Double Vision

by Pat Barker

  He turned to look back at the cottage and the farmhouse far below. Very small and square, they looked, like Monopoly houses. A white van had pulled into the farmyard – visible from here, though it couldn’t be seen from the lane – and two men were carrying something out of the back door. A television set. He wondered for one brain-dead moment whether Beth had arranged for it to be collected and forgotten to tell him, but how had they got in? No, it was a burglary. And then he saw Justine’s little red Metro travelling along the lane. He prayed for it to stop outside the cottage – it was possible she’d call in for a coffee before taking the shopping up to the farmhouse – but no, she drove straight past without slackening speed, and pulled up outside the farmhouse, which to her would look normal. There’d be nothing to see from the lane. He hadn’t remembered to set the burglar alarm, so there’d be no flashing or ringing. He saw her get out and lean for a moment on the car roof, looking up at the hill. She was looking straight at him. He waved his arms and yelled, ‘Justine!’, but she couldn’t hear him, any more than he’d heard the car’s engine.

  He started to run, hurling himself headlong down the hill, tripping over tussocks, catching his feet, and knowing all the time that, even if he ran till his heart and lungs burst, he still wouldn’t get there in time.

  Justine leant on the car roof, feeling the metal warm under her bare arms and looked up at the hill and the twin vapour trails from a plane dispersing in the blue sky. Then she heaved the carrier bags out from the back seat and set off up the path.

  The daffodils were at their peak, though Beth, who for some reason disapproved of yellow flowers, had restricted them to a single clump by the door. You’re vulgar, you are, she told them as she reached for her key. You should be silver-grey or white. And then, rejoicing in the unsubtlety of daffodils, she carried her bags along to the kitchen and dumped them on the table. Coffee, before she unpacked. Looking out of the window, she saw that the vapour trails had almost disappeared.

  Then a scurry of footsteps, a blow between her shoulder blades and an arm coiled round her neck. Stephen, she tried to say. There was a second when she actually believed this was Stephen, not because it was the kind of thing he would do, but because the other explanation was unthinkable. DON’T LOOK, YOU FUCKING STUPID CUNT. The words burst on her ear in a spray of spit. Fingers poked into her eyes. A hand pressed hard into her nose and mouth. Can’t breathe. She threw herself back against him, trying to take him by surprise. He grunted and started hitting her, big flat-handed blows, not like a man or even a woman, more like a toddler batting something away, trying to make it not there. Now that her mouth was free, she drew in breath with a screech and expelled it in a scream. DON’T TURN ROUND. I’LL KILL YOU, YOU FUCKING STUPID COW. Frustrated, he began banging her head against a cupboard, cutting her forehead and scalp on the sharp edge. She felt a gush of blood down her face and neck. Huge red splashes appeared on her white T-shirt, dropped like rain on to her arms and hands. Plenty more where that came from. The meaningless thought formed and hung suspended in the darkness. Another roar of rage from him – he was angry with her for being hurt. She focused on him so intently she anticipated his every reaction. He had become the world. She was no longer afraid, or not in the way she’d previously understood fear. Her whole being had shrunk to a single diamond-hard point of determination to live. He thrust her forward against the sink till it cut into her stomach. The pain steadied her. She made a rumbling noise behind the hand, trying to tell him she couldn’t breathe. DON’T LOOK AT ME. SHUT UP. DON’T TURN ROUND. He banged her against the sink with every word, his anger feeding off her fear. She went limp, pretending to faint, then, judging his height from the direction of his voice, drove her right elbow into his stomach. A grunt of pain. Then he swung her round and she found herself staring into two pale blue eyes thickly fringed with lashes that were almost white. He hit her, hard, and the middle of her face exploded in pain. There was just time to think, He’s going to kill me, and then she was fainting, crumpling to the floor. She was aware of being dragged into the living room, the carpet leaving burn marks on her back where her T-shirt had ridden up. Two figures now, two voices, but the new one was careful to stay out of sight. They picked her up and threw her on to the sofa, and then she must have blacked out again, but not completely. She was aware of them talking, trying to solve the problem. She’d seen one of them. She could describe him. They couldn’t solve it just by running away. She went on playing dead. Even with her eyes closed she knew exactly where they were, as if some part of her mind had split off and was watching what happened from somewhere else in the room. She could see herself lying on the sofa, a hand over her face, snuffling blood and mucus.

