by Pat Barker
But they persevered. They got the photograph album out as soon as they could bear to, and laughed and cried over old memories, guiding themselves gently past the last photographs of him in the chair, reminiscing about family holidays, the dogs they’d kept when Tom was a child.
A year after his father’s death she still, occasionally, laid the table for two.
On the first anniversary she went to the local RSPCA refuge and adopted Tyger, a three-year-old tabby whose previous owner had died. The owner’s other four cats had been rehomed without difficulty, but Tyger grieved ceaselessly, irreconcilably, turning his back – literally – on anybody who tried to make friends. In the end he’d been placed in a carer’s home, where he took up residence inside a doll’s house, glaring through its latticed windows, coming out only to eat and use his tray. ‘That’s the one,’ his mother said. ‘Come on, Tyger. Let’s go and be miserable together.’ Stage four of grieving: the transference of libido to another object, person or activity. Tom’s mother made more rapid progress with this than Tyger, who, for the first three months, retreated behind the sofa, and spat.
The natural love object, the one that would have contributed enormously to her recovery, was a grandchild, but that he was, rather conspicuously, failing to supply. ‘How’s Lauren?’ she asked.
‘Fine. Fine. She seems to be enjoying herself.’
‘Coming home this weekend?’
‘No, she’s going to see her parents. It’s their fortieth wedding anniversary soon, so they’re all planning the party.’
‘You should go with her, Tom.’
‘I’m not invited.’
‘Oh.’ She swished her drink round the bottom of the glass, not looking at him. ‘It’s not good, is it?’
‘Everybody has bad patches, Mum.’
She nodded her acceptance. ‘Come on, let’s eat.’
The meal passed in gentle, inconsequential chat. Jeff Bridges, his best friend from primary-school days, was getting a divorce. ‘He was always trouble, that one,’ Tom’s mother said, rather harshly he thought. Marriage wasn’t easy, and Jeff had embarked on it far too young. Home from university for the first long vacation, he’d met Jeff pushing his eldest daughter in her pram. Tom had felt like a schoolboy, still, in comparison with Jeff, though he’d had sense enough not to envy him.
Just as they were finishing lunch, a sudden squall of rain blew up. Shadows of black clouds, chasing each other up the hill, dowsed the gorse. Tom dashed out to lower the parasol, wrestling with its damp folds, feeling drops of rain patter on to his back through the thin shirt. The slap of wet cloth against his face exhilarated him, and he went back into the house, glowing.
As soon as they finished their coffee, he said, ‘I think I should be getting back.’
They embraced on the doorstep, but his mother was the one who broke the embrace first. A scrupulously honourable woman, she would never, for a second, leech off her son’s life, or use him in any way as a substitute for his father. ‘Ring when you get back,’ was all she said.
Danny Miller had been at the back of his mind all day, and he wanted, before setting off home, to revisit a place he had played in as a child. It was only a few miles away, a slight detour off the main road. He pulled on to the grass verge, and set off to walk the rest of the way.
The path to the pond seemed less clear, less well trodden, than when he was a boy, and he and Jeff Bridges came here to play. The recent heavy rain had turned dips into quagmires. He edged past them, shuffling sideways along the steep verge, hawthorn twigs snagging on his shirt. Pushing down the green tunnel, he seemed to be going back into the past. He wouldn’t have been surprised to meet his ten-year-old self coming in the other direction, holding a jam jar, the murky water thick with tiddlers or tadpoles. Or spawn.
They’d been looking for spawn that day. He and Jeff had wanted to go off by themselves, but instead they’d been saddled with Neil, the four-year-old son of some friends of Jeff’s parents who’d turned up for the weekend and wanted to go for a drink in a pub that didn’t take children. ‘The boys can play together,’ Jeff’s father had said easily, ignoring Jeff’s muttered, ‘Da-ad, do we have to?’
