by Pat Barker
‘I don’t know. I was being obstreperous, I suppose. He lifted me on to the peg, put my jacket over the pegs and left me there to scream.’
‘How long for?’
‘Not long.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I’m determined I’m not going to say, “I was abused, therefore…” Because it’s not as easy as that.’
‘No.’
‘The fact is he was trying to be a good father, and… I hero-worshipped him. He was tall, he was strong, he had a tattoo that wiggled when he clenched his fist, he had a gun, he’d killed people… I thought he was fucking brilliant.’
It took Tom a long time to realize that Danny was not using his father’s violence as a way of excusing his own behaviour. It was rather more sophisticated than that. He was talking about moral circles, the group of people (and animals) inside the circle, whom it is not permissible to kill, and the others, outside, who enjoy no such immunity. For Danny’s father, dogs, cats and most people were inside the circle. Chickens, convicted murderers, rabbits, enemy soldiers, farm animals, enemy civilians (in some circumstances), game birds, children (in uniform), burglars, if caught on the premises, and Irishmen, if suspected of being terrorists and providing the appropriate warnings had been given, were outside. Danny simply presented the picture of a small boy, in short trousers, sitting on a bale of scratchy straw, listening. The question was implicit. You said I had a clear understanding that killing was wrong. Are you sure?
Danny found it harder to talk about the break-up of his parents’ marriage.
‘What went wrong?’ Tom asked.
‘The farm was failing. Basically, once he’d done all the field draining and fence building and that sort of thing, he lost interest. Didn’t have a feeling for the chickens, for keeping them alive, I suppose. And the whole point about battery hens is they’re supposed to stay alive, for a couple of years anyway. You can’t wring their necks, and then complain they’re not laying. And he was a bit above the hard grind of working on a farm. Or he thought he was. He was an officer and a gentleman, so obviously if he was a farmer he had to be a gentleman farmer – what other sort could he possibly be? He spent a lot of time in the lounge bar of the Red Lion, buying rounds of drinks with money he didn’t have. The locals saw him coming. They were laughing at him behind his back, overcharging him…’
‘This is your grandmother again.’
A smile. ‘That’s right. She didn’t like to see my mother dragging herself about doing really hard physical work, while he propped up the bar. Quite right too.’
‘You listened to the women talking?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you feel?’
‘Angry. Because in my mind he could do no wrong.’
‘In spite of the beatings?’
‘They were my fault.’
Tom let a silence open up. ‘So. Financial pressure.’
‘Yes. And then my mother found a lump in her breast, and she had to have a mastectomy. I went to the hospital with Dad, but I had to stay outside in the car. I was there all by myself, splashing in puddles. He seemed to be gone years, and then he came back, and pointed to one of the windows. She’d dragged herself out of bed to see me. He said, “Look, there she is.” And I waved like mad, but there were hundreds of windows. I didn’t dare say I couldn’t see her. Then, after she came out, things really went to pot. She just couldn’t do it any more. They got this girl Fiona in to help, and he rallied round a bit, of course he did, but I don’t think he had the slightest comprehension of what she was going through. One or two jokes when her hair fell out, that can’t have helped. And one day I was walking across the field to the cowshed
– Dad’s workshop – and I heard Fiona laughing. I don’t know why I didn’t walk straight in, but I didn’t. I looked through the window, and there they were, on the bales of straw. Hard at it.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Went away.’ A pause. ‘You know, the awful thing is, I blamed my mother. That was the really bad time. And then he left. And, by a curious coincidence, so did Fiona.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Nine years and 362 days. It was three days before my birthday. I was sure he’d left me a birthday present somewhere. I ransacked the house, but of course he’d cleared everything out, all his drawers and cupboards were empty. And then I thought, He’ll have left it in the cowshed. And as soon as I thought about it, it was so obvious that’s what he’d do. So I went and searched there, and I found his binoculars. They were hanging up under an old coat, and I sort of convinced myself he’d hidden them there, that was the present, he’d left them for me, only he hadn’t had time to wrap them. And I kept them round my neck all the time. Went to bed with them, everything. They were quite powerful: you could zoom in really close, see the hairs in somebody’s nose if you wanted to. And they wouldn’t know. I remember looking at my mother crossing the yard with buckets of feed, and her hands were red raw. She’d just come out of hospital after the third lot of chemotherapy, and she was feeling sick
all the time, but… Bloody hens still had to be fed. I knew I ought to go down and help her, but I didn’t. I turned the binoculars round, and then she was just a little beetle crawling across the yard.’