  Creeping along behind the hedge, Stephen did a bent-double, lung-bursting run along the path and into the kitchen garden. From here he could see the house through a gap in the hedge. The sunlight flashed on the conservatory windows, but there were no figures moving around inside. Adam had shown him where Beth kept the spare key: incredibly for an intelligent woman, she left it under a stone urn outside the conservatory door. Woodlice scrambled away in all directions as he found the small polythene envelope and took the key out. He slid it into the lock, holding his breath as it turned, praying he wouldn’t make any noise getting in. Running down the hill, he’d thought he might burst into the house shouting, ‘Police’, hoping they’d panic and run, but if they didn’t he’d have lost the element of surprise. And they might be upstairs in one of the bedrooms. It mightn’t be so easy for them to run. But he daren’t think about that. Through the door, across the black-and-white tiles, into the hall. On a table there was a bronze statue of an African man, immensely tall and thin. Stephen picked it up, held it round the legs and edged forward again. Voices, though he couldn’t catch any of the words. Deep, slow breaths. It hurt his chest to breathe like that, but he did it. Peering round the edge of the door, he saw Justine lying on the sofa, her face a mask of blood, and, only a few feet away, his back to the door, a man wearing a dark blue sweatshirt and jeans. Stephen could see short, ginger hair, the nape of a pink neck. He raised the statue, took two long strides into the room, and brought it crashing down. At the last second somebody shouted, ‘Look out’ and the man ducked, deflecting the blow on to his shoulder. Stephen felt the jar of bone breaking travel up his own arm, and then, howling, the man turned and ran.

  Kneeling by the sofa, he tried to estimate the damage to Justine. Forehead cut and bruised, nose swollen, but the most worrying injuries were the cuts to her head, though she seemed comparatively unaware of them and was simply holding a hand over her eyes and nose to shield them. He tried to take her in his arms, but she was stiff and unyielding, staring round her as if she expected them to come back at any minute. He dialled 999 and asked for police and an ambulance. While he was phoning, he looked round the room. Television gone. DVD player, music centre. The mantelpiece had been swept clean, but he couldn’t remember what had been on it.

  ‘They’ll be here in about twenty minutes.’

  ‘Lock the door.’

  He was about to argue that they certainly wouldn’t come back, but then he saw her expression – the staring hyper-wakeful eyes – and did as she asked. In the utility room his feet crunched on broken glass, and he saw that the small window was shattered. Then back to the living room. He found it hard to look at her face. ‘Did you lose consciousness?’

  ‘I think so. Or perhaps I just fainted. I don’t know.’

  At least, he thought, they weren’t rapists. Of course, if they’d been watching the house – Beth had mentioned getting silent calls – they’d know it was normally empty at this time of day, so Justine walking in on them like that would have been a helluva shock.

  A whoop and scream of sirens, a hammering on the front door, and suddenly the room was full of men in uniform. He saw Justine shrink back into the sofa cushions, but she seemed more dazed than frightened.

  The cut-off part of Justine watched from the hall, as a girl with
a cut and bruised face was examined by paramedics. There was nothing unreal about this division. She felt the harsh texture of the hall carpet under her feet.

  A face leant close to hers. ‘You’d better come along to the hospital, Miss. You’ll need a few stitches in that.’

  She could tell from the way he said ‘a few’ that he meant ‘a lot’. ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘Better be on the safe side.’

  On the way out she remembered the frozen food thawing in carrier bags on the kitchen table and turned to ask Stephen to put it in the fridge, but the thought sank back into the darkness before she could speak. Standing there, wrapped in a red blanket, she groped about in her mind trying to recover it, before admitting it was gone.

