an abyss! He even uses the word “erected”. You don’t erect bridges, do you? You build them, surely? Then there’s the river. That’s always got to do with sex, hasn’t it. Water, flowing, channels. The image of the female. And it’s a trout stream! We all know what fishes swimming in a river are supposed to mean.’
‘What?’ Adam asked, not batting an eye.
Tess shot a glance at me. Did he really not know?
‘Well . . .’ she said, ‘penises, sperm, the male in the female . . . And then there’s this dark stranger with the stick – I suppose you’ll say that’s another penis – which he plunges into the man’s hair and then jumps onto the middle of his body. And after that the storyteller falls and smashes onto stones in the river and is ripped apart. All that is sex, and the failure is that he’s supposed to be a bridge but he can’t bear the first person who comes along without cracking up. So he’s a failed bridge. Sex and failure.’
‘So all you think it means is he can’t get it up?’ I said.
‘But the figure who comes along is a man,’ Adam said.
‘Yes, well, I’d rather not go into that, thank you,’ Tess said, making her mock-shock face. ‘The whole thing seems pretty dubious to me. Unless the figure is his father, which would be bad enough. Which reminds me – it’s time I left you two to it.’
‘Now there’s an Oedipal connection,’ I said, laughing.
‘Left us to what?’ Adam said, beginning the banter of departure that matched the banter of arrival.
‘Whatever you do when I’m not here.’
‘Nothing near as exciting as we could do if you stayed.’
‘This place is becoming a den of vice,’ Tess said, making for the door. ‘In your minds, anyway. Night all. May flights of angels sing you to your rest.’
When she had gone, the sound of her bike echoing down the road, Adam picked up the book again and sat reading for long minutes. After a while he started humming (was he conscious of doing so or not?) a tune I couldn’t at first remember; then it came back: ‘. . . like a bridge over troubled waters I will lay me down . . .’
When at last he looked up, his expression serious, his eyes the other Adam’s eyes, he said, as if making the meaning plain, ‘It’s the stones, the stones in the rushing water.’
I nodded, pretending I understood. But I didn’t.
[– You and me, being so so clever, did we sense that talking about bridges and what bridges might mean wasn’t a good idea that night? It’s funny, but I can’t remember. I can remember the evening and saying the things you say we said – or most of them; I don’t remember any of those twittish puns! I do remember what we did and what we said and I even remember how I felt, but I don’t remember what I thought.
But I’m off the point, which is that it didn’t seem to occur to us that Adam’s dream was about a bridge and Kafka’s story was about a bridge and that there we all were sitting by a bridge, and that bridges are always about connecting two separated things, about joining things together that can’t meet otherwise, and about crossing from one side to the other. In either direction. That bridges are borders and boundaries. And are walls with holes in them. That things (rivers, roads, cars, boats) and people go through and under them as well as on and over. That they are places where people meet, where they hide, where they go to look down on what goes under. From where they fish, play Pooh-sticks, and sometimes have to pay to cross. And even throw themselves off.
We hadn’t found wonderful Calvino then, more’s the pity, or we might have also known about Marco Polo in Invisible Cities, and you might have read that to us, which would have made a lot of difference to the way we thought about Adam’s dream. I’m thinking of this bit:
Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
‘But which is the stone that supports the bridge?’ Kublai Khan asks.
‘The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,’ Marco answers, ‘but by the line of the arch that they form.’
Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: ‘Why do you speak of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.’
Polo answers: ‘Without stones there is no arch.’
I think the thing we didn’t really understand was what Polo says to Kublai Khan. We didn’t understand yet that, yes, we are each individual stones, but that together we can make an arch. We hadn’t made that connection. We hadn’t bridged that gap.
By the way, you really were painfully jealous of Adam and me, weren’t you! Perhaps you were so jealous that even now you find it hard to admit? Or is writing it a kind of confession? Come to that, isn’t this whole story a kind of confession? Or do I read it like that because I’m a lapsed Catholic from a family of lapsed Catholics? That’s what you’ll say, I suppose, never having been anything yourself but a lapsed atheist.]
4
One day a raven came to the bridge, perching on the peak of the toll-house roof, and returned day after day. Adam took a fancy to it.
The raven would stand on the roof and peer around with its reptilian eyes, spying for food I expect, as it was winter.
They are so impressively big are ravens, bigger bodied than a carrion crow, and armed with a long heavy beak set off by shaggy throat feathers that give them an evil predatory appearance. You can see why they get such a bad press. But Adam admired our visitor and would stand in the road and speak to it. Not the billing-and-cooing of sentimental animal lovers, as if animals were human babies of low intelligence, but in something that sounded like a foreign language, with its own rhythm and music and vocabulary. I can’t capture it in writing, it would look like gobbledegook. He didn’t speak loudly, either. There was the raven up on the roof, and there was Adam down on the road, and he would look up at the raven and mutter his animalian no louder than he would speak to someone standing right in front of him. You wouldn’t have thought the bird could hear. But it would turn to face him and stretch its cruel head down and fix him with its cold eyes and twist and cock its head as if listening hard to every nuance.
Adam did this for four or five days in a row whenever he heard the raven’s coarse deep-throated croaking from the roof. I began to wonder if it was actually calling for him. He would go out and talk for two or three minutes and then come back inside. Nothing else.
