Border Crossing

by Pat Barker

  Sweat from the long journey evaporated from his armpits and groin. He was surrounded by beds of red-hot pokers, hundreds of them, coral-pink and gold spires proudly erect or drooping, at detumescent angles, over the path. A ripple of decorous applause came from the car radio. His mind filled with images from the path-lab photographs – Lizzie Parks’s body laid out on the slab. It seemed incredible that a child should have done that. He went on pacing, up and down, up and down, and the red-hot pokers seemed to breathe in his horror and incredulity, and exhale them as heat and dust.

  And here Danny was, thirteen years later, grown up, out of prison, living under a false identity supplied by the Home Office and the police. He couldn’t tell Lauren. Any more than Martha Pitt had been able to tell him, though they were colleagues on the Youth Violence Project and saw each other at least once a week. She’d been supervising Danny for months. She knew Tom had been involved in his trial, but she hadn’t once mentioned him. Well, good for Martha. That was the degree of secrecy required.

  He walked across to his car, deactivated the alarm and opened the door. ‘Coincidence is the crack in human affairs that lets God or the Devil in.’ Typical God-bothering rubbish, he thought, though his own paranoid suspicion that Danny had plotted the meeting was no more rational. The fact is, that when confronted by a number of disturbing events, the human mind insists on finding a pattern. We can’t wait to thread the black beads on to a single string. But some events are, simply, random.

  Perhaps. Adjusting the mirror, he caught his own eye in the glass, and stared back at himself, alert, sceptical, unconsoled.

  THREE

  In the railway-station buffet, at eight o’clock on Monday morning, Lauren sat hunched over a table, spearing worms of ash on a burnt matchstick. ‘I just think we need help.’

  ‘You mean I need help.’

  ‘We’re not making love often enough, are we?’

  ‘We’re not “making love” at all.’ He tried not to sound bitter. ‘Look, why don’t we give it a bit more time?’

  ‘I haven’t got time.’

  ‘We, Lauren. We haven’t got time.’

  She shook her head. ‘But that’s the point, isn’t it? The clock isn’t ticking for you. You’ll still be spraying tiddlers round all over the place when you’re eighty.’

  Not on present showing, he thought. ‘What I think about going for help is that it’s going to focus even more attention on the problem, and I think that’s the trouble, you see. We’ve become… obsessed.’

  ‘You mean I have.’

  ‘All right, yes, you. I’m sick of being a sperm bank. I’m sick of feeling I don’t count. What’s happened to the, to the… relationship, for God’s sake?’ He leant towards her. ‘When we got married, you didn’t even want kids. It was… you and me.’

  An incomprehensible announcement blared out of the loudspeaker above their heads. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said.

  ‘Ring me tonight.’

  She pushed a strand of pale-blonde hair behind her ear. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing tonight.’

  They walked across the bridge in silence. On the platform he asked, ‘Are you coming home next weekend?’

  ‘No, I’m going to my parents. I told you, don’t you remember?’

  After that they stood in silence, not looking at each other, until the train came in.

  Back home, Tom pulled the duvet up over the creased sheet, the scene of his most recent failure, the one they couldn’t ignore. He wished he had the energy to change the sheets, because he knew that tonight, when he got into bed, they’d smell of Lauren’s scent, and he was beginning to dislike it. It seemed to him cloying, over-sensuous, now, though he’d loved it once, when he still loved her. And then he was horror struck, standing there, staring into the mirror, a pillow in his hands, because he’d trapped himself into using the past tense.

  He did love her. They were in trouble, yes, but he was never sure how much trouble. Only nine months ago – telling themselves that a delay in conceiving was only to be expected at her age – they’d been happy. There were many times when that happiness still flickered over the surface of their present lives, and it seemed possible to grasp it again. Not just possible – easy. And yet they never quite managed it.

