Pat Barker - Border Crossing

Back home, he found himself with that curious suspended feeling that comes from having spent the night in your childhood home, a sense that adult life had been put on hold. Everything about it was unsettling. The single bed, so narrow he’d woken in the middle of the night with his arm flung out into empty space, the wonky headboard, the curtain and carpet patterns that seemed mysteriously to have soaked up the sweats and nightmares of his childhood fevers and breathed them out again into the air as he tossed and turned and tried to sleep.

In spite of his bad night, he was restless now, full of energy. Just as well, perhaps, since he’d agreed to take part in a television discussion later that night. His first reaction had been to say no, but contributing to the public debate on how young offenders should be treated was, after all, part of his job.

He played back the answering machine, took notes on the calls, then slumped in front of the television for an hour. He’d have Hked to have gone for a jog to calm himself down, but the weather, which had been close and sticky all day, seemed about to break. He saw through the bay window the massing of black clouds, sagging over the rooftops like a tarpaulin full of water, though for the moment there was no rain, only this hot, brooding intensity. Then a flash of lightning, and the first spattering of raindrops on the glass.

He was about to pour himself a drink when the phone rang.

It’s Danny,’ a whispering voice said.

Tom opened his mouth to reply, but something wrong in the voice stopped him. He stayed silent, aware of his breathing, knowing it must be audible at the other end. Heavy breathing call in reverse, he thought. Bloody ridiculous. A minute, two minutes, then the receiver was softly replaced.

Somebody checking, obviously. Thank God he’d had the sense to keep quiet. He drew the curtains, lit a fire, piled logs on to it, thinking a good blaze would be pleasant to come home to. The worst times for missing Lauren were coming back to an empty house, though he’d been doing it for over a year, he should be used to it by now. But a fire helped.

He was watching the second half of a thriller, and he’d long since lost track of the plot, but the fire blazed away, his face felt swollen and numb with heat, and still the wind moaned around the house. Somewhere a gate was banging. Probably the postgrad students next door had left their gate off the latch. He got up to look. Pulling the curtain back, he saw what at first he took to be his own face reflected in the glass, until a sudden movement dislocated the illusion. Pale features, lank wet hair, distorted by streaming rivulets of rain.

They stared at each other, and then the intruder turned and ran down the gleaming road. By the time Tom got to the door he’d disappeared. Probably he should phone the police, but there wasn’t time. He had to leave for the television studios in twenty minutes. Better check the back-garden door was bolted, and make sure all the doors and windows were locked. Could be a peeping torn or somebody looking for an empty house to burgle. No real reason to suppose it was connected with Danny.

Before leaving the house he made sure the burglar alarm was primed, and then stood looking up and down the street, which was as empty as it always was at this time of night.

Tom never liked studio discussions. Sweating under the hot lights, remembering to sit on the hem of his jacket, resigned to cameras that in the interests of cutting-edge journalism zoomed in on nostrils and ears, and all for the sake of a debate that rapidly got bogged down in the evil effects of point-and-shoot video games. One of the twelve-year-olds charged with Mrs Kelsey’s murder had been addicted to such games, or so the newspapers claimed — along with a few thousand other kids who’d never killed anybody. Afterwards they adjourned to the Green Room, where a far more interesting and honest discussion took place over glasses of warm white wine. Tom was offered help in getting his make-up off, but since he was driving straight home decided not to bother. He left the studio feeling that nothing new had been contributed — not in front of the cameras anyway — and that he was as much to blame for this as anyone.

How desperate people were for an explanation — any explanation, as long as it was simple — and how difficult it was to supply one. No, not difficult, impossible. He was remembering that once he and Lauren had become involved in-a. local opera group’s production of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. Lauren had been asked to design the sets, a task that suited her particular talents very well. Huge, light-filled backdrops of sky and estuary, the tower, the lake, the copse with its bare branches and black nests like clots of blood in veins. He’d been dragged in as a production assistant, and in rehearsal must have heard every note of the score, every word of the libretto, a dozen times or more, though all he remembered now was Miles’s song, his little Latin mnemonic.

Malo: I would rather beMalo: in an apple treeMalo: than a naughty boyMalo: in adversity

No animals in the opera, for obvious reasons. No animals in the novella either, though children living on a country estate would have been surrounded by them. But animals give the game away. Are the children really evil? Or is the governess mad? Any halfway-decent vet could’ve sorted that out in seconds. Disturbed children torture animals.

Danny didn’t. That had struck Tom from the beginning. All those neglected, used, abused, dead or dying animals, but Danny had not been cruel to any of them. Or so Danny said. But then Danny’s story, though Tom believed him to be telling the truth, most of the time, was not all it appeared to be. His apparently rambling excursions into the past were anything but rambling. He was constructing a systematic rebuttal of the evidence Tom had given in court. There was a good deal of antagonism in all this. More than Tom had realized at the start.

It took him ten minutes to get home, and another five before he found a parking space in a side street several hundred yards from his front door. The street was deserted, the lamps a line of orange flowers blossoming in puddles. He walked quickly back to the main road, his footsteps echoing amongst the empty warehouses that rose, tall and black, into the night sky, ghost smells of the goods they’d once contained — sharp, sweet, sour — fading on the air. He turned the corner, and noticed a solitary figure outside his house, advancing a little way down the road, then going back up the steps into the shadow of the porch.

Tom quickened his pace. ‘Danny,’ he said, when he was close enough to be heard without raising his voice. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

‘Somebody’s following me.’

He looked deranged, slack mouthed and sweating, but there was no doubting the reality of the fear. Tom could smell it on him. ‘You’d better come in,’ he said, unlocking the front door and stepping quickly inside to switch off the burglar alarm. He walked ahead of Danny into the living room, not bothering to switch on the hall lights.

‘Can you pull the curtains to?’ Danny asked, lingering in the doorway.

Tom made sure the folds of material overlapped at the centre so that no chink of light could show through, and then he turned to the drinks table. Normally he never offered clients alcohol, but this wasn’t a proper session, and he needed a drink himself. He felt high after the TV interview, vapidly talkative, mentally flatulent, deeply distrustful of himself. Talking to the media produces exactly the same kind of unfocused anxiety as a night of heavy drinking. He raised a hand to his face, and his fingers slipped on skin greasy with make-up and sweat, as if he were wearing a rapidly disintegrating mask. And now, to all this, was added the strangeness of having Danny here, in his half-empty, booming living room, agitated, scared, in what felt like the middle of the night. But wasn’t, he reminded himself with a glance at his watch. It was still twenty minutes short of midnight.