by Pat Barker
And the stammer? The stammer vanished or, at least, was reduced to a slight hesitation that had the effect of concentrating his listeners’ attention on the next word.
Helen was interested in the reasons for these changes, in the social forces that had obliged the young Geordie to repress his memories of fear, pain, bitterness, degradation, because what he had thought and felt at that time was not acceptable. A later generation, fresh from a visit to Oh! What a Lovely War, the Dies Irae of Britten’s War Requiem pounding in its ears, couldn’t get enough of fear, pain, etc. The horror, the horror. Give us more. Suddenly a large part of Geordie’s experience was ‘acceptable’, though still not all.
Towards the end of the published interview, Helen attempted to get Geordie to see that he still hadn’t been asked to talk about class, the different experiences of officers and men, profiteering, the whole idea of the war as a business in which some people suffered and died to make others rich, though this bitterness, as much as the anguish of grief for lost comrades, had shaped and framed his experience of the post-war years. He was still, Helen believed, remaking his memories to fit in with public perceptions of the war, only now he was working to a different template.
She tried to get Geordie to frame his war experience in terms of late-twentieth-century preoccupations. Gender. Definitions of masculinity. Homoeroticism. Homo-what? asked Geordie. Helen, with her Oxford First. Geordie, with his board-school education, shovelled into one dead-end job at the age of fourteen and then, aged eighteen, into another. It was an unequal contest. Geordie won.
‘Penny for them?’ Helen says.
Nick feels cold glass against his fingers and takes the whisky. ‘Oh, I was just thinking about this.’ He shows her the book. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve still got the transcripts, have you?’
‘Yes, somewhere. In the department, I think.’
‘May I borrow them? I mean, I’d get them photocopied and let you have them back.’
‘No problem. I’ll look them out.’ She curls up on the sofa, and chinks the ice in her glass. ‘You know, I went with him to the Imperial War Museum and he was in the trench talking to these kids and they were saying, “Was it like this?” And he was saying, “Well, this is pretty good, but in the real trenches there were rats and dead bodies and horrible smells, and bombs falling and it was cold and it was wet and it was noisy and you were fed up and you were frightened and you wanted to go home.” And of course the kids lapped it up. There were two little boys racing up and down the trench making machine-gun noises. You know?’ She rakes the room with an imaginary machine-gun. ‘And I said to Geordie, “Are you sure this is doing any good?”’
‘And he said?’
‘ “Yes.”’ She laughs. ‘He never doubted it.’
Silence. Nick takes a gulp of whisky and waits for the question he knows is coming.
‘What do you think?’
‘I’m not a historian.’
‘No, but you must have an opinion.’
‘Well, you see the first thing is I don’t believe in public memory. A memory’s a biochemical change in an individual brain, and that’s all there is. There’s quite a lot of evidence that traumatic memories are stored in a different part of the brain from normal memories, and that’s what makes them so incredibly persistent. And so… almost hallucinatory. They’re not accessible to language in the same way. It’s like watching a film, or… or even worse it’s like acting in a film.’ He spreads his hands. ‘As for warnings and messages… I don’t know.’ A spurt of anger. ‘Anyway what is the message? You look back over the whole horrible blood-sodden mess. Isn’t the real message: You can get away with it.?’
“And yet you went to the battlefields with him.’
‘Somebody had to. He couldn’t have managed on his own.’ Nick wants to tell her about Thiepval, but there’s no time, he ought to be going. And anyway he hasn’t succeeded in telling himself about Thiepval yet. ‘Thanks.’ He puts down the empty glass. ‘I needed that.’
‘I’ll look out the transcripts,’ she says, opening the door. ‘And you’ll let me know when he’s ready for a visit?’
