The Toll Bridge Read Free

this after.’
    â€˜Be gone by then I hope.’
    She taps my parcel with a black-gloved hand. ‘Weekly survival kit?’
    â€˜What else?’
    â€˜Mummy’s boy!’ She laughs and revs. ‘See you.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜You’ve not brought any bedding and such,’ Bob Norris said. ‘Told you at the interview that you’d need it.’
    â€˜I’ll be OK for tonight.’
    â€˜I could fetch a few essentials from home to tide you over.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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