Free The Toll Bridge by Aidan Chambers

let myself in for.
    5
    When you keep a bridge you develop a third ear tuned to listening for approaching vehicles. I knew the sound of Tess’s bike as well as I knew her voice; heard her coming over the bridge while I was splitting logs in the woodstore. (This was the half-basement under the house formed by the bank falling steeply down from the road to the garden-river level. The loo was in there too, and brass-monkeycold it could be in winter, as well as tools and other gear and the tin bath that’s used in a page or two.)
    By the time I’d lugged the laden log basket up the stairs into the house, she’s talking to Adam. I see them through the window. She’s taken her helmet off, which she never bothers to do unless she plans to stay a while, and is flirting her hair at him, and laughing, and giving him the eye.
    Adam is replying at full throttle with The Grin, The Hand Run Through the Hair, and The Pelvic Thrust. And they’re performing a slow-motion ring-a-ring-a-roses; the courting dance of Homo sapiens.
    I dump the logs and go out.
    â€˜Have you asked him?’ I say.
    She doesn’t take her eyes off him. ‘He didn’t do it.’
    â€˜You believe him!’
    Adam is preening. I’m sure The Grin has stretched round to the back of his head. The Teeth flash white semaphore in the dusk.
    â€˜I remember now.’ She looks at me at last. She’s fizzing. ‘You were in the boat. I came out and talked to you. We decided to pick blackberries. You climbed out and off we went, but you didn’t tie up. I expect it just floated away.’
    â€˜So it’s my fault now!’
    â€˜No, I didn’t mean that. I should have noticed.’
    â€˜Oh, thanks! Maybe you should have noticed that I’d already tied up before you came out.’
    â€˜You had?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Oh, well, I don’t remember. And what’s it matter. Listen, I was just saying to Adam –’ She turns, they do a Grin-Giggle-Hands-Through-Hair-Eyeballing-Pelvicthrusting exchange, and then she looks at me again. ‘I’ll nip home, have tea and come back about seven, OK? We can talk then.’
    But does not stay for an answer.
    â€˜Good thinking,’ Adam says.
    â€˜See you,’ Tess says, and winks at me as she passes.
    [– I know you’ve got to tell this story the way you remember it, but this last scene just isn’t right. I wasn’t the way you describe me at all. I was never that flirty. I know you’ll tell all the embarrassing details when the time comes, but at this point I don’t recognize myself And if you get me wrong here, aren’t you likely to getme even more wrong later when more important things are happening?
    I know people remember the same events quite differently. And I know you’re trying to tell what happened to Adam and Gill and me and yourself the way you saw it then, rather than the way you think about it now, but still you can’t tell it
only
like that, can you? Well, yes, you can but that will give a very distorted view of us.
    You’re always going on about how one person’s understanding of anything is only part of the truth – how no one ever really knows everything, or ever knows enough. So how are you going to get more than your own partial understanding of what went on between all four of us into your version of our story?
    What I know is, in case you go on getting me as wrong as you just have, I reserve the right to tell my bit of the story in my own way at some point.]
    6
    As we watch Tess putter away, the stink of hedge-bottom twitches my nose.
    â€˜Look,’ I say, ‘you’re not ponging the place out again. Before we eat you’re having a bath.’
    â€˜Yes, Dad,’ Adam says. ‘Lead me to the water.’
    There was no bathroom complete with all mod cons, only one of those galvanized tin tubs, wider at one end than the other, like a man-sized sardine