The Toll Bridge by Aidan Chambers
Will not tell you all the stuff about the doctors, they said I was not to blame, it was a one-off, but could not promise it would not happen again so they put me away and give me treatment which I will not tell you about either, it makes no difference what they say or what they do, they do not have the dreams, they do not have the headaches which I have because of what I did.
I am sorry I killed the boy, I am to blame aren’t I or who is? I know that even though I do not understand what happened to me or why it happened and am afraid about it happening again. I was so scared when I come to on the boat the other night, I was afraid I might of done it again you see, and you helped a lot, you really did, you are a good bloke, Jan, I wish I was as well, we could be friends I know that and wish I could stay with you at the bridge where I think I could be happy if it was not for what might happen. But they are taking me back where I ran away from which I do remember but I do not remember any of the time you told me about at the bridge, I was telling you the truth, it was just a story to me, I wish it was me, I think I would have liked to be me if I was Adam, you had a lot of fun.
I want you to keep the chain, I have nothing else to give you and I want you to remember me and to wish you all the very best of luck in the world which you deserve.
Daffodils in great swaying clumps all the way up the drive to the main building. I never see daffodils now without remembering that day. They have always been my favourite flower, such brave bright beauty, fresh yellow clown-collared heads nodding to the world on their straight-limbed stalks.
The unit was a complex of buildings clustering round an old Victorian mansion. The approach looked ordinary, nothing like a prison, but beyond the main house were ugly modem functional buildings behind high security fences and walls.
The reception area in the entrance hall had that hard echoey emptiness of public institutions that occupy old family houses. I had to wait for half an hour, sitting in a plastic-covered armchair that was sticky to the touch, before Doctor Pelham arrived: flapping white coat, jeans and Adidas trainers, bony face, grey eyes, fleshy lips, thinning salt-and-pepper hair, balding at the front, wispy long at the back, big heavy hairy hands that were labourer-rough and gripped hard. He wasted no time on pleasantries, just said, ‘Hi, you ready for this?’
‘Nervous, a bit.’
‘Just take what you see, be neutral. If it upsets you, come back here, don’t display in front of Aston, OK?’
A visitor’s identity pass was clipped to my sweater, I signed some kind of permission form, after which the doctor led me through a maze of corridors, and outside, through a security gate in a high fence, along a path by the side of what looked like living quarters with bars over the windows, through another security gate in a high ancient brick wall, which let us into a large walled area that I guessed must have been the nursery garden in the old days. There were oblongs of ground cultivated as flower beds or vegetable patches with grass paths between. A couple of warders were on duty, watching five or six young men in regulation trousers and jackets who were hoeing, digging, planting. The doctor spoke to them as we went by, the matey professional, everyday cheery stuff about their gardening. One of the men called out, ‘A new chicken for the coop, doc?’ Pelham laughed and waved and called back, ‘Never know your luck, Freddy.’
The far corner of the garden, away from the flowers and vegetables, an area about forty metres square bordered by paths on two sides and the angle of the high brick wall on the other two, had been allowed to grow wild. A tall Norway maple dominated the area, already thickly dressed in spring-green leaves. A rope ladder dangled down through the branches. Under the tree was a makeshift tent made of an old patched tarpaulin draped over rough-cut wooden poles tied down by improvised guy ropes. In its entrance stood a rickety-looking table and chair each cobbled together out of oddments. There was a book on the table on top of what I thought was a magazine. Cluttering round the tent were wooden orange boxes and packing cases and a barrel. Nearby was a pile of wooden palings about three metres long, also rough-cut. From one wall to the other, curving around in front of the tent and tree, marking it off like an enclosure, was a length of rope held up by stakes stuck into the ground at two- or three-metre intervals, with no gap for a way in. The whole place had the look of an adventure playground in the early stages of construction, yet everything was tidy and neat and carefully arranged as if for some serious adult purpose.
The doctor brought me to a stop at the rope barrier facing the entrance to the tent.
‘Hello, there,’ he called. ‘Aston?’
‘Hi, doc.’ The voice came from high in the tree, Adam’s voice but lighter than I remembered, boyish, a child’s voice.
‘Would you like to come down for a minute?’
‘OK.’
Branches shook, the rope ladder danced, bare feet appeared, legs in tattered jeans chopped off just below the knee, a body in a loose garment, half shirt, half jacket, cackhandedly home-made of pieces of thick brown cloth (curtain material?) stitched together with red gardener’s twine, and the unmistakable head with its jet black hair long now and rum led.