A silence. ‘You still blamed her?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you see your father again before the trial?’
‘No. And I wouldn’t have seen him then if the newspapers hadn’t found him.’
‘He came every day.’
‘Shamed into it.’
‘And he visited you at Long Garth.’
‘Ego trip. My son at boarding school. The minute I tried to talk about anything, he got up and walked out. Well, I told you. I watched him from the bedroom window, striding away down the drive, fast as his legs could carry him.’
‘What did you feel, watching him walk away like that?’
A flash of impatience. ‘What do you think I felt?’
‘I don’t want to guess, Danny. I want you to tell me.’
‘Nothing much. He’d walked out before, he was walking out again. That was what he did best.’
He looked drained.
‘I think we should leave it there,’ Tom said.
Probably not a good moment to leave it, but then no moment was going to be good. Whatever happened in these sessions Danny would be alone with it afterwards. Tom tried to imagine the room he was going back to.
On the pavement Danny hesitated, the light from two street lamps disputing his shadow. ‘Right, then,’ he said. ‘Thursday.’
A brief, taut smile, and he was gone.
ELEVEN
At six, Tom gave up trying to sleep, pulled on a tracksuit and trainers, and let himself out of the house. The river was smooth as glass, but as the sun rose the wind sharpened, flicking the brown water into little skips and bursts of foam. He loved this: the smell of the sea on the dawn wind, the city, with its precipitous streets tumbling down the hillside, silent in the clear air.
He jogged past the empty warehouses in a capsule of his own noise: gasping breath, pulsing blood, pounding feet. He was thinking about Lauren: the messages he’d left on her answering machine, the cool voice that returned his calls. She’d decided it was over, and the fact that he hadn’t jumped on a train and gone down to see her meant he thought so too.
She was coming home this weekend, and he was well aware it might be for the last time. He’d spent half the night thinking of ways of rescuing the situation. A long holiday? But she was about to start term, and hehad to finish the book. Six months’ trial separation? But they were separated already. They’d had all the time in the world to think. He stopped by one of the deserted quays, clinging to the rusting railings while he fought for breath. Far below the river sweated oil.
Back home, he showered, forced down two slices of toast, and set off for the station. Still preoccupied, he parked the car, bought a newspaper, located the right platform, paced up and down, all on automatic pilot, hardly aware of
the sour smell of old smoke in the station, or the people hurrying past. And then, suddenly, he was here, inside his own body, his own life, this moment. He took a deep breath. The smell made him think that somewhere up there, trapped under the glass roof with its colony of golden-eyed pigeons, were the ghosts of steam trains of the past: diesel fumes, burning coke, wet coal, smoke clearing slowly from platforms, passengers emerging after long journeys with soot-smudged faces and red veins in the whites of their eyes.
Lauren was wearing a silver-grey trouser suit, and she was not in the least red-eyed. During the night he’d rehearsed countless ways in which she might say what he was convinced she was going to say. Blurt it out, right there on the station? No, not Lauren’s style. Wait till evening, and tell him over dinner, drowning bad news in litres of red wine? Risking the inevitably uninhibited row that would follow? He should have known better. Lauren walked towards him along the platform, swinging two extremely large, and obviously empty, suitcases. She didn’t need words at all.
Automatically, he tried to take the suitcases from her.
‘No need,’ she said, lifting them up and down to show how light they were.