The August night’s cool, rather than cold, yet he shivers, an automatic reaction to the glitter of moonlight on cobbles and the stars pricking sharply through the telegraph wires that score the sky. The car smells musty, a mess of cardboard cartons left from the family’s last outing litters the back seats. Curried chips, his nose tells him. Gareth’s favourite. He wonders as he fumbles with the ignition key if he’s fit to drive. He’s well under the limit for alcohol, but he seems to be getting more tired by the minute, as if all the energy he’d expended over the last few weeks, moving and decorating, had been borrowed and the loan’s just been called in. His hands hurt where the wallpaper scraper rubbed off the skin. He yawns and yawns again, as the car at last sputters into life. He’ll go the back way, he decides. It’s a bit longer, but, at this time of night, there’ll be next to no traffic.
It’s been raining. There are crescents of silver light trapped inside the drops that speckle the glass. It seems a pity to press the button and sweep them away. Almost as soon as he starts the engine the rain comes on heavier. Smears of orange light on greasy cobbles, the wipers’ swish and whine, make it hard to stay alert. He’s hunched over the wheel peering at the edges of the road for guidance, driving as if in a thick fog, though there’s no more than a slight mist.
What he wanted to say to Helen, but couldn’t find a tactful way of phrasing it, was that she’d got Geordie all wrong. That she was so much in love with her thesis that she distorted his experience to make it fit. Geordie’s memories aren’t malleable: they don’t change to fit other people’s perceptions of the war. On the contrary. Geordie’s tragedy is that his memories are carved in granite. The nightmares of Harry’s death that had Geordie screaming back in 1919 are the same ones that wake him, sweating and terrified, in the sluice room now. And secretly, what he wants to say is that raking about in the detritus of other people’s memories is a waste of time and energy. The only true or useful thing that can be said about the past is that it’s over. It no longer exists.
All the houses are in darkness. Lob’s Hill, when he gets back, will be in darkness. Fran will have given up and gone to bed by now, and she won’t be too pleased either. He’d said he was going out ‘for a few hours’. His headlights pick out the silver trunks of trees, moths flickering like beads of light, big, pale stars of bindweed, and then, in the rear mirror, darkness swallows them. His lights seem to create the road he drives along, and then consign it to oblivion.
He lets himself gain speed, sits back, starts to relax. Too much, he’s getting drowsy. Probably he should pull over and walk up and down a bit, but that would make him even later than he is and anyway he’s nearly home. Another few minutes and then, providing Jasper’s asleep, he can slide into bed and lose consciousness. Louder music, that’s the thing.
He’s tapping on the wheel when a girl emerges from a gap between the trees and runs out into the road. A pale face turned towards him, staring through the windscreen. Not terrified, not anything, blank. The features shadowless, whited out by the glare. There’s a second when Nick knows it’s too late, knows it coldly and clearly and, despite the bulging of his heart, calmly. Nothing he can do, neither braking nor swerving, will be in time. The girl slips silently under his wheels.
A few yards further on the car skids to a halt. Automatically he puts the handbrake on and reaches for the door, dreading screams or, worse, silence. Already he’s out of the car and running, searching for the hump, the dark shape, in the road, his eyes blinded by the headlights. He can make nothing of the confused mêlée of moonlight and shadows. Except that the road’s empty. Thrown into the hedge? He searches on either side, groping through grass and stinging nettles. His grass-snarled feet send up a cloud of small pale moths, but his eyes, his hands, find nothing. He runs back to the car, gropes underneath. Warm tar under his fingertips, greasy from the recent shower
, still squishy from the long hours of sun. He prods round the wheels. Nothing. Crawls out again, runs his hands along the bumper. The headlights are burning his retinas, he can’t see a bloody thing, relies on his fingers to tell him the cool curve of metal is intact.
It’s impossible. He’d hit a dog once, a young Labrador, and the whole bonnet had crumpled under the impact. There’s no way the car can be undamaged. The headlights throw his distorted shadow far up the road. Unless there was no impact. He thinks back, and he’s almost sure he neither heard nor felt an impact. Nor had he felt the bump of the wheels going over a body. He bends down, shaking, finds sweetheart sticking to the legs of his trousers and peels it off, automatically, trying to think. No impact, and since he’d seen the girl fall under the wheels, no impact meant no girl. Hypnogogic hallucination. Must have been, can’t have been anything else. He’d been drowsy, mesmerized by the swish of wipers and the flick-flickering of his lights across the trees.
