Pat Barker - Double Vision

He put the daffodils and Adam’s painting down on the bedspread. ‘How are you?’

‘Not bad.’

She had some colour in her cheeks, but her eyes flickered round the room in a way he didn’t like.

Alec was in the doorway too now.

‘Angela, do you think you could put these in water?’ Justine asked sweetly, picking up the daffodils that had left a small damp patch on the white cotton.

They took it as a hint to leave. He bent down and kissed her on the forehead and they stayed like that, hearing each other breathe, not wanting to move, but then she sat back, raised her knees, and smiled. She was wearing a white nightshirt with a Snoopy design and looked every day of fifteen. His sympathies at that moment were all with Alec. I’d throw me out, he thought.

‘How are you really?’

‘Not good. Angela’s driving me mad. “Poor motherless child.”’

‘Have you spoken to your mother?’

‘No, we don’t know where she is. I’m OK. Or I will be when I can get up and about. I wish I hadn’t taken that bloody sedative.’

‘It might be a good idea to get some sleep.’

‘Not if it means waking up at three o’clock in the morning.’

‘Have you got some painkillers?’

‘Oh, yeah. Real knock-out stuff.’ She held up a bottle of pink pills from the table beside the bed. ‘I want to get up.’

‘Better not. You’ve had a shock.’

‘So have you.’

He shrugged. ‘Oh, I’m bomb happy.’

‘What were you going to do with that statue?’

‘Kill him.’

‘You’d have got five years.’

‘Not if they’d seen a photograph of you.’

‘Oh, well. It didn’t happen.’

She touched her scalp, prodding the line of stitches as he suspected she did twenty times an hour. ‘You must have lost quite a bit of blood.’

‘It looked a lot. I’m not sure it was.’ A pause while she prodded her scalp again. ‘How’s Beth taking it?’

‘Quite well. Tough as an old boot.’

‘She’s going to need to be, because I don’t think I can go back.’

‘No, I don’t think you should.’

‘It scuppers her completely.’

‘That’s her problem.’

‘Perhaps I could have Adam here.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, if it comes to that, I’ll mind him. What you should think about is going away for a holiday in the sun.’

‘Who with?’

‘Me, of course.’

‘What about the book?’

‘Fuck the book.’

‘I’ve never heard you say that before.’

‘Then you haven’t been listening, because I say that at least once a day.’

Angela came in with the daffodils in a vase and put it down on the table. ‘Have you taken your pill, Justine?’

‘Not yet. I will.’

‘You need a good night’s sleep.’

‘I’ll take it at bedtime.’

Angela withdrew.

‘Can’t you go downstairs and watch television?’

She shook her head. ‘I wish I could go out.’

‘Tomorrow.’

He was looking round the room, thinking how much of a young girl’s room it was. Posters, photographs, make-up, a red rosette pinned up on a cork board, the relic of some pony-club triumph of the past. Her shoes were lined up neatly in one corner next to the dressing table.

‘Do you think we could go somewhere?’ she asked.

‘Anywhere you like. If you’re sure you’ll be well enough?’

‘I don’t see why not. It’s a broken nose, for heaven’s sake, not a broken neck.’

‘All right. Where would you like to go?’

‘Don’t know.’

He touched her leg through the bedspread. ‘You be thinking about it. I’ll come and get you about ten.’

He thought, as he went downstairs and was let out of the house by Angela — Alec seemed to be avoiding him — that it had been an extraordinary day. We live our whole lives one step away from clarity, he thought. That moment, careering down the steep hillside, knowing that however hard he ran he wouldn’t get there in time, had taught him more about his feelings for Justine than months of introspection could have done. All along in the back of his mind he’d been aware of his priorities in life rearranging themselves without any conscious effort on his part. You thought you cared about that? Don’t be silly. The girl. She’s what matters.

Poor Justine. What a helluva year she’d had — breaking up with Peter, glandular fever, the disappointment over not going to Cambridge — and now this. But she was strong. She’d come through it. Changed, though. And the changed Justine might have no use for him.

Left alone, Justine lay for a time quietly watching the play of shadows on the bedspread. Then, just as she decided to get out of bed and go downstairs, she drifted off to sleep. She dreamt she was far out, a long way from land on a frozen lake. She’d been walking for hours, her boots squeaking on the ice, a cold wind flattening her skirt against the backs of her legs. Probably she ought to stop and turn back towards the line of lights behind her, but when she turns round the wind slashes tears from her eyes. Her face is burning. Don’t look, a voice whispers in her mind. Don’t turn round. She’s too far out already. It’s dark now and getting colder by the minute. Stop. Turn. Look down. The ice at her feet is thick and marbled, like frozen phlegm. It had borne her weight while she was walking away from the shore, but when she tries to go back it starts to creak alarmingly. She feels rather than hears the sound, a protest, almost a groan. Down there beneath her feet is icy water a mile deep. She tries to set off at another angle and again the ice creaks. It comes to her that there’s only one path back to the shore, and that she doesn’t know where it is. Ahead there is only the trackless waste of ice, catching a dull gleam from the stars.

She woke up, shivering, instantly alert. A glance at her watch told her she’d been asleep less than twenty minutes, though she felt as if she’d been walking across the ice all night. The fear of the dream was still on her. She snuggled down under the covers, reassuring herself that she was warm and dry. Safe at home.

Slowly her thoughts ranged back over the day. Even this brief interlude of sleep had given her a sense of distance from the attack. The interview with the detectives in the hospital kept coming back to her. ‘Your father,’ they said at one point. A few minutes later, they were talking about ‘your attacker’. My attacker? she’d wanted to say. But he’s nothing to do with me.

It still worried her. ‘Your’ attacker seemed to imply a continuing relationship. If she’d tripped on a kerb and broken her nose, nobody would have been talking about ‘your’ kerb. They were such harmless little words: ‘your’, ‘my’, but they opened the door on to a small dark room, a space so cramped it could hold only two people, herself and her attacker. Don’t look. Don’t turn round. She sat up and looked, slowly and carefully, at every object in the room, turned, and did the same for the wall behind her. She wasn’t going to let the attack define her. Who are you? I’m a woman who got beaten up by a burglar. Oh, no. There was quite a bit more to her than that.

Dad came upstairs and sat with her. He looked so lost and helpless sitting there, she started to feel responsible for him. ‘Where’s Angela?’

‘Gone home. She thought we’d like some time together.’

‘That was nice of her. I am pleased, you know. About…’

He nodded. ‘It might mean leaving the parish.’

‘Because you’re divorced?’

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps it’s time to move on anyway.’

‘Yes. I’ll miss it, though.’

‘Yeah, me too.’