Pat Barker - Double Vision

In a way that sometimes happens, once or twice in a lifetime perhaps, he knew he would remember this moment till the day he died. Naked, he went across to the bed and pulled back the covers.

She said, ‘Do you love me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. I love you.’

He climbed in beside her and for a moment they said and did nothing, lying side by side, fingers intertwined. The moonlight found the whites of her eyes. For a moment he saw the girl in the stairwell in Sarajevo, but she’d lost her power. This moment in this bed banished her, not for ever, perhaps, but for long enough. He rolled over and took Justine in his arms.

It seemed a shame to wake her, so he slid out of bed in the grey dawn light, found the clothes he’d scattered over the floor last night in his haste to get them off and crept with them into the bathroom. He dressed, then tiptoed out of the room.

Downstairs there was a smell of bacon frying. The relentless hotel trade which dictates that the working day should end after midnight and start again before dawn. Mouth filling with saliva, he crossed the bar, which was full of the smells of cigarette smoke and stale beer. Even the red plush banquettes seemed to exhale a stale sat-upon smell, as if still warm from last night’s backsides.

He was afraid he might find the door locked and have to ask somebody to come from the kitchen to let him out, but no, it was open. He stepped out into the chilly dawn air and stood staring up and down the street. Deserted — until a trolley with chinking milk bottles came into sight further up the hill and stopped long enough for the girl driver, muffled up against the chill, to get down and deliver several bottles. He turned his collar up and set off in the opposite direction.

As he came out from between the houses, he saw the sea. He started to walk on the beach in deep fine, unpolluted sand, until he came to a row of ‘dragons’ teeth’: gigantic blocks of concrete scattered along the edge of the dunes in a rough line like a child’s bricks. Tank traps — the detritus of the last war. They were covered with graffiti: NFC RULES, SUNDERLAND ARE WANKERS. Ben would have loved them. They reminded Stephen a little of his last photograph: the abandoned Russian armoured cars in Afghanistan, filling almost the whole frame. No room for anything else except a strip of sky and that small, white, moribund sun.

A minute after he took that photograph he was dead.

Stephen had been travelling in a convoy behind him. They were flagged down, warned not to go any further. Ahead, in a gulley by the side of the road, was what looked like a heap of rugs. He’d known before he was told that it was Ben. Nobody could be sure that he was dead, only that he’d been seen lying in a bomb crater by the side of the road. Stephen had known with absolute certainty that he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he didn’t go to find out. Ben might be wounded or unconscious: it was just barely possible that he could be saved.

And so he ran, bent double — as if that would have made the slightest difference — to the armoured car. He told himself to go back, and went on running. He ran round the side of the vehicle, saw nothing, and then, at the bottom of the pocked and scarred hole, he saw him, lying on his back, his camera only a few feet away.

Stephen dislodged stones and pebbles as he scrambled down the slope, briefly hopeful because Ben looked untouched. But he didn’t stir. His open eyes stared into the white sun without wincing. There was an ants’ trail of blood coming down from the left temple. He looked surprised. Stephen expected to be shot himself at any moment — obviously a sniper had the road covered. His teeth were chattering. Oh, so they do that, he thought, calm enough, shocked enough, to be interested. He started to unfasten the chain from round Ben’s neck, but his hands were shaking too much, so he caught a loop of it between his fingers and wrenched it off. The catch had lasted longer than his luck. Then the camera. He must have come down here to take a photograph, lining up his camera for the shot, while somewhere out of sight another man lined up his gun. Nothing here but stones and rocks. But then Stephen looked up and saw them, the wrecked tanks. He’d been driven past them twenty times perhaps, but he hadn’t spotted what Ben saw. From the bottom of the crater they looked like a wave breaking. A sun so white it might have been the moon hung in the sky behind them. All the time, he was talking to Ben, saying, ‘You fucking idiot. You stupid, fucking fool. Your life — for that ?’

Clutching the camera to his chest, he turned and ran back, his boots loud on the gritty road, expecting at any moment that final explosion of pain in head or chest, but he reached the armoured car intact. Somebody tried to speak to him, but he pushed them aside. He was shaking with rage and grief. He wanted to huddle down somewhere private and cry, but when he got into the backseat and turned his face away the tears wouldn’t come. He felt totally dry — no spit, no sweat, no tears. Like one of those trussed up, desiccated bundles you see in a spider’s web.

He still hadn’t cried for Ben. Missed the funeral. Hadn’t managed to squeeze out a single tear. But at least Kate had the amulet. That mattered. And he’d brought the last photographs back.

He walked down to the sea — calm today, creaming over on the sand, each wave withdrawing with a small rasping sound, like a tiger’s purr. Here the sand was partly shingle. He started searching about, looking for flat pebbles to skim, and had found five or six really good ones, when he heard a shout and turned to see Justine coming down the dunes towards him. Her hand went up and felt the padding round her nose, then to her scalp to check that the two barbed-wire fences were in place. Last night had been extraordinary — the sex passionate and yet interspersed with tender, almost sexless kisses. He had been so afraid of hurting her.

She came straight into his arms and kissed him.

‘Can you do that on the sea?’ she said, looking at the stones. ‘I thought it had to be calm water.’

‘It is calm. Look at it.’

She started searching for her own pebbles. Instant competition. That’s my girl.

‘No, too big. Here, have this,’ he said, giving her his best one.

They were intent, childlike, silly, innocent, though it was sex that had brought them to this state. His back hurt. Justine’s lips, breasts, thighs burned from contact with his chin.

She threw the first pebble. ‘Two.’

‘One and a bit.’

‘You’re a hard man, mister.’

He threw his first pebble, which sank, ignominiously, with a detumescent plop. Justine started giggling. ‘Just you wait.’

This time he got the flick of his wrist exactly right. He knew, before the stone left his hand, that this one would walk, miraculously, across the water, each point of contact setting off concentric rings that would meet and overlap, creating little eddies of turbulence, but always, always spreading out, so that the ripples reached the shore, before, finally, it sank.

‘There,’ he said. ‘You see?’

Then he put his arm around her shoulders and they walked on, half in the water, half on land, while behind them the sun rose above the dunes, casting fine blue shadows of marram grass on to the white sand.

My thanks go to Neil Darbyshire of the Daily Telegraph for enabling me to attend the opening of the Milosevic trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague, and to Neil Tweedie, foreign correspondent of the Daily Telegraph , for helping to make my visit a pleasant experience.