Pat Barker - Double Vision

When he finally stopped work in the evening, they watched television, like an old married couple. It was strange watching news bulletins, or programmes like Panorama that in the past he’d often contributed to, but he soon found that Justine disliked them anyway.

‘Why won’t you watch the news?’ he asked. It staggered him, this indifference to what was going on in the world.

She shrugged. ‘I don’t see the point. There’s nothing I can do about it. If it’s something like a famine, OK, you can contribute, but with a lot of this there’s nothing anybody can do except gawp and say, “Ooh, isn’t it awful?” when really they don’t give a damn. It’s all pumped-up emotion, it’s just false, like when those families come on TV because somebody’s gone missing, or thousands of people send flowers to people they don’t know. It’s just wanking .’

That last word was the give-away. ‘But you can’t have a democracy if people don’t know what’s going on.’

‘You can read the papers. It’s the voyeurism of looking at it, that’s what’s wrong. Do you know, some people never watch the news, on principle?’

‘I don’t know how people tell the difference between principle and just being too fucking self-centred to care.’

The long hours alone with Justine, in bed and out of it, had the unexpected effect of waking him up sexually. Like Cleopatra, but rather earlier in life, she made hungry where most she satisfied. Now, as he walked through the streets of Newcastle on his way back from the university library to his car, he noticed every woman he passed. The sensation was almost painful, like blood flowing back into a numbed limb.

The sky was a deep turquoise, and the starlings were beginning to gather, huge folds and swathes of them coiling, spiralling, circling, and everywhere their clicks and chatterings, as insistent as cicadas. Beneath this frenzy, another frenzy of people rushing home from work, shopping; young people setting off for a night out; girls, half naked, standing in shop doorways; young men in short sleeves, muscular arms wreathed in blue, green, red and purple, dragons and serpents coiled round veined biceps. He passed a gaggle of girls, the pink felt penises on top of their heads bobbing about in the wind that blew up from the Quayside. Perhaps he gaped too obviously, for one of them turned round and stuck two fingers in the air.

He walked through all this, muffled up against the weather, sensible, middle aged and cautious, but also, as the blue light deepened and the girls became lovelier, racked with lust. He stopped at the foot of Grey’s Monument, craning to look up, while thousands of starlings broke in waves above his head and a few stars pricked through the darkening sky.

Standing here like this, in his dark mac among the half-naked boys and girls, he looked, he suspected, not merely middle aged but furtive. The man in the park peering up the skirts of little girls on the swings. He needed a drink, and that was a problem because he had the car with him. And yet he didn’t want to go tamely back home with a bottle as he had on previous nights. Not bloody likely. He looked around for a wine bar — he could have one drink, for God’s sake, there was no harm in that, and even one at the moment felt like a life-saver, softening his mood, dissolving the hard edges of memory so that he could flow into the lives around him.

And then he saw Peter Wingrave, standing in the doorway of Waterstone’s, obviously waiting for somebody, a girl, probably. Or perhaps not. He watched Peter watching the crowds and saw an echo of his own loneliness, his own desperation. It was enough. Peter glanced up as soon as he realized he was being directly approached, with a face prepared for strangers, cautious, polite, ready to take evasive action, balanced on the balls of his feet. Excessively cautious, surely. Stephen could well believe it might get rough a bit later in the evening, but not now.

‘Hi,’ Stephen said.

A flash of recognition, succeeded almost immediately by a dull flush. Now why? Because he’s on the pick-up, on the prowl, or perhaps not even that. Perhaps just ashamed of being alone. He was very attractive-looking underneath the nerdy specs and the designer stubble, but you couldn’t see him fitting in easily with his contemporaries, though he knew nothing about him, really. He had no grounds for thinking that. Peter might be the linchpin of a thriving social network, for all he knew. Good looks, intelligence, charm… And something else, something that undermined them all.

‘Mr Sharkey.’

‘Stephen.’ Despite Peter’s confident use of the name, he seemed uncertain. ‘We met at Kate’s studio.’

‘Yes.’ He was glancing from side to side, as if looking for a way out of the encounter. But when Stephen suggested a drink, his gaze immediately focused on Stephen’s face and after only a second’s hesitation he said, ‘Yes.’

They went to a wine bar a few hundred yards down the street. It was crowded, but not with the kind of young people who were walking past outside. This was job-related drinking, people disguising from each other the fact that they had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, clinging to this extended version of the working day because outside it they didn’t exist.

Or because they love their jobs, he reminded himself, remembering how much he’d loved his.

A man with a roll of pink fat overlapping his collar was speaking urgently into a mobile phone, a finger blocking out the din from his other ear. They had to push their way past him to get to the bar. Stephen was sweating, though outside he’d been cold in spite of the coat. Peter asked for a whisky. Stephen bought him a double, himself a single, and stood pinned against the bar, wondering why he was doing this. Glancing at Peter, Stephen saw him looking round, searching the faces round the bar, and, as he leant closer to speak to him, he caught a whiff of sweat, fresh, but not the normal scent of a healthy body reacting to heat. He’d always meant to ask somebody — Robert might know — why fear sweat smells different from ordinary sweat. It certainly did. An intimate acquaintance with his own armpits in various sticky situations had taught him that. And yet these people were, what? Accountants? Lawyers? Not the kind of people to tear strangers in their midst limb from limb. But at least he now knew why Peter interested him — had done from the moment he walked into the studio. Something was wrong, something didn’t fit, and Stephen’s nose for a story was twitching.

It was hard to get a conversation going. Partly the noise, partly his own state of mind. When he’d been working as hard as he had recently a kind of verbal dislocation set in, in which it was hardly possible to string another sentence together, and names of even very common everyday objects escaped him. He’d hear himself say ‘thingy’ or ‘whatsit’. It had irritated the hell out of Nerys, but then so had everything else he did, in the end.

‘Have you been working for Kate long?’

‘No, just a few weeks. It’s useful because gardening dries up in the winter months.’

‘Oh, yes, I remember. You’re a gardener.’

‘I’ve done a lot of gardening.’

‘But it’s not what you want to do?’

‘No, I want to be a writer.’

Oh, God. No wonder he’d been so keen on coming for a drink. He was on the lookout for contacts, agents, publishers. Stephen was already working out a cast-iron excuse for why he couldn’t read whatever it was Peter’d written.

It’s a haiku .

I really am pressed for time at the moment …

‘Have you had anything published?’ An unkind question, perhaps, but then he wasn’t trying to be kind.