But on the sixth or seventh day he was there so long that I went to the window to see what was happening. He was standing in the middle of the road as usual, but this time holding his right arm up, gently beckoning with his fingers and murmuring his animalian so quietly I could hardly hear him from inside. He’s never, I thought, at once feeling fearful, he’s never trying to tice it down!
But that is exactly what he did do. I’d only been watching for a few seconds when the raven swooped shockingly into view, the great black metre-wide fans of its wings throbbing the air, powering the bird round Adam’s head, once, twice, three times, while it let out a high-pitched metallic cry as it circled, Adam standing statuesquely still, until it came gliding in, claws extended, and clutched Adam’s wrist, where it settled, after a dodgy wobble back and forth till they both found the right balance. Then the two of them stood still, gazing into each other’s unblinking eyes.
By now I had broken into a cold sweat. And the sight of that scimitar beak only a fist away from Adam’s eyes completely unnerved me. My knees buckled and I sat down on the windowsill, grasping the edge to keep me from falling. But I couldn’t stop looking.
Adam waited for a while that seemed an age, murmuring murmuring, the tension so great I desperately wanted to pee.
The pair of them remained there, the one talking, the other listening, for endless minutes. Then Adam began to move slowly, slowly, careful step by careful step, first in a wide circle, then in a straight line up the middle of the road onto the bridge for a few metres before turning and coming back again. All the time he talked his quiet animal talk. And all the time the raven stared at him, only occasionally looking away with a sharp twist of its head as if to assess the view.
When they were near the house again, where I hoped he would launch the bird into the air and be done with his circus act, Adam paused for a moment. But then set off again, slowly, slowly, this time towards the front door.
Dear God, I thought, he’s never going to bring it in!
But he did. Step by step, and pausing every two or three steps, allowing the raven to take in what was happening, and talking his lingo all the time, calmly, lightly, soothingly, gradually edging his way through the door, and on into the living room, right past me, where I sat pressed against the window utterly speechless, every muscle paralysed though I could hear my heart thumping in terror and feel an effusion of sweat soaking my clothes.
At last, reaching the centre of the room Adam gently turned so that he faced me and the door, and stopped, the bird twisting its head and stabbing its beak nervously in this direction and that, and Adam’s monologue the only sound.
Could he have got away with it? Might he have kept the bird quiet until he had taken it outside again? We never found out because a car arrived just then. I was so spelled that I wasn’t aware of it coming. The first I heard was the noise of an engine outside the house. There was a moment when we all – Adam, the raven, myself – cocked our ears in its direction, Adam like me thinking, What now?, and the raven gathering itself for flight.
At which second the car’s horn blew and the raven took off, seeming in one spread of its wings to fill the room. Instinctively, I threw myself onto the floor and lay there, curled up as tightly as I could and shielding my head with my arms while the bird blundered and buffeted around the room, squawking loud angry croaking cries and banging into walls and ceiling light and furniture, such a confined space being far too small for it to achieve proper flight. Adam ducked and dodged as it flayed about his head, its wings raising a draught that swirled up clouds of dust and caused the chimney to backfire, sending wood smoke billowing into the room. In seconds the place looked and smelt like a dungeon in the bowels of hell during an attack from an avenging angel.
In the middle of this confusion the car must have driven off, at any rate it wasn’t there a few minutes later when everything was under control again. Probably the driver took fright at the noise, which must have sounded like ritual murder, and decided he was better off out of it.
After beating about for I don’t know how long, time being now a commodity I’d completely lost sense of, the raven careered headfirst into a wall, fell onto the back of the armchair, clutched at it wildly, dug its claws into the upholstery, and found itself perched there, ruffled, agitated, defensive (that cruel beak stab-stab-stabbing) and the room suddenly silent again.
Slowly the swirls of dust and smoke settled to a haze. And as if to mark the time a lone black feather floated lazily down from the ceiling, coming finally to rest at Adam’s feet.
He by now was hunkered half under the table watching with a satisfied smirk as if this were the very scene he had hoped to create.
From my exposed position flat on the floor I muttered, ‘What the hell do we do now?’
‘Hush,’ Adam said. ‘Keep still.’
And he started talking his beastspiel again. I thought, This time it won’t work. But it did. Slowly, oh so slowly! His patience was impeccable. I remember thinking, How can he be so calm and patient at a time like this when normally he’s such an unpredictable volatile fidget? Which only goes to show how little I understood Adam or myself or human nature in general.
With delicate care he approached the nervous bird, coaxed it after repeated attempts onto his arm, and then half-step by half-step eased his way across the room and through the living-room door and at long last through the outside door and into the road, where for a moment he stood still, the pair of them again like a sculpture, ‘Boy with Bird’, before he raised his arm, and the raven launched itself cleanly into the air and flapped off, soaring into the sky, repeating as it went its deep-throated cry in farewell.
Once the bird was out of sight the tension broke. The relief was almost as unbearable.
I stormed outside yelling, ‘What in hell’s teeth d’you think you’re playing at! You must be crazy! You could have lost an eye! That was just about the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen anybody do! You’re mad! Never do anything like that again, d’you hear! Never!! Jesus!!!’
Adam grinned at me as I frothed.