  Only at the last minute, climbing up the steps into the ambulance, did she remember what really mattered.

  ‘Ring Dad,’ she called to Stephen.

  He nodded, then spoke to the driver. ‘Where are you taking her?’

  ‘The RVI.’

  ‘I’ll come as soon as I can.’

  He blew a kiss. Then the doors banged shut behind her, shutting out the bright day.

  After ringing Alec, who sounded winded by the news, but said he’d go to the hospital at once, Stephen settled down to be interviewed by the police. It took about an hour. He was careful to emphasize that there were two burglars, that they’d attacked Justine, that for all he knew they were armed. The broken collarbone – whatever it was – had to be accounted for. He didn’t think he was likely to be charged with assault, but he was playing safe. Stranger things had happened.

  Long before the interview was over, the house was full of white-suited scene-of-crime officers, dusting grey powder everywhere. And then, in the middle of all this, Robert rang from Orly Airport and had to be told the news. ‘Is Justine all right?’ he asked.

  Full marks, Robert, Stephen thought. He hadn’t even asked what was missing.

  Stephen was given an incident number to pass on to Robert, the phone number of a glazier who did emergency calls, and was told to expect a visit from Victim Support. Then the young policeman snapped the elastic round his notebook and stood up. He didn’t hold out much hope of recovering anything, he said, as Stephen accompanied him to the front door, but this was aggravated burglary and they’d give it their best shot.

  Shortly afterwards the chief scene-of-crime officer, a pretty, red-haired girl with a Scottish accent, popped her head round the door to say she was going too.

  So he was alone, in a house he couldn’t leave till the glazier had come and fixed the window.

  He went back over the story he’d told the police, and then the other story: the one he hadn’t needed to tell them because – thank God – it wasn’t relevant. Locked in his brain, though, was the truth. All the way down the hillside he’d had flashbulbs exploding in his head. So many raped and tortured girls – he needed no imagination to picture what might be happening to Justine. It would not have surprised him to find her lying like a broken doll at the foot of the stairs, her skirt bunched up around her waist, her eyes staring. Years of impacted rage had gone into the blow he’d aimed at the back of the burglar’s head. He’d meant it to kill.

  He looked around him. One pool of blood in the kitchen, another in the living room, and everywhere, on every window, every door, every piece of furniture, clustering thickly round doorknobs and latches, grey fingerprints, handprints, thumbprints, everywhere, as if the house were suffering from an infestation of ghosts.

  Twenty-five

  Justine had a fleeting impression of the casualty department as the ambulance men hurried her through it – a row of people sitting on a bench. Because the police were with her, she was taken immediately to a treatment room at the far end of the corridor. The policewoman withdrew. Justine was asked to undress on to paper on the floor and given a scratchy hospital robe to wear. Her clothes and the paper were scooped up and carried away. A young man came and sat beside her, asked if she’d scratched her attacker, examined her fingers and took scrapings from underneath the nails. She couldn’t remember scratching him. She looked at her hands, imagined them being bagged up as evidence and taken away.

  She couldn’t breathe normally, but snuffled through mucus or breathed through her mouth. Audible breaths frightened her – if she’d been able to breathe silently she’d have calmed down much quicker – but mouth breathing made her thirsty. She kept swallowing, running her tongue round her mouth, flexing her lips. At last she got up, walked the few steps to the sink in the corner, took a polystyrene cup, filled it to the brim with water and drank the lot. Then she filled the cup and drank again. It was the first decision she’d made, the first action she’d taken, since they threw her on the sofa and yelled at her to shut up. And it had a curious effect – she started to shake.