They were told to stay in the garden. They did, for about twenty minutes, playing piggy in the middle. Neil had to be the piggy because he couldn’t throw the ball. They sent it high above his head, getting a sour pleasure from his increasing bewilderment as he ran to and fro. Then, bored, they decided on a quick visit to the pond, got their jam jars and set off, dragging Neil after them. He was a polite, solemn little boy, with dark-rimmed glasses and an anxious expression. Grown-ups thought Neil was cute, kids thought he came from another planet. He trotted along with his mouth open, breathing noisily through his nose because he’d been told not to breathe through his mouth, and Neil always did what he was told. ‘We’re going to get frog spawn, Neil,’Jeff said, in the spuriously excited, isn’t-this-fun tone of voice he’d heard used by adults (mainly adults who didn’t like children very much).
Wellies, that day. It wasn’t raining, but in spring all the paths were deep in mud. Once they’d got to the pond they saw that the frog spawn – newly laid, standing proud above the water – was five or six feet away from the bank. Too deep for wellies, so they pulled them off and stood on the edge of the pond, barefoot, cold goose shit oozing up between their toes. Neil prattled away, poking at the sandy bank with a stick, ignored by both of them.
The pond was on a farmer’s land, though not visible from the farmhouse. You weren’t supposed to play there, because the pond wasn’t a proper pond at all, but a flooded well. Out there, in the clear centre, where no weeds grew, there was a drop of a hundred feet.
Thirty years later, standing on the edge of the same pond, Tom wondered if that were true. It sounded like the kind of story adults might tell to frighten the children away, but he couldn’t be sure. They’d waded out up to their waists once, daring each other to go further, but then Jeff stubbed his toe on a stone, and, panicking, they’d splashed back into the shallows. Behind the fringe of willow trees on the far bank was a road, quiet, since the building of the bypass five years ago, but then, busy, cars, buses and lorries roaring past.
No geese today. Then, they’d honked and hissed and swayed off, to stand at a slight distance, malevolent and watchful, as Tom started to wade into the pond. His feet raised clouds of fine mud. Frogs kicked away into the weeds, tiny males clinging to the fat females, even in the emergency of this invasion unable to let go. They dived into the mud and reappeared further out, croaking mournfully, their eyes like blackcurrants breaking the surface.
New spawn, the jelly still firm with tadpoles like full stops. Old spawn, slack jelly, tadpoles like commas. Tom lowered the jam jar beneath the surface, easing mounds of silvery slobber over the rim. Some of it was too firm to flow; he had to pull it apart to get it in. When he’d got enough, he turned round and saw Jeff, scooping spawn into his own jar, and behind him, wobbling precariously, still wearing his wellies, Neil.
It started as a joke. A cruel joke, yes, but still a joke. Whose idea was it to put frog spawn into Neil’s wellies? He couldn’t remember. Jeff’s, he thought, but then he needed to think that.
Neil screamed as the heavy jelly slopped over the tops of his boots and filled them to the brim, pressing in on his bare legs. He wasn’t hurt, he just couldn’t bear the cold slime on his skin. He screamed and screamed, jumped up and down, fell over, got up again, soaked, face smeared with snot, piss coursing down his legs. There was no way out. The more he screamed, the more they panicked. They couldn’t take him home like this, and they couldn’t clean him up. Jeff scrambled on to the bank, Tom followed, but Neil couldn’t move. They shouted at him to get out, but when he tried to move the spawn shifted and squelched inside his wellies, and he screamed again.
Jeff threw the first stone. Tom was sure about that. Almost sure. Little stones, pebbles, plopping into the water around the screaming child, who backed further out towards the
centre of the pond. Why did they do it? Because they were frightened, because they shouldn’t have been there at all, because they knew they were going to get into trouble, because they hated him, because he was a problem they couldn’t solve, because neither could be the first to back down. Bigger clods of earth landed in the pond, not too close, they weren’t trying to hit him yet. The frogs submerged and did not reappear. The geese retreated, honking and swaying, as they made their way up the hill.
