Border Crossing

by Pat Barker

‘When did he leave? I mean, how long ago?’

  ‘A year and…’ He counted. ‘Four months.’

  ‘How did you feel about that?’

  Nothing, not even a shrug. Danny didn’t do feelings.

  Over the next two hours, as Tom probed his emotional and moral maturity, his mental state, his fitness to stand trial in an adult court, Danny came out with some startling opinions. Startling in a child.

  ‘Is it wrong to kill somebody?’

  ‘Not always.’

  ‘When is it all right?’

  ‘If you’re a soldier.’

  ‘But if you’re not a soldier, is it wrong?’

  Danny shrugged. ‘Thousands of people get killed all the time, all over the world. You know, people look at the telly, and they say, “Oh, isn’t that awful?” But they don’t mean it.’

  ‘So people getting killed doesn’t matter any more?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘What about Mrs Parks? Lizzie. Do you think it matters that she was killed?’

  ‘I didn’t kill her.’

  ‘That’s not what I asked.’

  Danny took so long to answer that Tom began to think he never would. ‘Yes,’ he said, at last.

  ‘A lot?’

  ‘She was old.’

  ‘So not a lot?’

  Danny shook his head.

  ‘I want to get this clear, Danny. You’re saying it does matter that she’s dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But not very much, because she was old?’

  ‘She’d had her life.’

  For the first time he seemed to be quoting somebody else, though nobody would have said that to him about Lizzie. Tom sat back and took a moment to think. Immediately, Danny also sat back in his chair, a precise, almost synchronous mirroring of Tom’s movement. Casually, Tom changed position again, this time resting his hands on the arms of his chair. Danny did the same. This was deliberate mimicry, not the unconscious echoing of the other person’s posture that occurs in a conversation that’s going well.

  ‘You know when you used to go rabbiting with your dad. Did you ever kill a rabbit?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think it’s different, killing a rabbit and killing a person?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How is it different?’

  Danny looked Tom full in the face. ‘Rabbits run faster.’

  He was an arrogant little bastard. ‘But do you think people surfer more?’ Silence. ‘Somebody who was suffocated might suffer quite a bit.’ Silence. ‘Wouldn’t they?’ She, he wanted to say.

  ‘Yes, but then they’d be dead.’

  ‘So it wouldn’t matter any more?’

  ‘No, they’d be dead:

  ‘When people, or animals, die, do they stay dead?’

  Danny looked at him as if he’d gone mad.’ ‘Course they do. You wring a chicken’s neck, you don’t expect to find it running round the yard next morning, do you?’

  Tom glanced down at his fingernails. ‘So Lizzie can’t come back?’

  The question distressed Danny so much that for a while Tom thought he might have to suspend the interview. He held Danny’s wrists, saying, ‘C’mon, breathe. It’s all right, Danny. Breathe.’ At last, when he was relatively calm, Tom said, ‘You can tell me, you know.’

  Danny whispered, ‘She does come back.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Night-time.’

  ‘You mean you dream about her?’

  ‘No, she’s there.’

  ‘Is this just after you’ve woken up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you do about it?’

  ‘There’s nothing to do. I just look at her.’

  ‘Do you try to stay awake?’

  Yes, he made himself say the twelve times table backwards, and he put toy soldiers round his bed. ‘I pretend they’re my dad.’

  ‘Do you ever see her during the day?’

  ‘Yes.’ A second later, ‘But not the same.’

  ‘What’s it like during the day?’

  ‘It sort of hits you. Like –’ He brought both hands up to his face, as if he were going to hit himself in the eyes.

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘Her.’

  ‘What exactly?’

  ‘Her. At the bottom of the stairs.’

  Danny was pleading not guilty, so, in the course of the assessment, Tom could ask no questions about the murder. But Danny admitted being in Lizzie’s house, shortly after the murder. His story was that he’d gone to see Lizzie because she’d told him one of her cats had had kittens and he wanted to see them. The backdoor was open, he thought she must have left it open for him, and so he’d gone in and found her lying dead at the foot of the stairs, the cushion that had been used to kill her lying over her face. He touched her – she was still warm – and lifted the cushion off her face, but put it back again immediately because she looked so horrible. And then he heard footsteps upstairs, realized the murderer must still be in the house, and ran for his life. He ran all the way home, and hid in the barn. He didn’t tell anybody because he was afraid the man would come and kill him if he did.

