Pat Barker - Another World

When he can’t bear waiting any more he gets up and walks along the corridor to Room Four. The door’s open. Jasper’s sitting up on a trolley in the bright light with dried blood all over his face, a thick stream of new blood moving sluggishly over it. Mum pushes the tacky hair off his forehead, Jasper’s whimpering, Mum’s nearly whimpering as well. Nick sits on a chair, his hands clasped between his knees, looking as if he wants to kill somebody. Nobody’s saying anything.

Gareth goes back to the waiting room and sits down again. Miranda looks up from her magazine, licks her finger slowly, and turns a page. After a while Nick comes out, kneels down in front of Gareth and says it’s very important for Gareth to try to remember whether Jasper lost consciousness. ‘Did he look as if he was asleep?’

‘No, he didn’t,’ Gareth says, and his voice sounds weird, it’s so long since he used it. ‘He started crying as soon as he fell down.’ He feels Miranda’s eyes on the side of his face.

Nick goes away. Five minutes later he comes out again with Jasper on a trolley. A porter’s pushing the trolley and Mum’s walking on one side and Nick on the other, and there’s a nurse in a navy-blue dress walking ahead of them with a file in her hand. Gareth won’t look at Miranda. He goes across to the window and looks out at the car-park instead.

Dr Jenner pins the X-ray to the screen. He’s explaining things, but Fran can’t take any of it in. It’s a shock to see Jasper’s skull on the screen. Somehow you slip into thinking that skulls are figments of the imagination. Long-lost murder victims in crime series on the telly, gruesome toys for Hallowe’en. This isn’t happening. There’s a dressing over the wound now, and it’s stopped bleeding. Fran bends down, puts her mouth against his silky hair, feels the heat of his scalp, smells Johnson’s baby shampoo, blood, disinfectant, the suntan oil on her arm.

Dr Jenner’s asking why she hadn’t taken Jasper to the doctor when he fell over at the Metrocentre. Fran tries to explain he was all right, not sick, not drowsy, not anything, running round playing, she hadn’t felt justified in bothering the doctor. He didn’t lose consciousness then?

‘No,’ says Fran. And then, ‘I wasn’t there.’

‘You weren’t there again today.’

Fran’s beginning to feel she’s on some kind of short-list for the World’s Most Absent Mother prize. It isn’t fair. She gave up work to look after Jasper. And Nick can’t help because — Fran feels a slow stir of anger — because Nick bloody well wasn’t there either. Nick hasn’t been there very much at all recently.

‘So who was?’ Dr Jenner asks.

‘Who was what?’

‘Who was there when the accidents happened?’

Nick says, ‘Gareth.’

‘And Gareth is?’

‘Fran’s son. My stepson.’

‘And he was there on both occasions?’

‘Yes.’

Fran thinks, No, he doesn’t mean that. ‘You’re saying they weren’t accidents?’

‘No-o, I’m saying… Perhaps it might be a good idea if you didn’t leave him alone with his brother.’

‘What do we do now?’ Nick says.

‘Well, he’s going to need stitches.’

Fran says, ‘Can I stay with him?’

‘Of course. I’ll just go and find a nurse to help me.’

After he’s gone they sit in silence, each finding it hard not to look at the brightly lit skull on the screen. It doesn’t seem to connect with the little boy who sits on Fran’s knee, cheek pressed into her breasts, sucking his thumb and pulling at his ear. His face is dirty, tear-stained. Fran remembers bending over his bed after that disastrous trip to the Metrocentre. It seems so obvious now she should have called the doctor, got the full story out of Gareth, kicked up a tremendous fuss. They wouldn’t be here now if she had. Hindsight’s a cruel teacher. She has to remind herself forcefully that, at the time, calling the doctor out to a slight graze would have seemed like the action of a fussy, over-anxious, hysterical mother. But then she was stretched to the limit that day, she’d been only too happy to pretend everything was all right.

Jasper’s quiet, too quiet, though at least he hasn’t been sick again. Fran clings to the few reassuring things Dr Jenner said. No fracture, that’s the main thing. No sign of haemorrhage. They just have to be careful. Watch out for drowsiness and sickness. Jasper looks drowsy at the moment, but then he’s had a hard day. This is the time he would normally have a nap. Even the vomiting — he doesn’t need a blow on the head to be sick in the car. He does it all the time.

They’ll just have to wait.

‘I shouldn’t’ve gone to sleep,’ Fran says.

‘Neither should I.’

‘No, well, you were tired. You’ve had Geordie to look after.’ She doesn’t bother to disguise the bitterness, though up till now she truthfully hasn’t minded. She’s always accepted that, however peculiar it might seem to other people, this is something Nick has to do. But now, with Jasper’s blood stiffening on her fingers, it looks a bit different. A grown man chasing after his grandad and his auntie, leaving her with a house to run, shopping, cooking, kids to look after, one of them his daughter, for Christ’s sake. She’s stoking her anger deliberately, because it helps her forget how frightened she is. ‘It wasn’t an accident,’ she says slowly. ‘Was it?’

‘We don’t know that.’ Nick gropes for the right words. ‘Don’t think about it. Let’s just get this over first.’

It could still be an accident, Fran tells herself. Some bizarre game of Gareth’s gone wrong. Twice.

Dr Jenner comes back with a nurse, who’s carrying a kidney bowl and scissors. As soon as Jasper feels the scissors in his hair, he screams, and he goes on screaming through all the washing, clipping and stitching that follows.

Outside in the waiting room, Gareth wriggles on his chair, looks up and finds Miranda staring at him again. ‘What you looking at, shit-face?’

‘You.’

She goes back to her magazine. Ten minutes later Nick comes out, followed by Mum with Jasper in her arms, and says they can all go home.

As soon as Nick unlocks the front door, Gareth pushes past him and runs to his room. Fran takes Jasper upstairs, hoping he’ll have a nap, while Nick makes sandwiches for the older children. Bag of crisps each, and they can eat it in front of the telly.

Through the open window he hears children’s voices. An indistinct murmur and then a girl’s voice: ‘I wasn’t there.’

Upstairs, Miranda lies on her bed, stretched out with her hands on her tummy. She doesn’t move even when there’s a knock on the door. ‘Come in,’ she calls, expecting it to be Dad.

Gareth sidles round the door.

‘What do you want?’

‘You won’t tell them, will you?’

‘Tell them what?’

‘About Jasper.’

She goes still. ‘What about him?’

‘You know.’

‘No, I don’t. I wasn’t there, remember?’

‘Yes, you were.’

‘Gareth, I wasn’t.’

‘You were on the cliffs.’

‘Watch my lips. I wasn’t there.’ She sits up and swings her legs over the edge of the bed. ‘Though you do realize, don’t you, you’ve just told me what happened? If I didn’t know before, I do now.’

‘You’d better not say anything.’

‘Oh, go away.’

When he’s gone, Miranda lies down again, on her back with her eyes closed, but it’s no use. Jasper’s face with the eyes full of blood floats on the inside of her lids. I wasn’t there.

Lying cunt, cow, sod, bitch, slag. She’s saying that now, but when the time comes she’ll drop him right in it.