by Pat Barker
‘Tom, are you saying he needs to be in a secure hospital facility? Because if you are, you know what that means, don’t you? The Home Office is going to rescind his parole.’
‘Yes, I know.’ He glanced at Danny, who seemed to be aware of being observed, and turned to look at him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not saying that.’
In the silence that followed, they heard the shriek of a police siren. Martha said, ‘That’s them now. We’ll need a coat or something to put over his head.’
Tom fetched his coat from behind the utility-room door. It was the one he’d been wearing when he and Lauren went for that walk along the river path, and, as he took it from the peg, a powerful smell of river mud filled the room. He never had remembered to have it cleaned. He took it back upstairs with him. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘This’ll do.’
A fist banged on the door and Martha went to open it. Suddenly the hall was lull of policemen in uniform, radios crackling at their hips.
‘Don’t worry about that lot, sir,’ an inspector said, pushing his way to the front. ‘We can’t shift them altogether, but we’ll get them moved to the end of the street. And if you have any more bother just give us a ring.’
A policeman waited, looking over his shoulder, one hand on the half-open door.
‘I’ll have to go, Tom,’ Martha said, raising her face to be kissed.
‘Good luck, Danny,’ Tom said, handing him the coat.
Danny smiled. ‘I seem to make a habit of walking off with your coat.’
‘Keep it this time.’
Martha ran to get her bag and came back hitching it over her shoulder, looking pale and excited in a slightly shame-faced way. Tom watched a policeman wrap Danny’s head in the black folds of the coat. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s only till they get you into the car.’
‘Right, then!’
The inspector nodded to the man by the door. And then they all barged out into a chaos of clicks, whirrs, shouts and flashes. Martha followed. Tom saw her walk round the car and get in the other side, while one of the policemen, shielding Danny’s head with his hand, pushed him down on to the back seat.
The car nosed forward, journalists trotting alongside, shouting questions, holding cameras to the windows. The remaining policemen forced them back. Thwarted, they came running back to Tom, who nipped into the house and slammed the door in their faces. He didn’t see the car pull away, accelerate and disappear round a bend in the road.
Shouts from the street as the policemen persuaded the press to move further away. Tom leant against the door, his burnt hand pressed into his armpit, gasping for breath as if he’d just returned from a run, and stared at the space where Danny had been.
TWENTY-TWO
After a few minutes he pulled himself together, went upstairs to the bathroom and held his hand under a stream of cold water for a foil ten minutes. It should have been done immediately, of course, but even now it might help to minimize the damage. Turning off the tap, clumsily, with his left hand, he inspected the burnt areas.
The fingers were swollen and shiny, but the only real injury was to the palm of the hand, which was badly blistered, though as far as he could tell all the blisters were intact. It wasn’t possible to go to the hospital. He could imagine what the headlines would be if he turned up in the casualty department now. He had no choice but to do the job himself. It was difficult, working only with his left hand, but he padded the burnt area well, and managed to wind clear tape round his hand to keep the wads of lint and gauze in place. Then he took painkillers and sleeping tablets, and crashed out on the bed.
It was late morning when he woke. After lying for a few minutes, blinking, he crawled out of bed, cradling his burnt hand, and went across to the window, where he peered through a crack in the curtains, trying to make out whether the reporters had gone, or merely retreated to the end of the street. He couldn’t see anybody, except Mrs Broadbent setting off for the shops, leaning heavily on her trolley, which was really a sort of disguised Black Watch tartan Zimmer frame. After trundling a few yards down the street, she turned and went back, trying the door handle to make sure that it was locked. And immediately Tom remembered another old lady who’d done exactly that, and died because of it.
He spent the rest of the morning, and most of the afternoon, creeping round the house, or listening to messages on the answering machine. The phone rang every two or three minutes, some calls from journalists wanting to talk about Danny, others from friends who’d heard the news of his split with Lauren. He would have to return those calls, but he didn’t feel like doing it now. The person he most wanted to hear from was Martha, but she didn’t ring, too busy handing Danny over to whoever was going to supervise him through the next stage of his life. The next identity.
