by Pat Barker
A few people, Lauren amongst them, drifted off, not liking the hectoring tone, but most stayed to watch. Something deeply unpleasant about this, Tom thought, nasty, though the boy, who, after all, was more than half naked, showed no signs of ill treatment, no lacerations, no bruises. He was skinny, but not undernourished, and seemed bored, or indifferent, rather than cowed. He stepped into the sack. His father — if it was his father — pulled it over his head and tied it. Then he began to win4 the chains round the sack, padlocking them as he went, until boy and sack had been transformed into a mummy whose bandages were iron.
A small, thin woman began to beat a drum. The bundle convulsed, each end struggling to meet in the middle, like a chrysalis beginning to split. Tom almost expected to see yellow fluid oozing from the bag. More convulsions, grunts of effort, turning, writhing. The chains screeched on the flagstones. No progress, though, until suddenly, amidst a growing murmur of concern, the first chain fell away. The boy jackknifed, and then, in a single movement, stood up holding the last padlock above his head.
The crowd clapped, a grudging ripple of applause that seemed to infuriate the tattooed man. Grabbing the boy by the arm, he dragged him round the breaking circle, thrusting a cap into people’s faces, almost shaking the coppers out of them. Tom threw all his loose change into the cap, not because he was intimidated, but because he felt ashamed of having been present.
The performance had deepened his depression. He was glad to get away. He began searching for Lauren, pushing his way up and down the crowded aisles, looking for a pale, blonde head, thinking how strange it was that, for an hour or so longer, he still had the right to look for her. The market was no more than a quarter of a mile long, but he couldn’t see her. Nothing could have happened to her. Still, there was a constriction in his throat, a fullness in his chest, and he began to shoulder his way roughly through the crowds. At last, forcing himself to stay calm, he climbed some steps and scanned the crowd, slowly and methodically, left to right and back again, and there she was. Not alone. Talking to somebody, a tall, dark-haired young man standing with his back to Tom. His head looked familiar, but it wasn’t until he turned slightly that Tom recognized him. Danny Miller.
No reason why he shouldn’t be here. He was a student: this was one of the few places students could afford to shop. He must have identified Lauren from her photograph on Tom’s desk, and stopped to speak to her. No reason why he shouldn’t. Yet the sight of them together made Tom uneasy.
It was odd, he thought. He’d spent hours watching every flicker of expression on Danny’s face, noticing torn cuticles, clean nails, the size of his pupils, minute changes in the way he dressed and held himself. And somehow in the process he’d stopped seeing him. At any rate, stopped seeing what Lauren was seeing now. A quite exceptionally good-looking young man.
Danny had height, good looks, charm. Thirteen years ago, watching him in the witness box, Tom had asked himself, How can so many things be right? With an uncomfortable sense of treading in his own footsteps, he asked it again now.
He set off through the crowds, wanting to get there quickly, hardly knowing whether he was worried about Lauren’s safety (but what could possibly happen to her here?) or simply disconcerted by the sense of exposure that the sight of her and Danny together aroused in him.
He reached her in time to see Danny’s back disappear into the crowd. ‘Who was that?’
‘The boy who tried to drown himself She was flushed. Tm glad I bumped into him. I was wondering what had happened.’
They stood facing each other. She pushed a strand of hair behind her ears in a gesture he was going to have to get used to not seeing. ‘Well,’ she said.
Somewhere a church clock chimed the hour.
‘We ought to be getting back,’ he said, sparing her the need to say it.
They set off, letting the crowds separate them, grateful to be able to postpone, even for a few minutes, the need to say goodbye.
TWELVE
Tom had been living alone, except at weekends, for more than a year now. There was no reason why Lauren’s deciding to get a divorce should make the house seem larger, but it did. He came down next morning to a living room that had expanded to the size of St Pancras Station. Pieces of furniture stood with their backs to the wall, watching him. One false move out of you, mate, they seemed to say, and we’re off too.
He spent the morning trying, and failing, to work. Then he rang his mother, arranged to have supper with her, and over the meal told her the news, which came as no surprise, and left, just after ten o’clock, feeling… brutal. He’d cancelled the future.
