Border Crossing

by Pat Barker

  No answer.

  ‘Are you frightened because you know she’ll tell your mother?’

  Danny’s thumbmoved up to his mouth and, under the pretext of biting his nail, he sucked. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘What were you feeling when you did that? Can you remember?’

  ‘Just peaceful. Deep water, no buzzing. Quiet.’

  ‘Was there ever a time when you thought you should stop?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you weren’t frightened? Or angry?’

  ‘No. I was later, frightened, but not then. I lifted the cushion off and she’d been sick. I think I remember her thrashing about, because I thought she was trying to get away, and I pressed down harder, but it can’t have been that, can it? She must’ve been…’

  Tom waited and waited until, at last, the word popped out of Danny’s mouth, as improbable as a toad.

  ‘… dying.’

  ‘And what did you feel then?’

  ‘Nothing. Just tired.’

  ‘When did you start… when did you realize what you’d done?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure I did. I was dazed.’

  ‘Frightened?’

  ‘I suppose so, I don’t know. I don’t know whether I’m thinking I must’ve been frightened, so… I don’t know. I’m scared shitless now.’

  He reeked of sweat. Tom was beginning to wonder how much further this could be allowed to continue. He had to balance Danny’s desire to press on with the knowledge that worse was to come. ‘What did you do next?’

  ‘Went into town and played Space Invaders.

  ‘With the insurance money?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you see how that seemed to other people?’

  ‘Yeah. Rotten psychopathic little bastard, didn’t give a shit. Let’s hammer him.’ Danny shook his head. ‘Wasn’t how it felt.’

  ‘How did you feel?’

  ‘Like a chicken with its head off.’

  ‘And then you went back home?’

  ‘Yeah, had my tea, threw up, which was good actually because my mother decided I was ill, so I went to bed early and hid under the clothes. I kept getting flashes, you know, Lizzie’s face, and I heard her coming up the stairs again, but this time they were our stairs. And she sort of leapt across the room, right into my face. And I wet the bed. I kept jabbing myself with a sharp pencil to keep myself awake because I didn’t dare go to sleep. And in the morning when I got up I somehow thought that everybody knew, I thought it would’ve leaked out somehow, but it was just normal. Nobody knew.’

  ‘And then you went back,’ Tom said flatly, surprised himself by the brutality of his return to the facts.

  ‘Yes,’ Danny said, on an exhaled breath.

  ‘Why? When you were so frightened you were jabbing pencils into yourself to stay awake?’

  ‘I wanted to see if she was still dead.’

  A pause. Tom considered the various options open to him. The truth, he thought. ‘No, Danny, I can’t accept that. You knew she was dead.’

  ‘I was ten years old.’

  No breathless treble now, but a hard, grinding, angry adult voice.

  ‘Yes,’ Tom said steadily. ‘And I think it’s quite true – a lot of ten-year-olds don’t understand death. They don’t realize it’s permanent. But I think you did.’

  ‘You just don’t want to admit you got it wrong.’

  ‘What did I get wrong?’

  ‘Telling the court I knew what I’d done. Have you ever stood outside a junior school and watched the kids come out? The biggest kids, the “big boys”? They’re tiny. I was like that.’

  ‘I know. I remember. I still say you knew death was permanent.’

  A braying laugh. ‘Because of the fucking chicken?’

  ‘Because you lived on a farm. Because you witnessed the deaths of animals, because you took part in killing them, because your grandfather had died, and you knew bloody well he hadn’t come back, because you were frightened when your mother went into hospital for the second mastectomy. You thought she was going to die, and you knew bloody well that didn’t mean she was going to be away till teatime. You were frightened you were going to lose her. You were frightened she’d never come back.’

  Danny said deliberately, ‘When I went back to Lizzie’s, part of me thought she wouldn’t still be there.’

  Tom nodded.’Go on.’

  ‘She was just lying there. She’d changed, her skin was a different colour, darker, and the cats were yowling all over the place.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I fed the cats.’