And then a bus came past. A man, glancing up from his paper, peered through the window, hardly able to credit what he saw, and immediately jumped up and rang the bell. The driver, who could have decided to be awkward, stopped the bus, and minutes later the man – Tom never knew his name – careered down the bank, waded into the pond up to his knees, and gathered Neil into his arms. He carried him all the way home, having got the address out of a subdued and frightened Jeff. They followed him, stomping along behind, too shocked to speak, leaving the jam jars marooned in muddy footprints by the side of the pond.
Three children were saved that day. A man glances up from his newspaper, sees what’s going on, acts on what he sees. Accident. A more interesting news story, a thicker coat of dirt on the bus window, a disinclination to intervene, and it might have ended differently.
In tragedy, perhaps. It might have. He didn’t know. It was his good fortune not to know.
Had he known at the time that what he was doing was wrong? Yes, undoubtedly. His parents had been easy, tolerant, in many ways, but in all essential matters the moral teaching had been firm and clear. Cruelty to animals, deliberate unkindness, bullying smaller children: these were major crimes. What interested him was how little sense of responsibility he felt now. If somebody had asked him about that afternoon, he’d have said something like, ‘Kids can be very cruel.’ Not, ‘I was very cruel.’ ‘Kids can be very cruel.’ He knew he’d done it, he remembered it clearly, he’d known then, and accepted now, that it was wrong, but the sense of moral responsibility was missing. In spite of the connecting thread of memory, the person who’d done that was not sufficiently like his present self for him to feel guilt.
It was something to be borne in mind, he thought, strolling back to his car, in talking to Danny.
SIX
He was watching the Channel 4 news when the doorbell rang. Looking through the peephole, he saw Danny, trapped in the distorting glass, like a fish in a bowl. ‘Hello, you’re early,’ Tom said, holding the door open.
Danny stepped across the threshold, his shadow, thrown by the porch light, leaping ahead of him as if it already knew the way. ‘I didn’t know how long it would take.’
‘Never mind. Come in.’
Tom took Danny’s coat and hung it up.
‘Can I get you a drink?’
‘What are you having?’
‘Whisky.’
‘That’ll do fine.’
Tom was remembering the other room, the one in which they’d first met. The shock of seeing the small boy walk in beside the warder. Now he was experiencing a similar shock. Danny’s height, the depth of his voice, the hunched power of his shoulders, the stillness – all these perfectly ordinary characteristics seemed bizarre, so powerfully did Tom sense the presence of that child, immured inside the man.
What was back, without effort, without his wanting it even, was the intimacy of that first meeting.
‘Well, how have you been?’ he asked, settling into an armchair.
‘Since I left hospital? Tired. I went to bed and slept for ten hours. Woke up, didn’t know where I was.’
Not an easy situation, this, Tom thought. You could hardly pretend it was a social call, and yet it wasn’t a consultation either. He was going to have to feel his way forward. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’
A shrug, bringing memories of their first meeting flooding back. ‘Don’t mind.’
‘Quite a decision at your age. How old are you?’ ‘
You know how old I am.’ A pause. ‘Twenty-three.’
‘So what went wrong? After you came out?’
A faint smile. ‘I met a girl. I was living with a Quaker couple at the time, and they’re very nice but also quite elderly and a bit strait-laced, and I decided I’d rather live with the girl. It wasn’t a great big thing.’ He dropped his voice into the bass register. ‘We are now committing ourselves to each other. We were students, students live together. But Mike – the probation officer I had then – told me I had to tell her, and if I didn’t tell her, he’d tell her. So of course I broke it off. I didn’t dare risk it.’
‘Did she mean a lot to you?’
Danny pursed his lips. ‘Dunno. She was nice. Is nice. I don’t suppose it was… You know, some of it was just me proving I could do it with a girl. I mean the bulk of my experience… Uh, the bulk, he says. 99.9 per cent of my experience has been the other sort.’ A gulp of whisky. ‘Not all of it voluntary. It’s the one thing –’
‘No, go on.’