When he got back, the house seemed to have become emptier. Ridiculous; he was used to coming home to an empty house. Walking round it – since there was clearly no point in going to bed – he discovered that some rooms were worse than others. The bedroom, surprisingly, was tolerable. He simply switched to sleeping on Lauren’s side. The kitchen was very bad. Even sitting in her chair, he was aware of the noise of his own eating, biting, chewing, swallowing, and he couldn’t stand it. Like feeding time at the zoo. After the first morning he ate breakfast standing up, or walking round the garden, and had supper upstairs on a tray.
The computer screen unnerved him. The winking cursor was both too demanding, and not demanding enough. It could be ignored, as a patient sitting in the chair beside his desk could never have been ignored. He began to search for things to do to take him out of the house. He arranged to see Bernard Greene, Danny’s old headmaster, and he made a list of interviews he needed to do with kids on the Youth Violence Project.
Ryan Price was the first name on the list. Making the appointment wasn’t easy, because Ryan’s mother wasn’t on the phone, but keeping it was worse. He couldn’t take a taxi because no taxi driver would go on to the estate. He couldn’t park outside the house because the car would be stolen or torched by the time he got back, and the bus dropped you off on a corner that had one of the highest rates of muggings in mainland Britain. In the end he drove to the nearest GP’s surgery, left the car in one of their secure parking spaces and walked the rest of the way.
He turned the corner into Belford Street, and saw a police car pulled up on the kerb outside Ryan’s house. Two policemen were getting out. The older one nudged his companion. ‘Hey up, here comes the silver streak.’ A reference to a time, two years earlier, when Tom had got done for speeding. The police never tired of the joke.
‘Which one are you after?’ the older one asked.
Tom shrugged and spread his hands.
‘Well, if it’s Robbie and Craig, you can’t have ‘em.’
Big beer belly on him, the older one, but no swagger, no aggression. The younger one, all feet and Adam’s apple, was already peering into the living-room window.
Jean Price, a thin woman whose eight-month pregnancy barely showed, leapt up from a sofa laden with half-naked children, and ran to the window. ‘What do yous lot think you’re doing? Looking in at my window at half-past eight in the sodding morning?’
‘Howay, Jean. Open the door.’
‘You’re enough to give anybody a heart attack, you.’
‘C’mon, love. We’re only doing our job.’
She knew she had no choice. The door opened. ‘Only doing your job. Pair of bloody piss artists.’
‘We’ve come for Robbie and Craig, Jean. They were supposed to be in court yesterday, weren’t they?’
‘And what’s that got to do with me? It’s not up to me to get them into bloody court, know what I mean?’ She looked over their shoulders at Tom, whom she regarded as an ally, of sorts. ‘Can’t you tell them?’
They followed her into the living room, an almost bare room with an unguarded electric fire. The children, in vests and little else, stared at the policemen with big eyes.
‘Don’t get yourself upset, Jean,’ beer belly said.
‘Don’t get meself upset? I thought you were doing it.’ She raised a finger. ‘Them lads is fifteen and sixteen y
ears. They’re old enough to get theirselves off to court, know what I mean? They get letters from their solicitors reminding them. They can read.’ She bent to pick up a child’s shoe, but couldn’t settle. ‘If they don’t want to go to court, that’s up to them.’
Beer belly went to the foot of the stairs and yelled, ‘Craig? Robbie? Come on down now.’
‘Hands off cocks, on socks,’ the younger one said.
‘Eeh, will you listen at the language in front of them bairns?’ She was talking to Tom now. ‘What the bloody hell am I supposed to do? I was sat in court when I was nine months pregnant with her. Here, this one. She was bloody near born in court, her.’
Beer belly started up the stairs.
‘Oh, make yourself at home, ‘Jean yelled after him. She turned back to Tom. ‘This is harassment, this is. I’ve got eight kids, I’m a single parent, I don’t need this.’ She was struggling to put on a little girl’s socks as she spoke, but her hands shook so badly she had togive up. I’m on tablets for me nerves, as it is. Anybody with kids this hour, they’re getting them offto school, know what I mean?’ She rounded on the police. ‘If you waited half an hour I’d be sat here with a cup of tea, know what I mean? Might even’ve give you one.’
