Pat Barker - Border Crossing

‘Yes.’

‘Do you believe there was a sexual assault?’

She pursed her lips. ‘There may have been a relationship. Not that I’m justifying it for a minute, but… Angus wasn’t the only person to leave over Danny. I can think of another four.’

‘Who had relationships?’

‘No, no, just got over-involved. You’d be amazed how many people didn’t believe Danny had killed that woman. When he tried to stab the boy in the woodwork class, the teacher who was taking the class was absolutely shattered. Not by the incident — by what he saw in Danny, because he was one of the ones who couldn’t believe he was guilty. Danny didn’tpick fights, you see. So it was easy for people to slip into thinking he wasn’t violent. And this teacher said he thought, My God, there it is.’

The tea was cold. ‘Would you like another?’

‘I’m taking up a lot of your time.’

‘Nothing’s spoiling. I’ll put the kettle on.’

She got up and began moving around. Tom watched her thinking that he still had no real idea what she felt about Danny. ‘I’m interested in what you were saying about Danny’s mimicry. If that’s the right word.’

‘No, it was more than that. He…’ She groped for the right word. ‘Borrowed other people’s lives. He… it was almost as if he had no shape of his own, so he wrapped himself round other people. And what you got was a… a sort of composite person. He observed people, he knew a lot about them, and at the same time he didn’t know anything because he was always looking at this mirror image. And of course everybody let him down, because you couldn’t not let Danny down. Being a separate person was a betrayal. And then you got absolute rage. Angus had no idea what he was tangling with.’

‘You really didn’t like him, did you?’

A short laugh. ‘I thought he was one of the most dangerous boys we’ve ever had through the school. Bernard thinks we transformed him. I don’t think we even scratched the surface. Or, if anybody did, it was Angus, and look what happened to him. ’

‘Do you know what did happen to him?’

‘Angus? He runs some sort of writers’ centre. So he stayed in teaching, that’s one good thing.’

‘Do you think I could have the address?’

‘Yeah, hang on a sec, I’ll get it.’

He went to the patio doors and stood looking over the garden, while she turned over papers in a drawer. Green lawns, rose bushes, blue shadows creeping over the grass. Beyond the trees, the smooth, windowless walls of the secure unit, as disturbing, in the fading light, as a face without eyes.

‘We used to live in there,’ she said, coming back. ‘Can you imagine? Bernard said it did the boys good to have a normal family living with them. I’m afraid I had to put my foot down, and point out that the normal family wasn’t going to stay normal if we didn’t get a bit of privacy.’

‘It must get quite claustrophobic’

‘It certainly does.’ She held out a piece of paper. ‘Here you are. North Yorkshire. Somehow I always thought he’d go back to Scotland.’

He thanked her and shortly afterwards left. She stood at the door, watching him go, and then, as he started to reverse the car, came out into the drive.

‘Be careful, won’t you?’ she said. And he knew she wasn’t referring to the fading light and the long drive.

Towards evening it came on to rain. The river was a confusion of overlapping rings and bubbles, too turbulent to reflect the blackening sky. Tom looked back into the room. ‘I’ve been to Long Garth.’

‘Did you see Mr Greene?’

‘Yes.’

Danny smiled. ‘I won’t ask what you thought of him.’

‘More to the point, what did you think of him?’

‘Idealistic. Naїve.’ A slight pause. ‘Vain.’

‘No, I meant when you arrived. When you were eleven.’

‘I admired him, I think. He was like my father. In some ways. Very upright, clean, organized. There was absolute clarity at that school, and it came from him. You knew what the rules were, what the rewards were, what the punishments were, and it was always the same, and it was the same for everybody. You felt safe. I know a lot of people would say the regime there was pretty inadequate. But… you’ve got to start with the basics. You can’t do anything in a place like that unless people feel safe. And we did. We were supervised round the clock. You couldn’t go to the lavatory on your own, you couldn’t close your door, you weren’t allowed to be alone with anybody, you couldn’t go out… It was absolutely bloody terrible, I hated it, but it worked.’

‘And you met Angus?’

Danny looked surprised. ‘Did Greene talk about him?’

‘His wife did.’

‘Oh yes. Elspeth. She didn’t like me very much.’

‘Why do you think she didn’t like you?’

‘Not partial to murderers?’

Tom let the silence deepen round the attempted flippancy of that remark. Then, ‘Tell me a bit more about Angus.’

‘I don’t know that there’s much to tell.’ He was staring at Tom, perhaps trying to work out how much he already knew. ‘He was a brilliant teacher.’

‘Tell me about his teaching methods, then. What did he ask you to write about?’

‘Usual stuff. A Storm at Sea. Masses of purple prose. And then one day he said, “Write about your granddad,” and I wrote about the day my grandfather died.’ Danny was reaching for another cigarette. ‘I hadn’t thought about it for years. He came into the kitchen talking about rabbits, thousands of them, he said, all over the top field, and there were drops of sweat on top of his bald head, grey, like dirty rain. And by midnight he was dead.’

‘Of?’

‘Pneumonia. Old man’s friend.’

Danny seemed to have ground to a halt. Tom said, ‘What else did you write about?’

A smile. ‘ “My Pet”.’

‘Duke.’

‘Yes. He was a bull mastiff, and he was kept chained up in the paddock by the side of the house. He used to watch the geese walk past on their way to the pond. One year he got one, just before Christmas. My grandmother said he’d watched them getting fatter. Quite old, smelly, ropes of saliva hanging from his jaws.’

‘Did you love him?’

A blank look. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Why was he kept chained?’

‘Because Dad liked the idea of a powerful dog, but he didn’t want the grind of training it. Like a lot of things about Dad, it was all show. And when he left home he left the dog behind.’ He laughed. ‘I think I was more shocked by that than his leaving me behind. Anyway, the dog was too big for my mother to cope with. My grandmother felt sorry for him and took him for a walk, and he dragged her through a bed of nettles. So he was given to a man who ran a scrap-metal yard. I used to go and see him in the school lunch hour, and there were notices all over the place. “Beware of the Dog.” There was a little kennel, too small for him to get into, and a bowl with no water in it. I told the other kids it was my dog and they didn’t believe me. I went up and put my arms round him, and he stank. He was hot, he was slobbery, he was a horrible dog. I started to cry.’

‘And that’s what you wrote about?’

‘Yes, and then the battery hens, and the pigs on the next farm. And in the end Angus said, “But I can’t see the people.” And of course he was right. No bloody way was I doing the people.’

‘So how did he get you on to that?’

‘He said, “Does your father use an electric razor?” And I said, “No,” and he said, “Tell me about your father shaving.” Well, that was always a time of enormous tension, because he didn’t shave in the mornings if he was going to be on the farm all day, he shaved in the evenings before he went out. I’d be sitting with my mother in the living room on this leather sofa we had. If you were in short trousers the backs of your legs stuck to the seat, and when you stood up you really yelped. And my mother would be sitting in the armchair, pleating her skirt. On and on, making pleats, smoothing them out, making them again, and… not saying anything. And there’d be this bluthering and spluthering from the kitchen. He always got ready at the kitchen sink, almost as if he was trying to start a row. Because, you know, because he was going to the pub, and he was going to be spending money we didn’t have, buying rounds for people who laughed at him behind his back. And there’d be this… tension.’