‘I was going to say it’s the one thing I’m bitter about, but then I’ve got no right to be bitter about anything. Have I?’
In the courtroom, Tom had seen Danny smile at his social worker, and thought, Don’t smile. Don’t laugh, don’t look pleased or excited, don’t fidget, don’t scratch your bum, don’t pick your nose, or wriggle, or do any of the things kids do all the time. Not now, not ever. ‘If that’s what you feel…’
‘Yeah, well, okay, I feel bitter. I think they should just come right out with it, you know? “I sentence you to be raped. By some big ugly bastard who’s built like a brick shithouse, uses his arm as a pincushion, and isn’t wearing a condom.”’
‘You don’t mean, you’re –’
‘Oh no. Got lucky there. I’m just naturally slim.’
Danny crossed his legs at the ankle, a conscious display that made Tom want to smile. Wasted on me, son, he thought. Though he could see it wouldn’t be wasted on everybody.
Rape was too intimate a revelation for the first ten minutes of a meeting. Either Danny had no sense of normal social distance and pacing (and where would Danny have acquired that?) or he too had a sense of falling through a trapdoor in the present, into the closeness of their first meeting. Tom kept using words like ‘intimacy’ and ‘closeness’ to describe the atmosphere of that meeting, but there’d also been massive antagonism. As there was now. And yet Danny had trusted him then, he thought, looking into the adult Danny’s amused and trustless eyes. ‘Anyway, the relationship broke up?’ he said.
‘Yes. And then I was told I couldn’t teach.’
‘Why not?’
‘Not allowed to work with children. Actually, not allowed to work with people.’
Tom said gently, ‘But you can see the point, can’t you? I mean if you were a parent and you found out your child’s teacher had been convicted of murder, how would you feel?’
‘I hope I’d think it was a long time ago.’
‘Would you?’
A silent struggle. ‘No, probably not. But it threw me, you see, because I’m just starting the third year –[ did three years of an Open University degree, inside, when I was in prison, and you can transfer the credits – and I thought teaching was what I’m going to do, and now I don’t know what I’m going to do. And, you know, the whole thing pisses me off, because last year, I was released in November and I couldn’t get a job, so I decided I’d be a gardener, only there wasn’t any work so I thought I’d be a tree surgeon. I was turning up at old people’s houses with a chainsaw, asking them if there was anything they wanted lopping off. Nobody worried about that.’
‘Did you tell – Mike, was it? The probation officer?
– about the chainsaw?’
‘No.’
‘Might be why he wasn’t worried.’
Danny smiled. ‘The point is, he had no need to be.’
‘But they have to be ultra-careful, don’t they? And so do you. One silly little incident, and you’re back inside.’
‘No, it’s not
that. You see the real question is: can people change?’ Danny was leaning forward, meeting Tom’s gaze with an almost uncomfortable intensity. ‘And all sorts of people whose jobs actually depend on a belief that people can change, social workers, probation officers, clinical psychologists’ – he smiled – ‘psychiatrists, don’t really believe it at all.’
‘Well, yes – because those are precisely the jobs that furnish people with a good deal of evidence that it doesn’t happen.’
‘Do you believe it?’
Tom leant back, massaging the skin of his forehead, his face partially screened from Danny’s gaze. ‘It would be very easy for me to say yes, but I suspect in the sense you mean, I… don’t. Obviously, if you take a particular individual and change his environment, completely, for a long time, he’s going to learn new tricks. He’s got to, the old tricks don’t work any more, and he’s an organism that’s programmed to survive. If he’s capable of learning at all, he’ll learn. My God, he will. But I don’t think the responses are genuinely new, I think they were there all along. Lying dormant. Because they weren’t needed.’
‘So the logic is, if you put this “particular individual” back into the old situation, with all the old pressures, he’ll revert to the old responses.’
‘The old situation might not still be there.’
‘But if it was? He’d revert?’
‘Not necessarily. There’s always the hope that some of the new tricks might carry over.’