Double Vision

Five

As soon as Robert had gone, Stephen looked all over the cottage, feeling a surge of pleasure as he took in his surroundings. Despite the fire there was a chill in the air, but then the cottage had been standing empty for a year, the foot-and-mouth epidemic having destroyed the market for weekend breaks.

A small kitchen and, upstairs, a tiny bathroom. In the front bedroom there was a desk and chair, useless for writing, at least in their present position, because they were too close to the window. Flying glass. He’d always felt bizarrely safe in the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo because the glass in the windows was long gone. He would lie curled up, fingers thrust into his armpits, hoarding warmth, and listen to the pitter-patter of rain on the polythene sheets that divided him from the thudding sky, until the mingled sound of rain and small-arms fire became a lullaby. He missed it when he got home. Surrounded by leafy trees and the hum of London traffic, he’d found it impossible to sleep. At the time he’d preferred to regard this as a personal quirk rather than as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. He still did.

The back bedroom was larger. He stood at the small, ivy-fringed window, looking out over the garden. A patch of lawn, shrubs, a path leading down to a gate and beyond that, on the crest of a hill, a copse of deciduous trees. Bare branches clotted with rooks’ nests stood out against the smoky red of the sky.

He took off his trainers, shirt and jeans and stretched out on the bed, telling himself he couldn’t possibly sleep, and, almost immediately, slept. Once, he jerked awake at a sudden sound — the creak of a floorboard perhaps? — but the sound wasn’t repeated and he made himself relax. Somewhere near by an owl hooted, and he waited for the scream of a small creature finding dusk turn to night in the shadow of immense wings. Nothing. The owl hooted again. It must have a nest up there among the trees.

Drowsily, he tried to catch the words that were drifting through his brain. Something to do with owls being restless in a place where people had met violent deaths, but he couldn’t remember, and anyway it was nonsense, nobody had died here, or only in their beds of sickness or old age. No violent deaths since the union of England and Scotland brought the long centuries of border raiding to a close. No skulls in the grass, no girls with splayed thighs and skirts around their waists revealing, even in the early stages of decomposition, what had been done to them before they died. No smell of decay clinging to the skin. Just a square of window fringed by dark leaves. He closed his eyes, and the window became a pattern floating on the inside of his lids, turning first to orange and then to purple before fading, at last, to black.

His sleep was threadbare, like cheap curtains letting in too much light. He woke, slept, turned over, slept again, and then woke finally with a cry in the blackness, disorientated, thinking he could hear the patter of rain on polythene.

But there was no sound of rain at the window, so the pattering must have come from his dream. Brutally awake now, he started to think about Ben, as he’d known he must sooner or later, coming here to Ben’s home ground.

It had been raining that night in Sarajevo, heavy showers falling as sleet and blown across the road. The cold hit him as he came out of the television centre and stood, upright and exposed, on the steps leading down to the street. The snow was pockmarked under his feet. He took a deep breath, dragging cold into his lungs, and was about to step down into the road when he heard a sound behind him and turned round to see Ben Frobisher come out of the swing doors behind him.

‘Do you mind if I tag along?’

Stephen did mind, but it was too late to say so. The armoured car had gone, and there was no other way of getting back to the hotel. He was secretly furious: the whole point of this walk was that he should do it alone.

They stepped out into a world so dark their faces and hands seemed to give off the only light. Far away on the horizon the flickering artillery rumbled. A flare went up, and, for one trembling second, the roofs were edged in blue, then darkness fell again, deeper than before.

Despite the cold, he started to sweat, raising his gloved hand to wipe his upper lip. The flak jacket and the body armour encumbered his movements, and he was aware of Ben walking in the same robotic way. They passed graffitied walls whose scribblings they couldn’t read, and then a block of flats with all its windows shattered, shards of glass lying in the slush around the chained gates. Despite the chains, people still lived here. He was aware of eyes all round them, of ears straining to listen as their feet slithered through the slush. In places the snow covered pieces of rubble. He was intensely aware of Ben, of the gleam of his eyes and teeth, of his body as a source of heat in the cold dark, almost as if the brain, deprived of vision, developed a kind of thermal-imaging technique. Far away to the right, in the darkness, snipers waited for somebody desperate enough for heating, or water, or food, to break cover and step out into the road.

As they approached the crossroads, he turned in his lumbering moon walk to Ben and pointed him deeper into the shadow of the building. Scuffing their shoulders, they scaled along the wall, then stopped for breath, side by side now, leaning against a door while they nerved themselves to face the dash across the open road. For two or three seconds they would be dark shapes against the glimmering whiteness.

‘Well?’ Ben whispered.