‘And don’t stand there grinning!’ I blathered on.
‘It was fun.’
‘Fun! You call that fun!’
‘Sure. Gave you a thrill as well.’
‘Me!’
‘You loved every minute.’
‘I did not!’
‘Yes, you did. Look at you, you’re shaking with excitement.’
‘I’m shaking from anger, you great steaming ape, that’s why I’m shaking.’
He raised his hand to run it through his hair, that irritating tic whenever he was excited. It was then that I saw blood soaking through the arm of his sweater.
‘What’s this?’ I said, catching hold of his hand.
‘Nothing.’ He tried to tug his hand away, but half-heartedly.
I eased the sweater back. Blood was oozing from torn flesh just above his wrist.
‘Christ, its claws must have dug into you! Thank God it missed the vein. We’d better see to that.’
He allowed me to lead him to the sink where I cleaned the wound and dressed it as best I could with strips of cloth torn from a T-shirt. Doing that calmed me, maybe for the same reason that the raven calmed Adam.
‘Why the hell did you do that?’ I said quietly as I worked.
‘Just to see if I could.’
‘Well, I hope that’s all the proof you want.’
‘Till I think of something better.’
‘Not while I’m around, if you don’t mind. The beak on that bird! You could easily have lost an eye. One peck – And look at your arm. It’s a mess.’
‘Worth it though,’ he said.
5
‘Hey!’ Tess called out.
We turned from our work. Her camera clicked.
‘Not again!’ I said. ‘How many more?’
She was taking photos for an optional course on photography at school. She’d chosen the toll bridge as a topic, photographing it regularly for six months. At the beginning she thought it would just make an interesting subject, a study of stones and water and people and the effect on them of weather and the changing seasons. She called the finished portfolio ‘Tolling the Bridge’.
Adam enjoyed being snapped enormously, camping up the poses if he got the chance, which Tess liked for a while, but when she’d had enough of it, would creep up on us and take us unawares. Early on, she persuaded Adam to perform his Tarzan act for her (not that he needed much persuading of course), which she shot in black and white from various angles – on and under the bridge, from the garden, from the back-door steps, from the river (she had to get into the water for these shots and nearly died of the cold), even from above in the tree itself It took three sessions during which I was required to act as general runabout and slave to the pair of them. Of course I pretended to be sniffy about this at the time but I have to admit the resulting pictures are my favourites, beautifully capturing the sense of movement and energy. (The school made Tess cut the sequence out of the portfolio before putting it on show with the work of the rest of the group because Adam was in the nude and Tess refused to crop away or cover with airbrushed shadows the full frontal naughty bits. Another example of how prissy puritanism still rides shotgun in certain sectors of the British social system. [– Compare and contrast in two hundred words the ‘page three’ popsies in the tabloid dailies and then write three hundred words in their defence, imagining yourself to be one of the dishy dolls.])
6
One drizzly morning a Range Rover stopped at the door. I went out to take the toll but already the driver, a young guy, incipient version of B-and-G, dressed in a cheap grey junior businessman suit and sporting one of those fluffy moustaches that grow on the faces of insecure post-adolescents who want you to think they’re older than they are, was hauling out of the back a large notice on a pole. FOR SALE, the notice said, and the usual details of agent’s name and phone number. Plus the inevitable emblem – not head of Greek god, nor flourishing oak tree, nor prancing black stallion but blue swallow in full flight. Why never anything nearer the truth, like a brace of money bags or a vulture picking on a corpse or a shark with a bloodstained mortgage in its teeth? Stupid question, really.
What does puzzle me, though, is why we put up with such pollution of the mind. We go on and on about dodgy food and acid rain and nuclear radiation and other threats to our bodies but we don’t bat an eye at abuse of symbols or poison pumped into our minds by advertisers and other con artists, or foul emissions spewed out every day by, for example, so-called ‘news’ papers and politicians and TV’s self-appointed public opinionaters. What’s the point of a living body without a living mind to go with it? Nichts. All the evidence I need is here.
The driver, studiously ignoring me, was carrying the sign to the corner of the house.
‘Has Mister Norris OK’d this?’ I asked.
‘And who might you be, squire?’
‘The toll keeper.’
Sizing up the stonework for a place to fix the pole, he said, ‘I’m impressed.’
He leaned the hoarding against the house, returned to the back of his Rover from where he was taking a claw hammer and a handful of round-head spike nails when he caught sight, as I did from following the line of his surprised gawp, of Adam, who must have come outside while our backs were turned, quietly taken possession of the hoarding, and was now casually bearing it, raised like a banner, towards the bridge.
Speechless, the agent’s agent watched as Adam, reaching the middle of the bridge, lifted the hoarding over the parapet, hoyed it into the river, ran to the other side, watched it float through and swirl away downstream, after which, without casting a glance in our direction, he walked calmly back to the house and disappeared inside.
Only then did the agent’s agent find his voice.
‘Who the hell was that?’
‘Him? Just my assistant.’
‘Your assistant!’
‘Now you’re impressed.’
‘What the shit does he think he’s playing at?’
‘Pooh-sticks.’
‘Eh?’
‘Do return when you have obtained written permission to molest the building,’ I said with all the hauteur I could assume, and stalked into the house, quietly closing the door behind me.