They walked out of the station to the car. Lauren raised her face to the mizzle. ‘Why is it always raining here?’
It’s raining everywhere.’
‘Not everywhere. It was fine in London.’
She swung the suitcases on to the back seat, and got in beside him. The air in the car smelt cold, foisty and damp. When he switched the heater on, the windows misted over.
‘You’re taking a few things back with you then?’
She turned to him in the dingy light. ‘Well, actually, Tom, it’s a bit more than that. I don’t think things are working out. For either of us. So I thought I’d — well, you know.’
‘Move out’
‘Yes. I want a divorce.’
No point challenging Lauren with plain speaking. She was on for any amount of it.
‘A divorce.’ Somehow the word shocked him. He’d been thinking of separation, of… He didn’t think she’d got that far.
‘It’s not working, Tom, is it?’
He might have insisted it was. As long as he claimed the marriage was alive, she couldn’t unilaterally declare it to be dead. ‘No,’ he said.
He flicked a lever up and water jetted on to the windscreen. Squeak, whine… whoosh. More water. Whoosh. ‘Well, we can’t sit here all day,’ he said.
‘Don’t backput. You can’t see.’
‘It’s okay. The heater’ll work in a minute.’
But she got out, leant into the car through the back door and rubbed condensation off the rear window, her face, in profile, tight, preoccupied, exasperated. Everything about him was wrong at the moment. It was the only way she could get through it.
When he’d reversed safely, he said, ‘Will you be going back tonight?’ He could ask that quite calmly and coldly. None of it was real to him yet.
‘No, I thought I’d stay over. If that’s all right?’
‘Be my guest.’
That helped both of them. They drove the rest of the way home in a satisfyingly irritated silence.
The silence didn’t last. They owed it to their marriage to talk, and talk they did, endlessly, though not because there was anything left to say.
Dinner was in a Chinese restaurant, whose dark-red flock wallpaper made Tom feel he was trapped inside somebody’s mysteriously fur-lined intestines. ‘The marriage’, as they’d begun to call it, sat with them at the table. They ordered food, and picked at it, and a litre bottle of wine that they sank in record time.‘The thing is,’ Lauren said, not quite steadily,’ can’t stand not being wanted. I know it’s not your fault, I know you can’t help it, it’s not voluntary, I know that, and I’m not blaming you, I’m really, truly not blaming you, but I can’t stand it. It’s… I just feel completely and utterly humiliated. I feel as if I’m turning into this little dried-up shrivelled old woman—’
‘You’re not. You’re beautiful.’
‘But that’s how it feels.’
‘I’m sorry. ‘He spread his hands helplessly. ‘I don’t know what else to say, except it’s my fault. It’s not yours. I don’t understand why it’s happened any more than you do.’
‘I can’t go on.’
‘No, I know you can’t. ‘Silence.’And I can’t say, “Give it another six months, it’ll get better,” because… it’s not like that. I don’t know what else I can say.’
Back home, drinking the second bottle, they found plenty to say, both of them. Round and round, up and down. The fact was, Tom thought, in one of those moments of total clarity that characterize drunkenness, they actually needed to have a short, simple conversation, and they couldn’t bring themselves to do it, because it seemed an insult to everything that had happened in the last ten years. So they kept burying and disinterring, and carrying out elaborate rambling inquests. At last, exhausted, in the early hours of the morning, they started a full-scale row, only to stop in the middle of it, slightly embarrassed, realizing they no longer knew each other well enough.
Then, they began to talk about the practical details of disentangling their lives. Would the house have to be sold? If so, how was the equity to be divided? Which pieces of furniture would Lauren want to take? There was something mildly indecent about this conversation, like talking about insurance policies when the person insured is still clinging to life. Nothing useful was said, but the mere fact of trying to grapple with these mundane matters made each of them believe — in Tom’s case, for the first time — that it was going to happen.