What should he do? He sits in the driver’s seat with his feet on the road and lights a cigarette. Go to the police? He’ll be breathalized. Well, he’s all right, he’s pretty sure he’s all right. In any case that’s not the point. The point is there’s been no accident. There’s nothing to report. He double checks the bumper. Nothing could hit the car without leaving some trace, and the bumper’s unscathed. He lets the relief wash over him, ashamed, a second later, that he could have run round like that, gasping and panicking, not thinking at all.
He tries to recall the girl, but her face was whited out by the glare of the headlights. An impression of long hair and a long skirt, as she came running out from the trees. Nothing more individual than that. Where had she been running to? The only house on this stretch of road is Lob’s Hill. Though if she’s the product of an over-tired mind, it makes no sense to ask where she was running to.
The house is in darkness when he arrives. He goes to the living room first, spends a few moments looking at the painting, and then slowly, unbuttoning his shirt, climbs the stairs. His mind fizzes. He can smell his armpits, a fear-sweat smell unlike any other, and despises himself for it. On the landing he undresses and then, naked, goes into the bedroom.
EIGHT
Fran sees a silhouette against the landing light, sharply black and slim, so that for a moment, waking from deep sleep, she feels a jolt of fear. Almost unconsciously she moves to give him room as he climbs into bed, and begins groping for sleep again, only to realize he’s lying awake beside her, flat on his back, his skin, where his thigh touches hers, burning hot. Grandfather ill, cancer, she remembers. ‘How is he?’
‘Bad.’
She mumbles some kind of response.
‘I had a bit of a shock on the way back. I thought I’d hit something.’
‘But you didn’t?’
‘No, it’s all right.’
Rabbits and hedgehogs and the occasional bird lie in crumpled and bloody heaps all along the back lane that leads from their house to the main road. It’s awful, but what can you do? She squeezes his hand in token consolation and turns away. He curls around her, and after a few seconds she feels the stir and rise of his cock.
‘Nick.’
‘I know, I know.’ He presses his face into the hollow between her shoulder blades, lifting her hair and running his mouth from side to side, a slow sweeping kiss. A hand comes round, cradling her breasts, fingertips find her nipples, tweak gently.
‘I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,’ Fran says dryly. ‘You might get more than you bargain for.’
They lie tensely locked together; she waits for him to give up and turn away, but he doesn’t, and part of her’s thinking, It’s not much fun for him. He does try to help, only now he’s got his grandfather to worry about, and he just seems to look on helplessly as control of the domestic situation slithers out of her grasp. Between them, Jasper and the unborn baby are eating her alive.
Responding to her tension, the baby heaves itself across her stomach, one of its cosmonaut somersaults. It’s nobody’s fault, she thinks, and it won’t go on for ever, but meanwhile Nick hasn’t had sex for weeks, months, and almost involuntarily she arches her back, giving him an easier entrance. ‘I won’t move,’ Nick says. ‘I’ll just lodge him inside.’ And she wants to giggle at his self-deception, does giggle, and he gasps as he feels the nudge of her downward-shaken womb. He begins to move, tentatively, asking on held breath, ‘You all right?’ ‘Fine,’ she says, still sleepily, then starts to get interested. She likes this position, though generally, after a few minutes, they switch to her lying over the edge of the bed and Nick kissing her, but his thrusts become faster and deeper, his hand on her hip braces and tightens, and then with a cry he’s shuddering and jerking and pouring himself into her. Painful tweaking of the skin on her hips follows as he cries out and convulses and sobs, yes sobs, and what the fuck, she thinks, do you have to sob about?
Afterwards they lie side by side on their backs, staring into the dark. He says, ‘That was all right, wasn’t it?’ and she says, ‘Was it?’
‘I didn’t know whether you wanted to come.’
‘You didn’t try to find out.’
‘I could kiss you down there. Come on, Fran, please… Please?’
‘Don’t bother.’
