Pat Barker - Border Crossing

He reeked of sweat. Tom was beginning to wonder how much further this could be allowed to continue. He had to balance Danny’s desire to press on with the knowledge that worse was to come. ‘What did you do next?’

‘Went into town and played Space Invaders.

‘With the insurance money?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you see how that seemed to other people?’

‘Yeah. Rotten psychopathic little bastard, didn’t give a shit. Let’s hammer him.’ Danny shook his head. ‘Wasn’t how it felt.’

‘How did you feel?’

‘Like a chicken with its head off.’

‘And then you went back home?’

‘Yeah, had my tea, threw up, which was good actually because my mother decided I was ill, so I went to bed early and hid under the clothes. I kept getting flashes, you know, Lizzie’s face, and I heard her coming up the stairs again, but this time they were our stairs. And she sort of leapt across the room, right into my face. And I wet the bed. I kept jabbing myself with a sharp pencil to keep myself awake because I didn’t dare go to sleep. And in the morning when I got up I somehow thought that everybody knew, I thought it would’ve leaked out somehow, but it was just normal. Nobody knew.’

‘And then you went back,’ Tom said flatly, surprised himself by the brutality of his return to the facts.

‘Yes,’ Danny said, on an exhaled breath.

‘Why? When you were so frightened you were jabbing pencils into yourself to stay awake?’

‘I wanted to see if she was still dead.’

A pause. Tom considered the various options open to him. The truth, he thought. ‘No, Danny, I can’t accept that. You knew she was dead.’

‘I was ten years old.’

No breathless treble now, but a hard, grinding, angry adult voice.

‘Yes,’ Tom said steadily. ‘And I think it’s quite true — a lot of ten-year-olds don’t understand death. They don’t realize it’s permanent. But I think you did.’

‘You just don’t want to admit you got it wrong.’

‘What did I get wrong?’

‘Telling the court I knew what I’d done. Have you ever stood outside a junior school and watched the kids come out? The biggest kids, the “big boys”? They’re tiny. I was like that.’

‘I know. I remember. I still say you knew death was permanent.’

A braying laugh. ‘Because of the fucking chicken?’

‘Because you lived on a farm. Because you witnessed the deaths of animals, because you took part in killing them, because your grandfather had died, and you knew bloody well he hadn’t come back, because you were frightened when your mother went into hospital for the second mastectomy. You thought she was going to die, and you knew bloody well that didn’t mean she was going to be away till teatime. You were frightened you were going to lose her. You were frightened she’d never come back.’

Danny said deliberately, ‘When I went back to Lizzie’s, part of me thought she wouldn’t still be there.’

Tom nodded.’Go on.’

‘She was just lying there. She’d changed, her skin was a different colour, darker, and the cats were yowling all over the place.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I fed the cats.’

Up till this moment Tom had been able to suspend his knowledge of the forensic evidence, to listen to Danny’s story as if this were his only source of information. Now, suddenly, there was a chorus of muffled voices in the background. Thirteen years ago, everybody had told Tom about the feeding of the cats, in a tone of voice that suggested it merely amplified the horror. ‘And then he fed the cats.’

‘Why?’

‘They were starving.’

Domestic animals were inside Danny’s moral circle, Tom thought, as they had been inside his father’s. ‘So you fed the cats? Then what?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Do you remember what happened?’

‘Nothing happened. I fed the cats and I went home.’

‘You were there for five hours. You were seen going in and you were seen coming out.’

Those five hours, for the police who’d investigated the case, for everybody who’d been involved in any way, were the heart of the darkness, the source of that look of frozen disgust that Tom remembered so vividly from the trial. Nigel Lewis, showing Tom photographs of scuffmarks on the carpet where Lizzie had been dragged across the floor, had said: ‘He played with her.’ The horror in his voice could still raise hairs on the nape of Tom’s neck thirteen years later.

‘You moved her, Danny.’

‘I never touched her.’

‘You did. Look, if you don’t want to do this, that’s fine. Perhaps there’s things you shouldn’t say, perhaps there’s things you can’t say. But there’s no point lying. There’s no point coming this far and then telling Hes. It’s a waste of what you’ve put yourself through to get here.’

Along silence. No sound but their breathing, which suddenly seemed loud,

‘There’s nothing there,’ Danny said. ‘People say five hours. Okay, I have to believe it, but what I remember covers about ten minutes. I looked at her, I fed the cats, I made sure the doors were open, so the mother cat could get in and out, I went home, I know what the police thought, they thought I molested her. Even though there was no evidence, even though I was only ten, they still thought that.’ He leant forward. ‘But you know, I wasn’t sexually abused. I didn’t have that kind of awareness. I didn’t have a sex drive, for God’s sake. Plus she was seventy-eight.’

‘And dead.’

‘And dead.’

‘What did she look like? Try to imagine you’re looking down at her. What are you thinking?’

‘She’s like a doll. She can’t do anything. She can’t hurt me, or shout, or anything. It’s stupid to be frightened. All that stuff about her coming upstairs —’

‘Your stairs?’

‘Yes — it’s rubbish. She can’t even move.’

Silence. Danny seemed to be dragging himself back from a great distance. ‘You talk about me putting myself through this for no reason. Well, it is for no reason. I don’t know why I killed her. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. And I don’t know how to live with it.’

They broke there. Danny’s speech was slurred. Tom made him a cup of coffee, then spent twenty minutes trying to calm him down. Danny was dreading the journey home. On the doorstep, turning to look back, he said, ‘I know you don’t believe me, but I am being followed.’

Tom was aware, almost telepathically, of every stage of Danny’s journey home: rocking backwards andforwards on the Metro, gazing blank-eyed at the advertisements opposite, while grey walls lined with bunched and corded cables hurtle past. Then the train glides to a halt between graffiti-daubed walls. Danny gets out and pushes his ticket into the turnstile, which disgorges him into a night of rain and wind, of orange light smeared over greasy streets, and then, turning up his coat against the cold, he’s away from the lights and crowds, striding down dark streets, where once-imposing houses loom over him, until he goes down a flight of steps to a basement flat, takes out a key, lets himself in. And there, in the dingy hall with its black-and-white tiles and single naked bulb, Tom loses him.

Tom did one press interview in connection with the Kelsey murder. As the journalist was getting ready to go, she asked casually about Tom’s connection with Danny Miller, and, looking down into her open bag, Tom saw the red light on her tape recorder still lit. He smiled, and denied all knowledge of fanny’s current whereabouts.

He spent Friday night and most of Saturday with his mother. She was saddened by the breakdown of his marriage, but not surprised. She didn’t say: 1 told you so.’ She didn’t discover that she’d always disliked and distrusted Lauren. In fact she did everything right, but still he was glad to get away.