by Pat Barker
‘But he might revert?’
‘Yes. There’s always that possibility.’
Danny crossed his arms and leant back in his chair. ‘You’re a cynical sod, really, aren’t you? Under all :hat compassion you don’t actually give a toss for inybody.’
‘Whereas you believe in redemption.’
Danny was so startled his nostrils flared. ‘Oooooh,’ he said, midway between a sigh and a groan. ‘I don’t know that I do. I’d like to.’ He paused. ‘Of course in your terms that would be a genuinely new response.’
‘Yes.’
A short silence. Danny said, ‘Sorry.’
‘What for?’
‘Calling you a cynical sod.’
‘That’s all right, you don’t have to be polite.’
He didn’t. This was now definitely not a social call.
‘Tell me about going back to prison.’
‘Nothing much to tell. It was… impulse, really. I just thought, Sod it, I can’t make it work. And in a curious sort of way, I did make prison work, I’d got a job in the library, I was doing a degree.’ His expression hardened. ‘And I could work with people. If somebody wanted to talk, they talked. They knew bloody well I wasn’t going to pass it on.’
‘So you had a role?’
‘Yeah, which is more than I’ve bloody well got out here. So I went back. Hitched most of the way, walked the last ten miles. And then I bumped into one of the warders, one of the better ones, and he said, “Come and have a cup of tea.” And I told him what I was doing and he said, “Don’t be daft, Danny, they’re not going to let you back in.” And that was the first time anybody had called me Danny for months, so that didn’t discourage me. Anyway I banged on the door and I’ve no doubt he’d rung ahead and warned them I was coming. I was put in the visitors’ waiting room. There was this girl there with a baby, visiting somebody, she thought I was visiting too. And then Martha came and got me. Stupid.’
‘It was understandable.’
‘Gerraway, man. It was pathetic’
A sudden incursion of a Geordie accent. Why? ‘How long ago was that?’
‘Nine days.’
‘Is that what made you so depressed?’
‘No, I’d been feeling down for months. It’s always bad in the vacations when everybody else goes home.’
‘Can’t you go home?’
‘My mother’s dead.’
‘Oh, I am sorry.’ Tom remembered her clearly, a woman with mousy fair hair, wearing a blue cardigan that matched the faded blue of her eyes. In the course of the trial, her eyes seemed to become paler, as if tears could dilute the colour. She’d wept, quietly, persistently, into an embroidered handkerchief, the sort almost nobody carried any more, and Tom had been conscious of mounting irritation as the furtive sniffling went on and on. You’d have thought she was the victim. Danny looked round at her continually, more worried about her, it seemed, than he was about himself. And even that had counted against him, making him seem mature beyond his years. ‘When did it happen?’
‘Two years ago. Of course I was still inside. They took me to see her in the hospital, only they wouldn’t rake the handcuffs off, so she had all the shame of other people, nurses, seeing me like that. And we couldn’t talk, with the warder there. And then she got a lot worse, and I asked if I could go to see her again, and the governor hummed and hawed and… finally said yes. And I stood to attention, and said, “Thank you, sir.” I should’ve ripped his fucking liver out.’
Tom let a silence open up. Then he said, ‘I hope you’re careful who you say that to.’
A direct gaze. ‘I am. At the funeral I was in handcuffs again – of course. When I bent down to throw earth on the coffin, I had to kind of coordinate it with the warder, like a bloody three-legged race. It was ridiculous.’
‘So there’s no home base?’
‘No.’
‘What about your father?’
‘Haven’t seen him for years. He used to come and see me at Long Garth. You know, it was almost like a posh school, sort of place he went to. I think he quite liked that, so long as he didn’t have to remember why I was there.’ He stopped, patted his pockets. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
‘No, go ahead.’
He used matches still. Tom put an ashtray near him and went back to his chair.
‘I did try to talk to him once.’
‘About?’
‘The obvious. He got up and walked out. I can’t remember if that was the last visit. If it wasn’t, there weren’t many more.’
