Pat Barker - Double Vision

Anything could’ve woken her, she thought. A dustbin lid clattering against a wall, a door banging, but then she saw it, a glow of light from inside the studio where no light should have been. A moving light, a torch or a small lamp. She saw the reflection on the hillside rather than the light itself, a tinge of purple on the heaving grass.

Police. She picked up the phone, unable at first to understand why there was silence rather than a steady purr, then realized the lines must be down. Checking, she switched on the bedside lamp. Dead. She went downstairs, trying lights on the staircase and landings, then found the torch she kept in a drawer of the hall table. Through into the living room, swinging the beam around her, she brought the light to a stop on Ben’s portrait. Oh, my dear, she thought, and touched his face.

If there’d been burglars in the house, she’d have locked the bedroom door and let them have the lot. But this was her work. She wouldn’t let that be stolen or destroyed.

In the kitchen she pulled on wellies, her bare feet jamming against the rubber, cold toes wiggling in space — too much space — she must’ve put on Ben’s boots, not her own. No time to change, she was out in the yard, switching the torch off as she left the house. She felt that carrying a light would make her conspicuous, though she switched it on again as she ventured out into the yard, briefly creating a wobbling sphere of light with slanting, silver lines of rain sweeping across it, then switched it off again, paused for a moment to get her eyes accustomed to the dark, and set off to the studio door. She opened it quietly, and stood in the lobby among the familiar daily smells, aware of somebody on the other side of that door. Deep breaths. Blood clamouring in her head and neck, destroying her ability to think. She put her eye to the crack in the door, wanting to know who and what she had to confront.

She couldn’t see anybody. The shadow of the huge Christ lay across the floor and climbed the wall, and a second smaller shadow flickered around it, like a grey flame. She pressed closer to the door, wondering if she dare push it open, trying to remember if it creaked, and then she heard the last sound she expected to hear — though it was the sound that filled the studio almost every day of her working life — the tapping of a mallet on a chisel. She pushed the door further open.

Peter Wingrave stood there, a torch propped up on one of the benches behind him, his shadow huge against the wall of the studio, but this was Peter as she’d never seen him before. Her mind grappled with the wrongness of the image, and then she realized he was wearing her clothes, even to the fur hat with earflaps that she sometimes wore when the studio was really cold. He looked ridiculous — and terrifying. Deranged. His bare arms protruded from the plaster-daubed fisherman’s smock. She was a tall woman, but on him the sleeves were barely past his elbow, and his legs stuck out of her tracksuit bottoms, bare legs, white and hairy in the torchlight, more clearly visible than the rest of him. Only her moon boots had defeated him. He was barefoot, his strong prehensile toes gripping and relaxing as his feet moved across the mess of white plaster dust, towards the figure, pause, strike, away. Decision, action, contemplation: the constant comparison of the shape in the mind with the shape that was emerging from the plaster. The shadow of the figure thrown on to the wall in front of him, one shadow threading in and out of the other, like a weaver’s bobbin.

He looked mad. He looked totally, utterly deranged, and he was destroying her Christ.

But then, a second later, something that had been tugging at the edges of her mind became clear. There was something wrong about the sound. She strained to listen. The scuff of his feet moving across the floor, a snap as a larger piece of plaster broke under his weight, then again the tap of mallet on chisel. There was no impact, no jar and squeak of the chisel biting into the plaster. He was miming. Pretending to be her. In his own mind, perhaps, he had become her.

The first rush of relief at knowing the figure wasn’t being damaged gave way immediately to a deeper fear. If he had been destroying her work, she must and would have confronted him, but this was so different from anything she’d expected to see that she stepped back into the darkness and stood there, thinking. He was stealing her power in an almost ritualistic way. She couldn’t confront him, because she couldn’t begin to understand what she was dealing with — she couldn’t foresee what his reaction would be.

Slowly, being careful to make no noise, she backed out of the lobby and ran across the yard into the house, where she locked and bolted the door behind her.

She began searching for her bag, but when she found her mobile she couldn’t get a signal. And in any case, she thought, putting it down, what could she say? There’s a man in my studio. Did he break in? No, I gave him the key. Is he doing any damage? No. Is he threatening you? No. Are you frightened? Yes. Terrified. Are you a neurotic, stupid bitch? Yes — probably.

They wouldn’t say that. All the same she didn’t particularly want to have the conversation. She put the mobile down and sat at the kitchen table, in darkness, torn between the desire to go back over there and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing, and her fear that what he was doing made so little sense, even on his own terms, perhaps, that he wouldn’t be able to answer, and that the question might therefore topple him over into some state she couldn’t predict and wouldn’t be able to deal with. No, better left.

He was wearing her clothes.

She felt a spasm of revulsion, not from him but from herself, as if he had indeed succeeded in stealing her identity. It was easy to believe that what she’d seen in the studio, through the crack in the door, was a deranged double, a creature that in its insanity and incompetence revealed the truth about her.

Half an hour later, perhaps a little less, she heard the studio door close, footsteps walking along the side of the house and then the noise of his van driving away.

The storm blew itself out over the next few hours. Kate made no attempt to sleep again, but sat at the kitchen table, tense and watchful, eyes prickling with tiredness, mouth and stomach sour with too much caffeine.

After a while, as the light coming through the window panes strengthened, she crept out of the house into the opening eye of day, and in that watery yellow light made her way across the yard, which was strewn with twigs and small branches torn off the trees, to the studio.

The huge figure towered over her. It had changed, and yet there were no fresh chips of plaster on the floor, and no chisel marks she couldn’t remember making herself. If it looked different, it must be because her way of seeing it had changed. The belly was scored in three, no, four different places. She put her hands into the cracks. Chest and neck gouged — it looked like a skin disease, bubonic plague, a savagely plucked bird. Pockmarks everywhere. Slowly, she raised her eyes and looked at the head. Cheekbones like cliffs, a thin, dour mouth, lines graven deep on either side, bruised, cut, swollen. Beaten up. Somebody with a talent for such things had given him a right going over. This was the Jesus of history. And we know what happens in history: the strong take what they can, the weak endure what they must, and the dead emphatically do not rise.

She’d made this, not Peter, and yet it seemed to her, remembering last night, that everything she found most disturbing in this figure corresponded with his mimed movements.

Putting the problem aside as too complex to solve now, she looked round the studio, thinking he might have left things behind, and sure enough, there was his jacket on the bench. Putting scruples aside, she felt inside the pockets and found loose change, three five-pound notes and a credit card. She’d have to find a way of returning these: she didn’t want him coming here to collect them. Perhaps she could drop them off at the vicarage. He could pick them up there.