  Up till this moment Tom had been able to suspend his knowledge of the forensic evidence, to listen to Danny’s story as if this were his only source of information. Now, suddenly, there was a chorus of muffled voices in the background. Thirteen years ago, everybody had told Tom about the feeding of the cats, in a tone of voice that suggested it merely amplified the horror. ‘And then he fed the cats.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They were starving.’

  Domestic animals were inside Danny’s moral circle, Tom thought, as they had been inside his father’s. ‘So you fed the cats? Then what?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Do you remember what happened?’

  ‘Nothing happened. I fed the cats and I went home.’

  ‘You were there for five hours. You were seen going in and you were seen coming out.’

  Those five hours, for the police who’d investigated the case, for everybody who’d been involved in any way, were the heart of the darkness, the source of that look of frozen disgust that Tom remembered so vividly from the trial. Nigel Lewis, showing Tom photographs of scuffmarks on the carpet where Lizzie had been dragged across the floor, had said: ‘He played with her.’ The horror in his voice could still raise hairs on the nape of Tom’s neck thirteen years later.

  ‘You moved her, Danny.’

  ‘I never touched her.’

  ‘You did. Look, if you don’t want to do this, that’s fine. Perhaps there’s things you shouldn’t say, perhaps there’s things you can’t say. But there’s no point lying. There’s no point coming this far and then telling Hes. It’s a waste of what you’ve put yourself through to get here.’

  Along silence. No sound but their breathing, which suddenly seemed loud,

  ‘There’s nothing there,’ Danny said. ‘People say five hours. Okay, I have to believe it, but what I remember covers about ten minutes. I looked at her, I fed the cats, I made sure the doors were open, so the mother cat could get in and out, I went home, I know what the police thought, they thought I molested her. Even though there was no evidence, even though I was only ten, they still thought that.’ He leant forward. ‘But you know, I wasn’t sexually abused. I didn’t have that kind of awareness. I didn’t have a sex drive, for God’s sake. Plus she was seventy-eight.’

  ‘And dead.’

  ‘And dead.’

  ‘What did she look like? Try to imagine you’re looking down at her. What are you thinking?’

  ‘She’s like a doll. She can’t do anything. She can’t hurt me, or shout, or anything. It’s stupid to be frightened. All that stuff about her coming upstairs –’

  ‘Your stairs?’

  ‘Yes – it’s rubbish. She can’t even move.’

  Silence. Danny seemed to be dragging himself back from a great distance. ‘You talk about me putting myself through this for no reason. Well, it is for no reason. I don’t know why I killed her. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. And I don’t know how to live with it.’

  They broke there. Danny’s speech was slurred. Tom made him a cup of coffee, then spent twenty minutes trying to calm him down. Danny was dreading the journey home. On the doorstep, turning to look back, he said, ‘I know you don’t believe me, but I am being followed.’

  Tom was aware, almost telepathically, of every stage of Danny’s journey home: rocking backwards andforwards on the Metro, gazing blank-eyed a
t the advertisements opposite, while grey walls lined with bunched and corded cables hurtle past. Then the train glides to a halt between graffiti-daubed walls. Danny gets out and pushes his ticket into the turnstile, which disgorges him into a night of rain and wind, of orange light smeared over greasy streets, and then, turning up his coat against the cold, he’s away from the lights and crowds, striding down dark streets, where once-imposing houses loom over him, until he goes down a flight of steps to a basement flat, takes out a key, lets himself in. And there, in the dingy hall with its black-and-white tiles and single naked bulb, Tom loses him.

  TWENTY

  Tom did one press interview in connection with the Kelsey murder. As the journalist was getting ready to go, she asked casually about Tom’s connection with Danny Miller, and, looking down into her open bag, Tom saw the red light on her tape recorder still lit. He smiled, and denied all knowledge of fanny’s current whereabouts.