‘What about last Saturday?’
‘I woke up feeling quite good, actually. I’d got the second anniversary of my mother’s death over, and I thought, Right now, for Christ’s sake, start moving on. And then… I don’t know what happened. I just fell into the pit. I was wandering round, I’d had quite a bit to drink – that didn’t help – and I was near the river, and I thought, Sod it.’
‘Like when you went back to prison?’
‘It was a bit like that, yes. Except worse, because then I knew there wasn’t anywhere to go.’
‘So you didn’t plan it at all?’
‘No.’
Danny’s face was veiled in smoke. Not that it mattered. Any good liar – and Danny was exceptionally good – can control his expression. It’s the body that gives the game away. Tom thought he could discern a new tension in Danny’s posture, a choppiness in the movement of the hands. When he said ‘No’, he’d :ned to shrug, but only one shoulder moved. And who carries temazepam around with them in the middle of the day? No, Danny was telling, at best, a partial truth.
‘I’m glad it happened,’ Danny said.
‘Why?’
‘Because I met you. Again. And I know you’re going to laugh, but I still think that wasn’t an accident.’
You and me both, Tom thought. ‘So what was it, then?’
‘It was, I dunno, a sort of kick in the pants, I suppose, because I’d tried to go on ignoring it and pretending it didn’t happen and suddenly there it is, bang. Right in front of me.’
‘And that’s a sign you have to face up to it?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re putting an awful lot on coincidence, Danny. I mean, you get fished out of the river by a psychologist, so you decide it’s time for some psychotherapy. Suppose I’d been a tailor. Would you have ordered a suit?’
‘That’s not fair. And it’s not a psychologist, is it?’
Tom took time to think. ‘You know, if you’re really serious about this, there’s quite a strong argument for starting at the beginning with somebody else.’
‘No. It’s you or nobody. And by the way, I don’t want psychotherapy. Why would I want that? I want to work out why it happened.’ He waited. ‘It’s not as if we had a personal relationship.’
‘No, that’s true. Did you ever get any treatment?’
‘No. Don’t look so shocked. You were the one who told the court I was normal.’
‘I didn’t say you were normal. I said you were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.’
‘Yeah, well, they forgot about that. Look, it was made pretty clear you didn’t talk about it. Not to anybody. Mr Greene, that was the headmaster at Long Garth, actually said, on the first night, I don’t care what you’ve done. Nobody’s going to ask you about that. This is the first day of the rest of your life. And everybody did what he said. There was an English teacher there, and I wrote something for him, but not about the murder. I couldn’t talk to my mother.
Floods of tears the minute she walked through the door. And when I tried to talk to my father –’
‘He got up and walked out.’
‘Yes.’
A long pause. Danny was looking down at his hands. Nails neatly manicured, cuticles picked raw. Tom waited.
‘When my mother died,’ Danny said at last, ‘somebody sent me some photographs, and there was one of me as a little boy, pushing one of those trolley things, you know, with bricks inside. I�
�d have been about two, I suppose. And I look at that photograph, and – I look like a normal little kid. I know, you can siy, “Well, what do you expect? Horns?” But that’s i”, you see. I just want to know why.’
‘Danny, if we’re going to do this…’ Tom raised both hands. ‘And I’m not saying we are. I think you have to think very carefully about whether… about v/hether you’re up to it. Because it’s not a simple matter of getting the facts straight. It’s… you’re going to be dredging up the emotions as well. Do you see that?’
‘Yes. Yes.’
‘No, not “Yes, yes.” Think. If you start this, and then you have to stop because it’s too painful, you’re going to feel you’ve failed. And if you do manage to go on, there’re going to be times when you feel a lot worse than you do at the moment. And what I’ve got to remember is that a couple of days ago you tried to kill yourself.’
‘But I’m not depressed.’ Danny waited for a reply.
‘Do you think I’m depressed?’
Tom hesitated. ‘I see no sign of it.’ What he couldn’t say was that he didn’t find the absence of depressive symptoms reassuring.