Adam was standing in the middle of the living room, clenched fist raised and pulling victory faces. We wanted to burst out but stifled ourselves in order to hear what went on outside for, there being no curtains, we didn’t want to spoil the effect by being seen looking out. Not that there was long to wait before a cruel slamming of car doors, over-revved engine and squealing tyres told us all we needed to know.
A futile gesture but spine-tinglingly satisfying. Naturally, fluffy lip was back by noon, flapping an officious piece of paper in our faces and braying his FOR SALE sign to the wall with all the crucifying passion of a minion with a score to settle. Another episode in the comedy of rage.
7
After three weeks of painting and decorating I began to feel ill. Irritated lungs, runny nose and eyes, heavy aching head, dizziness sometimes, queasy stomach, wanting to puke. This went on for a day or two, me thinking I was coming down with the flu, when one night I woke up and made it to the back door just in time. Soaked in fever sweat, freezing in the night frost and dark December air, I threw up till there was nothing left to throw and retching was itself a pain. When it was over I stumbled back inside, washed, drank a glass of water, stirred up the slumbering logs on the fire, and hunkered as close to the warmth as I could, shivering, sniffling, and miserable.
Adam didn’t move. I resented that for a while, all my only-son reflexes, I suppose, conditioned to expect coddling and consolation. But as the spasm wore off I was pleased he’d stayed where he was. This was the first time since I came to the bridge that I’d been physically ill. It had never occurred to me that I would be. Now it had happened I felt suddenly vulnerable and was glad there was someone else in the house, but I certainly didn’t want him fussing over me, and suggesting remedies.
Once I was warm again and the spasm was properly over, I felt so washed out and weary all I wanted was to crawl back into bed. Which I did, and slept so soundly that I didn’t wake next morning till I heard Tess’s voice saying my name. She was standing by my bed dressed in her biking leathers, Adam at her side.
‘Hello. Are you all right?’
‘What time is it?’
‘Eight thirty. Is anything wrong?’
‘Just a bit queasy.’
‘You don’t look too terrific.’
Adam said, ‘He was spewing half the night.’
‘I’ll get up.’
Tess said, ‘You might be better in bed. Was it something you ate?’
Adam said, ‘We both had the same.’
He was, as ever, the epitome of health, being one of those people who look tanned even in the dead of winter.
‘I’m all right.’
They looked at me like mourners surveying a corpse.
‘Shove off. I want to get dressed.’
‘If you’re sure,’ Tess said.
‘I’m sure, I’m sure. Go!’
They went, closing the door behind them. There was mumbling from outside before Tess’s bike started and drove off, not over the bridge, as it should have done if she were on her way to school, but towards the village. So I wasn’t surprised when Bob Norris turned up twenty minutes later in his van, Tess puttering along behind. By then I was sitting by the fire, feeling like Lazarus, nibbling half-heartedly on a piece of dry bread, which was the only food I could face.
‘Traitor,’ I muttered at Tess when she and her father came in with that apprehensive look people wear when visiting the uncertain sick. Adam, who had been outside taking tolls, tagged along behind.
‘What’s this?’ Bob Norris said in his foreman’s bantering style, which he hadn’t been using much lately. ‘Skiving, is it? Day off? General strike? Go slow? What?’
‘Inquisition followed by public burning, by the looks,’ I said trying to respond in kind, but it sounded more like accusation than joke. While I sat quiet I seemed fairly normal; as soon as I spoke, or worse, moved, I knew I wasn’t.
‘Haven’t lost your appetite, I see.’
‘Favourite breakfast, dry bread.’
‘Stomach is it? Bad chest, snotty nose, dizzy head?’
‘Flu, I expect. Nothing to bother about.’
‘Sick in the night though.’
I glared at Tess.
‘Painter’s colic,’ Bob Norris went on. ‘Breathing those fumes for too long. Not enough fresh air. Not enough ventilation. Windows shut at night to keep out the cold.’
‘I’ll take a walk.’
‘You’ll do nothing of the sort. You’ll come home with me in the van. The wife’ll see to you. You need some time out of here and a day or two recuperating before things get worse.’ He turned to Adam, who was leaning in the doorway. ‘Can you cope without him?’
‘Sure.’
Tess said, ‘I could stay and help. We’re not doing much at school.’
Her father gave her a wry glance. ‘You’ve done your bit for today, girl. Best get going, you’re late already.’
‘Girl indeed!’ Tess stretched up, pecked a kiss on his unshaven cheek and said, ‘I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir.’
‘Eh?’
And bending down, pecked a kiss on my cheek too. ‘O, flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified!’ I was too addled to remember what she was quoting. ‘Get well soon, dear Jan.’ And she clumped away in her biking boots. ‘See you, Adam. ‘Bye all.’
Mrs Norris fed me bread and milk, a potion for sickly children I’d only ever read about in books, hustled me into the spare bedroom, and left me luxuriating between fresh-smelling pink flannelette sheets, a radio playing quietly, curtains drawn against the light, and firm instructions that I must sleep. A brisk good-humoured spoiling quite different from my mother’s all-consuming full-time attention.
