Pat Barker - Another World

It’s been raining. There are crescents of silver light trapped inside the drops that speckle the glass. It seems a pity to press the button and sweep them away. Almost as soon as he starts the engine the rain comes on heavier. Smears of orange light on greasy cobbles, the wipers’ swish and whine, make it hard to stay alert. He’s hunched over the wheel peering at the edges of the road for guidance, driving as if in a thick fog, though there’s no more than a slight mist.

What he wanted to say to Helen, but couldn’t find a tactful way of phrasing it, was that she’d got Geordie all wrong. That she was so much in love with her thesis that she distorted his experience to make it fit. Geordie’s memories aren’t malleable: they don’t change to fit other people’s perceptions of the war. On the contrary. Geordie’s tragedy is that his memories are carved in granite. The nightmares of Harry’s death that had Geordie screaming back in 1919 are the same ones that wake him, sweating and terrified, in the sluice room now. And secretly, what he wants to say is that raking about in the detritus of other people’s memories is a waste of time and energy. The only true or useful thing that can be said about the past is that it’s over. It no longer exists.

All the houses are in darkness. Lob’s Hill, when he gets back, will be in darkness. Fran will have given up and gone to bed by now, and she won’t be too pleased either. He’d said he was going out ‘for a few hours’. His headlights pick out the silver trunks of trees, moths flickering like beads of light, big, pale stars of bindweed, and then, in the rear mirror, darkness swallows them. His lights seem to create the road he drives along, and then consign it to oblivion.

He lets himself gain speed, sits back, starts to relax. Too much, he’s getting drowsy. Probably he should pull over and walk up and down a bit, but that would make him even later than he is and anyway he’s nearly home. Another few minutes and then, providing Jasper’s asleep, he can slide into bed and lose consciousness. Louder music, that’s the thing.

He’s tapping on the wheel when a girl emerges from a gap between the trees and runs out into the road. A pale face turned towards him, staring through the windscreen. Not terrified, not anything, blank. The features shadowless, whited out by the glare. There’s a second when Nick knows it’s too late, knows it coldly and clearly and, despite the bulging of his heart, calmly. Nothing he can do, neither braking nor swerving, will be in time. The girl slips silently under his wheels.

A few yards further on the car skids to a halt. Automatically he puts the handbrake on and reaches for the door, dreading screams or, worse, silence. Already he’s out of the car and running, searching for the hump, the dark shape, in the road, his eyes blinded by the headlights. He can make nothing of the confused mêlée of moonlight and shadows. Except that the road’s empty. Thrown into the hedge? He searches on either side, groping through grass and stinging nettles. His grass-snarled feet send up a cloud of small pale moths, but his eyes, his hands, find nothing. He runs back to the car, gropes underneath. Warm tar under his fingertips, greasy from the recent shower, still squishy from the long hours of sun. He prods round the wheels. Nothing. Crawls out again, runs his hands along the bumper. The headlights are burning his retinas, he can’t see a bloody thing, relies on his fingers to tell him the cool curve of metal is intact.

It’s impossible. He’d hit a dog once, a young Labrador, and the whole bonnet had crumpled under the impact. There’s no way the car can be undamaged. The headlights throw his distorted shadow far up the road. Unless there was no impact. He thinks back, and he’s almost sure he neither heard nor felt an impact. Nor had he felt the bump of the wheels going over a body. He bends down, shaking, finds sweetheart sticking to the legs of his trousers and peels it off, automatically, trying to think. No impact, and since he’d seen the girl fall under the wheels, no impact meant no girl. Hypnogogic hallucination. Must have been, can’t have been anything else. He’d been drowsy, mesmerized by the swish of wipers and the flick-flickering of his lights across the trees.

What should he do? He sits in the driver’s seat with his feet on the road and lights a cigarette. Go to the police? He’ll be breathalized. Well, he’s all right, he’s pretty sure he’s all right. In any case that’s not the point. The point is there’s been no accident. There’s nothing to report. He double checks the bumper. Nothing could hit the car without leaving some trace, and the bumper’s unscathed. He lets the relief wash over him, ashamed, a second later, that he could have run round like that, gasping and panicking, not thinking at all.

He tries to recall the girl, but her face was whited out by the glare of the headlights. An impression of long hair and a long skirt, as she came running out from the trees. Nothing more individual than that. Where had she been running to? The only house on this stretch of road is Lob’s Hill. Though if she’s the product of an over-tired mind, it makes no sense to ask where she was running to.

The house is in darkness when he arrives. He goes to the living room first, spends a few moments looking at the painting, and then slowly, unbuttoning his shirt, climbs the stairs. His mind fizzes. He can smell his armpits, a fear-sweat smell unlike any other, and despises himself for it. On the landing he undresses and then, naked, goes into the bedroom.

Fran sees a silhouette against the landing light, sharply black and slim, so that for a moment, waking from deep sleep, she feels a jolt of fear. Almost unconsciously she moves to give him room as he climbs into bed, and begins groping for sleep again, only to realize he’s lying awake beside her, flat on his back, his skin, where his thigh touches hers, burning hot. Grandfather ill, cancer, she remembers. ‘How is he?’

‘Bad.’

She mumbles some kind of response.

‘I had a bit of a shock on the way back. I thought I’d hit something.’

‘But you didn’t?’

‘No, it’s all right.’

Rabbits and hedgehogs and the occasional bird lie in crumpled and bloody heaps all along the back lane that leads from their house to the main road. It’s awful, but what can you do? She squeezes his hand in token consolation and turns away. He curls around her, and after a few seconds she feels the stir and rise of his cock.

‘Nick.’

‘I know, I know.’ He presses his face into the hollow between her shoulder blades, lifting her hair and running his mouth from side to side, a slow sweeping kiss. A hand comes round, cradling her breasts, fingertips find her nipples, tweak gently.

‘I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,’ Fran says dryly. ‘You might get more than you bargain for.’

They lie tensely locked together; she waits for him to give up and turn away, but he doesn’t, and part of her’s thinking, It’s not much fun for him. He does try to help, only now he’s got his grandfather to worry about, and he just seems to look on helplessly as control of the domestic situation slithers out of her grasp. Between them, Jasper and the unborn baby are eating her alive.

Responding to her tension, the baby heaves itself across her stomach, one of its cosmonaut somersaults. It’s nobody’s fault, she thinks, and it won’t go on for ever, but meanwhile Nick hasn’t had sex for weeks, months, and almost involuntarily she arches her back, giving him an easier entrance. ‘I won’t move,’ Nick says. ‘I’ll just lodge him inside.’ And she wants to giggle at his self-deception, does giggle, and he gasps as he feels the nudge of her downward-shaken womb. He begins to move, tentatively, asking on held breath, ‘You all right?’ ‘Fine,’ she says, still sleepily, then starts to get interested. She likes this position, though generally, after a few minutes, they switch to her lying over the edge of the bed and Nick kissing her, but his thrusts become faster and deeper, his hand on her hip braces and tightens, and then with a cry he’s shuddering and jerking and pouring himself into her. Painful tweaking of the skin on her hips follows as he cries out and convulses and sobs, yes sobs , and what the fuck, she thinks, do you have to sob about?