  He made coffee and took it up to his study. He’d chosen to work in one of the attic rooms on the top floor because he loved the view of the river, though most mornings he had to wipe a hole in the condensation on the glass before he could see it. Not much of a view today. The sea fret had lasted all weekend, and the arch of the bridge rose out of the mist, disconnected from road and river, as apparently functionless as Stonehenge.

  To work. His current task was to read through the fictionalized case histories he’d used in the book to check that they were sufficiently different from the originals to protect children’s identities. Most of them he hadn’t seen for months, though their voices were preserved on tape.

  Michelle. Ten years old. Included in the research cohort – she was the only girl – because she’d bitten off the nose of her foster mother’s natural daughter.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ Tom had asked, the first time they met.

  ‘’Cos she was slagging off me mam.’

  A bold, self-confident expression, the abused child’s air of knowing exactly what was what and how much you had to pay for it. He was sure she’d have rated her chances of getting him to take his trousers off, right there on the floor of the consulting room, very high indeed. Nothing a man was capable of would have surprised Michelle, except restraint.

  She’d used the word justice’ seven times in the course of their first interview, and that intrigued him. Her teachers rated her ability as average, at best. By no stretch of the imagination was Michelle an ‘academic’ child, and yet she kept returning to this abstract concept.

  ‘He was an animal,’ she said, referring to her mother’s boyfriend, who’d raped her when she was eight. ‘It wasn’t just me, he had a go at me nanna ‘n’ all – and the dog.’

  ‘Did it bite him?’ Tom asked.

  She looked at him suspiciously, afraid he might be laughing at her. ‘No, but I did. And then me mam went into hospital, and she hadn’t to have any drink, with her liver ‘n’ all that, and he poured vodka into the orange juice. I watched him do it. He could’ve killed her. He used to come in drunk and beat her up, and I used to wait for him in the kitchen with the lights out, leave the back window open, and as soon as he got his fingers on the sill I’d jump up and slam it down. It was great, that.’ Her smile faded. ‘Only then I got took into care.’

  ‘Do you remember why you were taken into care?’

  Michelle lowered her head.

  ‘Do you know why?’

  ‘ ‘Cos me mam brayed us.’

  ‘Why did she do that?’

  ‘ ‘Cos she didn’t believe us.’

  ‘About him raping you?’

  ‘Yeah, she says I was making it up, but I wasn’t.’

  ‘No, I know you weren’t.’

  ‘She still won’t have it, you know. Sun rises and sets out of his bloody arsehole. It’s not fair.’

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘Him. Two bloody years, time off for good behaviour, bounces back out like a frigging yo-yo. I lost me mam, me baby brother – I used to put him to bed every night, but he’s only two, he won’t remember – and the poor bloody dog got put down. She says she couldn’t stand to see it after what I’d said. Now where’s the justice in that?’

  ‘Didn’t she believe your nanna?’

  ‘Nah, she just says women her age get fancying.’

  Tom needed Michelle for the discussion on moral thinking in children with conduct disorder. It was too easily assumed that such children simply lacked conscience. Of course, a minority did. Preserved on tape, somewhere in the box, was Jason Hargreave saying, in his piping treble, ‘Conscience is a little man inside your head that tells you not to do things. Only I haven’t got one.’ Four people ha
d died in the fire Jason started, and he had shown not a hint of remorse. But Jason wasn’t typical. Michelle, in everything but gender, was. Many of the children, and most of the adolescents he talked to, were preoccupied – no, obsessed – with issues of loyalty, betrayal, justice, rights (theirs), courage, cowardice, reputation, shame. Theirs was a warrior morality, primitive and exacting. Nothing much in common with the values of mainstream society, but then they came from places that had been pushed to the edge: sink housing estates, urban ghettos. The young men were unemployed, sexually active, took little responsibility for their children (though their mothers often did), and cared more for the reputation of being ‘hard’ than for anything else. They were warriors. The little boys in the research project knew that this was the future, and sensibly prepared for it. School was irrelevant – and most of them didn’t go.

