Pat Barker - Another World

It’s the dead still of night when Nick wakes and lies, half dazed, awaiting the repetition of the sound that woke him. Silence. He’s settling himself to sleep again, thinking that after all it must have been the chimes of the clock that disturbed him, when he feels a current of cool air move across his face. A window’s open, or a door. He gets up and looks out, sees nothing, but then he hears the rattle of the latch on the back door. He races downstairs to the kitchen, but it’s empty. Light glares from the naked bulb; the room looks surprised and desolate. The back door’s wide open and Grandad’s standing at the bottom of the yard, arms clasping his skinny chest, staring at the sky. Wisps of cloud chase each other across the moon. Geordie’s a column of slippery light and shade; grey and silver shadows net his white hair. Nick calls his name, but he doesn’t turn round.

No time to find coat or shoes. A light rain’s been falling, the sloping, green-algae-coated surface of the yard feels greasy under his toes. Geordie sees him coming, his fingers find the latch, the door opens and he’s gone. Nick follows him out into the alley. The ground’s cobbled, the cobbles silver-edged and distinct in the moonlight, rounded as skulls. Geordie’s got halfway along the wall. He’s staggering, bent almost double, but then, as Nick watches, he crouches, listens, moves on again. Nick wants to cry with the despair of it. Geordie’s reached a telegraph pole, and hides behind it. Nick begins to creep along the wall behind him, not wanting to shout his name and wake the street, still less to chase after him and add to the terror he must be feeling.

He’s got to within a few yards, dodging the piles of dog shit that litter the alley, when Geordie with the agility of a much younger man sinks to his knees and starts slithering across the cobbles on his elbows and knees, pausing, waiting, lowering his face to the ground, edging forward again. Nick edges closer. He hears Geordie muttering to himself, but then he moves on again, making for the wood. But which wood is it? Devil’s Wood, High Wood, Mametz, Thiepval? Geordie crawls faster, slithering away into the shadow of the trees.

Nick’s grasp on the situation starts to slip. His day-time self, the sane sensible middle-aged man coping as best he can with a confused elderly relative, vanishes. It’s too insubstantial an identity to survive in the dark wood at night. He forces himself to cough, a harsh sound that has Geordie spinning round. No trace of recognition. Nick goes up to him. He looks entirely mad, striking Nick flat-handed over his head and shoulders as Nick tries to get hold of him. Nick bats him off with blocking movements of his raised arms. Geordie’s blows are slow, exhausted and clumsy. He’s floundering like a man in mud or fire.

All this has been silent, but now Geordie starts to yell with rage. Lights go on all along the row of houses, so that their slow scufflings are illuminated in overlapping orange squares. Curtains are pulled aside, pale faces look down, realize it’s not a burglar, not a threat to them or their property, and half withdraw behind the shelter of closed curtains.

The lights and faces where no lights and faces should be reduce Geordie to a quivering abject terror, horrible to see. Nick can’t take any more. ‘Grandad,’ he says. ‘Come on now, come back to bed.’

Grandad. The preposterous word. Geordie peers at him, at the middle-aged, unknown face. He looks across the lane at the sharp angles of roofs, dark against a blanching sky; and not the horrors of the past, but the incomprehensibility of the present makes him afraid. He starts to shake, as on those night-time slithers through the wire he never shook, only trembled slightly, stomach muscles clenching, a sickness of anticipation rather than of fear.

‘Grandad,’ the stranger says again.

Geordie looks down at himself, at the pyjama jacket, the fuzz of white hair on his chest, and starts to cry. Nick puts his arm round him, cradling the whiskery cheek in the fingers of his other hand, and begins half pulling, half dragging him towards the house. Geordie struggles again as they reach the yard door.

‘Look,’ Nick says, groping for words that will make sense in both worlds. ‘We’ve got to get back, it’s nearly light;

Grandad scans the sky, sees dawn massing grey clouds edged with gold, and lets himself be helped back, limping barefoot over the cobbles.

In the kitchen Nick examines him. He stinks to high heaven and can’t be allowed to get back between the sheets like that. It’s not the dirt, it’s the dog shit. Nick takes off his pyjamas, and puts Grandad’s own mac round his shoulders. He sits on a high stool, while Nick lays a towel on the floor and gets to work washing his feet, his head nudging Geordie’s bony knees as he works. When the feet are clean, he dries them on the towel, and then scrapes the mess off his stomach, aware all the time that he’s doing this to a dying man, that Geordie’s life is ebbing away as he sits upright, God knows how, on the stool.

‘Do you want a fag?’

Geordie turns his head in the direction of the voice, and his lips move. Nick lights one for each of them, puts Geordie’s between his lips, and drags deeply on his own. Geordie’s concentrating on his first draw. He sits, silent, inhaling deeply, a blue mist between himself and the world. Are they in the trenches now, a dugout in the front line perhaps, or are they in the back kitchen of 22 North Road? Nick doesn’t know. Wherever Geordie is, he’s there too.

Nick leans against the wall, which sags alarmingly under his weight. None of the attempts to repair the plaster over the years has ever worked. This is it, he thinks, not confused, not even tired any more, just seeing clearly. He never talked. All through Nick’s childhood Grandad had said nothing. His body with its ancient wound, as hard to decipher as the carving on a rune stone, had been left to speak for him. Over the past twenty years, the time he should have been dead, he’s talked endlessly, delivering his stark and simple warning, but now they’ve come full circle. There he is again, silent, under the wreath of smoke.

‘Come on,’ Nick says, tossing his cigarette into the sink. ‘Let’s get you to bed.’

They go upstairs — a jostling of uncoordinated hips and shoulders in the too narrow space — and then on to the bed, where they collapse, panting like lovers.

‘Come on now,’ Nick says. He pulls the sheets further back, lifts Grandad’s scaly shins off the floor and into bed.

‘I can’t, I’ve got to —’

‘No, you haven’t,’ Nick said firmly. ‘There’s nothing you’ve got to do.’

He switches on the lamp beside the bed, thinking it might be reassuring for Geordie to see the familiar room, but he looks round at the furniture in bewilderment and then, in real terror, at Nick’s face.

He doesn’t know who I am, Nick thinks. There’s a moment of narcissistic pain, of real diminishment. For the first time in his life he looks into the steel mirror and it doesn’t reflect his face. More important things than that to think about. Geordie’s cold. ‘Do you want a bottle?’

No answer. Nick changes out of his filthy pyjamas, fetches a clean T-shirt and pants, puts them on and gets in beside him. They’ll get warm, probably, sooner or later, though he doubts if he’ll be able to sleep. The window’s a square of definite light. He lies, tensely, aware of the other body, reluctant to turn and look at him. He wonders whether Grandad’s remembered who he is.

Time passes, he doesn’t know how long, or whether he’s been to sleep after all.

Geordie’s eyes are wide open. He mutters something and Nick bends closer to listen. He can’t make head nor tail of it, except that it’s about Harry.