After lunch, he tried to do some work on the book, but could neither hold a pen nor type for very long. What he really needed was to get away, and towards evening he left the house by the back way, along the river path, walked into town and took the train to Alnmouth, where he spent the night. Next morning, he hired a car and set off for Hadrian’s Wall.
His plan was to walk along the Wall westwards from Homesteads over Cuddy’s Crags, Hotbank Crags, Milking Gap, high above the steely waters of Crag Lough, and on to Peel Crags and Winshields. But by the time he reached Vindolanda it was blowing a gale. He persevered for a time, staggering in the gusts, but the wind threatened to blow him off the Wall, and along with other disappointed walkers he was obliged to turn back.
Instead, he drove to the coast, parked the car and walked across the causeway to Holy Island. It was low tide. The flat, shining, level sands stretched out for miles on either side of the road. It was difficult to believe that at high tide the ground he was walking on would be fifteen feet below the sea.
The causeway was longer than he’d remembered. He was sweating by the time he reached the sign by the side of the road: WELCOME TO THE HOLY ISLAND OF LINDISFRANE. He climbed the steep hill on the other side, following a path that ran between sand dunes crowned by plumes of bleached marram grass.
He walked all the way round the island, looking at the cormorants that lined the cliffs on the seaward side, their black wingp hung out to dry. Thirteen hundred years ago, Eadfrith and Billfrith, Dark Age scribes, had used those birds to illuminate the Lindis-farne Gospels, thick, supple, snake-like necks coiled around the initial pages of St Matthew and St John. Yet surely then, as now, they must have seemed ominous, those black shapes against the sky, harbingers of death.
At lunchtime he went to the nearest pub, ate sandwiches, drank rather too much beer and lingered by the fireside, talking to a middle-aged couple who were on a walking holiday and, like him, had been forced to abandon their original plan of walking along the Wall. Eventually they left, saying they would try again tomorrow, and he sat on by the fire, sinking into a bovine reverie as the warmth lulled the pain in his hand to sleep.
When, finally, he left the pub, he discovered that a sea fret had blown in across the island, and the sand dunes were half hidden in drifting veils of vapour. He made slow progress. His joints had stiffened during the long rest by the fire, and at times he seemed to be merely hobbling along. The sea fret had brought with it a drop in temperature, and the palm of his hand prickled and burned.
He was less than halfway across the causeway when the mist thickened. Looking round, he saw that the island had vanished, and that the coast ahead of him was no more than a dark smudge in the all-encompassing white. Only the midway refuge, a hundred yards ahead, was still visible. He wondered if he should turn back, but that would mean spending the night on the island, and although, at this time of year, it would be easy to get a room, the prospect made him feel claustrophobic. He peered out over the water, trying to judge how long it would be to high tide. The sea had another nine or ten feet to rise before it even lipped the edges of the road. Plenty of time.
The mist was damp. The surface hairs on his woollen sweater were matted with drops of moisture,
though it had not rained. Now and then, a wave lifted the masses of bladderwrack on the beach, and let them fall again, releasing a pungent smell of salt water and decay. His footsteps echoed, seeming to bounce back at him from the wall of mist. It was easy to imagine that somebody else was out there, walking towards him. This was a place for the unexpected, the near-miraculous meeting. It would not have surprised him to see Danny emerge from the sea fret, with that curious walk of his, head down, hands deep in his pockets, striding along as if he had all the space in the world. As if he were walking through some internal landscape, for where, in the confined places of his upbringing, could he ever have learnt to walk like that?