For the rest of that day I drifted pleasantly, cosily, in and out of sleep. In the waking times my mind played with memories of the past year and thoughts about my time at the bridge and about Mother and Dad and everything Dad had told me in his letter, and about Gill and me and my confusion about what I really wanted, and about Adam and Tess and the strangeness of everything, the unlikeliness of all life, the unrealness of its reality. For it wasn’t only because I was mildly ill that other people and life in general seemed such a puzzle, so surprising and beyond understanding, so unknowable, and yet so fascinating. So beautiful and yet so ugly too. In a less fevered way, that is how it was for me always and still is: the surprise and fascination, the otherness, the not-me of it all.
Lying there in the Norrises’ spare bedroom, gazing dozily at the wallpaper covered in big-patterned dark green vine leaves entwined with huge bunches of ripe red grapes, and at the family knick-knacks neatly grouped on every flat surface, and at the furniture – heavy dark-wood dressing table and matching wardrobe, cane bedside table, wooden milking stool, ancient Windsor rocking chair with bright red cushion – most of which must have come down from generations before, solid and brightly polished as a freshly opened conker, my own deep confusions about myself became all the more disturbing, and I wished that somehow I could belong to the settled, ages-old certainties that the Norrises lived by. But knew I never could, and maybe only wanted to now in a fit of sentimentality brought on by painter’s (melan)colic.
Among the knick-knacks one especially caught my eye, an object so strange, so unlike any of the others, that I had to get out of bed to pick it up. The size of a small mug, it was crudely hand-made of mud-red clay with a stubby almost straight handle across the top so that the thing was like a small pottery bucket. But for carrying what? Raised from the surface of the mug, to each side of the handle, was a plump face, one solemn and stern and clean-shaven with pursed lips, the other moustached and goatee-bearded and smiling mischievously. The faces were framed by ringlets of hair falling like twined snakes behind the ears – large ears on the stem man – and were circled by a crown, as if both faces belonged to one head.
I knew as soon as I picked it up that this weird antique must have something to do with the god Janus. And as I caressed its pitted cracked sandy surface, and with a delicious shock found that the pad of my thumb and the tip of my index finger fitted exactly into the hollows where the potter had pressed the ends of the handle into the rim of the vessel, I felt a kind of awe, as if some magnetic power emanated from this ancient piece of crudely shaped clay and took me into its possession. I was suddenly afraid the holy pot might break or even crumble to pieces in my hand, yet did not want to put it down, wanted to keep it with me, hold it to me, hide it on me. I actually had to suppress a strong desire to steal it.
Ever since that moment I have been able to understand the magic power of sacred objects. I cannot explain how the magic works but I no longer scoff at anyone who believes in it.
At midday Bob Norris came to see me, bearing a bowl of Mrs Norris’s vegetable soup and a chunk of brown bread. He spotted that I’d placed the Janus on the bedside table where I could look closely at it while I lay in bed.
‘Like it?’ he said.
‘Very much. How old is it?’
‘Roman-Egyptian, circa first century BC – about two thousand two hundred years old. Know what it is?’
‘Something to do with Janus?’
‘One face is Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and fruitfulness and all vegetation. He bestows ecstasy and is also the god of drama. They used to worship him with very sexy goings-on. The other is Satyr, a goat-like man who drank a lot and danced in the procession behind Dionysus and chased the nymphs. Bit of a randy devil.’
‘Quite a pair.’
‘And they make Janus, the god of gates and doorways and bridges and of beginnings in general because when you go through a door or cross a bridge you enter something new, a different place. That’s why the Romans made January the first month of the year. For them he was the god of gods, coming even before Jupiter. He’s very very ancient, one of the true gods who was worshipped long before Roman times. They took him over and made him into their own, the way they took over Christianity and turned it into an Imperial religion.’
‘Doesn’t sound as if you like the Romans much.’
‘I don’t. Totalitarian fascist bunch of thugs.’
‘But what was the mug for? Not for drinking out of, surely? You can’t get your nose in.’
‘It’s not a mug, it was used for carrying a prayer. When you went to the temple, you bought one, probably from a stall outside, along with a small strip of lead. You etched your prayer into the metal, bent the strip in two so that no one else could read it, put the prayer into the pot, then took the pot into the temple and stood it on the altar as a kind of supplication to the god.’
‘Looks like a pretty down-market example, this one.’
‘Does, doesn’t it. Made in two halves, each pressed into a mould then joined together, I should think, wouldn’t you? Quickly done. Their equivalent of cheap mass-production probably. You can see the join where the two halves were stuck together, the potter hasn’t even bothered to smooth it off, and there’s pitting on the surface of the faces where the clay wasn’t pressed into the mould firmly enough.’
‘And the handle! It looks like the sort of thing we used to roll out with modelling clay in infant school.’
‘Have you put your finger inside?’
‘Mine fits exactly!’
‘It does? My goodness! Mine’s too big.’
‘Weird sensation.’
‘Wonderful.’
‘Fingers abolishing time.’
‘Aye, and space. One thing’s for sure – the man who made this doesn’t have a headache any more.’
We smiled and nodded at each other, acknowledging the kinship of understanding.
At four thirty, full of fizz, Tess brought up tea and buttered scones along with news that Adam was slogging away at the house and enjoying it all so much he hadn’t stopped to eat anything so she was going back to cook something for them both. They were having a ball, I could tell just from the grin on her face.