She turns over. After lying for a while, irritatingly exuding guilt, Nick rolls away from her, and though she tosses and turns and heaves deep sighs it’s not long before he starts to snore.
When she wakes next morning he’s still snoring.
He’ll be full of guilt when he wakes up.
Not full enough.
Today’s Sunday and they’re going for a day out to Fleete House, where, Nick seems to think, the Fanshawes lived after they left Lob’s Hill. But the thought of having to organize it all: the nappies, the sandwiches, the orange juice, the cans of coke, the car seat, the pushchair, the beaker, the potty – in case Jasper starts to think its absence means he needn’t bother – makes her want to vomit.
Lying there, lazily, in the last few minutes before Jasper wakes and roars for attention, she dips her fingers between her legs and sniffs them. That warm, kippery smell of fucked-the-night-before cunt, the best smell in the world. Normally she’d have invited Nick to join in, but not after last night. Her fingers move further down to the episiotomy scar, soon to be cut open for the third time. She wonders how Nick would react if somebody proposed cutting his scrotum open without a general anaesthetic and then repeating the procedure, twice. He isn’t keen on the idea of a vasectomy – the Big Snip, he calls it – though it’s the obvious solution for somebody who grows ten thumbs at the sight of a Durex packet.
Jasper’s chuntering rises to a yell. Fran gets out of bed, staggers out into the landing, feeling dizzy as she always does when she gets up too quickly, and trips over the tangle of jeans and underpants Nick’s left on the landing. He’d only got undressed out there because he was trying not to disturb her, but that doesn’t stop her feeling angry. Lifting the heap of clothes on one bare foot, she kicks it halfway downstairs.
Jasper’s leaning on the rail of his cot in that four-square John Bull way, the way a man stands when he’s inordinately proud of what he’s got between his legs, though what Jasper’s got is a sodden nappy that drops to the floor with a disgusting plop as she picks him up. ‘You stink,’ she says. His bottom’s wet and cold against her arm, as she carries him along the corridor to the bathroom – pausing to bang on Gareth’s door as she goes past – and runs the bath.
The bathroom’s lovely, almost her favourite room in the house, though the window’s so closed around with roses that the room seems dark. Green, rather. A submarine light with fugitive shadows of leaves chasing each other across the wall.
She runs a shallow bath and puts Jasper in. It’s easier to hose him down than to wipe him. ‘You’re going to see Paddington Bear today,’ she tells him. He’s concentrating on a yellow plastic duck that, when squeezed, squirts jets of water high into the air. One spurt hits her in the
eye, and he roars with laughter as she gasps and blinks. Like father, like son, she thinks, and lifts him out to dry.
Gareth ignores the bang on the door. With any luck he’ll get half an hour on the new game, before Mum bursts in rabbiting on about family togetherness and all that crap. The screen glows gently in the gloom of the closed curtains. While he waits for the computer to finish loading, he reads the back of the box.
There is no doubt that you are being watched, by whom and by what life form is not determined. Even Spock has not been able to accurately assess this data. The occurrences are just too strange. Is that truly an ancient WWI triplane heading straight for you at Warp 9? How can your sensors suddenly report life forms on a dead planet…?
He feels pressure on the back of his neck. The sense of somebody in the room behind him’s so strong he almost turns round, thinking it must be Mum telling him to for God’s sake switch the damn thing off and get dressed. But she’d have spoken by now, and Gareth’s too frightened to turn round.
Instead, he goes on looking straight ahead. He sees his own shadowy reflection in the screen, but can’t be sure there’s nobody else there. In a small voice he hardly recognizes as his, he says, ‘Please go away.’
Nobody answers. After a few moments the pressure on the back of his neck’s lifted and he knows he’s alone.
‘Why do babies need so much stuff?’ Nick asks, pushing rolled-up nappies into the plastic duffel bag with its design of blue frolicking teddy bears, while Fran tries to squeeze the potty into the zipped compartment underneath. He knows the answer, he’s just trying to break the thunderous silence Fran’s maintained since breakfast, but she’s in no mood to respond to overtures.