‘Well, then. What you… sorry, what I don’t seem to be able to get across is that I don’t want therapy. I don’t want to “feel better”. I simply want to know what happened and why.’
Tom took a moment to think. ‘Danny, a lot of people would say the real priority for you is to tackle the problems you’ve got now. You can’t change the past, but you can change the present.’
A wintry smile. ‘It’s up to me to set my priorities.’
‘Yes, that’s true.’
Danny leant forward. ‘Can I ask you what you think – no, sorry what you feel – about the trial?’
‘What I feel? I’m not sure my feelings are relevant.’
‘Oh, I think they are.’
Tom’s mind flooded with images of the courtroom. The small, lonely figure in the dock. ‘Uneasy,’ he said at last.
Danny smiled. ‘You see? That’s what I mean. You want it to be doctor and patient, or expert witness and accused. But it… it isn’t just that I don’t want it to be like that… it isn’t like that.’
‘We seem to be making sense of the trial now. Danny. I thought it was the murder you wanted tc talk about.’
‘It’s not much of a choice, is it? One led to the other. You see, all this stuff about, Can I can stand it? Is it going to make me worse? Shouldn’t I be thinking about sorting out the problems I’ve got now? It’s all a load of…’ Another unexpectedly charming smile. ‘With respect, bollocks. Because in the end you need this as much as I do.’
Tom sat back in his chair, arms folded across his chest, not caring about the body language, wanting every bone and muscle to express what he felt. ‘Danny,’ he said, ‘if you have the slightest suspicion that I need… anything out of this, you should run a mile.’
‘I’m sorry. I need this very badly, and I don’t… I cion’t know how to put this. I don’t always manage to distinguish between what I’m feeling and what ether people are feeling. I seem to be –’
‘permeable?’
A short laugh of recognition. ‘Yes, I suppose. More than most people.’
That was an impressive display of self-knowledge, Tom thought. ‘Look, let’s leave it for now. I need to talk to Martha, and of course you do realize there’s no question of going ahead if she doesn’t agree? And even if she does agree, I still haven’t made up my mind.’
‘All right,’ Danny said, putting his glass on the table. ‘I haven’t handled this very well, have I?’
‘Oh, I don’t think you did too badly.’
SEVEN
Martha Pitt called first thing next morning, her smoke-roughened voice sounding, as it always did on the phone, slightly tentative. It had taken him a long time to work out why. It wasn’t that she disliked the phone; she just hated giving her name. At first he’d thought it was her nickname – ‘Pit Bull Martha’ – that she disliked, and you could see why – not a lot of women would have liked it – but it turned out to be ‘Martha’ she couldn’t stand. ‘How do you think it feels? Condemned from the cradle to choose the worser part.’
‘What is the worser part?’
‘Doing good, rather than contemplating God.’
Martha was a Catholic. She knew that sort of thing.
‘Bloody good name for a probation officer, then.’
‘Aw, piss off.’
Now she said crisply, ‘I think we need to talk.’
‘What about?’ he asked, teasing.
‘Ian Wilkinson.’
They arranged to meet for lunch at one o’clock. He’d been standing at the bar for five minutes when Martha came in, clutching the enormous black satchel she carted around with her everywhere. Sometimes, watching her scrabble about inside it for something she knew she had somewhere, he imagined her disappearing into it, backwards, dragging make-up, car keys, court reports in after her, like a badger pulling fresh bedding into its sett.
Bending to kiss her, he breathed in the familiar smells of stale cigarette smoke and peppermints. She’d become addicted to mints during her last attempt to give up smoking, and now scoured sweetshops for stronger and stronger varieties. Fiery Fred was her latest fix. The last time they’d met he’d made the mistake of accepting one, and his eyes had watered for a full five minutes afterwards.
‘Do you want a pint?’ he asked.
He waited, patiently, while the usual struggle with temptation played itself out on her features, ending as it always did. ‘Yeah, go on, why not?’