He reached the ground and turned to approach us, smiling broadly at the doctor – that wide anguishing grin, white teeth showing, eyes wrinkling. I wanted to run and grab him and hold him to me. Pelham must have sensed this because he took hold of my arm as if ready to restrain me. What held me back, though, was the complete lack of any sign of recognition in Adam’s face. And he moved, not as the Adam I knew, but as a child would, a little less coordinated, uninhibitedly unaware of himself, yet a hint of wariness too, not entirely trusting. His face was grubby, his hands and clothes smeared with moss and dirt from the tree. Already, as he came towards us, it was hard for me to see Adam, but instead a boy who had been made to break off from play.
He reached us and stood dutifully waiting to hear what the doctor wanted.
‘So how are you today, Aston?’
‘OK.’
‘The leg holding up?’
‘It’s OK. Doesn’t bother me.’
‘No pain or anything?’
‘It’s all right. Hurts a bit if I jump on it, but it’s OK.’
‘Well, take it steady for a few more days.’
‘OK.’
‘This is Jan.’
The eyes turned on me: the other-Adam eyes. ‘Hi.’
‘Hi.’
‘Jan’s having a look round.’
‘Is he a savage?’
‘No, I don’t think so. Would you like him to join you?’
I was inspected more closely. ‘Was he sent by Providence?’
‘Could be.’
Further scrutiny. I stood, smiling back, trying to be calm and unrevealing, though inside my stomach churned.
‘Not Friday, though.’
‘No?’
Pelham let go of my arm and took a step away, exaggeratedly viewing the enclosure. ‘Looks like you’re about ready to start your fence.’
‘A wall for my habitation.’
‘Finished your chair as well.’
‘Robinson took five days. I only took two.’
‘Great! Well done. Perhaps you’d like to show Jan your books?’
‘Life and Strange Surprising Adventures.’ He pronounced the words like a rune.
‘Would you?’
‘Well . . . OK.’
He went to the table and brought them back, handing them over with the anxious pride of a fan offering his most treasured souvenirs to someone who might not be properly respectful. The book was a modem edition of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, with black and white illustrations. The magazine wasn’t a magazine after all but a well-thumbed American comic-strip version of Crusoe in colour. I flipped through their pages, and, as Crusoe when he first saw Friday’s footprint in the sand, stood like one thunder-struck.
‘Good, eh?’ Adam said.
‘Amazing.’
Doctor Pelham took the books and handed them
‘I’ll search for it myself.’
‘I’ll see you later today as usual, then.’
‘Can I go now?’
‘Sure.’
‘So long, doc.’
‘So long, Aston.’
I wasn’t even given a glance. He turned, ran to the ladder, and climbed into the tree.
‘He didn’t remember me at all!’
‘That’s one way of putting it. Another way is to say you haven’t entered his life yet.’
‘Don’t understand.’
‘The person you just met is not the Adam you knew, nor is he the seventeen-year-old he is biologically. The person you met is Aston Davies, aged eleven.’
We were sitting on a bench by the wall at the other end of the garden five minutes later.
The doctor said, ‘Aston was fourteen when he suffered his trauma. After that he went through a kind of hell of guilt and remorse. It was so bad he twice tried to kill himself. Part of the difficulty for anybody trying to help him is that no one can explain why he acted as he did – why the sudden switch from a childish game to uncontrollable violence that ended in horrific, brutal murder. He doesn’t know how bad it was because he was quite literally mindless at the time. He doesn’t remember anything about the final moments, and the worst details have always been kept from him for fear of what the knowledge might do to him. But he does dream them. Terrible nightmares, which he believes are some kind of warning of what he might do one day rather than being records of what he once did.
‘In August he escaped while on a routine outing. Psychologically speaking, he wasn’t really running away from us, he was trying to run away from himself When he was brought back in December he could vaguely remember making his escape but then nothing till he came to on the boat.’
‘So what happened? When he broke into the toll house he wasn’t desperate, anything but.’
‘We don’t know the details, of course, but we do know about his condition. The frigue state isn’t very common but it’s well documented. The patient goes on the run – becomes a fugitive, if you like, and completely loses his memory of his previous life. He invents a whole new personality, even down to the smallest details. We’re not sure how this works. It might be a moment to moment thing, like making up a story as you’re telling it. Or it might be that the new personality is made up of wishes and desires and aspects of the patient’s personality that have been suppressed or have never found expression. So someone who has always been shy and fearful and meek turns into an open, outgoing, confident person who does all sorts of things that in his other life he never dared try. There are even cases where the patient has spoken a language he’s never been taught, and others who have performed skilled tasks, like a medical operation, for which they’ve never had any training. The people they meet are usually completely convinced that they are who they say they are. One thing they all are, however, is restless. They usually keep moving. Physically or mentally, they’re always in flight. In fact, the fugue state is a kind of suicide.’
