Pat Barker - Border Crossing

Outside the bar, they kissed goodnight and he set off to walk home, hoping that the combination of fresh air, exercise and far too much to drink would enable him to get to sleep.

The nights were bad. He found himself regularly standing at the window, at two or three or four a.m., staring up and down the street. Once he thought he’d identified a fellow insomniac. A bedroom light, nine or ten doors down, kept going on and off, and he took some comfort from the presence of a fellow sufferer. Over the following nights he identified a pattern and realized the light was coming from a lamp wired up to a timing device. He felt the loss of this unknown companion as a distinct twinge of pain, and wondered that anything so trivial could make itself felt amidst the general misery.

Tonight, though, he fell into a deep sleep and woke refreshed. He lay and watched sunlight creeping over the carpet towards the bed. And this morning, instead of forcing himself upstairs to his attic workroom, as he did every day, he was driving to Long Garth.

Somewhere inside his head, Martha’s voice said, ‘You’re free now.’

As he went down to breakfast, he thought about it. Being free didn’t stop the pain, or the bewilderment, or the sense of failure, but it was a new and equally valid perspective on his situation, and it demanded attention.

Long Garth, the secure unit where Danny had spent seven years of his life — what was left of his childhood and all his adolescence — lay in a fold of green countryside beneath Brimham Rocks. Having arrived too early for his appointment, Tom drove up to see the rocks, huge granite boulders left strewn across the moorside as the last Ice Age retreated, some grouped together, some isolated. One block of granite was so finely balanced on top of another that it swayed in the slightest breeze.

Tom watched the moving rock, then looked down over the moorside, listening to the distant bleats of sheep that came and went as random as wind chimes. He could see Long Garth from here, a low building surrounded by playing fields, with the blue oblong of a swimming pool set a little to one side. Once Long Garth had been part of a much larger institution for adolescents in trouble with the law, but that had been closed down. Fashions change: the extreme isolation of the setting was now thought unsuitable for the rehabilitation of young offenders, but the secure unit remained. Twenty-four adolescents — all boys — behind a sixteen-foot-high perimeter fence.

Tom had never met Bernard Greene before. He’d written to the Home Office three times, in the first year after Danny’s conviction, emphasizing how important it was that Danny should receive professional help rather than be subjected to mere containment, and each time he’d received the same bland reply. Danny had settled in well. Progress towards his eventual rehabilitation was being made. But Tom had heard from other sources that there was no provision for psychotherapy at Long Garth, and Danny confirmed this. Instead he’d received an eccentric, old-fashioned form of public-school education: large grounds, well-equipped classrooms, small classes, firm moral teaching, an emphasis on the role of games in the training of character. No wonder his father had approved.

Cloud cuckoo land, Tom would have said. No relevance at all to the treatment of a severely disturbed child, except that Danny had flourished here, for a time at least.

Bernard Greene lived outside the grounds, down a narrow lane that ran parallel with the perimeter fence. A wisteria covered the front of the house, its leaves rustling in the breeze. It had the effect of making the house seem alive, a sheltered space within the garden,but not separate from it. The leaves were beginning to turn. He couldn’t imagine what this place would be like in winter: bare moors, icy winds and, on the skyline, those precariously balanced rocks.

The door was opened by a large woman, one hand still wearing a red-and-white-striped oven mitt. ‘Dr Seymour?’ she asked. ‘Come on in. My husband’s expecting you.’ She stood smiling at him, her face shining with perspiration or steam, a rather jolly, unathletic games mistress in a girls’ school.

He stepped into the hall. A bowl of roses stood on the hall table, the silver reflected in the polished wood. Even the fallen petals, little pink and yellow gondolas, seemed to be part of the arrangement. Smells of lavender and lemon. Yet Mrs Greene had made no effort with her own appearance. A shapeless dress splodged with blue cabbage roses covered a body she’d clearly decided to forget about. Thin, grey-brown hair, clean and neatly combed, but not styled. She’d given up.

She opened a door on the right. ‘Dr Seymour to see you, dear.’

Bernard Greene was hovering just inside the. door, waiting to come forward and offer a cool, dry hand. Immediately Tom felt antagonistic. Why had he not got up and answered the door himself? Why leave his wife to come all the way from the kitchen, like a servant, when he was nearer? Greene’s whole appearance was elegant, self-contained, slightly boyish. Crisp grey curls, intensely blue eyes — so intense Tom suspected tinted contact lenses, though he couldn’t see the rim — sun-tanned skin, forthright manner, an erect almost military bearing. The contrast with his wife was startling. He looked about twenty years younger.

Well, perhaps he was younger. Tom sat down in the chair indicated: a chintz-covered armchair at the opposite side of the fireplace from Greene. An elaborate arrangement of dried flowers hid the empty grate. On his left was a grand piano, covered with photographs of two young girls, in their school uniforms, on horseback, playing in the garden, giggling on the edge of a swimming pool.

‘My girls,’ Greene said, as if his wife had played no part in their production. ‘Away on a school trip at the moment, so the place seems very quiet. Do you have children?’

‘No,’ Tom said. He thought it an odd question to ask at the start of a professional interview, almost as if Greene were trying to undermine any claims to competence in dealing with adolescents Tom might be about to make. ‘Thank you for seeing me at such short notice.’

‘Not at all. Only too pleased to help, though I don’t know there’s much I can tell you. Are you treating him?’

‘Not exactly. He wants to… to talk to somebody about, well, about the past, what happened, why it happened. I don’t know whether you remember — I was called as an expert witness at the trial.’

‘So you know most of it already?’

‘Some of it.’

Mrs Greene said, Tm surprised —’ then thought better of whatever it was she’d been going to say. ‘Would you like some tea?’

Greene glanced at Tom.

‘I’d love some.’

When she’d gone, Tom asked, ‘Has Danny been in touch since he left?’

‘No. He wrote once or twice, but that’s all.’

‘Did you expect him to? I mean, do they come back?’

‘Some. I thought Danny might.’

‘Why do you think he didn’t?’

‘I don’t know. If you’re seeing him, you could ask him.’ After a short silence, he went on, ‘I think he felt… let down. I’m afraid I did more or less promise he’d be allowed to serve his sentence here, at least until he’d turned nineteen. Because there was a precedent for that, you see. Another boy did that, and… He was actually released from here, but in Danny’s case the Home Office decided to transfer him to a top-security prison. So he left.’ A flash of bitterness. ‘And I’ve no doubt it took them six months to undo all the good we’d done in seven years.’

‘Can I start by going right back to the beginning? What was your first impression?’