Pat Barker: Double Vision

A short pause, as the car bumped off the grass verge, its headlights illuminating hedgerows laced with frost.

‘Why, do you know her?’

‘I’ve met her once or twice. I knew Ben well. I did quite a few assignments with him.’

‘Bosnia.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’ He was surprised she knew. It must be history to her.

‘I read the book. Left here.’

He took the corner, his headlights revealing the dark mass of the forest straight ahead. ‘That was the last book we did together.’

She mumbled something about it being very tragic. He agreed that it was. After that they drove for a while in silence, and the soft sound of the tyres over slushy snow seemed to seal him off from normal life. There hadn’t been time for the news about the house to sink in, but he was beginning to realize he was free. Single. He didn’t know whether he felt elated or frightened, but elation was closer. He felt he was setting off for a day out, instead of just driving Beth’s au pair home.

‘You scored a real bull’s eye with those owl pellets.’

‘Yes, he liked them, didn’t he? And you don’t have to boil them to get the skulls.’

‘That’s right.’ She laughed. ‘We’re going to label them tomorrow so that’ll keep him busy. And then we’re going to do a proper survey: how many mice? How many shrews? What’s the percentage of each animal in the owl’s diet…? I don’t suppose you could show me the tree, could you? Because we’re going to need a lot more pellets.’

‘Of course, come over any time. It sounds like an awful lot of work.’

‘I don’t mind. I’ll miss him, if I do go on this course.’

‘I wouldn’t’ve thought he was all that easy to take care of. He’s —’ He pulled himself up, sharply.

‘Weird. Yes, I know, but I don’t think There’s all that much wrong with him. Beth was frantic when they diagnosed Asperger’s.’

He mustn’t let her see that he hadn’t known. ‘I’ve never really understood what that is.’

‘It’s basically a sort of difficulty in seeing other people as people. Like if you were looking at this’ — she pointed to the trees his headlights were revealing — ‘there wouldn’t be any essential difference between me and the trees. So you can’t change your perspective and see the situation from another person’s point of view, because you can’t grasp the fact that they have their own internal life, and they might be thinking something different from you.’

‘So they’re objects?’

‘Yes.’

Stephen thought for a moment, trying to relate this to his knowledge of Adam. He didn’t know him well enough. ‘I don’t know how much good these labels do. I was supposed to go and see a psychiatrist — the newspaper I worked for wanted somebody to have a look at me.’

‘What was wrong?’

‘I was starting to howl at every full moon.’

‘No, really what was wrong?’

‘Nightmares. The usual. If you want the label — post-traumatic stress disorder. I don’t know. I decided in the end it just wasn’t for me. After all, nobody forced me to go to those places. Some of them I actually begged to go to — it was my idea. And if you bring it on yourself, like that, I don’t think you’ve got any right to complain. You’ve certainly no right to expect sympathy.’

‘You sound as if you think you don’t deserve help.’

‘I don’t think it’s possible. I think you have to do it yourself. Especially if you got yourself into the mess in the first place.’ This was the wrong conversation to be having with her — too intimate, too intense — but he didn’t know how to get out of it. ‘There was a guy once — a Holocaust survivor — who said something about seeing the sun rise in Auschwitz and it was black. But you see he didn’t choose that experience. He got lumbered with it. Whereas people like me who go round the world poking their noses into other people’s wars — we do choose it.’

‘A black sun?’

‘Yes. We risk the possibility. And if you end up with nightmares, too bad. they’re part of the baggage. And you certainly shouldn’t go running to a therapist, and say, “Poor little me.”’

They drove for a while in silence.

‘I shouldn’t say anything,’ she said at last, ‘because I don’t know enough about it, but I do think you’ve got therapy completely wrong. I don’t think it’s about feeling sorry for yourself, or even the therapist feeling sorry for you. I think it’s supposed to be a lot tougher than that.’

He was surprised by her vehemence and let the subject drop. After a few minutes he asked, ‘So what are you going to do after university?’

‘Don’t know really. Something with children.’

‘Teaching?’

‘No, I thought of being a paediatrician. Or a child psychiatrist, but it’s years ahead. I don’t really know.’

‘Oh, so you’re reading Medicine?’

‘Yes.’ She was stifling a yawn as she spoke. ‘Right here and then just follow the road.’

‘You sound tired.’

‘It’s the warmth. I’ll be all right.’

The next time he looked she was asleep, hanging from her seat belt like a toddler, her full lips pouting slightly on every exhaled breath. He smiled to himself and tried to drive smoothly, taking his time on the bends, braking well in advance.

The next bend was sharper. He reached out to steady her and felt her body heat on the palm of his hand, like a burn that lingered for many minutes after he touched her. She slipped sideways until her knee rested against his thigh. He was intensely aware of her warmth. He didn’t want the drive to end. For as long as she went on sleeping, she was potentially his. As soon as she woke up, He’d be back with the implacable reality: that she was his sister-in-law’s au pair and more than twenty years younger than him.

On the next stretch of straight road he risked looking down at her. Her face was in shadow. He could see only her hands, which were loosely knotted in her lap. There was a dusting of gold hairs on her wrists, each hair distinct in the faint glow of light from the dashboard. He thought how smooth and firm her skin looked, how pleasant it would be to touch, then dragged his gaze back to the road.

Too late. The road was momentarily streaked with red. He thought he heard a thud, but it was lost immediately in the squeal of brakes. The car began to skid, but he righted it, though not before He’d glimpsed the slope between the trees, leading down to the stream in the valley far below. He brought the car to a jarring halt.

Justine was awake, staring. ‘What was it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did we hit it?’

‘I don’t know. Stay here.’ She started undoing her seat belt. ‘No, stay here.’

He got out of the car, his stomach churning. Burnt rubber mixed with the smells of new bracken and moist earth. He inspected the ground round his wheels, his fingertips flinching in anticipation of what they might find. No sound now, except for the occasional slither and plop as an overburdened branch let fall its weight of snow. Whatever it was must be dead — that was all right, he could cope with death. What he dreaded was injury — the need to put whatever it was out of its misery. His fingers dabbled in wetness, but when he brought them close to the headlights they were merely smeared with mud. He stood up, scanning the ground, peering under the wheels, looking up and down the road.

‘Can you see anything?’

‘No, I think it must be further back. We must have gone right over it.’

‘I expect it was a rabbit. There’s lots of them about at the moment.’

He’d seen them too, baby rabbits newly out of the burrow bumping along the grass verges without fear, or caught in the middle of the road, quivering bags of blood with the headlights in their eyes. But he didn’t think this was a rabbit. He remembered that streak of red.