Pat Barker - Border Crossing

‘And that’s a sign you have to face up to it?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re putting an awful lot on coincidence, Danny. I mean, you get fished out of the river by a psychologist, so you decide it’s time for some psychotherapy. Suppose I’d been a tailor. Would you have ordered a suit?’

‘That’s not fair. And it’s not a psychologist, is it?’

Tom took time to think. ‘You know, if you’re really serious about this, there’s quite a strong argument for starting at the beginning with somebody else.’

‘No. It’s you or nobody. And by the way, I don’t want psychotherapy. Why would I want that? I want to work out why it happened.’ He waited. ‘It’s not as if we had a personal relationship.’

‘No, that’s true. Did you ever get any treatment?’

‘No. Don’t look so shocked. You were the one who told the court I was normal.’

‘I didn’t say you were normal. I said you were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.’

‘Yeah, well, they forgot about that. Look, it was made pretty clear you didn’t talk about it. Not to anybody. Mr Greene, that was the headmaster at Long Garth, actually said, on the first night, I don’t care what you’ve done. Nobody’s going to ask you about that. This is the first day of the rest of your life. And everybody did what he said. There was an English teacher there, and I wrote something for him, but not about the murder. I couldn’t talk to my mother.

Floods of tears the minute she walked through the door. And when I tried to talk to my father —’

‘He got up and walked out.’

‘Yes.’

A long pause. Danny was looking down at his hands. Nails neatly manicured, cuticles picked raw. Tom waited.

‘When my mother died,’ Danny said at last, ‘somebody sent me some photographs, and there was one of me as a little boy, pushing one of those trolley things, you know, with bricks inside. I’d have been about two, I suppose. And I look at that photograph, and — I look like a normal little kid. I know, you can siy, “Well, what do you expect? Horns?” But that’s i”, you see. I just want to know why.’

‘Danny, if we’re going to do this…’ Tom raised both hands. ‘And I’m not saying we are. I think you have to think very carefully about whether… about v/hether you’re up to it. Because it’s not a simple matter of getting the facts straight. It’s… you’re going to be dredging up the emotions as well. Do you see that?’

‘Yes. Yes.’

‘No, not “Yes, yes.” Think. If you start this, and then you have to stop because it’s too painful, you’re going to feel you’ve failed. And if you do manage to go on, there’re going to be times when you feel a lot worse than you do at the moment. And what I’ve got to remember is that a couple of days ago you tried to kill yourself.’

‘But I’m not depressed.’ Danny waited for a reply.

‘Do you think I’m depressed?’

Tom hesitated. ‘I see no sign of it.’ What he couldn’t say was that he didn’t find the absence of depressive symptoms reassuring.

‘Well, then. What you… sorry, what I don’t seem to be able to get across is that I don’t want therapy. I don’t want to “feel better”. I simply want to know what happened and why.’

Tom took a moment to think. ‘Danny, a lot of people would say the real priority for you is to tackle the problems you’ve got now. You can’t change the past, but you can change the present.’

A wintry smile. ‘It’s up to me to set my priorities.’

‘Yes, that’s true.’

Danny leant forward. ‘Can I ask you what you think — no, sorry what you feel — about the trial?’

‘What I feel? I’m not sure my feelings are relevant.’

‘Oh, I think they are.’

Tom’s mind flooded with images of the courtroom. The small, lonely figure in the dock. ‘Uneasy,’ he said at last.

Danny smiled. ‘You see? That’s what I mean. You want it to be doctor and patient, or expert witness and accused. But it… it isn’t just that I don’t want it to be like that… it isn’t like that.’

‘We seem to be making sense of the trial now. Danny. I thought it was the murder you wanted tc talk about.’

‘It’s not much of a choice, is it? One led to the other. You see, all this stuff about, Can I can stand it? Is it going to make me worse? Shouldn’t I be thinking about sorting out the problems I’ve got now? It’s all a load of…’ Another unexpectedly charming smile. ‘With respect, bollocks. Because in the end you need this as much as I do.’

Tom sat back in his chair, arms folded across his chest, not caring about the body language, wanting every bone and muscle to express what he felt. ‘Danny,’ he said, ‘if you have the slightest suspicion that I need… anything out of this, you should run a mile.’

‘I’m sorry. I need this very badly, and I don’t… I cion’t know how to put this. I don’t always manage to distinguish between what I’m feeling and what ether people are feeling. I seem to be —’

‘permeable?’

A short laugh of recognition. ‘Yes, I suppose. More than most people.’

That was an impressive display of self-knowledge, Tom thought. ‘Look, let’s leave it for now. I need to talk to Martha, and of course you do realize there’s no question of going ahead if she doesn’t agree? And even if she does agree, I still haven’t made up my mind.’

‘All right,’ Danny said, putting his glass on the table. ‘I haven’t handled this very well, have I?’

‘Oh, I don’t think you did too badly.’

Martha Pitt called first thing next morning, her smoke-roughened voice sounding, as it always did on the phone, slightly tentative. It had taken him a long time to work out why. It wasn’t that she disliked the phone; she just hated giving her name. At first he’d thought it was her nickname — ‘Pit Bull Martha’ — that she disliked, and you could see why — not a lot of women would have liked it — but it turned out to be ‘Martha’ she couldn’t stand. ‘How do you think it feels? Condemned from the cradle to choose the worser part.’

‘What is the worser part?’

‘Doing good, rather than contemplating God.’

Martha was a Catholic. She knew that sort of thing.

‘Bloody good name for a probation officer, then.’

‘Aw, piss off.’

Now she said crisply, ‘I think we need to talk.’

‘What about?’ he asked, teasing.

‘Ian Wilkinson.’

They arranged to meet for lunch at one o’clock. He’d been standing at the bar for five minutes when Martha came in, clutching the enormous black satchel she carted around with her everywhere. Sometimes, watching her scrabble about inside it for something she knew she had somewhere, he imagined her disappearing into it, backwards, dragging make-up, car keys, court reports in after her, like a badger pulling fresh bedding into its sett.

Bending to kiss her, he breathed in the familiar smells of stale cigarette smoke and peppermints. She’d become addicted to mints during her last attempt to give up smoking, and now scoured sweetshops for stronger and stronger varieties. Fiery Fred was her latest fix. The last time they’d met he’d made the mistake of accepting one, and his eyes had watered for a full five minutes afterwards.

‘Do you want a pint?’ he asked.

He waited, patiently, while the usual struggle with temptation played itself out on her features, ending as it always did. ‘Yeah, go on, why not?’

‘Cheers,’ Tom said, raising his glass. ‘Probably the end of useful work for the day, but never mind.’

‘How’s it going?’

‘Not bad. I ought to finish the first draft by the end o**next week.’