Pat Barker - Border Crossing

‘It’s going to open up again,’ Danny said, his voice strangled with misery and fear. Already he’d seen on television all the things that had happened to him: fists beating on the sides of a police van, shouted threats, the blaze of publicity, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

‘What exactly did they do?’

Danny denied any knowledge of this. He’d switched off the television as soon as he saw his photograph and gone straight to bed, half expecting his landlady to bang on the door and throw him out.

‘I really don’t think anybody would recognize you from that photograph,’ Tom said. ‘I know I didn’t.’

‘Some people would,’ Danny insisted. ‘I’m like you, Tom. I remember voices, I remember the way people move, but you’ve got to remember there really are people who never forget a face.’

A frisson of unease. That was an entirely accurate description of the way Tom’s memory worked, and yet he couldn’t recall any conversation in which he and Danny had talked about the different ways people recall the past.

It was also the first time Danny had called him Tom. This was the wrong moment to object, and anyway Tom had one or two adult patients who used his first name. It probably didn’t matter too much either way. And yet it jarred.

‘Have you phoned Martha?’ he asked.

‘I can’t get hold of her. I keep trying.’

I’ll have a go too. And I’ll try my secretary.’

He put through a call. Martha had been in to the Family Welfare Centre, but had just left, saying she was going away. She hadn’t said for how long. Tom tried her mobile, but it wasn’t switched on. Turning back to Danny, he said: ‘Look, we will get her. Don’t worry.’

‘I always knew it wouldn’t work. There’re too many people out there wanting to get me.’

Tom settled down to listen to him, aware of Lauren in the background pulling a piece of furniture across the floor. Danny was most afraid, not of violence, nor even of having his false identity blown — though these were real fears — but of the raking up of memories. Every newspaper, every news bulletin. On the Metro, coming to see Tom, he’d heard people talking about the crime, and he thought he’d heard the name: Danny Miller. It had disturbed him so much that he got off the train at the next station and found a seat in another carriage. ‘I don’t want to know what they did. I’m thinking about Lizzie all the time anyway. I don’t need this.’

‘Do you want to stop our sessions for a few weeks till this is over?’

No, he didn’t. In fact the exact opposite: he wanted to press on faster. ‘I’ve got to get it out now,’ he said. ‘Before all this muddies the water.’

Tom could see the sense in this. He didn’t believe Danny would walk past the news-stands and not buy a paper. He didn’t believe he’d switch off the television whenever the case was mentioned, and such was the urgency of his desire to make sense of what he’d done, and so insurmountable the barriers preventing him from doing it, that there might well be seepage from the reported facts of the crime into his memory of Lizzie’s murder.

The doorbell rang, and he heard Lauren go to answer it. Two male voices. He wanted to be able to see what was happening.

‘All right,’ he said, standing up. ‘Look, you can see things are pretty impossible here at the moment. Can you come back this evening? Say about seven?’

Danny moistened his lips. ‘Yes, all right.’

‘There really is no danger, Danny.’

Danny shook his head. ‘You didn’t see them banging on the van. They can’t get those two, but they can get me.’

Tom showed Danny out, then stood with his back to the door, bracing himself. Lauren was in the living room, sitting on the arm of the remaining sofa. This perching, this waiting to take off, irritated him. Why on earth couldn’t she sit down?

He started to say: ‘How long do you think it’ll take?’ but stopped halfway through, startled by the booming of his voice. Of course, the removal of furniture and paintings had altered the acoustics. It was like speaking into a phone, when somebody on another floor has forgotten to put the extension down.

She answered the incomplete question. ‘Not long. About half an hour.’

Her voice sounded different too. He realized he was going to remember this echo-chamber conversation as the sound of his divorce. Two people who used to love each other mouthing banalities in an empty box.

‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked, meaning, I’d like a drink.

She hesitated. ‘Yes, why not?’

He uncorked a bottle and came upstairs with two glasses. All these simple actions were so heavily invested with memories that he felt like a priest celebrating Mass. He searched for some way of making the handing over of a glass of red wine seem less sacramental, and failed to find it. ‘Well,’ he said, struggling to keep the irony out of his voice, and failing again. ‘Cheers.’

‘Who is that boy?’ she asked, turning away from him and walking over to the window.

‘Ian Wilkinson.’

She looked puzzled. ‘I know the face.’

‘Of course you do. You met him on the Quayside.’

‘No, before that.’

Tom shrugged, but his heartbeat quickened. Danny was right. Lauren was strongly visual, far more so than most people, and something about Danny’s face tugged at her memory. She’d recognize him from the school photograph.

And if she did, others would.

To distract her, he said, ‘You know the most horrifying thing about all this? Only a few weeks ago we were trying for a baby.’

‘Yes, I’ve thought a lot about that. Thank God it didn’t work.’

That for him, and perhaps for her too, was the moment when it ended. They were strangers now, not close enough to be antagonistic, trying to sort out the best way of disentangling their financial arrangements.

‘Will you want to sell?’ she asked.

‘I don’t think so. I might let out the top floor. It wouldn’t need much doing to make it self-contained. And I suppose the lawyers’11 sort out what to do about your share of the equity.’

‘I don’t want a long wrangle.’

‘Nor me. It’s more a question of what they want.’

They chatted for half an hour, finding it increasingly difficult to keep a conversation going. The topic he most wanted to raise — had she got somebody else? — was taboo. It wasn’t his business any more, though that didn’t stop him speculating. He scoured her face and body for signs of sexual fulfilment, but she looked as she always did, elegantly turned out, cool.

He wondered how it felt to be leaving the house for the last time. She’d loved it when they first moved in. All those months spent painting the river in every possible light, and then she’d exhausted whatever it was she’d found here. After that, he thought, she hadn’t liked the house much. On one wet day recently, peering through mizzled windows at the swollen river, she’d said they might as well live on a bloody boat.

It was a relief when the removal men came in and said they’d finished.

She stood up at once and looked at him. ‘Well, Tom, do you think we can wish each other luck?’

For a moment the anger almost choked him. You’re going, he thought, and you want me to wish you luck? But then he folded her stiffly in his arms, and patted her shoulders. He was surprised by his reaction. She felt wrong against him. The skin of his chest and arms was saying, Wrong body, so that, in the end, seeing her off for the last time, closing the door afterwards, he was able to feel that this parting was, to some extent, his decision.

A few minutes later, pouring himself another glass of wine, he realized that only a slight change of perspective was needed to make it all his decision. He could have gone to London with her and e-mailedchapters of the book to Martha and Roddy; they didn’t need to meet. And he could have made love to her, got her pregnant. Only his body’s apparently inexplicable refusal to perform had prevented it, and yet what a disaster it would have been. He would never use the word ‘dickhead’ again. It was grossly unfair. His dick was the only part of him that had shown the slightest spark of intelligence.