Pat Barker - Another World

Miranda waits for the house to be quiet before she gets out of bed. Her room’s dark, because it overlooks the back garden, darker than her bedroom at home, which has a street lamp outside. Thick velvety black that threatens to suffocate her. Every night she lies awake, waiting for the girl to come in, knowing all the time she won’t, and yet waiting anyway.

Only now the girl has a face. She has to see her again. She slips her hand into the drawer of the bedside table and finds the torch. She’s not sure it makes things better, because everything outside the wobbling circle of light becomes blacker, but she needs it to find her way downstairs.

On the landing she listens. Dad snoring, bed springs creaking, no sound from Jasper’s room, a constant flit-flit from Gareth’s, which means he’s on the computer again. She starts to walk downstairs, eyes lowered, looking at nothing but her feet, which become more and more weird as she watches them, like small nocturnal animals creeping about.

The door to the living room’s closed. She switches off the torch before she opens it, in case the light could be seen from the road. Somebody might think the house is being burgled. Moonlight, reflected from the daubed white sheets that cover the floor, gives enough light to move around by, though she sees the figures in the painting only as patches of darkness against the pale plaster.

Close to the wall she switches the torch on again, and instantly, like the pupil of an eye contracting, the room recedes. Now there’s only the faces and her fingers on the torch.

One after another the point of light summons them back from the dark. The father, the mother, the elder brother and the little boy. She leaves the girl till last, because she’s the one Miranda dreads seeing most. When at last she shines the torch into those eyes, she notices that the minute cracks in the plaster look like lines in the iris.

The room’s cold. She backs away from the portrait — it’s too powerful a presence for her to feel comfortable with it behind her. Only at the last moment can she bring herself to look away, pulling the door closed as quietly as somebody leaving a sick room.

In the room that has always been the nursery, Jasper sleeps in the cot he’s almost outgrown. His hands, raised on either side of his head, are curled like new fern fronds. A cloud begins to drift across the moon, a shadow encroaches on the pillow, and Jasper whimpers as it passes over his face.

The moon sails clear. White light falls on the choppy sea of dust sheets covering the living-room floor. The Fanshawes, visible again, though now there’s no one to see them, gaze through the french windows over the lawns, the rose beds, and the rhododendron bushes of the garden that had once been theirs.

Slim and sexy, Queen Victoria gazes out from her plinth to where the wrinkled Tyne crawls beneath its six bridges. Above her head seagulls squeal like abandoned puppies.

Craning his head back to see her face, Nick realizes again how long his grandfather’s life has been. This Victoria, broader in the beam but awesomely stable, still sat on the throne when Grandad took his first steps. Now, inside the hospital named after her, older than Victoria on her deathbed, older than most of us will ever be, Geordie sits on a plastic chair beside the window and looks out at a few blowzy roses dropping their petals on to the wet soil.

The last rose of summer, Nick thinks, left blooming alone, though blooming’s hardly the right word. He’s wearing a white gown, the kind that slips on at the front and ties at the back. They’ve wedged a white cellular blanket between his back and the chair, because he’s already showing signs of bedsores.

It’s unusual to find him alone like this. Usually he’s one of the few old men on the ward who’s found somebody to talk to, grumble to rather, complaining he misses his midday pint, he’s all bunged up with that stuff they gave him for the X-rays, he’s dying for a fag. Grousing — an old soldier’s version of stoicism. He’s a health educationalist’s nightmare. He’s had his telegram from the Queen, framed it, hung it over the mantelpiece. Cigarettes have never hurt him , he says, and what’s more there’s nothing beats a Woodbine for bursting lice eggs in the seams of your shirt — though at this point the person he’s talking to generally starts to edge away.

‘Hello, Grandad,’ Nick says, putting a bunch of green grapes on the table beside the bed.

Geordie looks at the grapes with suspicion, thinking the pips will insinuate themselves between his dentures and his gums, and wreak havoc.

‘Seedless. How are you?’

‘Middling.’

‘Fair to middling?’

‘No, if you must know, middling to bloody awful.’

Nick sits on the end of the bed. ‘Is this the first time you’ve been out of bed?’

‘No, they had me up for an hour last night.’

His cheeks are furrowed over naked gums, the neck protruding from the gown is thin and scaly, there’s several days’ growth of beard on his chin, but he doesn’t look inconsiderable or pathetic. He looks like Caravaggio’s portrait of St Jerome.

‘They haven’t shaved you, then?’

‘They offered. I can’t stand the chewing.’

‘Might make you feel better.’

‘It’s all very well for you,’ Geordie flashes back. ‘You don’t have to cope with young bits of lasses shoving their fingers up your arse every verse end.’

‘They are doctors, Grandad.’

‘Aye’ — doubtfully.

He looks so lost that Nick impulsively bends down and hugs him: a brief embarrassed collision of rough chins that has Geordie pulling away at once. It’s not rejection. It’s just that nothing must be allowed to disturb his position, which is very finely calculated to keep the pain asleep.

‘Bloody torture, this is,’ he says, grunting, after Nick’s straightened up.

‘Pain? You should—’

‘Ask them for more of yon stuff? I will not. I don’t know where I am with it.’

They sit in silence for a moment.

‘Anyway, I didn’t mean that. I meant the fags. Do you know I have to walk all the way down that corridor if I want a fag? Can’t smoke in here. I says, “Can’t I nip out the french windows and have one?” No . Anyway if I stand up I show me arse. Have you seen this?’

He pulls at the shift to show the string fastenings at the back and the movement wakes up the pain. For a moment he says nothing at all — just fights it silently.

When it seems to have died down a bit, Nick asks gently, ‘Does it matter?’

‘’Course it bloody matters. See that lad over there?’ He’s pointing at one of the nurses. ‘Ian. Nice lad and all that but a nance if ever I saw one.’

The nice lad’s dispensing lunch from a trolley.

‘Are you allowed to eat now?’

‘Allowed yes. Whether I can’s another matter.’

He seems entirely clear mentally, better than he was before he went into hospital, though his bearing’s not as erect as it normally is.

‘Are the stitches starting to pull?’

‘They are a bit.’

‘Do you mind if I have a look?’

Using the white blanket as a screen, Geordie pulls up his shift to reveal the red centipede crawling up his stomach, past that other scar, the one he brought back with him from France.

‘It’s healing well,’ Nick says.

Geordie’s penis, retracted into the brown rugosities of his scrotum, looks like a rose in a bed of dead leaves.

‘Itching’s supposed to be a good sign, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, I think it is.’

Nick wonders how much Geordie understands. How much he minds. Other people don’t respond to this illness as they normally would. They say things like: ‘Oh, well, he’s had a good innings,’ as if so many years of cheating death must automatically mean he’s reconciled to it now.