Pat Barker - Border Crossing

‘Did you tell — Mike, was it? The probation officer?

— about the chainsaw?’

‘No.’

‘Might be why he wasn’t worried.’

Danny smiled. ‘The point is, he had no need to be.’

‘But they have to be ultra-careful, don’t they? And so do you. One silly little incident, and you’re back inside.’

‘No, it’s not that. You see the real question is: can people change?’ Danny was leaning forward, meeting Tom’s gaze with an almost uncomfortable intensity. ‘And all sorts of people whose jobs actually depend on a belief that people can change, social workers, probation officers, clinical psychologists’ — he smiled — ‘psychiatrists, don’t really believe it at all.’

‘Well, yes — because those are precisely the jobs that furnish people with a good deal of evidence that it doesn’t happen.’

‘Do you believe it?’

Tom leant back, massaging the skin of his forehead, his face partially screened from Danny’s gaze. ‘It would be very easy for me to say yes, but I suspect in the sense you mean, I… don’t. Obviously, if you take a particular individual and change his environment, completely, for a long time, he’s going to learn new tricks. He’s got to, the old tricks don’t work any more, and he’s an organism that’s programmed to survive. If he’s capable of learning at all, he’ll learn. My God, he will. But I don’t think the responses are genuinely new, I think they were there all along. Lying dormant. Because they weren’t needed.’

‘So the logic is, if you put this “particular individual” back into the old situation, with all the old pressures, he’ll revert to the old responses.’

‘The old situation might not still be there.’

‘But if it was? He’d revert?’

‘Not necessarily. There’s always the hope that some of the new tricks might carry over.’

‘But he might revert?’

‘Yes. There’s always that possibility.’

Danny crossed his arms and leant back in his chair. ‘You’re a cynical sod, really, aren’t you? Under all: hat compassion you don’t actually give a toss for inybody.’

‘Whereas you believe in redemption.’

Danny was so startled his nostrils flared. ‘Oooooh,’ he said, midway between a sigh and a groan. ‘I don’t know that I do. I’d like to.’ He paused. ‘Of course in your terms that would be a genuinely new response.’

‘Yes.’

A short silence. Danny said, ‘Sorry.’

‘What for?’

‘Calling you a cynical sod.’

‘That’s all right, you don’t have to be polite.’

He didn’t. This was now definitely not a social call.

‘Tell me about going back to prison.’

‘Nothing much to tell. It was… impulse, really. I just thought, Sod it, I can’t make it work. And in a curious sort of way, I did make prison work, I’d got a job in the library, I was doing a degree.’ His expression hardened. ‘And I could work with people. If somebody wanted to talk, they talked. They knew bloody well I wasn’t going to pass it on.’

‘So you had a role?’

‘Yeah, which is more than I’ve bloody well got out here. So I went back. Hitched most of the way, walked the last ten miles. And then I bumped into one of the warders, one of the better ones, and he said, “Come and have a cup of tea.” And I told him what I was doing and he said, “Don’t be daft, Danny, they’re not going to let you back in.” And that was the first time anybody had called me Danny for months, so that didn’t discourage me. Anyway I banged on the door and I’ve no doubt he’d rung ahead and warned them I was coming. I was put in the visitors’ waiting room. There was this girl there with a baby, visiting somebody, she thought I was visiting too. And then Martha came and got me. Stupid.’

‘It was understandable.’

‘Gerraway, man. It was pathetic’

A sudden incursion of a Geordie accent. Why? ‘How long ago was that?’

‘Nine days.’

‘Is that what made you so depressed?’

‘No, I’d been feeling down for months. It’s always bad in the vacations when everybody else goes home.’

‘Can’t you go home?’

‘My mother’s dead.’

‘Oh, I am sorry.’ Tom remembered her clearly, a woman with mousy fair hair, wearing a blue cardigan that matched the faded blue of her eyes. In the course of the trial, her eyes seemed to become paler, as if tears could dilute the colour. She’d wept, quietly, persistently, into an embroidered handkerchief, the sort almost nobody carried any more, and Tom had been conscious of mounting irritation as the furtive sniffling went on and on. You’d have thought she was the victim. Danny looked round at her continually, more worried about her, it seemed, than he was about himself. And even that had counted against him, making him seem mature beyond his years. ‘When did it happen?’

‘Two years ago. Of course I was still inside. They took me to see her in the hospital, only they wouldn’t rake the handcuffs off, so she had all the shame of other people, nurses, seeing me like that. And we couldn’t talk, with the warder there. And then she got a lot worse, and I asked if I could go to see her again, and the governor hummed and hawed and… finally said yes. And I stood to attention, and said, “Thank you, sir.” I should’ve ripped his fucking liver out.’

Tom let a silence open up. Then he said, ‘I hope you’re careful who you say that to.’

A direct gaze. ‘I am. At the funeral I was in handcuffs again — of course. When I bent down to throw earth on the coffin, I had to kind of coordinate it with the warder, like a bloody three-legged race. It was ridiculous.’

‘So there’s no home base?’

‘No.’

‘What about your father?’

‘Haven’t seen him for years. He used to come and see me at Long Garth. You know, it was almost like a posh school, sort of place he went to. I think he quite liked that, so long as he didn’t have to remember why I was there.’ He stopped, patted his pockets. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘No, go ahead.’

He used matches still. Tom put an ashtray near him and went back to his chair.

‘I did try to talk to him once.’

‘About?’

‘The obvious. He got up and walked out. I can’t remember if that was the last visit. If it wasn’t, there weren’t many more.’

‘What about last Saturday?’

‘I woke up feeling quite good, actually. I’d got the second anniversary of my mother’s death over, and I thought, Right now, for Christ’s sake, start moving on. And then… I don’t know what happened. I just fell into the pit. I was wandering round, I’d had quite a bit to drink — that didn’t help — and I was near the river, and I thought, Sod it.’

‘Like when you went back to prison?’

‘It was a bit like that, yes. Except worse, because then I knew there wasn’t anywhere to go.’

‘So you didn’t plan it at all?’

‘No.’

Danny’s face was veiled in smoke. Not that it mattered. Any good liar — and Danny was exceptionally good — can control his expression. It’s the body that gives the game away. Tom thought he could discern a new tension in Danny’s posture, a choppiness in the movement of the hands. When he said ‘No’, he’d: ned to shrug, but only one shoulder moved. And who carries temazepam around with them in the middle of the day? No, Danny was telling, at best, a partial truth.

‘I’m glad it happened,’ Danny said.

‘Why?’

‘Because I met you. Again. And I know you’re going to laugh, but I still think that wasn’t an accident.’

You and me both, Tom thought. ‘So what was it, then?’

‘It was, I dunno, a sort of kick in the pants, I suppose, because I’d tried to go on ignoring it and pretending it didn’t happen and suddenly there it is, bang. Right in front of me.’