I said, ‘I’ll come.’
‘No you won’t, Mum won’t let you. The place reeks of paint, you’d be ill again straightaway.’
‘I’m still coming.’
Tess went to the door and called out, ‘Mum, he says he’s going back to the bridge.’
Which brought Mrs Norris pounding up the stairs. ‘Oh no he isn’t. You’re staying where you are, young man, you’re staying here tonight, so compose yourself to it.’
Tess was ushered away, bedclothes were efficiently tidied, Janus returned to his place among the other knick-knacks, the whole room given a critical survey and the door firmly closed. Leaving me to my unwilling isolation and the torture chamber of my imagination, which for the next few hours was filled with gradually more agonizing fantasies in which Tess and Adam performed with enthusiastic gusto all of the sexiest Dionysian dramas in my then, I must admit, not very extensive repertoire.
I sizzled with desire, sweated with jealousy, prayed to Janus to set me free, groaned with frustration and pique. I was like a lone spectator who, locked in an empty cinema, is forced to watch a film specially made to reduce him to a state of lust-racked blither. And the really ridiculous thing about times like that, the thing I always laugh about later, is that you do it to yourself. You are your own jailer, your own film-maker, your own torturer. The fantasies are your own. It’s your own imagination that invents them and your own will that lets it happen and your own mind that puts the show on. You could stop it at once if you wanted to but you don’t because it gives you some sort of twisted satisfaction. And it’s my belief that there’s a side to the human race that loves plodging around in this kind of dart. Sometimes we like to be right up to our necks in it. Sometimes people even drown in their own psychic shit.
A film fantasy can’t go on forever but the fantasies inside your head can and then other people call you mad. Maybe my feverish fantasies drove me a little mad that night. In the end I could bear them no longer. I had to know what Tess and Adam really were up to. And in my place, my sanctuary, dammit! I had to be there with them. So I got up, dressed as quietly as I could, mumbled a prayer to Janus to protect me, and stole down the stairs, feeling like a burglar in reverse. The noise of the TV, which the Norrises were watching in their living room, covered any give-away sounds.
Outside, I ran all the way to the bridge. Arrived panting so hard I stopped to recover my breath when I came in sight of the house. My inclination had been to burst in before they had a chance to stop whatever it was they were doing. But while I caught my breath, a deeper, stranger desire took hold of me. I wanted to see them as they were, on their own, without me. As a kid I was always wondering what other people did when I wasn’t there. Maybe because I knew I had a secret life of my own which I only ever let show when no one else was around, I supposed that other people were like that too. And I felt a consuming desire to know what those private selves were that parents and relatives and teachers and friends hid from me. So I would sometimes steal around, peeking in at windows or snooping at doors in the hope of discovering those hidden selves revealed.
I had not done this for years, however. Had even forgotten that I used ever to do it. Now, as I recovered my breath, that childhood desire overwhelmed me again. The fun of observing people when they are completely unaware of being watched, the nervous excitement of it – the same excitement that experimental scientists must feel, and Peeping Toms as well, I guess.
I checked that no vehicles were approaching before padding quietly up to the house. The bedroom was dark but the living room was softly lit by low table lamps that hadn’t been there before, one each side of the fireplace.
It was not the lamps, however, that immediately caught my eye but Tess and Adam tangled naked on the floor in front of the fire. Hollywood TV soft corn. Much pawing going on and sucking and kissing and licking. More complete in range than in my fantasies. More surprising. More tantalizing. More fleshed out would be true to say. Fantasies depend, like everything else, on information. My experience of life so far hadn’t informed me all that well; and obviously I hadn’t read the right books. They were doing things to each other with fingers and mouths that were stunning news to me.
For a while I watched with the amazement of an initiate secretly learning the mysteries of his trade. Till another kind of amazement grew beside it: amazement at my own reaction to the scene before me. For deep inside I was watching myself with just as great intensity as I was watching them. Observer observing himself. And what amazed me was that instead of anger or jealousy or resentment or envy or hard-on lust there came over me a calm – or maybe I ought to say a calming – satisfaction. I can only compare it to watching a close friend doing something he’s good at and doing it very well. You might wish you could do it well too while knowing that you couldn’t. But mainly you feel pleased for him, happy that he’s achieved the reward, the recognition, the satisfaction, the pleasure he wanted and deserved.
Naturally I felt a little sad for myself too because this was the moment when I properly knew – when I accepted – that Tess was not, would not be, for me nor me for her. Not in the way she was being for Adam right there before me. I even wondered, as he entered her with a shudder of pleasure, whether she knew I was watching, whether she had expected I would find her doing this now, here in my room in my house, whether even by some trick she had planned it. Her way of forcing me to accept what she had told me about us was true. Ridiculous, of course. Another fantasy.
I had not seen ‘sex’ happening between two people before. I don’t mean pretended sex between actors, nor played at by gropers at parties or in public places, nor the clinical demonstrations in sex-education videos at school, but the all-out sweatlathed juicegreasing bodysquirming limbtangled skingreedy gutmelting mindlost neoviolent reality. So I didn’t know by first-hand observation, much less direct experience, about its animalness. The exclusive bodiliness of it. The utterly absorbed uninhibited unselfconsciousness of those involved in it as they writhe self-absorbed, lost to the world around them, lost, in fact, just like the cliché says, in each other.
