by Pat Barker
‘They always look worse than they are,’ he said, impatient to have it over.
She washed his arm with a sterile solution, till the sides of the small wound gaped white, then pressed the edges together and applied a clear, waterproof dressing. She didn’t speak as she worked and was breathing audibly, as children do when they concentrate. A dim memory of playing doctors and nurses with his slightly older girl cousins came back to him. He’d always been the patient, he remembered, though in those far-off games it had never been his arm that required attention. There was something erotic in Lauren’s intent, impersonal gaze, and he put his free hand on her hip.
‘Hot bath,’ Lauren said, closing the lid of the first-aid box. ‘Do you a lot more good than whisky.’
Resigned, he stripped off his wet clothes. She was bending over the bath, stirring the water, her face slick with steam. ‘Do you think he’ll be all right?’
‘Depends what he took. Prozac, yes. Paracetamol, no.’
‘Do you think we should ring?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘We did what we could. It’s somebody else’s problem now.’
‘I’ll put these into wash,’ she said, picking up his clothes.
He could see she was disappointed. She’d wanted to talk, to polish the shared-but-different experience until it acquired an even patina, became theirs, rather than his and hers. But he was used to switching off, to living his life in separate compartments. He’d learnt early, in his first few months of practice, that those who take the misery home with them burn out and end up no use to anybody. He’d learnt to value detachment: the clinician’s splinter of ice in the heart. Only much later had he learnt to distrust it too – its capacity to grow and take over the personality. Splinter of ice? He’d had colleagues who could have sunk the Titanic.
Gingerly, he lowered his aching shoulders into the water. Looking along the length of his body, he saw his cock, slightly engorged from the heat, gleaming and bobbing in the foam like a cylindrical fish. Well, hello, there, he thought, slipping into the mid-Atlantic drawl he used to distance pain.
‘Are you any warmer?’ Lauren asked, coming back with an armful of towels.
‘Bit. Why don’t you get in? You must be frozen.’
Dropping her clothes in a heap near the door, she climbed into the bath behind him, and lowered herself cautiously into the water. ‘Ouch.’
‘Sorry.’ He kept forgetting his ‘hot bath’ was Lauren’s idea of being boiled alive. ‘Would you like more cold?’
‘No, it’s all right. I’m in now.’
Her breath came in little explosive bursts against his back. He could feel her breasts pressing against his shoulder blades, and then her hand crept round, burrowing between his legs until she found, and cradled, his balls.
‘Not fair,’ he said. ‘I can’t reach anything.’
Groping under his arm, he found a nipple, and felt her laughter vibrate in his chest. A flash memory of cold mud sucking him in. ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to bed.’
They dried each other, then he chased her upstairs, and they fell on to the bed, where they lay, gasping for breath. Her eye, an inch away from his, was a grey fish caught in a mesh of lines. For the first time in months he didn’t know or care where she was in her cycle. This had nothing to do with ovulation or getting her pregnant, and not much to do, if he were honest, with loving her. Everything to do with the moment when he’d seen the boy’s body hang suspended, like a specimen in a jar of formaldehyde, an umbilical cord of silver bubbles linking his slack mouth to the air. He saw him now. The boundaries of flesh and bone seemed to vanish. He was staring at his own death.
Afterwards they lay side by side, a medieval knight and lady on a tomb.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He knew she hadn’t come.
‘It’s all right.’
He felt the bed shaking and knew she’d started to cry. ‘Lauren
She sat up. ‘Do you realize you risked your life back there for a complete fucking stranger?’
If this had been said with a scintilla of admiration, he’d have felt obliged to pooh-pooh the idea, to point out that he swam further than that every other day of his life, but her tone was aggressive, and he matched it. ‘There was no choice.’
A stubborn silence.
‘If I wasn’t a strong swimmer, I wouldn’t have gone in. But I am. And, anyway, I’m all right.’
She wasn’t angry with him for diving into the river.She was angry about the botched sex, and about his failure to get her pregnant. ‘Let’s have a drink, shall we?’