Craig and Robbie tumbled into the room. Immediately Jean started slapping them hard about their heads and shoulders. ‘I haven’t half got summat to tell them about yous, pair of bleeding poofs.’ The police towered over her. ‘Barging in here half-past eight in the pissing morning.’ She turned to Tom. ‘I’m not telling you a word of a lie, I’ve bled every month of this pregnancy. I’m losing now.’
‘Then let’s get you to the doctor,’ Tom said.
‘What’s the point of that? He’d only put me in hospital. Where can I go into hospital?’ She pointed to the children, who stared solemnly back at her. ‘You know as well as I do, if that lot got took into care, I’d never get’em back.’
Robbie finished pulling his trainers on and stood up.
‘Right, then, are we off?’ beer belly said. ‘Can we give you a lift to the station, Jean?’
‘Oh marvellous, that is. How many do you want me to bring? All six of’em, or just the baby?’
He shrugged, and pushed Craig out of the door. Jean and Tom watched from the window as the boys got into the back of the car, the younger policeman putting a hand on their heads to protect them.
At the last moment Jean ran to the door. ’Mind you ring for a solicitor now, our Robbie. And Craig? Don’t you go blabbing your mouth.’
The car drove off. Jean, still fuming, went back to dressing the little girl. ‘Oldest trick in the book, that. Get me to leave the bairns in on their own, then ring the social services. Bingo, whole bloody lot in care. That’s one thing nobody can say about me,’ she added, ramming a shoe on. ‘They’re not neglected, and I don’t go out and leave’em on their own.’
‘Nobody thinks you neglect them, Jean.’
‘Hmm.’ She was slightly mollified. A second later she grinned. ‘Here, have you seen me stood sideways?’ She demonstrated her almost flat stomach. ‘Me mam says, “By heck, our Jean, where the hell are you keeping it?”‘
Tom said, ‘Look, I know this is a bad time —’
‘No, you’re all right, love.’
He was never sure how Jean thought he fitted into their lives. Her manner with him was always slightly flirtatious, she seemed to feel he was on her side, but she didn’t seem to see it as a professional connection. ‘I was hoping I could see Ryan.’
‘Oh God, yes, so you were. Do you know, I’m that frazzled I don’t know what I’m doing half the time.’ She yelled up the stairs, ‘Ryan!’
A second later Ryan appeared, bleary-eyed and yawning. ‘Have the police gone?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What did they want?’
‘Not you. They come to take Robbie and Craig to court.’
‘Pair of poofs.’
‘Hey you, they’re your brothers.’
Ryan was rubbing his thigh. ‘Our Craig give us a dead leg.’
‘Ryan,’ Tom said firmly, ‘suppose we go in the kitchen and have a chat?’
A shrug. ‘Yeah, all right.’
Perhaps it was his own depression, but this morning the view from planet Ryan seemed even bleaker than usual. School: waste of time. He’d been suspended anyway. What did he feel about that? ‘Not bothered.’ Wasn’t it a good idea to get some qualifications? ‘Not bothered.’ Like most of Jean’s children, he was not stupid, and now and then burst into connected speech. Teachers lived in their own cosy little world. They wouldn’t last five minutes outside the classroom. Why wouldn’t they? They knew nowt. They thought it was marvellous if somebody passed their exams and got on to one of the slave-labour schemes. £1.99 an hour. Tom tried to get him to talk about the security guard whom he and his mates had thrown down an escalator in the Metro Centre. ‘Them bastard security guards are always giving us hassle.’ But the guard was still on crutches, wasn’t he? How did Ryan feel about that? ‘Not bothered.’ At moments like this, Tom thought, you felt these were really rotten kids,and that there was very little else to be said about them.
He walked back to his car. Every house left vacant here was stripped of fireplaces, bathroom fittings, pipes, roof tiles, and set on fire, either for fun or because the owners, despairing of selling or letting the property, paid children to do it. At the corner of the street there was a skip full of burning rubbish. A knot of children, on the other side of it, shimmered in the heat, like reflections in water.