  None of this was true. The forensic evidence for Danny’s guilt was overwhelming, but he was a good liar.

  ‘So the hairs on your jumper were Lizzie’s?’

  ‘They were white. I haven’t suddenly turned into an old man, have I?’

  Tom waited, then said, ‘Must feel a bit like it, sometimes.’

  Danny said nothing. Just wrapped his arms round himself, and hugged his narrow chest.

  There were things Danny wouldn’t talk about. He wouldn’t talk at all about his mother. At one point, Tom tried using dolls to get him to speak more freely, but Danny was so uncomfortable playing with them that the attempt had to be abandoned. He had no more idea at the end of the interview than he’d had at the beginning what forces in Danny’s background could have led him to commit such a crime.

  On the other hand, a clear picture of Danny’s present mental state did emerge. He was sleeping badly, he had nightmares, he suffered flashbacks, he couldn’t concentrate, he felt numb, he complained that everything around him seemed unreal. But none of these symptoms was any guide to his state of mind at the time of the killing.

  Towards the end of the three hours, Tom asked Danny about his fire-setting. Why did he light fires?

  ‘For a laugh. Everybody does it.’

  ‘Everybody sets fire to their bedroom?’

  Silence. Tom got a box of matches out of his pocket and pushed them across the table to Danny, who tucked his hands more firmly into his armpits.

  ‘Go on,’ Tom said, ‘light one.’

  Slowly Danny reached for the box, his hand creeping across the table like a small animal. A rasp and flare as he struck the match. A doubled reflection of the flame appeared in his eyes, whose pupils had not contracted, as one would have expected, but grown large, as if starved of light.

  ‘Blow it out when you’re ready.’

  Danny swallowed. The flame licked the wood.

  ‘Danny…’

  He didn’t move. Tom leant forward and blew. An acrid smell, a coil of blue smoke hanging in the air like a question mark.

  ‘Must have hurt.’

  Danny shook his head.

  ‘Let’s see.’

  Slowly, the small fist uncurled, revealing fingertips smooth and shiny where the skin had burnt. Danny was staring at him, and Tom had no idea whether this was a deliberate act of defiance, or whether he loved fire so much that he’d been incapable of blowing the match out.

  When Tom judged Danny had had enough, he summoned the warder. Danny looked startled, as if the end of the interview came as an unpleasant shock. Tom held out his hand, as he always did after the opening session with a child, but, instead of shaking hands, Danny threw himself into Tom’s arms. For a moment, Tom didn’t move, but it wasn’t in him to reject such a gesture from a child in trouble, and he returned the hug. ‘C’mon, Da
nny. Don’t cry, it’ll be all right.’ Though he knew it wouldn’t, and Danny had more reason than most to cry.

  ‘By heck,’ the warder said, as they were walking down the corridor together. ‘You must have a strong stomach.’ Seeing Tom’s expression change, he added defensively, ‘Well, he is a horror, isn’t he?’

  It was so common for loving mothers to describe their children as ‘little horrors’ that it was startling to hear the word used in that precise, almost archaic sense. As soon as he got home, Tom looked it up.

  In pencil, in the margin of his notes, he’d jotted the definition down:

  I (A painful feeling of) intense loathing or fear; a terrified and revolted shuddering; a strong aversion or an intense dislike (of); colloq. dismay (at) 2 The quality of exciting intense loathing and fear; a person who or thing which excites such feelings; colloq. a mischievous person, esp. a child.

  In Tom’s view there was no point in thinking about Danny, or any other child, in such terms. His job was simply to decide on the degree of Danny’s mental and moral maturity. There were huge gaps in his information – he had no clear picture of Danny’s family, for example – but he thought he had enough to answer the main questions. Could Danny distinguish between fantasy and reality? Did he understand that killing was wrong? Did he understand that death is a permanent state? Was he, in short, capable of standing trial, on a charge of murder, in an adult court? And to all these questions Tom had answered, Yes. Not without doubt, not without qualification, not without many hours of soul searching, but, in the end, Yes.