Tom stopped to look out over the water. He was thinking that Danny had won. That in the end, like Angus, like no doubt countless other people whose names hedidn’t know, he’d bent the rules for Danny. Two nights ago – only two nights, it seemed much longer than that – he’d seen Danny lapse into a borderline psychotic state, and Tom’s vague general warning to Martha had not gone nearly far enough. He knew that if, at some future time, Danny were to set a fire in which somebody died, his silence on that night would return to haunt him. He knew what he should have done. Only, at the crucial moment, Danny had turned to look at him, and it had not seemed possible to betray him.
A wave seethed in the bladderwrack at his feet. He looked around and saw that the tide was racing in fast, the last few yards of sand disappearing faster than he would have believed possible. Already it was too late to go back to the refuge, far, far too late to return to the island. He had no choice but to go on. Heart thudding against his ribs, he broke into a run. Surges of water, laced with foam, flooded the road in front of him. He splashed through them, gagging from the effort.
Then, suddenly, the ground was dry again. He slowed to a walk, legs trembling, feeling that he’d panicked for no reason. Though when he looked back, he saw that the road ran straight into the sea. The whole central section of the causeway had disappeared under the water. Only the refuge, high on its stilts, becoming clearer, minute by minute, as the mists round Lindisfame receded, was left to look out over the swirling tide.
A week after he got back home, Tom woke to a new noise. The light bulb in the kitchen was swinging on the end of its flex. He went to the front door and looked out, but could see nothing.
After breakfast, he ventured into the decaying hinterland of warehouses, sheds and factories, and saw a bright-yellow crane with a huge metal ball dangling from its jib. As he watched, the crane reversed, the ball swung and struck the side of a building, the blow sending spasmodic jerks rattling up the chain. Plaster and brick dust leaked from the open wound. Clumsily, the crane reversed. Another shock, another succession of shudders running up the chain. This time a whole section of the wall collapsed.
He spent the next few weeks living on the edge of a building site, doors and windows kept shut against the noise and dust. Curiously the work going on around him seemed to lift his mood. He worked steadily on the book, amazed he could work at all, for whenever he lifted his eyes from the screen he was aware of Lauren’s absence. Soon he was going to have to decide what to do about the house – what to do with himself– but the book came first.
Martha read it chapter by chapter, commented, commented again on the next draft. They met, now, several times a week, developing a habit of takeaway suppers with cans of beer. When she was there the house seemed less hollow. Always, as soon as he was alone, the absence rushed in, though, as time went by, it became more difficult to say whether the absence was Lauren’s, or Martha’s.
Lauren, he discovered from Roddy and Angela who kept in touch with her, was living with somebody called Francis. This happened so quickly it was obvious that Francis had been waiting in the wings. But at least Lauren’s desire to enjoy her new life unencumbered expedited the divorce. Only when he had the piece of paper in his hand did Tom start to feel free.
Winter closed in, icy winds blowing flurries of stinging snow off the river. The pleasure of pulling on an old, warm, well-trusted sweater became nightly more apparent. The time came when the evening’s talk drifted into silence, and it seemed merely silly for Martha to go home. They took the relationship one day at a time, neither of them assuming it would necessarily last, though they did suit each other, physically and in every other way, surprisingly well.
Gradually life settled into a new pattern. All around Tom’s street, shops, restaurants and hotels were springing up. Even the river changed. The crumbling jetties and quays were demolished, paths laid, trees planted. One night, looking over the railings at the place where shopping trolleys used to go to die, Tom saw what he took to be a large rat lolloping along the bank. But then he realized it was too big, and anyway rats don’t lollop. Another shadowy creature joined the first. He glimpsed wet hair roughed up into spikes, a moist nostril questioning the air. Otters. He could hardly believe it. Otters on the Tyne.
Throughout all this time, Danny neither wrote nor phoned. Martha had news of him occasionally, though only indirectly, through his new probation officer. Tom wasn’t surprised by his silence. This, rather than any ‘gimmick’ of throwing cassettes on to a fire, was Danny’s way of burning the tapes.