Stephen nodded, and braced himself against the door, which gave way under his weight so that he staggered back into the stairwell of the building. Ben followed, stopping when he was safely inside to examine the lock that had been smashed.

A flight of stairs led up into the dark. A scuffle from above, a sense of pricked ears and eyes watching. Ben produced a torch from his pocket, cupped his hand around the light, and shone it over the walls, so that they saw the dank passage and threadbare carpet veiled in his blood. His fingers were dark shadows in the ruby skin, like an X-ray, Stephen thought, and that red glow spread over the walls. Splinters of glass lying on the stairs had been crunched to a fine powder in the centre of the treads. Upstairs, the scuffling started again.

‘Up there,’ Ben whispered, pointing. He started to move towards the stairs.

Stephen caught his arm. ‘No, come on, leave it.’

Ben pressed on, not shaking him off, just quietly disengaging himself. Reluctantly, Stephen followed.

A smell of mould met them at the top of the first flight, and the red torchlight revealed fungus growing on a damp patch of plaster. Then other smells took over: the musty smell of old carpets covered in dog hairs, the burnt toast smell of dried urine on mattresses, and finally a smell Stephen fought against recognizing.

In a corner of the landing, away from the danger of flying glass, a girl huddled on a mattress. She didn’t speak or cry out or try to get away. Ben swung the beam along the wall until it found her face. Eyes wide open, skirt bunched up around her waist, her splayed thighs enclosing a blackness of blood and pain.

Stephen fell on his knees beside her and pulled down her skirt. A voice in his head said, Don’t touch anything. This is a crime scene. And then he thought, Bugger it. The whole fucking city is a crime scene. He wanted to close the terrible eyes, but couldn’t bring himself to touch her face.

He sat back on his heels. No way of telling whether this was a casual crime — a punter wanting his money back, a drug deal gone wrong — or a sectarian killing linked to the civil war. Increasingly crime and war shade into each other, Stephen thought. No difference to their victims, certainly, and not much either in the minds of the perpetrators. Patriot, soldier, revolutionary, freedom fighter, terrorist, murderer — cross-section their brains at the moment of killing and the differences might prove rather hard to find.

‘What do we do?’ he asked.

‘Nothing. There’s nothing we can do.’

The building felt empty — of people anyway. It must have been rats they heard moving. He could feel them now, waiting, and scanned the shadows outside the wavering circle of light. Ben glimpsed one — its naked tail trailing through dust — and let out a roar of anger. ‘Don’t —’ Stephen had time to say before he hurled the torch. It hit the wall and fell, its single weak eye, yellowish now, picking out a blister in the wallpaper where damp had seeped through.

Then it went out. Darkness, except for a strip of moonlight that fell across the floor and reached the girl’s eyes.

‘Come on,’ Ben said, getting hold of Stephen’s arm and pulling him to his feet. Far away the rumble of gunfire started again. Stephen thought of black clouds over bright cornfields, the sheen of sweat on naked arms, lit by flickers of summer lightning.

Then he was back on the stinking landing with the girl and the rats.

‘Come on,’ Ben said again. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

Ben went across the landing and Stephen followed, waiting while Ben picked up the torch, feeling the girl’s eyes boring into the back of his neck. Sweat prickled in the roots of his hair. Ashamed of the state he was in, he made himself go downstairs first and peer through the crack of the door. The air struck cold on his eyeball as he scanned the street.

Behind him in the dark he heard the bustle of rats begin.

‘All right?’

He turned to look at Ben, who nodded, braced. Stephen edged round the door, feeling the whole right side of his body cringe in expectation of the bullet that would come from that direction, if it came at all. His left side seemed almost relaxed, as if congratulating itself on its immunity. There was time to ponder this mad dislocation of awareness, to register it as a distinct sensation, before he hurled himself out of the shelter of the building into the white light of the crossroads. Ben’s gasping breaths behind him, their joined shadow on the snow, then he reached the other side, blind with fear, burrowing into the wall, and turned to take Ben’s full weight as he crashed into him. They stayed still for five minutes, their breathing becoming gradually less painful, their eyeballs less congested, fingertips no longer shaken by the beating of their hearts. Swallowing had become impossible. Stephen let his mouth hang open and panted like a dog.

Another hundred yards and they were home, bursting into the foyer to find the hotel in darkness. Candles on tables all around the bar illuminated the faces of people they knew well. Drink, food, conversation, laughter, but that night, while snow accumulated on the sagging polythene of his window, Stephen lay cramped and wakeful inside his sleeping bag, thinking about the girl, and the way her eyes had looked up at him, seeing nothing. Her head was beside his on the pillow, and when he rolled over on to his stomach, trying to get away from her, he found her body underneath him, as dry and insatiable as sand.

