Pat Barker: Border Crossing

Tom thought for a moment. ‘You know, you could come and talk to me, if you think it would be useful. Nothing formal. Just a chat.’

Danny smiled. ‘About old times?’

‘Whatever.’

The smile faded. ‘Yes, I would like to.’

‘I’ll give you the address.’ Tearing a page from the back of his diary, Tom wrote it down, adding, as an afterthought, his telephone number. He’d better make it an early appointment, so Danny had a date to look forward to. Discharge from hospital after a suicide attempt was a dangerous time. ‘Shall we say Tuesday evening, about eight o’clock? And if anything goes wrong, you can give me a ring.’

‘Thanks.’ Danny folded the page. ‘Your letters are in the locker. I was going to return them. And the coat.’

Defensive now, anxious to assert his honesty. Well, he did have twelve years in secure accommodation to live down. More than half his life. What had they made of him? What had they done with him? Part of Tom’s interest was simple professional curiosity. It wasn’t often you got the chance to follow up a case like Danny’s, but he was also concerned for this unknown young man whose face and personality seemed to contain, untouched, the child he had once been.

Tom got his coat from the locker, releasing, in the process, a powerful smell of river mud and decay.

‘You won’t be wearing that before it’s cleaned.’

‘You won’t be wearing this either,’ Tom said, bundling Danny’s coat into the locker. ‘Well, then. See you Tuesday.’

Danny raised a hand, but he’d fallen back against the pillows, and seemed unable to speak. Tom closed the door quietly behind him.

Mary Peters was standing by the desk, talking to the ward sister, and it seemed only polite to pause and say goodbye.

‘Well, what was all that about?’ she asked.

‘Oh, nothing much. He turned out to be an old patient. Hadn’t seen him for years.’

She seemed satisfied. And Danny had changed. There was no reason to suppose he’d be recognized by anybody who’d only seen his school photograph in the papers or on TV, thirteen years ago. After all, he hadn’t recognized him, and his contact with Danny went well beyond that.

Walking across the car park, he felt dazed, and stopped for a moment under the tarnished trees. He was remembering another car park, in June, in a heat wave. Arriving at the remand centre, where Danny was being held, twenty minutes before the time of his appointment, he’d chosen to wait outside, rather than in some dreary room inside the prison. The sun beat down and the car quickly became an oven. He left the doors open, and walked up and down the perimeter fence, listening to a Test Match on the radio. He had no need to familiarize himself with the notes spilling out of the files on the back seat. He knew them almost off by heart, and, in a sense, his task now was to forget them. The main pitfall in assessing the mental state of an offender is to produce a report that fits the crime, rather than the symptoms of the particular individual who is alleged to have committed it.

Sweat from the long journey evaporated from his armpits and groin. He was surrounded by beds of red-hot pokers, hundreds of them, coral-pink and gold spires proudly erect or drooping, at detumescent angles, over the path. A ripple of decorous applause came from the car radio. His mind filled with images from the path-lab photographs — Lizzie Parks’s body laid out on the slab. It seemed incredible that a child should have done that. He went on pacing, up and down, up and down, and the red-hot pokers seemed to breathe in his horror and incredulity, and exhale them as heat and dust.

And here Danny was, thirteen years later, grown up, out of prison, living under a false identity supplied by the Home Office and the police. He couldn’t tell Lauren. Any more than Martha Pitt had been able to tell him, though they were colleagues on the Youth Violence Project and saw each other at least once a week. She’d been supervising Danny for months. She knew Tom had been involved in his trial, but she hadn’t once mentioned him. Well, good for Martha. That was the degree of secrecy required.

He walked across to his car, deactivated the alarm and opened the door. ‘Coincidence is the crack in human affairs that lets God or the Devil in.’ Typical God-bothering rubbish, he thought, though his own paranoid suspicion that Danny had plotted the meeting was no more rational. The fact is, that when confronted by a number of disturbing events, the human mind insists on finding a pattern. We can’t wait to thread the black beads on to a single string. But some events are, simply, random.

Perhaps. Adjusting the mirror, he caught his own eye in the glass, and stared back at himself, alert, sceptical, unconsoled.

In the railway-station buffet, at eight o’clock on Monday morning, Lauren sat hunched over a table, spearing worms of ash on a burnt matchstick. ‘I just think we need help.’

‘You mean I need help.’

‘We’re not making love often enough, are we?’

‘We’re not “making love” at all.’ He tried not to sound bitter. ‘Look, why don’t we give it a bit more time?’

‘I haven’t got time.’

‘We, Lauren. We haven’t got time.’

She shook her head. ‘But that’s the point, isn’t it? The clock isn’t ticking for you. You’ll still be spraying tiddlers round all over the place when you’re eighty.’

Not on present showing, he thought. ‘What I think about going for help is that it’s going to focus even more attention on the problem, and I think that’s the trouble, you see. We’ve become… obsessed.’

‘You mean I have.’

‘All right, yes, you. I’m sick of being a sperm bank. I’m sick of feeling I don’t count. What’s happened to the, to the… relationship, for God’s sake?’ He leant towards her. ‘When we got married, you didn’t even want kids. It was… you and me.’

An incomprehensible announcement blared out of the loudspeaker above their heads. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said.

‘Ring me tonight.’

She pushed a strand of pale-blonde hair behind her ear. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing tonight.’

They walked across the bridge in silence. On the platform he asked, ‘Are you coming home next weekend?’

‘No, I’m going to my parents. I told you, don’t you remember?’

After that they stood in silence, not looking at each other, until the train came in.

Back home, Tom pulled the duvet up over the creased sheet, the scene of his most recent failure, the one they couldn’t ignore. He wished he had the energy to change the sheets, because he knew that tonight, when he got into bed, they’d smell of Lauren’s scent, and he was beginning to dislike it. It seemed to him cloying, over-sensuous, now, though he’d loved it once, when he still loved her. And then he was horror struck, standing there, staring into the mirror, a pillow in his hands, because he’d trapped himself into using the past tense.

He did love her. They were in trouble, yes, but he was never sure how much trouble. Only nine months ago — telling themselves that a delay in conceiving was only to be expected at her age — they’d been happy. There were many times when that happiness still flickered over the surface of their present lives, and it seemed possible to grasp it again. Not just possible — easy. And yet they never quite managed it.

He made coffee and took it up to his study. He’d chosen to work in one of the attic rooms on the top floor because he loved the view of the river, though most mornings he had to wipe a hole in the condensation on the glass before he could see it. Not much of a view today. The sea fret had lasted all weekend, and the arch of the bridge rose out of the mist, disconnected from road and river, as apparently functionless as Stonehenge.