Pat Barker - Noonday

“No, I’ve had enough.”

Immediately, a predatory fork descended and impaled the Cheddar. Neville munched in silence for a while.

Paul’s vertigo was getting worse. Fresh air, that’s what he needed, he’d be all right once he was outside, but the bill was a long time coming. When, finally, he staggered out into the street, the buildings started revolving around his head. He’d gone only a few paces when he found himself sitting on the pavement, trying not to be sick.

Neville stood over him. “You can’t be drunk.”

“Vertigo.”

Even the effort of saying the word made it worse. If only things would keep still. He fixed his gaze on a crack in the pavement and, for a moment, the spinning did slow down.

“Can you stand?” Neville offered Paul his hand and then, when that didn’t work, went behind and levered him to his feet. “Come on, my place. You need to get to bed.”

Slowly, with Neville’s help, Paul managed to take a few steps. He could walk, though he seemed to have only two paces: so slow he was threatening to sink into the ground, or so fast he was almost running. “Whoa!” Neville kept saying, as if to a skittish horse. Now he was drunk.

Blotched into a single shadow, they staggered from side to side in the road. Once, the wavering beam of a blackout torch came towards them, nothing of the man behind it visible except the hand holding the torch. An old man’s hand, with thick, raised, bluish-gray veins. “Good night!” he said. Seconds later, the murk swallowed him.

Not long after, they arrived back at the house. Neville lowered Paul into an armchair. “Well. That was a surprise.”

Unable to speak, Paul gripped the arms of the chair and willed the room to stop spinning. Neville stood looking down at him. “Who was the Witch of Endor anyway?”

“Saul,” he tried to say, but it came out as “sore.”

Immediately Neville’s fingers were round his throat. “Yes, it will be, your glands are up. Is there anything I can get you?”

“No, I’m all right, thanks.”

“Has it happened before?”

“Off and on since January. I had the flu and this started a few days later. But, you know, I’ve seen a doctor and he says it’s nothing to worry about. It’s just the room keeps spinning every time I move my head.”

“That’d worry me. Wouldn’t you be better off in bed?”

During the time he’d been sitting in the chair the spinning had slowed down, though he knew it would start again the moment he moved. It was tempting to stay where he was, even to sleep in the chair, but he knew Neville wouldn’t be happy leaving him downstairs on his own. “Yes, probably.”

With Neville behind him, pushing him every step of the way, he managed to get upstairs and across the landing into a guest room, where he immediately collapsed onto the bed. Neville’s voice came and went, now booming, now barely audible: the effect you can get by pressing your hands rhythmically against your ears. He remembered doing that in the hall at school, a small boy, lost and frightened, dumbfounded by the noise. In, out, loud, soft — and suddenly it was all right, everything was under control.

This wasn’t. He just prayed he wasn’t going to vomit all over the counterpane. Neville was pulling his shoes off now. Clunk: one of them hit the floor. And again: clunk. A blurry face bent over him. “You all right?”

This had gone on quite long enough. “Yes, thank you.” He enunciated the words with great precision, and immediately, as if in response to his efforts, Neville’s face swam into focus, though his voice still boomed and vanished. “I’ll be…door…don’t…if you…thing.”

Then he switched off the light, and Paul was left alone.

Nightmares crawled across each other like copulating toads. He was walking with Neville along a shingle beach, the rasp and roar of waves loud in his ears, but then he realized it wasn’t the waves, it was Neville’s breathing. Humped shapes lay at intervals along the shore. He assumed they were seals, and expected them to heave and lollop into the water, but they didn’t, and as he got closer he saw they were corpses, some stranded on the shoreline, others drifting to and fro on the tide: all too badly burned to be identified. Then, as he probed them, one stood up and seemed about to speak, its lipless mouth struggling to form words…

The dream shifted. He was going through the front door at home, throwing his school satchel down on the floor by the stairs. His hand was on the living-room door, but he hesitated, afraid to go in, afraid of what he would find. She’d be standing by the window and, though he knew she’d heard his footsteps, she wouldn’t turn round. She never turned round. Always, he had to touch her, pull her back, make her notice him. Then, slowly, she would turn — and turn and turn and turn, day after day. He never knew which face he was going to see: blank with misery, blubbery with tears, contracted into a hard, angry knot. Sometimes she didn’t turn at all, merely brushed his hand away as if it were an insect crawling across her skin. At other times, but rarely, she managed a smile: always with that curious string of saliva at the corner of her mouth — it should have been repulsive, but it wasn’t, not to him; it was one of the things he loved most about her — and then sometimes she’d say his name, but tentatively, as if she couldn’t quite remember who he was.

On the day they came to get her, she was sitting in a chair by the fireplace, and so, for a moment, he thought she must be better. But his father was home from work and he shouldn’t be — he was working two till ten — and Gran was in the kitchen, banging pots and pans. “I thought you were going to tea at your Auntie May’s?” she said. “Why, what’s happening?” “Nothing.” He looked at Dad, who just shook his head. It was bad, Paul knew it was. So he went straight to his mother and knelt beside her.

She had tears trickling down her face. Back when things were normal, before the standing-at-the-window began, she used to sing, and so he sang to her now: hymns — she knew hundreds of hymns — music-hall songs — she loved the music hall — and so he sang all her favorites, every single one. He was afraid to stop; he knew if he stopped something bad would happen. He even had a go at the “Hallelujah Chorus.” “Jesus Christ!” Gran muttered in the kitchen. At first, it didn’t seem as if his mother were listening, but after a while she reached out and squeezed his hand.

A knock on the door. Wiping her hands on her pinny, Gran went to answer it. His father hung back. A horse-drawn wagon had pulled up outside; he caught only one glimpse of it before Dad grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him into the front room. From the window, he saw them helping her into the wagon. The driver flicked the reins, the wheels started to turn, and, as if realizing what was happening for the first time, she turned to look back.

Meeting him in the street a few weeks later, the vicar said, “Why’ve you stopped coming to choir practice, Paul?”

Because. Because, because, because, because…

He went on seeing her standing by the window. She lingered like an after-image on the retina, except that after-images fade and this never did. There she stood, looking out onto a yard where nothing grew, where there was nothing to see except brick walls imprisoning a patch of sky. Still, even now, he had to touch her, make her acknowledge him: Mam, Mam. Still, he never knew which face he’d see. The angry face was the one he dreaded most: the shout, the slap that sent him flying…She was angry now and he was frightened, really frightened this time — only, thank God, he heard Dad coming up the passage, the door opened, and there he was—