As I watched I realized that I’d never achieved that state with Gill, never been mind-less, never been totally unselfconsciously absorbed, but had always been thinking about it, always been aware of what was going on, always observing myself do it, even as I now observed them and observed myself observing them. An observer by nature, that’s me. Did this explain my confusion over Gill? But if it did, what did it explain?
I also saw why there is so much talk about sex, why there are so many scenes about it in books and plays and films. Why it causes so much trouble, too. And why those who get it and those who don’t make such a fuss. And why there’s so much pretending about it – people pretending that they get it when they don’t, or pretending that they perform exotic contortions when actually they are as straight as a pencil. And why people who are born with sexy good looks get things easily.
Not that I’m any exception. Adam breaks into my bedroom, scaring the wits out of me, but as soon as I see him stripped, with his foxy good looks and lithe neatly built body and his exceptional dick, I let him stay and sponge off me instead of kicking him out. Not just because the sight of him turned me on but because I’m human, and everybody’s like that. I didn’t think about it at the time. Animal biology made the decision for me. As I reckon it does countless times a day between people everywhere. The fact is we’re all succoured by sex, and some of us are finally suckered by it too.
So I’m standing there for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, watching them, and watching myself watching them, and with a hard-on by then to be honest, making no effort by now to hide myself, when my bridge-keeper’s third ear alerts me to the sound of a vehicle I know approaching along the road from the village. Bob Norris’s van.
He’s bound to stop, even if he’s on his way to somewhere else. Bound to see his daughter in flagrante delicto with a footloose horny yob he doesn’t trust enough to keep the bridge never mind screw his daughter, and me, who he counts responsible, standing outside doing a convincing impersonation of a dirty old man.
I suppose I could – ought to? – have rushed inside, yelling a warning, and hustled the coupled pair out of the back door before Bob arrived. But I doubt if there’d have been time, for at that moment the final act wasn’t far from its climax, her on the floor under him, legs over his shoulders, locked together and going like the dappers, in such a state of pleasure that had I burst in they would probably have been beyond recall anyway.
No, that’s just an excuse. The truth is more shaming. I was curious to know what would happen when Bob arrived.
Not that any of this was thought out. The second I heard Bob’s van approaching, I slipped across the road and vaulted over the bridge onto the bank just where it dropped steeply down to the river. Hidden there I could squint between the urn-shaped balusters.
The van drew up. Bob got out. Tried the house door. Locked. Stepped, without knocking, to the lighted window of the living room, raising his hand to rap on the glass, but, seeing in, never did, his hand arrested in a clenched-fist salute.
I could only see his back silhouetted against the window. For a moment he was a statue spelled by what he saw. Then, as if punched in the stomach, he slumped forward and turned away. I heard a groan as he paused a brief moment then came stumbling across the road directly towards me, reached the parapet, the edge of which he grasped, arms spread for support, right above me, where he struggled to control what were not groans, after all, but angry grieving sobs.
I had not seen a grown man weep before. Not like this – so unrestrained, so racked. A second first in basic emotions within moments of each other: I had wanted life stripped to the essentials and I was getting it. And again I was observing myself as I observed the other. The sight of Bob Norris possessed by such naked tears came as a shock, entangling my embarrassment with a sense of double betrayal. I cowered in my inadequate hiding place, head down, terrified that Bob would see me – yet, oh, if only he would see me! – and torn as well by an impulse somehow – but how? – to comfort him. Besides, his sobbing made me want to weep too, for suddenly I saw the scene in the house not with my own eyes but with his, and felt a confusing mix of shame, regret, anger, and worst of all of loss.
Just as I had never seen a grown man weeping, I do not think I had ever really known till that moment what compassion felt like. A third first.
Eventually Bob gained control of himself Snuffled back his tears. Swore. Spat over the parapet, a gob that landed like a rebuke on my bowed head. Breathed in and out deeply a few times. Returned to his van. But did not start the engine. Instead, letting off the brake, allowed the slight incline to carry the vehicle backwards down the road until a safe enough distance away to drive off without causing alarm in the house.
As soon as his tail lights were out of sight I climbed from my hiding place and set off after him, dregs of guilt stifling an impulse to steal a last glimpse through the toll-house window.
Walking through the village fifteen minutes later I spotted Bob’s van parked outside The Plough. Knowing he wasn’t a pub man, and even at home not much of a boozer, ‘drowning his sorrows’ came to mind.
He was sitting on a stool, slumped on his elbows against the bar nursing a large whisky, obviously not his first.
‘Saw your van,’ I said, half-perching on a stool beside him.
He gave me a sideways look through reddened eyes. ‘Had enough of mouldering in bed?’ And downed his whisky in one go.
‘Something like that.’
‘Want a drink?’
He ordered a glass of cider and another large Scotch.
When they had arrived he said, ‘The wife was telling me about your mother.’ He downed half his drink. ‘Sounds badly, poor woman.’
I said nothing, unwilling to talk about that subject.
He turned away, sat square to the bar, not looking at me, thinking, and after a moment said, ‘Hard job, being a parent.’
Attempting relief with a smile, I said, ‘Wouldn’t know.’
