Pat Barker - Border Crossing

‘Oh marvellous, that is. How many do you want me to bring? All six of’em, or just the baby?’

He shrugged, and pushed Craig out of the door. Jean and Tom watched from the window as the boys got into the back of the car, the younger policeman putting a hand on their heads to protect them.

At the last moment Jean ran to the door. ’Mind you ring for a solicitor now, our Robbie. And Craig? Don’t you go blabbing your mouth.’

The car drove off. Jean, still fuming, went back to dressing the little girl. ‘Oldest trick in the book, that. Get me to leave the bairns in on their own, then ring the social services. Bingo, whole bloody lot in care. That’s one thing nobody can say about me,’ she added, ramming a shoe on. ‘They’re not neglected, and I don’t go out and leave’em on their own.’

‘Nobody thinks you neglect them, Jean.’

‘Hmm.’ She was slightly mollified. A second later she grinned. ‘Here, have you seen me stood sideways?’ She demonstrated her almost flat stomach. ‘Me mam says, “By heck, our Jean, where the hell are you keeping it?”‘

Tom said, ‘Look, I know this is a bad time —’

‘No, you’re all right, love.’

He was never sure how Jean thought he fitted into their lives. Her manner with him was always slightly flirtatious, she seemed to feel he was on her side, but she didn’t seem to see it as a professional connection. ‘I was hoping I could see Ryan.’

‘Oh God, yes, so you were. Do you know, I’m that frazzled I don’t know what I’m doing half the time.’ She yelled up the stairs, ‘Ryan!’

A second later Ryan appeared, bleary-eyed and yawning. ‘Have the police gone?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did they want?’

‘Not you. They come to take Robbie and Craig to court.’

‘Pair of poofs.’

‘Hey you, they’re your brothers.’

Ryan was rubbing his thigh. ‘Our Craig give us a dead leg.’

‘Ryan,’ Tom said firmly, ‘suppose we go in the kitchen and have a chat?’

A shrug. ‘Yeah, all right.’

Perhaps it was his own depression, but this morning the view from planet Ryan seemed even bleaker than usual. School: waste of time. He’d been suspended anyway. What did he feel about that? ‘Not bothered.’ Wasn’t it a good idea to get some qualifications? ‘Not bothered.’ Like most of Jean’s children, he was not stupid, and now and then burst into connected speech. Teachers lived in their own cosy little world. They wouldn’t last five minutes outside the classroom. Why wouldn’t they? They knew nowt. They thought it was marvellous if somebody passed their exams and got on to one of the slave-labour schemes. £1.99 an hour. Tom tried to get him to talk about the security guard whom he and his mates had thrown down an escalator in the Metro Centre. ‘Them bastard security guards are always giving us hassle.’ But the guard was still on crutches, wasn’t he? How did Ryan feel about that? ‘Not bothered.’ At moments like this, Tom thought, you felt these were really rotten kids,and that there was very little else to be said about them.

He walked back to his car. Every house left vacant here was stripped of fireplaces, bathroom fittings, pipes, roof tiles, and set on fire, either for fun or because the owners, despairing of selling or letting the property, paid children to do it. At the corner of the street there was a skip full of burning rubbish. A knot of children, on the other side of it, shimmered in the heat, like reflections in water.

That evening he phoned Martha, and said one word.

‘Detox?’

‘Right.’

They met in a bar in Northumberland Street, and ordered a bottle of wine.

‘So what’s been happening?’ she asked.

‘Oh, nothing horrendous. I was interviewing Ryan Price, and somehow — I don’t know — it just got to me.’

‘ “Not bothered,”‘ she said in Ryan’s monotone.

‘That’s right. You know he threw a security guard down an escalator? Well, him and the gang.’

‘Yeah, figures. He spent six weeks in traction when he was a kid. Robbie threw him downstairs.’

‘Hmm. Nice to see family traditions being carried on.’ He took a sip of wine. ‘You know, I looked at that estate, and I thought, if… ‘A quick glance round the bar, then he continued in a lower voice. ‘If Ian had done what he did there, there wouldn’t have been nearly the same uproar.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Because that’s them. But as soon as you get a kid committing murder in rural England — or small-town America, same thing — you’re attacking the… I don’t know, the myth — the moral heartland. And the press have hysterics. Do you know they’re still after Ian now, they’re still nosing around?’

‘I thought nobody knew he was out?’

‘Well, officially nobody does.’ She shook her head. ‘They know everything, Tom.’

‘But they don’t know the name?’

‘No, well, my God, I hope they don’t.’ She rested her steepled fingers against her lip. ‘Ian says you’re going to see other people.’

‘Yes. Well, only one so far. I’ve arranged to see his old headmaster, Bernard Greene.’

‘You will be careful, won’t you?’

‘You mean I mustn’t say the new name, even there?’

‘That’s right.’

Tom sat back, smiling. ‘You’re sure this isn’t just Home Office paranoia?’

‘You’ve never had the tabloids on your tail.’

They finished the bottle and, at his insistence, ordered another. He could talk to her about Lauren, but he needed a few drinks before he did it.

‘So what went wrong?’ she asked, playing with the stem of her glass.

‘Sex,’ he said. ‘In the end I wasn’t much use.’

‘Brewer’s droop?’

It was amazing what Martha could come out with and, still sound sympathetic. ‘No. Ovulation-prediction-kit droop.’

‘You were trying for a baby?’

‘Yes. And yes, I do know how irresponsible that sounds. But we were all right when we started trying. That’s what I can’t understand — it’s all gone down the plughole in such a short time. And I keep looking back, and you know if you’re not careful the present starts to destroy the past, because all the time I remember as happy I think, well it can’t have been like that. There must’ve been something wrong and I was missing it.’

Getting pregnant had become an obsession, he said, knowing this was, in effect, blaming Lauren, and not liking himself for it. But everything he said was true, or as close to the truth as he could get. He’d felt used, and he’d withdrawn, not consciously, not deliberately, but…

‘You can see why she was desperate, though, can’t you? How old is she?’

‘Thirty-six.’

‘Yes, well, I’m thirty-four and I think that’s bad enough. It’s not the same for men, is it?’ Martha’s usual cheerful expression had soured. ‘Never send to know for whom the clock ticks. Because it doesn’t bloody well tick for thee.’

‘I didn’t design the equipment. If I had, I’d have included a permanently inflated tube.’

‘Hey, be good that, wouldn’t it?’

‘Yeah. You could strap it to your thigh when it wasn’t required.’

‘Well, you could.’ She hesitated. ‘Did you ever try with anybody else?’

‘You mean—’

‘Try. Have a go. I mean it’s all very well saying it’s ovulation-prediction-kit droop, but I don’t see how you can know if you haven’t tried with somebody else.’

‘Thanks, Martha. That’s a great help.’ He brooded for a moment. ‘No, I didn’t try,’ he said at last. ‘I was married.’

‘Well, you’re free now.’

If that had been said by anybody else, he’d have thought it was a come-on. But not Martha. It wasn’t — that she was unattractive — in fact at one point, when they first started working together, he’d found her worryingly attractive — but they’d gone too far down the path of friendship to be able to turn back and choose the other route. Making love to Martha would be like pulling on an old, warm, well-trusted sweater on a cold dark night. She deserved better than that, and so did he.