‘So when he broke into the house he wasn’t Aston but his other invented person?’
‘Right.’
‘And when I said I didn’t know him from Adam –’
‘He accepted that as his name. Built it into his new personality.’
‘But did he know what he was doing?’
‘We don’t think so but we don’t really know. No one ever comes out of a fugue state remembering what happened while they were in it so they can’t tell us. Just as they forget their previous life when they go into the fugue, they completely forget their fugue life when they return to their normal personality – whatever normal means.’
‘That’s incredible!’
‘What is it we say up here? All the world’s queer save thee and me, and even thee’s a bit queer!’
‘Thank God!’
He laughed.
I said, ‘Sometimes there was something that bothered me. In his eyes.’
‘The windows of the soul – the great betrayers of falsehood.’
‘Was Adam false? Maybe he was the real person and Aston the false one?’
‘Could be. Or both are the real him in different versions.’
‘That as well, OK. But those times, it was like somebody else was looking at me. I used to call him the other-Adam. What changed him back from Adam to Aston?’
‘Banging his head on the wall of the bridge during the struggle with Gill, I should think. Blows to the head often occur in fugue cases, seeming to switch the patient into the fugue or out of it.’
‘And when he came to, he could remember his Aston life but not his Adam life?’
‘Correct.’
‘So why did he lie and say he couldn’t remember anything at all?’
‘Fear. He was afraid you’d turn him in once you knew about him. But worse than that, he was terrified he might kill someone again. He’d been told, you see, that this was possible. It’s one reason why he’s kept here.’
‘And it was all so awful that he tried to commit suicide by jumping from the bridge?’
‘The ultimate fugue.’
‘And the rope? That seemed so weird.’
‘Not so weird when you think about it. Logical and well planned, in fact. He wanted to make absolutely sure he drowned. Tethered by his feet he wouldn’t be able to swim, and, if you work it out, you’ll see he wouldn’t be able to raise his head above water. Like a fish on a hook, except the hook was in the tail. The current rushing through the narrow arch of the bridge would be too strong for him to twist round or do anything to save himself. And what irony, don’t you think, to tie himself by the feet – the very limbs on which one runs away.’
‘He must have been utterly desperate. Poor, poor Adam.’
‘Poor Aston, you mean. Adam was a happy-go-lucky uninhibited guilt-free sexy young man. He’d never have tried to kill himself. The very opposite of Aston, the inhibited shy guilt-ridden inadequate boy who found it hard to make friends with anyone but especially with people his own age. Adam was everything that Aston wanted to be but couldn’t be.’
Across the gardens I could see Aston-Adam working in his enclosure, standing on a crate, hammering a paling into the ground, the beginning of his fortification. Boy at play, young man at work.
I said, ‘I don’t understand what’s happening to him now, though.’
‘He came back in deep depression. His leg was in plaster of course. He couldn’t be very active and needed quite a bit of nursing just to keep him physically healthy. For a few days he remained like that, a depressed immobile frightened angry patient. But then he began to withdraw completely into himself, would say nothing at all, and started behaving like a child.’
‘A kind of regression?’
‘Regression suggests something negative, or a going back, as if life were a linear journey, birth point A to death point Z. I don’t see it like that.’
‘How then?’
‘We coexist as our selves. We are multiple beings. A mix of actualities and potentialities. One of the many things the so-called mentally ill have taught me is that we so-called healthy people are not very good at exploring our possible selves. Perhaps because we feel reasonably happy with the selves we are living. But perhaps we are the most imprisoned of all because of that. Whereas the mentally ill, being uncomfortable with their actual selves, sometimes explore their potentialities and find selves they like better and try them out.’
‘But surely with Adam, I mean Aston, it’s another flight, isn’t it? He’s become what he was once before.’
‘Not quite. As a boy of eleven he couldn’t have done what he’s doing now as well as he’s doing it. He’s being eleven only as a seventeen-year-old young man can be eleven.’
‘But why eleven?’
‘Because that was the happiest time of his life, just before the onset of the bad feelings about himself, the feelings of powerlessness, of always being a loser, a failure, of ne
‘Start again?’
‘But you don’t just go back to the point before you got into difficulties, you also use what you’ve learned from the experience of getting it wrong to help you get it right next time. We do that in everyday life all the time. Aston is doing it rather more dramatically and obviously, that’s all.’
‘No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’
‘Clever.’
‘Beckett.’
‘What?’
‘Quoting. Irritating habit. Samuel Beckett.’