  He spent Friday night and most of Saturday with his mother. She was saddened by the breakdown of his marriage, but not surprised. She didn’t say: 1 told you so.’ She didn’t discover that she’d always disliked and distrusted Lauren. In fact she did everything right, but still he was glad to get away.

  Back home, he found himself with that curious suspended feeling that comes from having spent the night in your childhood home, a sense that adult life had been put on hold. Everything about it was unsettling. The single bed, so narrow he’d woken in the middle of the night with his arm flung out into empty space, the wonky headboard, the curtain and carpet patterns that seemed mysteriously to have soaked up the sweats and nightmares of his childhood fevers and breathed them out again into the air as he tossed and turned and tried to sleep.

  In spite of his bad night, he was restless now, full of energy. Just as well, perhaps, since he’d agreed to take part in a television discussion later that night. His first reaction had been to say no, but contributing to the public debate on how young offenders should be treated was, after all, part of his job.

  He played back the answering machine, took notes on the calls, then slumped in front of the television for an hour. He’d have Hked to have gone for a jog to calm himself down, but the weather, which had been close and sticky all day, seemed about to break. He saw through the bay window the massing of black clouds, sagging over the rooftops like a tarpaulin full of water, though for the moment there was no rain, only this hot, brooding intensity. Then a flash of lightning, and the first spattering of raindrops on the glass.

  He was about to pour himself a drink when the phone rang.

  It’s Danny,’ a whispering voice said.

  Tom opened his mouth to reply, but something wrong in the voice stopped him. He stayed silent, aware of his breathing, knowing it must be audible at the other end. Heavy breathing call in reverse, he thought. Bloody ridiculous. A minute, two minutes, then the receiver was softly replaced.

  Somebody checking, obviously. Thank God he’d had the sense to keep quiet. He drew the curtains, lit a fire, piled logs on to it, thinking a good blaze would be pleasant to come home to. The worst times for missing Lauren were coming back to an empty house, though he’d been doing it for over a year, he should be used to it by now. But a fire helped.

  He was watching the second half of a thriller, and he’d long since lost track of the plot, but the fire blazed away, his face felt swollen and numb with heat, and still the wind moaned around the house. Somewhere a gate was banging. Probably the postgrad students next door had left their gate off the latch. He got up to look. Pulling the curtain back, he saw what at first he took to be his own face reflected in the glass, until a sudden movement dislocated the illusion. Pale features, lank wet hair, distorted by streaming rivulets of rain.

  They stared at each other, and then the intruder turned and ran down the gleaming road. By the time Tom got to the door he’d disappeared. Probably he should phone the police, but there wasn’t time. He had to leave for the television studios in twenty minutes. Better check the back-garden door was bolted, and make sure all the doors and windows were locked. Could be a peeping torn or somebody looking for an empty house to burgle. No real reason to suppose it was connected with Danny.

  Before leaving the house he made sure the burglar alarm was primed, and then stood looking up and down the street, which was as empty as it always was at this time of night.

  Tom never liked studio discussions. Sweating under the hot lights, remembering to sit on the hem of his jacket, resigned to cameras that in the interests of cutting-edge journalism zoomed in on nostrils and ears, and all for the sake of a debate that rapidly got bogged down in the evil effects of point-and-shoot video games. One of the twelve-year-olds charged with Mrs Kelsey’s murder had been addicted to such games, or so the newspapers claimed – along with a few thousand other kids who’d never killed anybody. Afterwards they adjourned to the Green Room, where a far more interesting and honest discussion took place over glasses of warm white wine. Tom was offered help in getting his make-up off, but since he was driving straight home decided not to bother. He left the studio feeling that nothing new had been contributed – not in front of the cameras anyway -and that he was as much to blame for this as anyone.