Nothing else had ever affected him in the same way, though He’d seen many worse things. She was waiting for him, that’s the way it felt. She had something to say to him, but He’d never managed to listen, or not in the right way.

He was still groggy from sleep when a banging on the front door sent him stumbling downstairs. Feeling slightly sick, he opened the door and there on the step, blinking in the sudden light, was a young girl. He stared at her. She seemed at first to be part of the dream, but then the blast of cold air reminded him he was wearing only his underpants and socks, and he blinked.

She was smiling. Wide blue eyes, scrubbed face, a stocky, powerful body — she could have been any age from twelve to seventeen, though, since the baggy sweatshirt failed to hide surprisingly large breasts, seventeen was probably more like it.

She was carrying a stack of yellow towels in her arms.

‘Beth sent these. She’s just remembered she forgot to put any towels in the bathroom.’

‘Oh, right. Come in.’

A man with no trousers on is never at his most confident, particularly if he’s forgotten to take off his socks. All he needed now to look completely ridiculous was an erection, but fortunately He’d reached an age when these show up only when required, and not always then. She passed with averted eyes, and a giggle that suggested rather less innocence than He’d supposed.

‘You’d better shut the door,’ she said. ‘You’ll catch your death.’

Closing it, he saw a small car — a Metro, he thought, its colour uncertain in the dark — pulled up on the grass verge beyond the garden gate. He followed the girl into the living room, trying to remember her name. Beth had mentioned her. She looked like one of those flushed, pink, sturdy English girls who never make it past the first round of Wimbledon. ‘You’re just in time. I was going to have a shower.’ He looked at his watch.

‘No rush. Meal isn’t on yet.’

‘I was hoping for a drink.’

A flash of the blue eyes, but she went shy on him again.

‘You must be Justine.’

‘That’s right. I look after Adam.’

And how’s that? he wanted to ask, but felt he shouldn’t. ‘Were you with him when he found the badger?’

‘No, thank God. I only do a couple of hours. Collect him from school, do a bit of housework, stay till Beth gets back. I’ll just put these upstairs. You’ve found out where the airing cupboard is?’

‘No.’

‘On the landing.’

‘Oh. Right.’

He was losing interest. He got a clean pair of jeans and a T-shirt from his suitcase and put them on. Robert had put his laptop on the table. He decided he would work in here, where he could enjoy an open fire, and began searching for the nearest plug. Tomorrow He’d get Robert to drop him in town so that he could buy a printer and start looking for a car. He could hear Justine moving around upstairs. Heavy footed.

When she came down, she said, ‘Looks like work.’

‘It is. Well, meant to be.’

‘You writing a book?’

He guessed Beth had told her. ‘that’s the idea.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘The way wars are represented.’

That was generally enough to discourage further questions, but Justine was made of sterner stuff. ‘War photography?’

‘Yeah — but not just that. Goya seems to be squatting all over it at the moment.’ He was too — like a monstrous jewelled toad.

Justine plonked herself down on the sofa.

‘Don’t you have to be getting back?’

‘No, I’m finished for the — oh,’ she said, flushing and jumping up again. ‘I see what you mean.’

Regretting his churlishness, he said, ‘No, it’s OK, don’t rush off. Do you want a cup of tea, or something?’

‘I’ll make it.’

‘No, you won’t. It’ll do me good to find out where everything is.’

In the end they made the tea together, unearthing, as a final triumph, a bowl of sugar left behind, he suspected, by the last tenants — Beth would never have given houseroom to anything as unhealthy as sugar. It was caked to the sides of the dish and brown in the middle from careless dipping of wet spoons. As Justine raised the mug — it had a yellow duckling on the side, which suited her, he thought — she blew a wisp of ultra-fine blonde hair out of her eyes. She wasn’t particularly attractive, not to him anyway — too fresh-faced, too wholesome — and yet when she lowered the mug and he saw her full, fleshy, pouting lips gleaming with wet he did feel a tweak of desire, impersonal but not exploitative. He wouldn’t have dreamt of making a move, even if he could have convinced himself that a teenage girl might find a middle-aged man with white hairy legs and raging conjunctivitis irresistible. She made him feel positively decrepit — rumpled, just out of bed, smelling, no doubt, a bit stale. Only he liked her mouth. It would repel lipstick, that mouth. No matter how carefully it was applied, she would never manage to retain more than a thin stain around the edges of her lips.

