Pat Barker: Border Crossing

To work. His current task was to read through the fictionalized case histories he’d used in the book to check that they were sufficiently different from the originals to protect children’s identities. Most of them he hadn’t seen for months, though their voices were preserved on tape.

Michelle. Ten years old. Included in the research cohort — she was the only girl — because she’d bitten off the nose of her foster mother’s natural daughter.

‘Why did you do that?’ Tom had asked, the first time they met.

‘’Cos she was slagging off me mam.’

A bold, self-confident expression, the abused child’s air of knowing exactly what was what and how much you had to pay for it. He was sure she’d have rated her chances of getting him to take his trousers off, right there on the floor of the consulting room, very high indeed. Nothing a man was capable of would have surprised Michelle, except restraint.

She’d used the word justice’ seven times in the course of their first interview, and that intrigued him. Her teachers rated her ability as average, at best. By no stretch of the imagination was Michelle an ‘academic’ child, and yet she kept returning to this abstract concept.

‘He was an animal,’ she said, referring to her mother’s boyfriend, who’d raped her when she was eight. ‘It wasn’t just me, he had a go at me nanna ‘n’ all — and the dog.’

‘Did it bite him?’ Tom asked.

She looked at him suspiciously, afraid he might be laughing at her. ‘No, but I did. And then me mam went into hospital, and she hadn’t to have any drink, with her liver ‘n’ all that, and he poured vodka into the orange juice. I watched him do it. He could’ve killed her. He used to come in drunk and beat her up, and I used to wait for him in the kitchen with the lights out, leave the back window open, and as soon as he got his fingers on the sill I’d jump up and slam it down. It was great, that.’ Her smile faded. ‘Only then I got took into care.’

‘Do you remember why you were taken into care?’

Michelle lowered her head.

‘Do you know why?’

‘ ‘Cos me mam brayed us.’

‘Why did she do that?’

‘ ‘Cos she didn’t believe us.’

‘About him raping you?’

‘Yeah, she says I was making it up, but I wasn’t.’

‘No, I know you weren’t.’

‘She still won’t have it, you know. Sun rises and sets out of his bloody arsehole. It’s not fair.’

‘What isn’t?’

‘Him. Two bloody years, time off for good behaviour, bounces back out like a frigging yo-yo. I lost me mam, me baby brother — I used to put him to bed every night, but he’s only two, he won’t remember — and the poor bloody dog got put down. She says she couldn’t stand to see it after what I’d said. Now where’s the justice in that?’

‘Didn’t she believe your nanna?’

‘Nah, she just says women her age get fancying.’

Tom needed Michelle for the discussion on moral thinking in children with conduct disorder. It was too easily assumed that such children simply lacked conscience. Of course, a minority did. Preserved on tape, somewhere in the box, was Jason Hargreave saying, in his piping treble, ‘Conscience is a little man inside your head that tells you not to do things. Only I haven’t got one.’ Four people had died in the fire Jason started, and he had shown not a hint of remorse. But Jason wasn’t typical. Michelle, in everything but gender, was. Many of the children, and most of the adolescents he talked to, were preoccupied — no, obsessed — with issues of loyalty, betrayal, justice, rights (theirs), courage, cowardice, reputation, shame. Theirs was a warrior morality, primitive and exacting. Nothing much in common with the values of mainstream society, but then they came from places that had been pushed to the edge: sink housing estates, urban ghettos. The young men were unemployed, sexually active, took little responsibility for their children (though their mothers often did), and cared more for the reputation of being ‘hard’ than for anything else. They were warriors. The little boys in the research project knew that this was the future, and sensibly prepared for it. School was irrelevant — and most of them didn’t go.

Tom worked for three hours, clicked Print, then set off to the hospital where he’d arranged to meet Roddy Taylor for lunch. Roddy was the director of the eighteen-bed, medium-secure unit that currently housed Michelle.

Roddy was larger than life, irrepressible, Henry the Eighth in a pinstripe suit, and running late, as usual. He looked up as Tom entered the room.

‘One more call, and I’m with you.’

Tom put the sheaf of papers on his desk, and sat down.

‘Is that moral perception?’ Roddy asked, while waiting to be connected.

‘Yes —’

Roddy held his hand up, listening intently. ‘All right, then, send him in.’ More listening. ‘Yes, yes. Yes, I know.’ He put the phone down. ‘Do you know, I honestly believe they think hospital beds breed like rabbits. Anyway —’

‘This still isn’t the final draft, but it’s readable, I think. There’s three of yours in there. Michelle, Jason, Brian.’

They talked about the cases for a while, then Roddy stood up and lifted his jacket off the back of the chair. ‘C’mon, let’s walk, shall we? I could do with a breath of fresh air.’

The pub was five minutes away, across a public square where young people lay sunbathing on the grass. A girl, with slim, brown, muscular arms and cropped, bleached-blonde hair, lay close to the path. ‘Will you look at the tits on that?’ Roddy muttered, as they walked past, hardly bothering to disguise his lust. With his huge, flapping bags of trousers, he looked much older than his forty years. He had three children now, and he spent most of his working life with younger people. But at least he knew where he was in the generations. One of Tom’s fears was that people who remain childless never really grow up. When he thought of the childless marriages he knew, it seemed to him that, in almost every instance, one of the partners had become the child. Somewhere, in the distance, was a vision of total selfishness, that dreadful, terminal boyishness of men who can’t stop thinking of themselves as young.

Tom had watched Lauren, tears streaming down her face, wrapping a christening present for Toby, Roddy and Angela’s youngest child. ‘Don’t let’s go, Lauren,’ he’d said. ‘We don’t have to.’ ‘Yes, we do,’ she’d said, and of course she was right. All their friends had children now. Either they adjusted to the fact and tried to fit in, or they spent their lives, isolated, in a child-free zone. He made a conscious effort to shake off his depression. A drink would help.

They bought pints of lager and sat outside under the trees. On impulse, Tom told Roddy how disappointed they were that Lauren still wasn’t pregnant. Roddy listened, nodded, sympathized, coughed, said, ‘Yes, well, early days,’ and seemed generally uneasy. Tom wondered why. Roddy was, after all, accustomed to conducting intimate conversations, but perhaps he didn’t do it with friends? Then, suddenly, though nothing had been said, Tom knew why. Lauren must have told Angela he was impotent, and sometime later, in the aftermath perhaps of one of their unaesthetic but productive couplings, Angela had told Roddy.

After that, all he wanted to do was get away. He felt betrayed. Inevitably, though he told himself he had no right to blame Lauren. Why shouldn’t she turn to her best friend for comfort? She got little enough from him. And he flayed himself, imagining Roddy and Angela giggling about it, knowing all the time they wouldn’t have done, that they’d have been as sympathetic as he and Lauren would have been, if the roles had been reversed. But he knew, also, that next morning Roddy would have stood in the bathroom, contemplating his todger — must be years since he’d seen it without the aid of a mirror — feeling an unacknowledged flicker of amusement. So old Tom can’t get it up? he would have thought. No, not even thought — would have permitted the thought into his mind only as a possible reaction, the hypothetical response of somebody altogether cruder and less compassionate than he was himself. Well, well, fancy that. And then he’d have toddled down to breakfast, whistling between his teeth in that irritating way of his, feeling more of a man because of it.