The Toll Bridge (5 page)

I love you. I love you.

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. . . No, I don't want you here. Keep away. Beware of the dog. Trespassers will be persecuted.
I do not want you here.

I explained the best I could before I left. I can't do any better now. Not yet. When I can you'll be the first to know.

Please do not quote memories at me. I don't care about memories. I don't want to hear about them. You say letters get misunderstood.
You're right. But memories get misunderstood even worse. People do what they like with them. They make them mean what they want them to mean. I want to live only in the present. That is where I am.

Yes, I enjoyed screwing you. If you were here I'd screw you again. But that's another reason I don't want you here. It would only confuse things. And I think that was what I wanted with you the most anyway. I'm not sure I wanted anything else. I won't pretend otherwise.

Pretending has been one of my problems. I'd got into the habit of pretending. Trying to be what everybody wanted me to be.

I've made a rule for myself here. I will only be what I feel I am. I will not pretend, even if that means being disliked and saying no when people want me to say yes. I want to be honest with myself. I don't know how else to start finding out what I really
truly
am. Who I am, I mean. There is so much old garbage inside me already, so much
dutter
, even after only seventeen years. What must it be like after thirty years or fifty? Is that why so many old people go round looking like they're weighed down by two tons of compressed crap? I don't want that to happen to me. But how do you stop it?

I don't like all this talk about love. What people call love is only things they want from someone else. Like a good screw or a nice time together or even just someone to keep them from feeling lonely. As far as I can see that's what most people mean by love anyway. It isn't what they want for anybody else, it's what they want for themselves. Eating people is wrong.

I just want to be me. I take money from people crossing the bridge, I repair the house a bit, I keep the garden tidy, I read a lot, I mess about with a rowing boat on the river now and then, I listen to music, I watch telly, I think, and I look after myself. And no one pressures me. For the first time in my life I am completely responsible for myself. And not responsible for anybody else. I like that. It's what I want.

Leave it like that for now, OK?

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‘DON'T SEND IT,'
Tess said.

‘Why not?'

‘It's not you. Not how you really are. It's mean.'

‘It's how I feel.'

‘You feel mean?'

‘The way she goes on about love. I don't want her here and I'm not going to lie.'

‘You don't have to. All I'm saying is you should put it better. All this about persecuting trespassers – you're talking about your girlfriend, for Christ's sake! And not wanting to be reminded of the nice times you spent together, and telling her she's asking stupid questions.'

‘Depends how you read it.'

‘So why show it to me? You asked what I thought. That's what I think.'

We were sitting drinking coffee at the toll-house table (which, persuaded by Tess, I'd sanded down to fresh wood during the last few days and then waxed), on the Sunday morning two days after Adam and Gill's letter arrived. Sundays were free days, no tolls, a day off. It was ten thirty, and one of those bright still quiet autumn mornings when the sun's warmth recalls high summer and the sky is a hazed blue. All the leaves die in Technicolor.

Tess's Sunday morning visits began as a duty chore, sent by her father to check I was OK, and became a regular habit we both enjoyed, looked forward to, though we didn't tell each other this at the time. She always brought fruit or veg out of their garden or a slab of home-made cake, which she said, untruthfully, came from her mother, or something from the estate farm – butter or jam or eggs or
cheese. Given the ‘mod wage' I was trying to exist on, I'd have been pretty pinched without this help.

I coveted her acts of friendship, they made me feel better, though I tried to hide this from her. But I did try to be ready with something for her so the gift-giving wouldn't be one-sided. As I hadn't much cash, at first the presents were usually objects I'd found and ‘treated'. Once a piece of wood I pulled out of the river that happened to resemble a fish, which I cleaned and painted with an eye and a mouth, and clear-varnished to give it a wet look. Once a George the Third silver shilling I dug up in the garden while clearing an overgrown corner, and buffed up bright.