  FIVE

  Tom went to bed late, expecting a bad night, but in fact he fell into a deep sleep almost immediately. Towards dawn he woke, lay for a few moments, dazed, in the half-light, then drifted off again, and dreamt about his father. He was in a crowded pub, edging between the tables with pint glasses in his hand, when he looked down and saw broad shoulders in a herringbone tweed jacket, the back of a curly, grizzled head. ‘Dad?’ he said. The man looked up. It was his father, though with dream logic he had to look at the missing tip of the middle finger on his right hand before he could be sure.

  The dream changed. Now they were walking down a street with a high wall on their left. The joy and relief of being able to talk to him again. Then something started to go wrong. ‘I have to go now,’ Dad said. ‘My rabbit’s gone wonky.’ And he shrank, not slowly, but catastrophically, like a balloon when the air’s let out, and became a bit of rag, a scrap of paper, something flying above Tom’s head, over the wall and out of sight. Tom grabbed the top of the wall and scrabbled up. He was looking into an old churchyard, headstones almost hidden by tall grass, and a rabbit running between the graves. A voice said, ‘That’s what a great love comes to – a rabbit running between graves.’

  Hearing the voice, Tom realized he was awake, though it took several more minutes for him to realize that the voice was part of the dream. It had moved him deeply. The joy of being with his father, and the sadness of losing him again, remained with him and coloured the day.

  ‘When are you coming home?’ his mother had asked, though the bungalow she lived in now had never been his home. Not that half-mythical place where dead leaves under a rhododendron bush brought back the time when he was two years old, small enough to crawl under the bush and believe himself forgotten, while adult feet, his mother’s in sandals, his father’s in the cracked, brown shoes he wore for gardening, tramped to and fro, and adult voices, loud, artificial, asked, ‘Where’s Tom? Have you seen Tom? I can’t think where he’s got to, can you?’ And he’d giggled nervously, afraid he might really be lost, invisible, relieved when his father pounced on him, shouting through the shiny green leaves, ‘I’ve got him! Here he is!’

  They’d moved into the bungalow a year before his father’s death, when it became clear that the wheelchair he persisted in treating as a temporary inconvenience was going to be nothing of the kind. It was on the outskirts of a small country town, only five minutes’ drive from the motorway interchange. ‘We can be anywhere,’ his mother had said proudly, ‘in half an hour.’ Though she’d gone nowhere while his father was alive. The local shops, hurrying there and back, had been the limit of her range.

  He set off early. As he dropped down into the Vale of York, a thin mist began to drift across the road, clotting in the hollows, reducing him to a walking pace. Cows, white vapour draped around their horns, came to the fence and chewed as the car crawled past. Then, as quickly as it had come, the mist cleared, and the sun shone. It looked like being a hot day.

  He passed the pub where he and his father had gone for what turned out to be their last drink together, though they hadn’t walked, as in the dream: he’d pushed his father there, horrifically used to doing it by then. His father sat hunched forward, dissociating himself from the chair. He only consented to be seen in it at all because in this village he was relatively unknown. He, who in his irascible way had preached patience to patients for years, never got used to the effects of his stroke, never accepted the damage, always turned his face away, even from those closest to him, to hide the disfiguring sneer. He wouldn’t adjust, wouldn’t accept that the changes were permanent, and he was right there, though death, not recovery, returned the wheelchair to the garage. Where it still was. Not because of any sentimental attachment, but because nobody had yet summoned up the energy to give it away.

  He slowed and turned right into the drive, and Tyger, his mother’s cat, came slowly across the lawn to greet him, white-tipped tail held aloft, rubbing his face against Tom’s ankle almost before he was out of the car. ‘Hello, there,’ he said, bending down to rub the backs of Tyger’s ears.

  His mother must have been waiting for the car. He saw her, blurred and tenuous through frosted glass, before he had time to press the bell. Opening the door, she started to cry, then stopped herself. He kissed her, and felt the scrumpled tissue of her cheek too soft against his lips. He didn’t like the way her flesh was sagging, knew it was too fast, that she was losing weight, probably neglecting herself, but he didn’t know what to do about it, or how to raise the topic without appearing to nag.