That evening he phoned Martha, and said one word.
‘Detox?’
‘Right.’
They met in a bar in Northumberland Street, and ordered a bottle of wine.
‘So what’s been happening?’ she asked.
‘Oh, nothing horrendous. I was interviewing Ryan Price, and somehow — I don’t know — it just got to me.’
‘ “Not bothered,”‘ she said in Ryan’s monotone.
‘That’s right. You know he threw a security guard down an escalator? Well, him and the gang.’
‘Yeah, figures. He spent six weeks in traction when he was a kid. Robbie threw him downstairs.’
‘Hmm. Nice to see family traditions being carried on.’ He took a sip of wine. ‘You know, I looked at that estate, and I thought, if… ‘A quick glance round the bar, then he continued in a lower voice. ‘If Ian had done what he did there, there wouldn’t have been nearly the same uproar.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Because that’s them. But as soon as you get a kid committing murder in rural England — or small-town America, same thing – you’re attacking the… I don’t know, the myth — the moral heartland. And the press have hysterics. Do you know they’re still after Ian now, they’re still nosing around?’
‘I thought nobody knew he was out?’
‘Well, officially nobody does.’ She shook her head. ‘They know everything, Tom.’
‘But they don’t know the name?’
‘No, well, my God, I hope they don’t.’ She rested her steepled fingers against her lip. ‘Ian says you’re going to see other people.’
‘Yes. Well, only one so far. I’ve arranged to see his old headmaster, Bernard Greene.’
‘You will be careful, won’t you?’
‘You mean I mustn’t say the new name, even there?’
‘That’s right.’
Tom sat back, smiling. ‘You’re sure this isn’t just Home Office paranoia?’
‘You’ve never had the tabloids on your tail.’
They finished the bottle and, at his insistence, ordered another. He could talk to her about Lauren, but he needed a few drinks before he did it.
‘So what went wrong?’ she asked, playing with the stem of her glass.
‘Sex,’ he said. ‘In the end I wasn’t much use.’
‘Brewer’s droop?’
It was amazing what Martha could come out with and, still sound sympathetic. ‘No. Ovulation-prediction-ki
t droop.’
‘You were trying for a baby?’
‘Yes. And yes, I do know how irresponsible that sounds. But we were all right when we started trying. That’s what I can’t understand — it’s all gone down the plughole in such a short time. And I keep looking back, and you know if you’re not careful the present starts to destroy the past, because all the time I remember as happy I think, well it can’t have been like that. There must’ve been something wrong and I was missing it.’
Getting pregnant had become an obsession, he said, knowing this was, in effect, blaming Lauren, and not liking himself for it. But everything he said was true, or as close to the truth as he could get. He’d felt used, and he’d withdrawn, not consciously, not deliberately, but…
‘You can see why she was desperate, though, can’t you? How old is she?’
‘Thirty-six.’
‘Yes, well, I’m thirty-four and I think that’s bad enough. It’s not the same for men, is it?’ Martha’s usual cheerful expression had soured. ‘Never send to know for whom the clock ticks. Because it doesn’t bloody well tick for thee.’
‘I didn’t design the equipment. If I had, I’d have included a permanently inflated tube.’
‘Hey, be good that, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yeah. You could strap it to your thigh when it wasn’t required.’
‘Well, you could.’ She hesitated. ‘Did you ever try with anybody else?’
‘You mean—’
‘Try. Have a go. I mean it’s all very well saying it’s ovulation-prediction-kit droop, but I don’t see how you can know if you haven’t tried with somebody else.’
‘Thanks, Martha. That’s a great help.’ He brooded for a moment. ‘No, I didn’t try,’ he said at last. ‘I was married.’
‘Well, you’re free now.’
If that had been said by anybody else, he’d have thought it was a come-on. But not Martha. It wasn’t -that she was unattractive — in fact at one point, when they first started working together, he’d found her worryingly attractive — but they’d gone too far down the path of friendship to be able to turn back and choose the other route. Making love to Martha would be like pulling on an old, warm, well-trusted sweater on a cold dark night. She deserved better than that, and so did he.