He didn’t expect her to follow him downstairs, and she didn’t. If only getting pregnant hadn’t become such an obsession. She reminded him of one of those female fish that, in times of environmental hardship, dispense with the male sex altogether, and carry his gonads in a purse on their sides. Well, sod that, he thought, glugging whisky. He was fed up to the back teeth with being a walking, talking sperm bank.
His mother (not that she knew the details, thank God!) blamed their difficulties on the new pattern of their lives. For the past year Lauren had been working in London, teaching at St Margaret’s School of Art, coming home only at weekends. ‘Husband and wife should stick together,’ his mother had said, sniffing over the tea towel she was using to polish a glass. ‘You and Dad were apart when he was in the army.’ ‘And a fat lot of good it did us,’ she flashed back at him.
But marriage was different now, he told her. Women didn’t expect to sacrifice their careers to their husbands.
‘Marriage doesn’t change as much as you think,’ she said, with another sniff. ‘You’d be better off sticking together.’
At the time he’d dismissed her as old-fashioned. Now it didn’t seem as simple as that. In his bleaker moments, he wondered whether he and Lauren hadn’t separated already, without even letting themselves know they were doing it. He could have gone to London with her. He was on sabbatical at the moment, writing up a three-year research project, and books can be written anywhere. There would have been nothing to stop him e-mailing chapters to his colleagues for comment, and if he had needed a face-to-face meeting he could have come back for a few days, or overnight. He hadn’t gone because he wanted to stay here. And since then, month by month, the sex had deteriorated. He blamed thermometers, calendars and pots of urine, and okay, he did find them a total turn-off, but there was something else he wasn’t admitting. Perhaps he’d just voted with… Well. Not with his feet.
‘Why?’ Lauren asked, after one of his not infrequent failures.
‘I don’t know.’
But she was having no truck with that. He was a psychologist, for Christ’s sake. It was his job to know.
He’d downed one tumbler of whisky, and was starting on the next, when Lauren came into the kitchen, and wrapped her arms around him. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘What you did was very brave and I’m sorry.’
‘What for?’
‘For hating you for doing it.’
Suddenly they were both laughing, and, for a few moments, it was all right.
*
It was late evening before he remembered the post. He’d left the house yesterday in a tremendous hurry because he’d thought he was going to be late for Lauren’s train, and didn’t want to leave her stranded at the station. The postman had met him a few yards from the front door and handed him the mail. Without bothering to glance at it, he’d shoved it into his coat pocket, and then, absorbed in discussing the difficulties of the marriage, he’d forgotten all about it.
Lauren was loading the dishwasher. ‘Where did you put my coat, darling?’ he called downstairs.
‘Utility room.’
As soon as he lifted it off the peg, he knew. River mud and, mixed in with that, a whiff of stale tobacco. He thrust his hand into the right pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. It was immediately obvious what had happened. He’d wrapped his own coat round the boy, because it was heavier, and that was the one he’d handed into the ambulance. He c
ouldn’t put off trying to get it back, because there were spare keys in the pocket, and oh God, yes, his address on the envelopes. Admittedly, the boy wasn’t in much of a state to contemplate burglary, but you didn’t know. You didn’t know who or what he was. He could be a drug addict desperate for cash.
‘I seem to’ve got the wrong coat, darling. I’ll have to go to the hospital.’
‘Can’t it wait?’
‘Well, no, not really. There were letters in it.’ He didn’t want to alarm her by mentioning the keys.
It was only a short drive to the General, but then he had to spend fifteen minutes trying to find somewhere to park. Visiting hour. Cars crammed bumper to bumper in every legitimate, and illegitimate, space.
The casualty department was packed. On a bench near the door a boy with a torn ear and blood trickling down his neck stared around with a kind of blank belligerence. A short distance away a young boy, his voice shooting up into registers he never intended, was trying to calm down a middle-aged woman. ‘Howay, Mam. Don’t let him see you upset.’ ‘Upset? I’ll give him bloody upset…’ On a trolley near by, an old man, with a miner’s blue scars on the backs of his hands, gasped his life away.