  Tom worked for three hours, clicked Print, then set off to the hospital where he’d arranged to meet Roddy Taylor for lunch. Roddy was the director of the eighteen-bed, medium-secure unit that currently housed Michelle.

  Roddy was larger than life, irrepressible, Henry the Eighth in a pinstripe suit, and running late, as usual. He looked up as Tom entered the room.

  ‘One more call, and I’m with you.’

  Tom put the sheaf of papers on his desk, and sat down.

  ‘Is that moral perception?’ Roddy asked, while waiting to be connected.

  ‘Yes –’

  Roddy held his hand up, listening intently. ‘All right, then, send him in.’ More listening. ‘Yes, yes. Yes, I know.’ He put the phone down. ‘Do you know, I honestly believe they think hospital beds breed like rabbits. Anyway –’

  ‘This still isn’t the final draft, but it’s readable, I think. There’s three of yours in there. Michelle, Jason, Brian.’

  They talked about the cases for a while, then Roddy stood up and lifted his jacket off the back of the chair. ‘C’mon, let’s walk, shall we? I could do with a breath of fresh air.’

  The pub was five minutes away, across a public square where young people lay sunbathing on the grass. A girl, with slim, brown, muscular arms and cropped, bleached-blonde hair, lay close to the path. ‘Will you look at the tits on that?’ Roddy muttered, as they walked past, hardly bothering to disguise his lust. With his huge, flapping bags of trousers, he looked much older than his forty years. He had three children now, and he spent most of his working life with younger people. But at least he knew where he was in the generations. One of Tom’s fears was that people who remain childless never really grow up. When he thought of the childless marriages he knew, it seemed to him that, in almost every instance, one of the partners had become the child. Somewhere, in the distance, was a vision of total selfishness, that dreadful, terminal boyishness of men who can’t stop thinking of themselves as young.

  Tom had watched Lauren, tears streaming down her face, wrapping a christening present for Toby, Roddy and Angela’s youngest child. ‘Don’t let’s go, Lauren,’ he’d said. ‘We don’t have to.’ ‘Yes, we do,’ she’d said, and of course she was right. All their friends had children now. Either they adjusted to the fact and tried to fit in, or they spent their lives, isolated, in a child-free zone. He made a conscious effort to shake off his depression. A drink would help.

  They bought pints of lager and sat outside under the trees. On impulse, Tom told Roddy how disappointed they were that Lauren still wasn’t pregnant. Roddy listened, nodded, sympathized, coughed, said, ‘Yes, well, early days,’ and seemed generally uneasy. Tom wondered why. Roddy was, after all, accustomed to conducting intimate conversations, but perhaps he didn’t do it with friends? Then, suddenly, though nothing had been said, Tom knew why. Lauren must have told Angela he was impotent, and sometime later, in the aftermath perhaps of one of their unaesthetic but productive couplings, Angela had told Roddy.

  After that, all he wanted to do was get away. He felt betrayed. Inevitably, though he told himself he had no right to blame Lauren. Why shouldn’t she turn to her best friend for comfort? She got little enough from him. And he flayed himself, imagining Roddy and Angela giggling about it, knowing all the time they wouldn’t have done, that they’d have been as sympathetic as he and Lauren would have been, if the roles had been reversed. But he knew, also, that next morning Roddy would have stood in the bathroom, contemplating his todger – must be years since he’d seen it without the aid of a mirror – feeling an unacknowledged flicker of amusement. So old Tom can’t get it up? he would have thought. No, not even thought – would have permitted the thought into his mind only as a possible reaction, the hypothetical response of somebody altogether cruder and less compassionate than he was himself. Well, well, fancy that. And then he’d have toddled down to breakfast, whistling between his teeth in that irritating way of his, feeling more of a man because of it.