It seemed ridiculous to share a bed after that, and, after ten years, equally ridiculous not to. Tom got undressed in the bathroom, but refused to hunt out his pyjamas. They’d always slept naked, and it would have seemed… stupid to do anything else now. But all the same, he went back into the bedroom feeling like a plucked chicken.
The cold air round his groin reminded him of the first horrible night in boarding school, two rows of little boys standing on the ends of their beds, in darkness, while Matron, a terrifying woman, bore down upon them, one by one, scooped their genitals up in a white cloth, and shone a torch in the folds of skin on either side. Searching for Tinea cruris, of course, but they hadn’t known that. God knows what they’d thought was going on. He remembered it clearly: the cold, the dark, the circle of light, Matron’s blurry face, bending down, the lines of pallid, frog-like little boys.
Sliding down the cool sheets, he realized that what had triggered the memory was not merely the embarrassment of nakedness in front of an unfriendly audience, but the sense of abandonment.
In the dark, sweating, he rooted towards her, blind as a mole, and she opened up to him, put her arms around his shoulders, pressed her face into his stringy hair. He lay, half on top of her, one hand clamped round her thin wrist, and she bore it, but inwardly, where it mattered, he felt her withdraw from him. More than anything else, this tolerance, this kindness, convinced him she meant what she said.
After a decent interval, she eased herself from under him, but it was a long time before he knew, from the evenness of her breathing, that she’d gone to sleep, and longer still before he managed to follow her.
The following morning he woke early. Sunlight streamed into the room through a gap in the pale-grey curtains. Lauren had kicked off the duvet during the night, and he lay looking at her, amazed by that cello-on-its-side flare of the hip, and the fuzz of fine golden down in the small of her back.
His cock was achingly hard. Well timed, old son, he thought bitterly. Spot on.
Breakfast was coffee and toast, eaten standing up in the kitchen, followed, on Lauren’s side, by two hours of packing. She’d bring a van for the pictures and the furniture, she said. She’d ring him early next week to agree on a time. As to what she’d be taking, they could sort that out later, over the phone.
He was relieved they weren’t going to haggle about it now. In fact, he was determ
ined not to haggle at all, though he’d seen enough of other people’s divorces to know how corrosive the process of separation can be. He sat in the living room, hearing her move around upstairs. It seemed unreal. At last the suitcases were filled and locked and their straps buckled. He carried them down to the hall.
Already the house felt depleted, though nothing had gone except the contents of Lauren’s wardrobe and a chest of drawers. One or two ornaments. He looked at a circle in the dust on the mantelpiece in their bedroom, and tried to remember what had been there. They were fading already, the details of their life together.
They had two hours to fill in before her train left. Nothing seemed right. In the end they spent the time, as they had often done on Sunday mornings, at the Quayside market.
The pubs were open. People crowded the pavements, bare-armed, sweating, boisterous. The air was hot and dusty, freshened by the merest hint of a breeze coming off the Tyne. The market had changed in the years they’d been coming here, become more of a tourist attraction, less obviously a place where items that fell off the backs of lorries changed hands with no questions asked. Once there’d been touts, posted at either end of the aisles, to warn stallholders of approaching policemen.
A crowd had gathered near the bridge, and they drifted in that direction. A young lad, twelve or thirteen years old, wearing only a pair of stone-coloured shorts and sneakers without socks, stood hugging himself. Little wizened nipples like berries on his chest. Tom noticed his shape most of all: small for his age, short-necked, short-waisted, pigeon-chested, that curious concertinaed look you used to see on girl gymnasts from the Eastern bloc. He was staring round the ring of people. Beside him, on the ground, lay a sack and a heap of rusty chains.
Suddenly, with a great scrape and rattle, a man with a bald head and tattooed arms swept the chains off the ground and carried them round the circle of spectators, pressing them — bullying them, almost — to test the strength of the links. He wore his long, dirty-blond hair in a ponytail; a bare torso rose out of filthy jeans. Tattoos covered his body everywhere, every available inch. Above the sagging belt were the words pussy magnet in red and blue.