But then one day, without warning, he saw him again. Tom had gone to the University of Wessex to give a talk on the Youth Violence Project. He arrived in the late afternoon and, after leaving his bag in the hall of residence where he was going to spend the night, was taken straight to the teaching block.
The lecture theatre was large, with the platform raised well above the auditorium. The lights were too bright for Tom’s taste, and at first he couldn’t see the audience at all, except as a blur of faces. Gradually, his eyes adjusted to the glare and he thought he saw a familiar face at the end of the second row on the left.
Danny. Or a young man who looked Hke Danny. He couldn’t be sure.
He sat, sipping water, listening to the introduction, working out how good the acoustics were, how good the microphones were. When he stood up to speak, he gazed around deliberately for a second, trying to see into the darkness of the auditorium, but he couldn’t. The figure remained shadowy, elusive. As soon as Tom began to speak he forgot about him, in the need to make contact with this large, intent, but, at seven thirty in the evening, inevitably jaded audience.
The talk went well. He’d given similar talks many times before, and could do it, now, almost on automatic pilot. When the time came for questions, he asked for the house lights to be raised, and there, unmistakably, was Danny. He’d been almost sure, but even so the sight of him was a shock. He stumbled over the answer to the first question, but recovered quickly.
After the questions, there were glasses of wine on a table in the foyer. Tom talked to various people who asked questions or made comments, aware all the time of Danny, who was leaning against a notice-board, a backdrop of many-coloured pieces of paper forming a jigsaw round his head. A rather aggressive young woman with dead black hair accused Tom of patronizing the people he spoke about. He’d given the entire talk, she said, without once seeming to be aware that there might be people in the audience who’d been in young offenders’ institutions. Tom explained courteously that he’d made no assumptions at all about the audience, beyond their willingness to listen.
‘You’re just exploiting them,’ she said, her nose-stud popping out with the force of her convictions.
‘I didn’t think he was exploiting them,’ Danny said, coming up to join them.
‘How would you know?’ She stared Danny in the eye, then, when he didn’t blink or move, turned on her heel and strode away.
‘She did six months for dealing,’ Danny said. ‘It’s her main claim to fame round here.’
Tom looked round, and realized that the audience was drifting away. He said goodnight to his host, who was worried he might not find his way back to the hall of residence.
It’s all right,’ Danny said. Til show him the way.’
They went out into the
gardens. A few hundred yards away the student bar was full of lights and music. People sat at tables outside, or spread out on to the grass, testing it before they sat down.
Earlier in the evening there’d been a shower of rain, enough to release the smell of lilacs from the bushes behind them. Danny reached up and caught a branch, sending a cascade of raindrops over his face and hair.
‘How are you?’ he asked, before Tom could speak.
‘Pretty well, and you?’
‘Not so bad.’
No explanation for his long silence, but then none was required. They had slipped back into the intimacy of their first meeting.
‘Whereabouts are you on your course?’
‘Finals this year.’
‘And then?’
‘I’m doing the MA in writing. It’s been a bit of a rush getting a portfolio together, but Angus has been very good.’
‘Angus MacDonald? You got in touch?’
A stab of jealousy that amazed him. He would have said he was incapable of such a reaction, and yet jealousy was unmistakably what he felt. Just as Martha would be jealous when he told her about this meeting. He thought about it, and decided to be amused. It was Danny’s gift.
‘I went on one of his courses,’ Danny was saying. ‘Very salutary.’ He didn’t say how.
Tom turned to look back the way they’d come. The lights in the teaching block were being switched off, one by one. Against the night sky, the building looked like a huge liner sinking, the lights, first on one deck, then another, going out, until everything was dark.
I won’t ask you your new name,’ he said, smiling.
‘No, better not. I’ve made up my mind about one thing though.’ He was looking towards the bar with its crowds and music. ‘If it happens again, I won’t run. There has to be a time when you say: “No, I’m just not running any more.’