  He had no right to blame Lauren for talking about their sexual difficulties, but he did. Somewhere in the back of his mind, as he and Roddy parted, was the picture of a rope, fraying, one strand after another coming apart.

  FOUR

  That evening, Tom read the report he’d written after his visit to the remand centre to see Danny.

  A dry, formal account of his assessment of the child.

  Nothing in it about arriving early. Nothing about the hot sunshine, or the prickly sweat on the backs of his thighs, or the photographs, sliding out of a file on the back seat. Nothing about the red-hot pokers standing as witnesses to it all, eyeless and mute.

  Nothing, either, about the shock of seeing Danny come into the room. He knew he was a child, and yet he was unprepared for the sight of the small boy walking along the corridor and into the room beside the warder. Because of his age, Danny had been asked whether he wanted somebody else to be present: his social worker, perhaps, or one of the warders, but he’d said no, and so, after the warder withdrew and closed the door behind him, they faced each other alone.

  Danny sat sideways in his chair, holding on to the radiator behind him, an odd thing to do, Tom thought, in the heat, until he touched it himself and realized it was the coldest object in the room. The windows were high, made of frosted glass. Nobody could see either out or in. But when Tom suggested opening one of them, Danny, speaking for the first time, whispered, ‘No. Somebody might hear.’

  He took his hands off the radiator and covered his ears, pressing in and out. Tom’s voice would be reaching him, if at all, as a muffled roar, masked by the whispering of his own blood. He screens out sounds, Tom thought. So sounds are important to him – voices are important. He made a conscious effort to speak gently, to ask simple questions. What did he prefer to be called? Did he like Daniel, or Danny, or Dan?

  ‘Danny.’

  ‘Have you got any pets, Danny?’

  ‘A dog.’

  ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘Duke.’

  ‘What sort of dog is it?’

  ‘A bull mastiff.’

  ‘When you lived at home did you take him for walks?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Why not?’

  A shrug. ‘Just didn’t.’

  The first ten minutes were spent like this.‘Have you got your own room?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘What can you see out of the window?’

  ‘A wall.’

  ‘What sort of things do you do?’

  A shrug.

  ‘Do you have lessons?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With the other boys?’

  ‘No, just me.’

  ‘What’s that like?’

  ‘Hard.’

  ‘Why’s it hard?’

  ‘I’ve got to answer all the questions.’

  Danny wasn’t deceived. He knew the hard questions were coming, and that here too there would be nobody else to answer them.

  ‘What do you do after lessons?’

  ‘Watch telly.’

  ‘What’s your favourite
programme?’

  ‘Football.’

  ‘Do you go outside?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘No, with a warder.’

  ‘Do you play with the other boys?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’re too big. They wouldn’t want to play with me.’

  ‘Would you like to play with them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  At last, eye contact. A snarl of impatience. ‘Because they’d kick me head in.’

  ‘Why would they do that?’

  Danny opened his mouth to tell Tom exactly why, then clamped it shut. He shrugged again, this time no more than a twitch of the shoulders. ‘Because.’

  He was a child. He lived in the present, and the present was dominated by his fear of the big boys. He was afraid that, one day, the warders would leave his door unlocked, and then the big boys would get him.

  ‘But the warders won’t do that, will they?’

  ‘How do you know? They might.’

  ‘They won’t, Danny.’

  He looked away, unconvinced.

  ‘Is there anything else worrying you?’

  He muttered something that Tom had to ask him to repeat.

  ‘The trial.’

  ‘What about the trial?’

  ‘Everybody looking at me.’

  ‘In the dock? But there’ll be somebody with you. You won’t be on your own.’

  ‘Yes, I will.’

  Those words, the fact that Danny didn’t need to amplify them, and knew he didn’t, marked a turning point. He took his hands away from his ears, leant forward, began to speak more freely. That day he talked endlessly about his father, how good he was at building things, how they used to go rabbiting together.

  ‘But he doesn’t live with you any more, does he?’

  ‘No.’