Double Vision

Twenty-four

Monday morning. In six hours Robert and Beth would be back home. Waking, Stephen threw his arm across the empty space and was ambushed by a sense of loss. He thought about Kate waking every morning without Ben beside her. There was no possible comparison, of course, between his momentary missing of Justine’s warmth and Kate’s loss. He was startled that he’d even made the comparison.

Justine was in the kitchen, fully dressed, frying bacon. Adam, in school uniform, sat slumped at the table, white-faced, bent over, complaining of tummy ache. Justine put a bacon sandwich, normally his favourite food, in front of him.

‘I’m a vegetarian,’ he said, pushing it away.

‘Since when?’ Justine demanded.

‘Since now.’

‘Why now?’

‘Why not now?’

‘C’mon, Adam, eat up,’ Stephen said.

Adam was clutching his stomach. ‘I’ve got tummy ache.’

‘He does look very white,’ Stephen said.

‘He’s like this every Monday.’

Stephen sat down beside him. ‘Adam, why don’t you want to go to school?’

A shrug.

‘There must be a reason.’

‘Everybody thinks I’m weird.’

‘Now why do you think they think that?’

‘Because I am weird.’

Stephen was left wondering whether insight was really such a good thing. ‘Is there anything else you’d like to eat?’

An exaggerated wet-dog shake of the head.

Justine cleared his plate away without comment. ‘Mum and Dad’ll be here when you get back, think of that.’

Adam trailed after her to the car and climbed — slow-motion — into the back seat.

‘Fasten your seat belt, Adam,’ Justine said.

‘I can’t. It hurts my tummy.’

‘The car won’t start till you fasten the belt.’

A bit of an empty threat, that, Stephen thought, since Adam didn’t want the car to start.

‘Adam,’ he said, bending into the car. ‘If you go to school without making a fuss I’ll take you to fly Archie this Friday after school. How’s that?’

Justine mouthed at him over the roof of the car. ‘I can’t believe you did that.’

‘What?’

‘Bribed him.’

‘Promise?’ Adam called from the back seat.

‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’ He caught Justine’s eye as she got into the driver’s seat. ‘I’m allowed to be irresponsible. I’m only an uncle.’

She smiled. ‘Are you staying here?’

‘No, I thought I’d go back to the cottage and get some work done. What about you?’

‘I’ve got some shopping to do for Beth.’

‘Right, then, see you later.’

It was a matter-of-fact leave-taking, he thought, as he went back into the farmhouse. They might have been married for years.

Quickly, he tidied up the spare bedroom, put the sheets into the laundry basket, did a quick check to make sure he hadn’t left any personal belongings behind and then let himself out of the farmhouse and walked quickly down the lane to the cottage. Inside, it smelled cold and musty, even after an absence of only three nights. He lit the fire, switched on the computer and tried to work.

On Friday he’d broken off in the middle of a discussion about the bombardment of Baghdad in 1991 — the first war to appear on TV screens as a kind of son et lumière display, the first where the bombardment of enemy forces acquired the bloodless precision of a video game. He’d found it disconcerting at the time, and still did. What happens to public opinion in democracies — traditionally reluctant to wage war — when the human cost of battle is invisible? Of course there was nothing new in strict wartime censorship: it had been imposed in both world wars. But, in the first, nothing could hide the arrival of the telegrams nor, in the second, the explosion of bombs. What had been new about Baghdad and later Belgrade was the combination of censorship with massive, one-sided aerial bombardment so that allied casualties were minimal or non-existent and ‘collateral damage’ couldn’t be shown. These were wars designed to ensure that fear and pain never came home.

But he was finding it difficult to get started. Walk. Walk first. A walk would freshen him up. He decided to take his usual route to the top of the hill, though it was a long walk, longer than he really had time for. At first he tried to jog, the grass he ran through flashing fire as his trainers shook off drops of dew. The sky a clear, translucent blue, and far away on the horizon a plane with the sunlight glinting on its wings had left twin vapour trails behind it, spreading out, thinning, fading to nothingness, though, whether from distance or some trick of the landscape, no sound reached him.

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.