Pat Barker: Double Vision

Stephen fell on his knees beside her and pulled down her skirt. A voice in his head said, Don’t touch anything. This is a crime scene. And then he thought, Bugger it. The whole fucking city is a crime scene. He wanted to close the terrible eyes, but couldn’t bring himself to touch her face.

He sat back on his heels. No way of telling whether this was a casual crime — a punter wanting his money back, a drug deal gone wrong — or a sectarian killing linked to the civil war. Increasingly crime and war shade into each other, Stephen thought. No difference to their victims, certainly, and not much either in the minds of the perpetrators. Patriot, soldier, revolutionary, freedom fighter, terrorist, murderer — cross-section their brains at the moment of killing and the differences might prove rather hard to find.

‘What do we do?’ he asked.

‘Nothing. There’s nothing we can do.’

The building felt empty — of people anyway. It must have been rats they heard moving. He could feel them now, waiting, and scanned the shadows outside the wavering circle of light. Ben glimpsed one — its naked tail trailing through dust — and let out a roar of anger. ‘Don’t —’ Stephen had time to say before he hurled the torch. It hit the wall and fell, its single weak eye, yellowish now, picking out a blister in the wallpaper where damp had seeped through.

Then it went out. Darkness, except for a strip of moonlight that fell across the floor and reached the girl’s eyes.

‘Come on,’ Ben said, getting hold of Stephen’s arm and pulling him to his feet. Far away the rumble of gunfire started again. Stephen thought of black clouds over bright cornfields, the sheen of sweat on naked arms, lit by flickers of summer lightning.

Then he was back on the stinking landing with the girl and the rats.

‘Come on,’ Ben said again. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

Ben went across the landing and Stephen followed, waiting while Ben picked up the torch, feeling the girl’s eyes boring into the back of his neck. Sweat prickled in the roots of his hair. Ashamed of the state he was in, he made himself go downstairs first and peer through the crack of the door. The air struck cold on his eyeball as he scanned the street.

Behind him in the dark he heard the bustle of rats begin.

‘All right?’

He turned to look at Ben, who nodded, braced. Stephen edged round the door, feeling the whole right side of his body cringe in expectation of the bullet that would come from that direction, if it came at all. His left side seemed almost relaxed, as if congratulating itself on its immunity. There was time to ponder this mad dislocation of awareness, to register it as a distinct sensation, before he hurled himself out of the shelter of the building into the white light of the crossroads. Ben’s gasping breaths behind him, their joined shadow on the snow, then he reached the other side, blind with fear, burrowing into the wall, and turned to take Ben’s full weight as he crashed into him. They stayed still for five minutes, their breathing becoming gradually less painful, their eyeballs less congested, fingertips no longer shaken by the beating of their hearts. Swallowing had become impossible. Stephen let his mouth hang open and panted like a dog.

Another hundred yards and they were home, bursting into the foyer to find the hotel in darkness. Candles on tables all around the bar illuminated the faces of people they knew well. Drink, food, conversation, laughter, but that night, while snow accumulated on the sagging polythene of his window, Stephen lay cramped and wakeful inside his sleeping bag, thinking about the girl, and the way her eyes had looked up at him, seeing nothing. Her head was beside his on the pillow, and when he rolled over on to his stomach, trying to get away from her, he found her body underneath him, as dry and insatiable as sand.

Nothing else had ever affected him in the same way, though He’d seen many worse things. She was waiting for him, that’s the way it felt. She had something to say to him, but He’d never managed to listen, or not in the right way.

He was still groggy from sleep when a banging on the front door sent him stumbling downstairs. Feeling slightly sick, he opened the door and there on the step, blinking in the sudden light, was a young girl. He stared at her. She seemed at first to be part of the dream, but then the blast of cold air reminded him he was wearing only his underpants and socks, and he blinked.

She was smiling. Wide blue eyes, scrubbed face, a stocky, powerful body — she could have been any age from twelve to seventeen, though, since the baggy sweatshirt failed to hide surprisingly large breasts, seventeen was probably more like it.

She was carrying a stack of yellow towels in her arms.

‘Beth sent these. She’s just remembered she forgot to put any towels in the bathroom.’

‘Oh, right. Come in.’

A man with no trousers on is never at his most confident, particularly if he’s forgotten to take off his socks. All he needed now to look completely ridiculous was an erection, but fortunately He’d reached an age when these show up only when required, and not always then. She passed with averted eyes, and a giggle that suggested rather less innocence than He’d supposed.

‘You’d better shut the door,’ she said. ‘You’ll catch your death.’

Closing it, he saw a small car — a Metro, he thought, its colour uncertain in the dark — pulled up on the grass verge beyond the garden gate. He followed the girl into the living room, trying to remember her name. Beth had mentioned her. She looked like one of those flushed, pink, sturdy English girls who never make it past the first round of Wimbledon. ‘You’re just in time. I was going to have a shower.’ He looked at his watch.

‘No rush. Meal isn’t on yet.’

‘I was hoping for a drink.’

A flash of the blue eyes, but she went shy on him again.

‘You must be Justine.’

‘That’s right. I look after Adam.’

And how’s that? he wanted to ask, but felt he shouldn’t. ‘Were you with him when he found the badger?’

‘No, thank God. I only do a couple of hours. Collect him from school, do a bit of housework, stay till Beth gets back. I’ll just put these upstairs. You’ve found out where the airing cupboard is?’

‘No.’

‘On the landing.’

‘Oh. Right.’

He was losing interest. He got a clean pair of jeans and a T-shirt from his suitcase and put them on. Robert had put his laptop on the table. He decided he would work in here, where he could enjoy an open fire, and began searching for the nearest plug. Tomorrow He’d get Robert to drop him in town so that he could buy a printer and start looking for a car. He could hear Justine moving around upstairs. Heavy footed.

When she came down, she said, ‘Looks like work.’

‘It is. Well, meant to be.’

‘You writing a book?’

He guessed Beth had told her. ‘that’s the idea.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘The way wars are represented.’

That was generally enough to discourage further questions, but Justine was made of sterner stuff. ‘War photography?’

‘Yeah — but not just that. Goya seems to be squatting all over it at the moment.’ He was too — like a monstrous jewelled toad.

Justine plonked herself down on the sofa.

‘Don’t you have to be getting back?’

‘No, I’m finished for the — oh,’ she said, flushing and jumping up again. ‘I see what you mean.’

Regretting his churlishness, he said, ‘No, it’s OK, don’t rush off. Do you want a cup of tea, or something?’

‘I’ll make it.’

‘No, you won’t. It’ll do me good to find out where everything is.’

In the end they made the tea together, unearthing, as a final triumph, a bowl of sugar left behind, he suspected, by the last tenants — Beth would never have given houseroom to anything as unhealthy as sugar. It was caked to the sides of the dish and brown in the middle from careless dipping of wet spoons. As Justine raised the mug — it had a yellow duckling on the side, which suited her, he thought — she blew a wisp of ultra-fine blonde hair out of her eyes. She wasn’t particularly attractive, not to him anyway — too fresh-faced, too wholesome — and yet when she lowered the mug and he saw her full, fleshy, pouting lips gleaming with wet he did feel a tweak of desire, impersonal but not exploitative. He wouldn’t have dreamt of making a move, even if he could have convinced himself that a teenage girl might find a middle-aged man with white hairy legs and raging conjunctivitis irresistible. She made him feel positively decrepit — rumpled, just out of bed, smelling, no doubt, a bit stale. Only he liked her mouth. It would repel lipstick, that mouth. No matter how carefully it was applied, she would never manage to retain more than a thin stain around the edges of her lips.