Pat Barker - Noonday

He could do nothing for her, neither save her life nor wrest her back to sanity. Indeed, the longer he stayed with her the more his own grip on reality would slacken. Reaching an abrupt decision, he stood up and retrieved his hat from the foot of her bed. Yet, even now, he lingered. Suddenly he became aware that in the last few minutes he’d unconsciously changed the rhythm of his breathing until it exactly matched hers.

Quickly then, he turned on his heel and walked out.

—

BERTHA LISTENED TO the footsteps dying away into the darkness. Somebody had been there, just now — they’d brought flowers — but she couldn’t remember who. Be glad to get out of this place. Talk about haunted, she’d never in her life experienced such a cluster of unquiet spirits. Now that was a point. Why did they cluster? Something to do with the place, the actual building? Had to be — unless, of course, they recognized a sensitive and were crowding round her. But no, that couldn’t be true, the night sister said they’d been here years.

Bertha had been surprised when she was on the toilet wrestling with constipation. The door was thrown open without so much as a by-your-leave and a woman came in wearing the dated uniform of a nursing sister in the last war. “Hurry up, now,” she’d said. “We haven’t got all day.” She’d been talking to somebody at the sink, totally oblivious to her, Bertha, sat there, needing a bit of privacy.

There was a child as well, a boy who came in and out of a wall where a door had once been. You could see the outline of the door under the paint. She felt sorry for him, he looked so lost, as did the young man in Victorian dress who sat with his back to the wall in the main corridor, sobbing his heart out, poor soul. She’d have helped them if she could, but they just stared through her. The spirits who came to her in seances— manifested —bloody Howard — wanted to make contact. These ones didn’t even know she was there.

The trouble was, she saw them all the time, whereas other people just caught glimpses now and then — the majority, not even that. Though she had once seen a doctor step aside to avoid the small boy as he came through the wall, and she’d thought: You don’t even know you did that. But he had, he’d stepped aside.

Payne was back. She thought it might actually be Payne this time, though she hadn’t heard him come in. On the other hand, she had been dozing, on and off, all day — she could easily have missed him. He was — well, not exactly talking, but words formed in her mind. On and on he bloody went. The school: how did she know how many people had died? Every bugger knows, she said. Just ’cos you say something’s secret doesn’t mean it is. And the boy-sailors on the Royal Oak, how did she know they were dead, when nobody had said the ship had been attacked? And the young men on the beaches of Dunkirk; the men she’d seen crawl out of funk holes in the trenches…“Oh, piss off and leave me alone.” She didn’t know whether she meant the spirits or him.

Somewhere in the lower regions Albert stirred. She was half inclined to let him come to the surface, give Payne a right good bollocking, bloody little pipsqueak. God, just look at him, objectionable little man. “Seedy”—that was the word. Seedy. She honestly did believe he could be the Devil, because he wasn’t fixed. Whenever you looked at him, he seemed to be a different shape and size. She felt herself start to sink, a sure sign Albert was on his way. She didn’t really know where she went when Albert was here, except sometimes it looked a bit like her bedroom at home. At night, when she was huddled up in the narrow bed, with the sheets over her head, she’d hear footsteps on the stairs and see the knob begin to turn, and then, as he came in, a tall, thin shadow would climb the wall behind the bed, and she’d hear a voice whispering: It’s all right, don’t cry. He loved her. He always said he did.

But tonight, letting herself sink didn’t seem to work. The thing in the chair, whoever he was— what ever — wouldn’t let go. She forced herself to go on looking at him. Neat mustache, reddish-brown with a few white hairs, nicotine-stained fingertips twirling his trilby, round and round, round and round, stains on the sweatband, shiny patches on his knees where the cloth had worn thin — oh, yes, he was down on his luck, this one, in spite of his airs and graces.

I see through you, she thought. And immediately, as in a dream, found she could do exactly that. He was still there, very much there, but reduced to an outline, like a child’s drawing. Where the solid mass of his face and body had been there was now only a string of rising bubbles, like you get in a pond when something’s rotting underneath. She couldn’t put her finger on the change, because she could still see him, only now there was a sense that his apparent solidity was a delusion, and the reality was this constant flux. And he was getting smaller; his feet no longer quite reached the floor. He was child-sized now, and still shrinking fast, but somehow this didn’t reduce the force of his presence. If anything it increased it. The more he shrank, the more he was reduced to his essence, the more powerful he became.

She wanted to cry out, call for help, but there was no help, not against this, because he was liquid. He could change shape endlessly, fit himself into anything, flow through every crack in every barrier. And flow he does, drenching her in slime.

Look away. She looks instead at her left arm, which is lying on top of the coverlet, but it doesn’t seem to belong to her anymore. She focuses on her hand, tries to wiggle the fingers, but they won’t move. It’s too heavy, too stiff, she can’t do anything with it. She feels a spurt of hostility towards it. Is it even hers? It doesn’t feel like hers. Is it his hand? Her whole body feels cold along that side and so heavy, so leaden, the bed must surely soon start to tilt. She won’t look at the chair. Her right eye can’t see anything anyway, but she closes the one eye that still obeys her. Spit drools from the corner of her mouth, she can’t wipe it away; she tries to wipe it away with her other hand. The sheets are briefly warm, then cold, oh God she’s wet the bed again, she won’t half get wrong for that. But she keeps her eye closed, she won’t look at the chair. She won’t look at the chair.

Voices now, in the ward behind the screens, feet come flapping; a light shines in her eye. Stroke, she hears, stroke, but makes no sense of it. Nobody’s stroked her, not for a long, long time. Oh, six strokes of the cane, yes, she remembers that, remembers running out of school the second the bell rang, along the beach and up the hill to the castle, its towers black against the sky as the sun sinks down behind it. Running across the courtyard, now, stones hard under her feet, flecks of foam drifting like blossom across the grass, her head, her ears, even the marrow in her bones filled with the roaring of the sea. Queen Margaret’s tower behind her, she stands on the edge of the cliff. Close, so close she’s blinded by the spray and the sea boiling and churning in the Egyncleugh beneath her feet. Oh, and it’s nothing now to step forward, to take another step, and then another, to walk on air, and see, in the last moment before the water closes over her head, high above her on the cliff, Dunstanburgh’s broken crown.

ELINOR’S DIARY

14 October 1940

I think. The trouble with my life at the moment is that every day’s the same so I end up losing track and forgetting what day it is.

I haven’t kept a diary for years and I’m in two minds about it now. I suppose, because I associate it with adolescence, all that endless self-absorption which I’m vain enough to think I’ve grown out of, though I’ve no doubt there’d be plenty of people to disagree with me. My entire family, for a start.