‘Ward Eighteen,’ a nurse said, raising her head, briefly, between disasters.
He walked the length of the corridor to Ward Eighteen and stopped by the nurses’ station. An old man in a wheelchair, at the entrance to one of the wards, grabbed a nurse’s behind as she walked past. ‘Now then, Jimmy,’ she said. ‘You be a good lad now.’ The old man cackled in demented glee, and pawed another nurse. They’ll trank the life out of you, old son, Tom thought, if you don’t behave.
A tall, rangy woman with strands of ultra-fine hair escaping from a knot on the top of her head, glasses dangling from a gold chain, and a general air of equine goodwill squeaked up to him on rubber-soled shoes. ‘Tom. Hello!’
Mary Peters. He couldn’t have wished for anyone better. ‘Hello, Mary. I’m looking for an attempted suicide you had brought in this morning. Quite a young lad.’
She twinkled at him. ‘Oh yes, I know. One of yours?’
‘No, this isn’t a professional visit, actually.’ He felt embarrassed. ‘I’m the one who fished him out. Only in the process he ended up with my coat. And I got his.’
‘Yes, we found your coat. And the letters. You’re lucky,’ she said, leading the way down the corridor. ‘The nurse read the name and address on the envelopes and assumed it was his name. You were very nearly admitted.’ She stopped in front of a door. ‘Fortunately he came round in time. His name’s Ian Wilkinson.’ She tapped her throat. ‘And he won’t feel like talking.’
‘What did he take?’
‘Temazepam. About ten, he thinks.’
The young man lying in the bed stared at Tom, the colour draining from his face. Tom was puzzled by the reaction, and by his own sense that he knew this boy. Of course he dealt with hundreds of disturbed young people in the course of a year… Still, he generally remembered them. He wasn’t good with faces, but he remembered names. Ian Wilkinson. It meant nothing.
‘This is Dr Seymour,’ Mary said. ‘Who rescued you. I don’t suppose you…’ Her voice died away, as she registered the atmosphere in the room. ‘Well,’ she said, after a slight pause. ‘I’ll leave you to it, then.’ At the door she turned. ‘Coat in the locker, Tom, when you’re ready.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, shifting his gaze in time to see the door close.
The boy was hauling himself up the bed as if his first impulse were to escape. His colour hadn’t returned. ‘You don’t recognize me, do you?’ he said. ‘I suppose I ought to find that reassuring.’
‘You were covered in mud.’
‘No, I mean before.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘When I was ten. Do you remember, you –’
Oh my God, Tom thought. He sat down heavily on the chair beside the bed. ‘Danny Miller.’
‘That’s right.’
Saying the name changed his perception of the face. Now, second by second, under the sharp bones and planes of the adult face, a child’s rounded, pre-pubescent features rose to the surface, and broke through, like a long-submerged body. ‘I’m sorry,’ Tom said. ‘I didn’t even know you were out.’
‘It was kept pretty quiet, as you can imagine. And…’ He nodded towards the door.
‘Yes, of course. New name.’
‘Ian was the governor’s second name. Wilkinson was the chaplain’s mother’s maiden name.’ His voice was expressionless.
‘How long have you been out?’
‘Ten months.’
‘I won’t ask how it’s going.’
Danny – he couldn’t think of him as Ian !– looked startled for a moment, then burst out laughing. A second later he was pressing his throat. ‘Tube.’
‘It’ll be sore for a few days.’
When Danny could speak again, he said, ‘What do you reckon the chances are of this happening?’
‘Of our meeting like this? A million to one.’
‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?’
It certainly did. Tom was already wondering whether this was genuine coincidence, or a dramatic gesture gone badly, almost fatally, wrong. Dramatic gestures of that kind are not uncommon, and they very frequently do go wrong, because the people making them usually have spectacularly flawed judgement. But to believe the meeting had been intended, he’d have to believe that Danny, for some undisclosed reason, had located him, and then, instead of ringing the doorbell, had decided to introduce himself by jumping into the river. It made no sense.
‘You know, when something like this happens,’ Danny said, ‘it makes you realize things aren’t just random. There is a purpose.’