  There was nothing in the room but this sink, a trolley covered with white paper, and two plastic chairs, mushroom-coloured. She sat on one of the chairs and looked at the other. The separate part of herself wandered round the edges of the room, glancing at her now and then, observing, she supposed, deciding whether that body over there was a safe place to be. She shouldn’t be as frightened as this now. She was safe – a policewoman down the corridor waiting to interview her – nobody could get at her here. Even the sounds – they were horrible, but at least she knew what they were. A man on a ventilator whom she’d glimpsed in the room next to hers breathed through his mask with a sizzling wheeze – he sounded like the ice warriors in Doctor Who – and then across the corridor there was somebody yelping. Not groaning or screaming – yelping. That door was shut and they were in there with him. Listening to those yelps, she felt a complete fraud. She had nothing worse than a headache and soreness in the middle of her face. It was a different matter when she tried to touch it, then she was biting back yelps of her own. But she was alone now with what had happened, and might have happened.

  The cut-off part of herself was moving further away. At one point she saw herself slumped on the chair. Loser, she thought, seeing how the blood had made black spikes in her hair.

  Did not see the spikes. Not see them. Only felt and imagined. She tried shutting her eyes and saying I, I, I… over and over again. I am looking at the sink. I am sitting on a chair. See Justine sitting on the chair. Like a child’s reading book, she thought. See Justine. See Peter. Peter has a ball. See the ball. See the dog. See the dog run.

  No daylight in the room, no window. The strip lighting above her head buzzed, and that buzzing became the sound of pain. And then she heard a familiar voice, hurrying footsteps and her father burst through the swing doors, stopped dead, looked at her, made as if to embrace her and then visibly held back. Why? she wondered. She wanted to be hugged, she wanted him to hold her, and he did, but it was a second, just one second, too late. He thought she’d been raped. He thought she wouldn’t be able to bear being touched even by him. Why did this make her hate him? But then she looked at his face and saw he was frightened. And so she made herself talk about the attack, domesticating it, not for herself but for him. And when she spat it all out like that, it really didn’t sound too bad. I walked in on a burglary. One of them panicked and started hitting me. I know I look a mess, but I’m all right, honestly, don’t worry about me, I’m all right. No worse than being mugged on the street, and a lot better than… She forced the words out. A lot better than being raped.

  It helped, making this effort – she could see herself in a few years’ time telling the story like this with a slight, self-deprecating laugh, and that was good because to imagine that she had to imagine herself surviving. But there was something else behind this bald account, something she daren’t articulate – I woke up, it was a normal morning, I did the shopping, I drove Adam to school. It was a lovely day, I was happy, I leant on the car roof, I felt the sun on my back… And then that meaningless, brutal, random eruption of violence. Meaningless to her at any rate. The men might have been planning it for months. A criminal psychologist might look a
t their lives and find the burglary predictable, the violence predictable. Perhaps everything in their lives had led them to that point, but then that was true of her too. And it was no help.

  She might feel happy again, but she would never again feel safe.

  An hour later she was sitting on the trolley, dressed in clothes Angela had brought in for her. She’d been interviewed, had given the fullest description of the burglars she could manage. At first she’d thought she wouldn’t be able to say anything useful, her memories were so chaotic, but the face of the one who’d hit her had imprinted itself on her memory. She only had to summon up the image and describe what she saw. About the other she could say almost nothing – he’d been so careful not to let her see him – but the police kept nodding their heads. She felt they knew who’d done it.

  Now shaved, stitched, scanned, taped, she was going home. She’d seen herself in the mirror and it was a fairly horrifying sight, but she didn’t care about that. She just wanted to be out. Home. In her own bed.

  She walked down the corridor on her father’s arm, like an old woman, she thought, though if she was an old woman he’d be dead. It was early afternoon, still a beautiful day. The sun flashed on rows of cars. A bird sang. This shocked her so much she had to stand in the entrance where the ambulances drew up, and stare at the bright light, at the sky. It didn’t seem possible.

  They’d given her some tranquillizers. Not many, not enough to get addicted, just enough to see her through the next few days. That’s why she felt she was seeing the world at one remove, padded in cotton wool. She had an appointment to go back and see a plastic surgeon about her nose – they thought it might need surgery – but that was in the future. At least there was a future. She remembered the shouting, the terror in his voice. He could have killed her. Not because he wanted to, not even because he was violent, but because he didn’t know what else to do.