Good manners required that, after her questions about his book, he should show some reciprocal interest, so he set to work to draw her out, something that from long practice he found easy to do. She was nineteen, so older than she looked. She’d had a place at Cambridge — she was supposed to be there now, but she’d got glandular fever just after the A-level results came out, and had to ask for her place to be deferred.

What A-levels did she do? Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Psychology. She’d wanted to do Art as well, but the timetable clashed.

So: four A-levels. No mention of grades. Bright and modest, or so perfectionist that no grades were good enough? There was nothing sharp or quick about her, nothing obviously clever — she seemed, if anything, rather hesitant. Young for her age. Painfully young. He kept getting this sense of pain from her — and yet she sounded cheerful enough.

‘Still,’ he said, ‘you’re only missing a year.’

‘Yeah, but I’ll be twenty by the time I get there.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry. I expect they have a lot of mature students.’

‘I suppose so,’ she said, not detecting irony.

He felt slightly ashamed, though he hadn’t meant to be unkind. He pictured her there, jogging along the Backs — but why jogging? She didn’t seem particularly athletic, perhaps it was the sweatshirt and the trainers — one of the hundreds who pass through and make no impression, but years later can recall the precise sound of oars in rowlocks, hear the voices of the coaches yelling encouragement from the banks, smell wood smoke, see misty light around a street lamp and feel an obscure pain, a longing, thinking of a key that never turned properly in the lock, a door that might have opened but didn’t.

Pain again. He must be projecting all these complex layers of pain and regret on to her, she didn’t feel anything like that, how could she? She was just a young girl at a loose end because her friends had moved on and left her behind.

‘Are you over the glandular fever now?’

‘Yes. Though I still get a bit tired. I’m in bed by ten o’ clock.’

Bored rigid, he thought, refusing to dwell on the thought of Justine in bed. ‘Have you any friends still around here?’

‘One or two in Newcastle. I see them at the weekends, but round here, no. Well, one person, I suppose.’

Blue shadows had appeared in the thin skin under her eyes, and for the first time it was possible to believe that she had recently been quite seriously ill.

Boyfriend, he thought. Ex-boyfriend. Somebody who should have stayed around when she got ill and didn’t.

‘Where do you live normally?’ she asked.

‘London.’

‘Why on earth did you come here?’

‘Peace and quiet.’

‘You’ll get plenty of that.’

‘I’m in the middle of a divorce,’ he said, more honestly. ‘I need somewhere cheap to live. And I’ve got to work my arse off.’

‘You won’t be disturbed here. You’ll see graveyards with more life.’

Again that bitter, restless chafing. It made her interesting to him, and again he looked at her mouth, then raised his eyes to hers and found her watching him. Careful, he thought, replacing the mug on the kitchen table. ‘I think I’d better have a shower.’

‘I’m sorry I woke you up.’

‘No, just as well. If I’d slept any longer I mightn’t have slept tonight.’

He saw her to the door. Neither of them said anything about meeting again, because they knew they would. He closed the door as soon as she was safely through the gate. A moment later he heard the engine start and the car — borrowed from her mother? A present after A-levels? — drive away.

After she’d gone, he washed up the mugs, aware that his stocking-feet were leaving damp footprints on the tiles. God, he was disgusting. These days, without warning, he poured out this cold, clammy sweat. But it would pass. Exercise, rest, decent food, cut back on the booze — drastically — and within a few weeks He’d be back to normal. This was his main objection to the psychiatrist they’d insisted on his seeing: that the man had understood the symptoms perfectly well, but had underestimated Stephen’s powers of recovery. He couldn’t have done his job as long as he had without having the power to slough off exhaustion and the after-effects of shock. But now, at this moment, he needed, above all, to feel clean. He could tackle the rest later.

He got into the shower. The water was so hot he had to jump out again and readjust the settings. Already the small bathroom was full of steam. He got in a second time, more cautiously, and scrubbed every part of himself, washed his hair and rinsed it till it squeaked, then, deliberately, taking a deep breath, turned the shower to cold.

After the first yelp he took it in silence, letting the icy water plaster his hair flat against his skull until he was as mindless as animals seem to be in heavy rain, every sense subdued to the battering of the elements. Last, he raised his face and let the sheet of water, falling on his closed eyelids and into his open mouth, remove whatever he had left of feeling or thought.

He towelled himself dry in front of the fire, then hunted in his suitcase for clean socks and pants, before setting off, damp-haired and red-eyed but otherwise presentable, for his brother’s house.

Justine’s car had gone, he saw with a twinge of disappointment, but then remembered she’d said she was going home. He was faintly amused at himself, at how cheerful he suddenly felt. Nothing like lust to make you feel life’s still worth living, even if the particular attraction is one that you absolutely do not intend to pursue.