Yes, possibly, Tom thought. But whose? ‘It doesn’t make me think that.’
‘You know the chaplain I just mentioned? He used to say coincidence is the crack in human affairs that lets God or the Devil in.’
Tom smiled. ‘I think what we need to let into human affairs is a bit more rationality.’
A pause. They seemed to have got in very deep, very quickly. Almost as if he’d read Tom’s thoughts, Danny said, ‘At least we’re not talking about the weather while you eat all the grapes.’
There were no grapes. No visitors. Nothing. Looking round the bleak, bare room, Tom knew it was impossible just to take his coat and go. ‘When do they say you’ll be out?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Will you go home?’
‘No, I’m in a bedsit. I’m a student.’
‘What’re you reading?’
‘English.’
‘Do you have somebody you can talk to?’
A shrug. ‘My probation officer. Martha Pitt.’
‘Oh yes, I know Martha. Shall I give her a ring and tell her you’re here?’
‘No, don’t bother, it’s the weekend. She has enough trouble with me. She was trailing over the Pennines last weekend to come and get me. I ran away to prison.’
‘You went back to prison?’
‘Yeah, I know. Sounds mad, doesn’t it?’
‘What happened?’
‘They told me to bugger off. And then the governor rang Martha, and she came and got me.’
‘Was that when you –’
‘Decided to go for a swim? No.’ He looked away. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps it was. It certainly didn’t help.’
Tom thought for a moment. ‘You know, you could come and talk to me, if you think it would be useful. Nothing formal. Just a chat.’
Danny smiled. ‘About old times?’
‘Whatever.’
The smile faded. ‘Yes, I would like to.’
‘I’ll give you the address.’ Tearing a page from the back of his diary, Tom wrote it down, adding, as an afterthought, his telephone number. He’d better make it an early appointment, so Danny had a date to look forward to. Discharge from hospital after a suicide attempt was a dangerous time. ‘Shall we say Tuesday evening, about eight o’clock? And if anything goes wro
ng, you can give me a ring.’
‘Thanks.’ Danny folded the page. ‘Your letters are in the locker. I was going to return them. And the coat.’
Defensive now, anxious to assert his honesty. Well, he did have twelve years in secure accommodation to live down. More than half his life. What had they made of him? What had they done with him? Part of Tom’s interest was simple professional curiosity. It wasn’t often you got the chance to follow up a case like Danny’s, but he was also concerned for this unknown young man whose face and personality seemed to contain, untouched, the child he had once been.
Tom got his coat from the locker, releasing, in the process, a powerful smell of river mud and decay.
‘You won’t be wearing that before it’s cleaned.’
‘You won’t be wearing this either,’ Tom said, bundling Danny’s coat into the locker. ‘Well, then. See you Tuesday.’
Danny raised a hand, but he’d fallen back against the pillows, and seemed unable to speak. Tom closed the door quietly behind him.
Mary Peters was standing by the desk, talking to the ward sister, and it seemed only polite to pause and say goodbye.
‘Well, what was all that about?’ she asked.
‘Oh, nothing much. He turned out to be an old patient. Hadn’t seen him for years.’
She seemed satisfied. And Danny had changed. There was no reason to suppose he’d be recognized by anybody who’d only seen his school photograph in the papers or on TV, thirteen years ago. After all, he hadn’t recognized him, and his contact with Danny went well beyond that.
Walking across the car park, he felt dazed, and stopped for a moment under the tarnished trees. He was remembering another car park, in June, in a heat wave. Arriving at the remand centre, where Danny was being held, twenty minutes before the time of his appointment, he’d chosen to wait outside, rather than in some dreary room inside the prison. The sun beat down and the car quickly became an oven. He left the doors open, and walked up and down the perimeter fence, listening to a Test Match on the radio. He had no need to familiarize himself with the notes spilling out of the files on the back seat. He knew them almost off by heart, and, in a sense, his task now was to forget them. The main pitfall in assessing the mental state of an offender is to produce a report that fits the crime, rather than the symptoms of the particular individual who is alleged to have committed it.