  How desperate people were for an explanation -any explanation, as long as it was simple – and how difficult it was to supply one. No, not difficult, impossible. He was remembering that once he and Lauren had become involved in-a. local opera group’s production of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. Lauren had been asked to design the sets, a task that suited her particular talents very well. Huge, light-filled backdrops of sky and estuary, the tower, the lake, the copse with its bare branches and black nests like clots of blood in veins. He’d been dragged in as a production assistant, and in rehearsal must have heard every note of the score, every word of the libretto, a dozen times or more, though all he remembered now was Miles’s song, his little Latin mnemonic.

  Malo: I would rather be

  Malo: in an apple tree

  Malo: than a naughty boy

  Malo: in adversity

  No animals in the opera, for obvious reasons. No animals in the novella either, though children living on a country estate would have been surrounded by them. But animals give the game away. Are the children really evil? Or is the governess mad? Any halfway-decent vet could’ve sorted that out in seconds. Disturbed children torture animals.

  Danny didn’t. That had struck Tom from the beginning. All those neglected, used, abused, dead or dying animals, but Danny had not been cruel to any of them. Or so Danny said. But then Danny’s story, though Tom believed him to be telling the truth, most of the time, was not all it appeared to be. His apparently rambling excursions into the past were anything but rambling. He was constructing a systematic rebuttal of the evidence Tom had given in court. There was a good deal of antagonism in all this. More than Tom had realized at the start.

  It took him ten minutes to get home, and another five before he found a parking space in a side street several hundred yards from his front door. The street was deserted, the lamps a line of orange flowers blossoming in puddles. He walked quickly back to the main road, his footsteps echoing amongst the empty warehouses that rose, tall and black, into the night sky, ghost smells of the goods they’d once contained – sharp, sweet, sour – fading on the air. He turned the corner, and noticed a solitary figure outside his house, advancing a little way down the road, then going back up the steps into the shadow of the porch.

  Tom quickened his pace. ‘Danny,’ he said, when he was close enough to be heard without raising his voice. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘Somebody’s following me.’

  He looked deranged, slack mouthed and sweating, but there was no doubting the reality of the fear. Tom could smell it on him. ‘You’d better come in,’ he said, unlocking the front door and stepping quickly inside to switch off the burglar alarm. He walked ahead of Danny into the living room, not bothering to switch on the hall lights.
<
br />   ‘Can you pull the curtains to?’ Danny asked, lingering in the doorway.

  Tom made sure the folds of material overlapped at the centre so that no chink of light could show through, and then he turned to the drinks table. Normally he never offered clients alcohol, but this wasn’t a proper session, and he needed a drink himself. He felt high after the TV interview, vapidly talkative, mentally flatulent, deeply distrustful of himself. Talking to the media produces exactly the same kind of unfocused anxiety as a night of heavy drinking. He raised a hand to his face, and his fingers slipped on skin greasy with make-up and sweat, as if he were wearing a rapidly disintegrating mask. And now, to all this, was added the strangeness of having Danny here, in his half-empty, booming living room, agitated, scared, in what felt like the middle of the night. But wasn’t, he reminded himself with a glance at his watch. It was still twenty minutes short of midnight.

  ‘Whisky?’he asked.

  Danny sat down, slumped rather, in one of the armchairs. He looked up and said: ‘Yes. Please.’

  Tom handed him a full glass, and settled on the other side of the fireplace. The fire had burnt low, and he spent a few minutes feeding nuggets of coal into the glowing caverns. A domestic scene, he thought, looking round the walls that seemed less bare, now, than they had by day, the squares left by Lauren’s pictures obscured by leaping shadows.

  ‘Well now, what’s been happening?’

  ‘I was followed.’ Danny’s voice had the strident pitch of somebody who doesn’t expect to be believed. ‘I was working in the library, and there was a man at the end of the street when I left, and I noticed in Grey Street he was still there, and then he got on the same train as me. He sat at the other end of the carriage.’

  ‘Did you recognize him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Isn’t it possible he was just going the same way?’

  A quick, stubborn shake of the head.

  ‘Did he get off at the same stop?’