[– See what I mean about men and gifts! Not that I wasn't pleased. It's one of your nicer characteristics – you can be thoughtful when you don't need to be. But I didn't want anything back. You just didn't feel comfortable receiving presents without squaring the account!]

After a couple of weeks I started writing poems for her, comic verses to begin with, as a joke. Because of her studying English Lit. We had that in common. We talked about her exam books. One week I gave her a parody of a poem by Ted Hughes she'd found difficult, a pig of a poem about pigs. After that, without thinking about it, it seemed natural to write more serious stuff. I made up the lines while collecting tolls or working on the house or mucking about on the river, and wrote them down and polished them in the evenings. It filled the time and I enjoyed it more than I expected. Soon I was writing two, even three, a week. (When I read them now they make me cringe. How could I ever have thought them worth giving anyone! Two years is an age. But it got me started, and I haven't stopped since. I discovered then that writing feels like a natural part of me: something I was born to do.)

‘So why show me her letter?' Tess said, flipping it back across the table. ‘You're going to be rotten to her anyway, aren't you, whatever I say?'

‘No, I'm not! When I tried before, half the trouble was I didn't know what I wanted to say. So I made up the sort of thing I thought she'd want to hear.'

‘Like?'

‘Oh, about this place, and what I was doing. But I hated it. It
was all an act, nothing to do with what I really felt. Not that I was feeling anything much. Just getting through each day. You know how I've been. The Glums. I sure as hell didn't want to write letters about that to anybody, Gill least of all. She knows about it anyway.'

‘You're not so depressed now though, not like when you first arrived. You looked pretty bombed then, I can tell you.'

‘Couldn't have stuck it without you.'

‘No, well –'

‘I spent a lot of time on that letter.'

‘Look, you really want to know what I think? Make up your mind whether you want Gill or not. If you do, write something more loving, because, honestly, if I was her, that letter would upset me a lot. But if you don't want her, break it off, don't keep her hanging on, hoping. It's not fair.'

She was right, I knew.

We sat in silence, me avoiding her eyes and feeling myself losing my grip and slithering back into that dark craggy pit I'd been clawing my way out of these last few weeks, even beginning to think I might have escaped. But no. Like the nightmare when you're fleeing from some murderous maniac, you turn to look behind, see nothing, he's gone, you breathe at last, and turn back relieved, and there he is, right in front of you, overwhelming, unavoidable, his axe coming straight at your head – and you wake up in the nick of time.

Depression, and I'm a first-hand expert, gets treated in two ways. Either you're told you're sick, and given pills to dull the effects by stupefying you into silence so that you stop getting on everyone's nerves, or you're told you're a malingerer, a wimp, who ought to pull yourself together and stop moaning, because there's a lot of people in the world who are worse off than you.

There is a lunatic fringe as well, a school of Holy Joes who tell you depression is a sin, a wilful wallow in self-pity which any decent Christian atheist ought not to indulge in – as if depression were a punishment for being a narcissistic wanker.

Having suffered from it for most of my seventeenth year I can only say it never seemed to me to fit any of these diagnoses. It always seemed more of an affliction, like having a hand go out of action for no good reason so you can't do all sorts of everyday things you usually do without thinking, and have to put up with this temporarily useless limb flailing about, knocking things over and thumping people, causing trouble and embarrassment. While at the same time you're being slowly
strangled (because your throat seizes up), and your guts chum like a sewage tank in labour (because you're worried sick about all sorts of minor problems that suddenly seem like major catastrophes), and your mind endlessly turns over the evidence of your complete failure as a human being until you've not a particle of willpower left to make yourself do anything except stare into space.

In my opinion depression is a disease caused by thinking too much about all the things you can only do well if you don't think about them at all.

‘Look,' Tess said, standing up, ‘it's a lovely day, there won't be many more like it this year, what are we doing sitting here? Let's take the boat upriver and I'll treat you to a drink and a sandwich at the Fisherman and Pike. I'm rich, would you believe!'

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