  ‘How are you, Mum?’

  ‘Not so bad.’

  It was always ‘not so bad’. He fully expected to hear those words from inside her coffin. Because of the heat – the bungalow’s picture windows turned any warm day into a scorcher – she was wearing a short-sleeved white t-shirt, and he saw how the flesh on her arms hung loose from the bone. She was still only sixty-two, but some people wither quickly in the absence of physical love, and he knew instinctively how good his parents’ love-making had been. It was one of the reasons why, as a teenager, he’d felt different from other kids. They thought of their parents as ‘past it’ – he knew he hadn’t reached it. (Still hadn’t, for that matter, and time was running out.)

  ‘I thought we’d just have a salad,’ she was saying. ‘It’s a bit warm, isn’t it, for anything hot?’

  He poured her the first of the two sherries she allowed herself before lunch, and himself a strong gin and tonic. They took their glasses out to the patio. Tyger jumped on to the table, squeezing his golden eyes shut several times in token of friendship, before losing interest in the proceedings altogether and going to sleep.

  The garden stretched out, not so much in front of them, as above them, for Tom’s father, in the last year of his life, had supervised the building of raised flower beds, beds he could reach from the wheelchair he refused to admit was permanent. ‘It’ll be easier for your mother’s back,’ he’d told Tom unblushingly, though then she’d suffered no more than the usual slight creaks of middle age.

  Now her arthritis was so bad, his mother was saying, the raised beds were a godsend. She got up, face tense with what she always referred to as ‘discomfort’, and showed him, with the trowel that lay always ready to hand, how easy it was for her to turn the soil Then, heavily, back to the chair, his father’s evasion turned into reality, and Tom found himself wondering how deep loyalty ca
n go.

  It was mid September. The late roses were still at their best; her arms were scored with red scratches where the gloves didn’t reach. He knew she was dreading the winter, when there would be nothing, or little, to do, except on the afternoons she worked at the Community Centre.

  A year ago she’d been gearing herself up to face retirement. ‘You’ll keep busy,’ he’d said. ‘I bet six months after you retire you’ll be wondering how to fit everything in.’ He’d meant, You’re used to coping with loss. You’re good at it. Now he looked at her and wondered whether she was coping at all.

  On the way over he’d been wondering whether to tell her about the dream he’d had about his father, and had almost decided not to, but sitting there, looking at the garden his father had started to make, and not lived to complete, he did tell her. It was one of their rules that his father’s name should be frequently on their lips, not obsessively, but casually, naturally, as absent friends are mentioned. But when he came to the ludicrous conclusion: that’s what a great love comes to, a rabbit running between graves, he hadn’t the heart to repeat it.

  ‘What an extraordinary dream,’ she said when he’d finished, and then, with barely a pause, ‘Of course the rabbits are a problem.’

  Tom felt himself go cold, a light chill, as if a cloud had drifted over the sun, but then realized she’d gone back to talking about the garden. Rabbits, from the gorse-covered hills behind the bungalow, regularly ate her new plants. You saw their bright, round, shiny pellets in clusters all over the lawn.

  This October would be the second anniversary of his father’s death. Some textbooks describe grieving for more than six months as prolonged. They were well into injury time, though they’d grieved like professionals: brought the body home, kept the coffin open, visited him frequently, in the cold room, with the windows wide open and a single light burning by his head. They’d touched his hands, become familiar with the density of dead flesh, watched the minute changes of expression as the rigor mortis wore off. And yet none of this had been enough to make them accept the reality of his going. He had been, even in his final illness, too large a presence. She still heard the hiss of wheelchair tyres along the wet paths, his voice calling for her from another room, because he’d depended on her totally in that last illness, not merely for the physical needs of life, but for her presence, her touch, her voice, her smell. As the sexual bond loosened, it had been replaced by this other, maternal, bond, equally physical, so that for her there had been no release from the white heat of bodily closeness in which their lives had been lived. It was too great a gap to be filled.