‘Cheers,’ Tom said, raising his glass. ‘Probably the end of useful work for the day, but never mind.’
‘How’s it going?’
‘Not bad. I ought to finish the first draft by the end o**next week.’
‘Then I can start reading?’
‘Yes. Gently.’
They took their glasses over to a table by the window and sat down. ‘Well, then,’ Martha said, lighting a cigarette, ‘how does it feel to be a hero?’
‘Dunno.’
She smiled. ‘C’mon, Tom. How close was it?’
‘For him? I don’t know. He’d taken enough pills to knock him out, so I suppose, yes, it was pretty close.’
‘Extraordinary coincidence.’
‘Extraordinary.’
They didn’t need to say much to make themselves understood.
‘Of course he’d say it wasn’t a coincidence,’ Martha went on.
‘That’s right. Arranged by God.’
‘Well, don’t knock it,’ she said. ‘A lot of perfectly rational people would agree with him.’
‘Yes, I know. And a lot of perfectly rational people would say it happened that way because Danny planned it.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘I don’t know. And, anyway, he has to be given the benefit of the doubt. There’s no way we’re going to prove anything. And outrageous coincidences do happen. He’s told you he wants to come and talk to me about…” He glanced round, but they had the back room to themselves. The solicitors and barristers who were the Crown’s daytime clients preferred the lounge bar. ‘The murder.’
‘He’s been talking about doing that on and off ever since I’ve known him. And I’ve always encouraged him. I think he needs to do it. Whether this is the right time
‘Did you think he was depressed?’
‘No. He seemed angry, if anything. But then I suppose if the anger’s got nowhere to go…’
‘How often do you see him?’
‘Three times a week.’
Tom whistled. ‘That’s a helluva lot.’
‘Yes, well, he needs it.’
‘Do you find him difficult?’
‘Draining. Sometimes after I’ve seen him I have to go home and lie down. But actually he’s also quite rewarding. He’s… I don’t know. Very empathic. At times it’s almost uncanny. You think, how the hell could he know that? I haven’t said anything.’ Sh
e paused to think. ‘He gets inside.’
‘Like a tapeworm, you mean?’
‘To-om.’
‘All right. I was starting to think I might consult him. So anyway, you think I should do it?’
To his surprise she didn’t answer immediately. ‘I’m not sure. You know I said he was very good with people? Well, he is, but –’
‘He doesn’t like triangles.’
She looked surprised. ‘How did you know that?’
‘Just a hunch.’
‘Did he say anything?’
She was over-involved. ‘About you? No.’
‘Well, anyway, you’re quite right, he doesn’t. Mike Freeman – you know Mike? – and I were supposed to work together, they thought it would be good for him to have a man and a woman. And it simply wasn’t possible.’
‘It must’ve been quite bad if he actually split you?’
‘Yeah, well, Mike isn’t very experienced/
He had split them. ‘And you think the same thing might happen with you and me?’
‘It’s possible.’
‘I don’t really see what you’re worried about. So okay, he’s not good at triangles? The general idea is that we’re supposed to be.’
‘It’s not just that. There’s a certain amount of antagonism there, Tom. Towards you.’
‘Yes, I think 1 detected that. Does he say why?’
‘He trusted you. In his mind, you let him down quite badly. He thinks if it wasn’t for you, he wouldn’t have been in court at all, he’d have been dealt with as a child. You were the one who said he understood what he was doing and that he was fit to plead in an adult court. He hasn’t forgiven you.’
Tom nodded. ‘We’d need to talk about it. But the antagonism itself isn’t automatically a barrier. I mean, frankly, even if I was starting from scratch, I’d expect to be on the receiving end of a fair bit of hostility, because he’s angry. He hates the system, he hates what it did to him.’
Martha shook her head. ‘No, it’s more than that.’
A long pause. Tom said, ‘There’s no question of my going ahead without your approval.’
‘And I think he needs to do it. So that’s that, then.’ ‘
You could try getting him to talk to somebody else.’