‘No.’ He downed the second half . ‘Just as well. If we knew the worst beforehand, maybe we’d never take it on.’
‘Is it that bad?’
He ordered another large Scotch.
‘If you ever have any –’ his words were slurring a little, ‘don’t have daughters.’
‘Didn’t know you could choose.’
He huffed ruefully. ‘Too true.’ Another half glass went down.
I said, chancing my arm, ‘Tess doesn’t seem so bad.’
‘Tess!’ he said, swivelling to me, ‘Tess! What d’you call her that for? Not her name. Katharine. Her name’s Katharine. You know that. Katey, if you like. Not Kathy, though, don’t like Kathy. But Tess! Dear God!’
‘Sorry. Private joke.’
‘Wonderful girl. Always was. Right from birth. Beautiful little thing. Nice-tempered. Lovely. Always loved her. Moment I saw her at the hospital.’
‘Well then?’
‘Another,’ he said to the barman.
‘Are you sure, Bob?’ the barman said. ‘Not like you.’
‘One more. That’ll be it.’
‘One more. But leave your van. Walk home, OK?’
He waited till the replenished glass was in front of him before looking at me with that close, slightly unfocused watery gaze of the not-quite-drunk intent on making a point too difficult to get words around. ‘What you think then? Of our . . . Tess?’
‘What do I think of her?’
‘What do you think of her?’
‘I like her.’
‘Come on, you can do better than that. How much?’
‘Dunno. A lot.’
‘Fancy her?’
‘Well –’
‘Go on. Don’t be shy. Man to man.’
‘Yes, but –’
‘But? Can’t be buts about fancying.’
‘She’s a friend, that’s all.’
‘Never done it. That what you mean?’
‘With her? No!’
He slurped from his glass.
‘Listen. Tell you something. It hurts. Know that, do you? Hurts like hell. Know what I’m talking about? Children – daughters – specially daughters – most specially . . . Tess. Katey . . . Lovely beautiful Katharine. Daddy’s girl. What her mother calls her. Daddy’s girl.’ He chuckled. ‘But they grow up, see? Love them. Want the best for them. Worry.’ He shot a glance at me. ‘Get jealous. Know that? Know what I’m talking about? Bet never thought that, eh? Fathers get jealous. Eh? Thought that? . . . I get jealous. Put it that way. Understand?’
Gripping the bar to steady himself, he slid uncertainly to his feet. Sweat glazed his face.
‘Let’s go. Too bloody hot here.’
He staggered. I caught his arm and guided him to the door. Outside, the cold December night slapped us. He braced himself against me, took two deep breaths, pulled his arm from my grip, and set off uncertainly towards his van. I skipped ahead, placing myself between him and the door.
‘Mr Norris, I don’t think you should drive. Let’s walk home.’
He stood scowling at me, swaying slightly. ‘Tess! Thought about her name careful, wife and me. Important – names. Yes? Important. You know – mean things. Don’t they? . . . Tell something else. Sometimes I feel – sometimes I want . . . Better not. Can’t hurt then. Member that.’
‘I will, Mr Norris, I will, but I think we ought to walk home now.’
I didn’t wake until after nine next morning. By the time I’d pacified Mrs Norris for going out the night before and returning with her husband drunk (a calamity she somehow seemed to blame on me) and argued her into letting me go back to the bridge it was ten thirty. When I arrived Adam was lolling by the blazing fire, supping coffee and looking smug, the room bright with fresh paint. Tess, it turned out, had been busy with Adam all day yesterday while I lay brooding between her mother’s flannelette sheets. She had skipped school and she and Adam had finished off glossing the woodwork and then titivated the entire place – living room, bedroom, kitchen area, even the basement lavatorywoodstore.
No longer was the house like the tidy squat Adam first took it to be. Now it was a newly decorated home. Not an especially well-off home, but still, a place where people lived. On the mantelpiece and windowsills winter berries and sprigs of evergreen sprouted from make-shift vases – bottles, old jugs. Stoneware cider flagons had been converted into table lamps to match the one I’d made for a bedside light, only these were topped with wickerwork shades like Chinese hats instead of naked bulbs. Tess had even managed to find an old rust-red rug for the floor. My books had been divided into collections of similar kinds, each collection shelved on its own: poetry on a newly fitted shelf in the living-room alcove to one side of the fireplace, nonfiction books on a shelf on the other side, fiction on the mantelpiece in the bedroom. Posters Sellotaped to the walls (Hockney’s ‘Bigger Splash’, Tom Phillips’s ‘Samuel Beckett’, Jimmy Dean walking in the rain at night). The television set stood on a crudely cobbled table. Even the lumpy old armchair looked revived, a bright red cushion nestling in its seat.
‘Like it?’ Adam asked.
‘You mean, Tess was here all day?’
‘Wanted to make the place nice for you. I made the table for the telly though.’
‘Where did all the stuff come from?’
‘Dunno. Very resourceful is Tess. Knows a lot.’ He chuckled, double-meaning. ‘All finished. No more painting.’
‘Terrific,’ I said flatly. Was the place mine any longer?
‘Aren’t you pleased?’
‘Delirious. Had a good time, then?’
‘Great.’
‘I’m glad. Worked hard, eh?’
‘Want some coffee? There’s some letters by the telly.’