Pat Barker - Regeneration

He could hardly believe what he saw. The coppery wires on the surface of her hair were standing straight up, in a way he had never believed any human hair could do. He pulled his cap off, and winced at the tingling in his scalp.

‘What is it?’ Sarah said.

‘Electricity.’

She burst out laughing.

‘No, I mean it.’

Lightning flickered once, illuminating her yellow skin.

‘Come on,’ Prior said.

He snatched her hand and started to run with her towards the shelter of some bushes. Scrambling up the last slope, he staggered, and would have fallen if he hadn’t grabbed a clump of marram grass. He felt a sharp pain, and, bringing his hand up, saw a smear of blood on the palm. Sarah pushed him from behind. They stumbled down the other side of the slope, just as a sudden fierce thickening of rain blinded them, and the first rumblings of thunder came.

A dense thicket of buckthorn offered the only possible shelter. Prior stamped down the nettles and thistles that thronged the gaps, and then held the thorns back for Sarah to crawl inside. He followed her in. They crouched down, the rain scarcely reaching them through the thick roof of thorn, though the wind rocked and beat the bush. Prior looked round. The ground was dry, and very bare, the thorn too thick to allow anything else to grow.

Sarah was feeling her hair. ‘Is it all right?’

‘It’s going down.’

‘So’s yours.’

He grinned. ‘’S not surprising. Storm took me mind right off it.’

She laughed, but refused to reply. Prior was remembering childhood games, making dens. An interior like this, so dark, so private, so easily defended, would have been a real find. Mixed with this distinctly childish excitement another excitement was growing. He no longer felt hostile to her, as he’d done back there in the crowd. They seemed to have walked away from all that. It was ages since he’d made love. He felt as he sometimes did coming out of the line, listening to the others talk and sometimes joining in, what they were going to do and how many times they were going to do it, though as far as he knew everybody else’s experience was like his own. The first time was almost always a disappointment. Either stuck at half mast or firing before you reached the target. He didn’t want to think about Sarah like this.

Sarah rolled over on to her elbow and looked at him. ‘This is nice.’

He lay beside her. A few splashes of rain found his upturned face. After a while he touched her hand and felt her fingertips curl round his. Through the thickness in his throat, he said, ‘I’m not pushing, but if you wanted to, I’d make sure it was all right.’

After a while he felt her fingers creep across his chest, insinuating themselves between the buttons of his tunic. He kissed her, moving from her lips to her breasts, not looking at her, not opening his eyes, learning her with his tongue, flicking the nipples hard, probing the whorled darkness of her navel, and then on down, down, across the smooth marble of her belly into the coarse and springy turf. His nostrils filled with the scent of rock pools at low tide. He slipped his hands underneath her, and lifted her, until her whole pelvis became a cup from which he drank.

Afterwards they lay in silence, enjoying the peace, until footsteps walking along the coastal path warned them that the storm was over. The buckthorn scattered raindrops over them, as they crawled out on to the grass.

They beat sand and twigs from each other’s clothes, then started to walk back along the coastal path.

‘What we need is something to warm us up,’ Prior said.

‘We can’t go anywhere looking like this.’

They stopped on the outskirts of the town, and tried more seriously to set themselves to rights. They went to a pub, and leant back against the wooden seat, nudging each other under the table, drunk with their love-making and the storm and the sense of having secrets.

‘I can feel your voice through the wood,’ Sarah said.

Abruptly, the joy died. Prior became quite suddenly depressed. He pushed his half-finished meal away.

‘What is it?’

‘Oh, I was remembering a man in my platoon.’ He looked at her. ‘Do you know, he sent the same letter to his wife every week for two years.’

Sarah felt a chill come over her. She didn’t know why she was being told this. ‘Why?’

‘Why not?’

‘How do you know he did?’

‘Because I had to censor it. I censored it every week. We read all their letters.’

He could see her not liking this, but she kept her voice light. ‘Who reads yours?’

‘Nobody.’ He looked at her again. ‘They rely on our sense of honour. Oh, we’re supposed to leave them open so the CO can read them if wants to, but it would be thought frightfully bad form if he did.’ Prior had slipped into his mock public school voice, very familiar to Rivers.

Sarah took it at face value. ‘You lot make me sick,’ she said, pushing her own plate away. ‘I suppose nobody else’s got a sense of honour?’

He preferred her like this. On the beach, she was only too clearly beginning to think that something had happened that mattered. He wasn’t going to admit that. A few grains of sand in the pubic hair, a mingling of smells. Nothing that a prolonged soak in the tub wouldn’t wash away. ‘Come on,’ he said, putting down a tip. ‘We’d better be getting back.’

Burns paced up and down the waiting room. Rivers had told him he intended to recommend an unconditional discharge, and though he hadn’t actually said the Board would accept the recommendation, this had been very strongly implied. So there was nothing to worry about, though when the orderly came and asked him to step inside, his stomach knotted and his hands started to tremble. The Sam Browne belt, bunching the loose fabric round his waist, made him look rather like a scarecrow tied together with string. He got himself into the room somehow, and managed a salute. He couldn’t see their faces to begin with, since they sat with their backs to the tall windows, but after Bryce had told him to sit down, his eyes started to become accustomed to the light.

There was a great deal of light, it seemed to him, floods of silver-grey light filtered through white curtains that stirred in the breeze, and the insistent buzzing of an insect, trapped. He fastened his eyes on Rivers, who managed to smile at him without moving a muscle of his face.

Major Paget, the third, external member of the Board, was obviously startled by Burns’s appearance, but he asked a few questions for form’s sake. Rivers scarcely listened either to the questions or to the answers. The buzzing continued. He scanned the high windows, trying to locate the insect. The noise was unreasonably disturbing.

Paget said, ‘How often do you vomit now?’

Rivers got up and went across to the window. He found a bumble bee, between the curtain and the window, batting itself against the glass, fetched a file from the desk and, using it as a barrier, guided the insect into the open air. He watched it fly away. Directly below him, Anderson and Sassoon were setting off for their daily round of golf. Their voices drifted up to him. Rivers turned back into the room to find everybody, Burns included, staring at him in some surprise. He smiled faintly and went back to his seat.

‘This is getting to be a habit, isn’t it?’

Prior, hands twined round the iron bars of the bedhead, smiled without opening his eyes. ‘Not one I enjoy.’

He hadn’t regained the weight he’d lost during his last stay in sick bay. The ribs showed clearly through the stretched skin. ‘You were lucky to get back. When did it start?’

‘On the train. It was jam-packed. Everybody smoking.’