Border Crossing

  ‘Should we kill it?’ the ex-alcoholic asked.

  ‘No, it’s coming from the other side of the valley,’ Angus said. ‘It’d be dead before we got there.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘Look,’ Malcolm said, ‘it’s going to die, and there’s nothing we can do about it. I’m going back to bed.’

  He strode away up the lawn. Very sane and sensible, Tom thought, and yet, not. An hour ago there had been talk, laughter, companionship, lights, warmth, wine, food, and the screams had blown it all away. Each one of them stood there, shivering, condemned to the isolation of his own skin. How fragile it all is, he thought.

  He felt Angus’s hand heavy on his shoulder. ‘Back to bed,’ he said, pushing Tom gently towards the house. ‘There’ll be a fox along soon.’

  ‘Will we see you at breakfast?’ Rowena asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ Tom said, over another scream. ‘I have to get back.’

  SEVENTEEN

  He’d forgotten that he was dependent on other people for transport. It was ten o’clock before anybody was free to drive him to the station, and then the train was late and he missed his connection in York. He’d intended to be in the house when Lauren arrived, though she had a key. She wouldn’t be waiting in the street.

  They were between Durham and Newcastle when his mobile rang. ‘Tom, is that you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Look, I’m in the house. You remember I was coming back to collect some of my stuff? You said today would be all right.’

  He could tell from her voice she was worried. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘You know the boy you pulled out of the river? He’s here. He said he had an appointment. I thought you must just have gone round to the shops, so I let him in.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘Walking up and down.’

  Her voice dropped to a whisper, difficult to hear. The reception wasn’t good anyway. The next thing he heard was: ‘I’ve tried talking to him, but it’s no use.’

  All along the carriage people were standing up and reaching for their bags. In another minute they’d be queuing in the aisle. The train terminated here.

  ‘Look, leave him alone. We’re coming into Newcastle now. I can be there in twenty minutes.’

  If he got off now before everybody else. If there was no queue at the taxi rank. He grabbed his bag and pushed his way to the door, where he waited, jittery with impatience, for the light to turn green. Then he ran, weaving between hurrying people, and burst out of the station to reach the taxi rank before anyone else.

  Once inside the cab, he drummed his fingers on his bag, ignoring the driver’s attempts at conversation. The traffic was reasonable, and the journey took fifteen minutes.

  Outside the house, he stuffed a handful of coins into the driver’s hand and waved away the change.

  He let himself in as quietly as he could, and stood in the hall, listening. A murmur of voices from the kitchen. At the foot of the stairs were two suitcases,one of them open, half full of small objects wrapped in newspaper. Stacks of paintings wrapped in brown paper rested against the wall. Through the open door of the living room he saw grey ghost squares on the walls where the pictures had hung. Some pieces of furniture had been pulled out and placed in the centre of the room. He felt a pang of grief, for the end of his life with Lauren, for the joint person they’d been. And into this intensely private trauma had come Danny, whose voice he could hear downstairs. He hadn’t known till now how little he trusted Danny, though there was an irrational element in his anxiety. The screams of the snared rabbit lingered in his mind, and he hadn’t managed to get back to sleep.

  He walked slowly downstairs. Through the banisters, he could see Danny’s feet in black-and-white trainers. Nothing else. A floorboard creaked, and he heard Lauren say, with a rush of relief in her voice: ‘That’ll be Tom now.’

  She stood up as he came into the room. He would never know how they would have greeted each other if they’d been alone. She came across the kitchen and offered him her cheek to kiss. He saw the moistness on her upper lip where pinpricks of sweat had broken through the make-up, and there was a peppery smell that came from her body, not from deodorant or scent.

  ‘Hello, darling. Sorry I’m late.’ He turned to Danny. ‘And Ian, this is a surprise.’

  ‘I think I may have got the wrong day.’

  Even as he offered Tom the easy way out, Danny looked pleadingly at him. Lauren was standing with her back to the kitchen table, her thin arms crossed over her chest. Her lower teeth nibbled at her upper lip. Tom felt as if he were seeing her for the first time. It was extraordinarily distracting: this feeling of a pivotal moment in his own life being played out in front of an uninvited audience. Danny’s hands were twisted in his lap, a knot of white knuckles, like worms.

  ‘Well, never mind, you’re here now, though I’m afraid I can’t manage the full hour. But I’ve got a few minutes.’

  He took Danny into his consulting room. All the way there he was aware of Danny noticing dust squares where paintings had been, a table pulled away from the wall, gaps in the book shelves, the remaining books collapsed on to each other in slack heaps. Danny’s face showed nothing but embarrassment, and yet Tom was aware of a line being crossed. Danny was inside, now.

  Perhaps the anxiety got into Tom’s voice. He said sharply, as soon as they sat down: ‘Now, then, Danny, what’s this about?’

  ‘You’ve seen the news?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’ This was obviously not the moment to mention his meeting with Angus. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Briefly, Danny explained. Two little boys, eleven and twelve years old, had been charged with themurder of an old woman. Two newspapers, and the late-night news on the BBC, had run ‘think pieces’ on the story. What is happening to our children? etc. Since the Kelsey murder was sub judice, and therefore not available for public debate, they’d illustrated their points with references to Danny’s crime. Even more seriously they’d used his school photograph.

  ‘It’s going to open up again,’ Danny said, his voice strangled with misery and fear. Already he’d seen on television all the things that had happened to him: fists beating on the sides of a police van, shouted threats, the blaze of publicity, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

  ‘What exactly did they do?’

  Danny denied any knowledge of this. He’d switched off the television as soon as he saw his photograph and gone straight to bed, half expecting his landlady to bang on the door and throw him out.

  ‘I really don’t think anybody would recognize you from that photograph,’ Tom said. ‘I know I didn’t.’

  ‘Some people would,’ Danny insisted. ‘I’m like you, Tom. I remember voices, I remember the way people move, but you’ve got to remember there really are people who never forget a face.’

  A frisson of unease. That was an entirely accurate description of the way Tom’s memory worked, and yet he couldn’t recall any conversation in which he and Danny had talked about the different ways people recall the past.

  It was also the first time Danny had called him Tom. This was the wrong moment to object, and anyway Tom had one or two adult patients who used his first name. It probably didn’t matter too much either way. And yet it jarred.

  ‘Have you phoned Martha?’ he asked.

  ‘I can’t get hold of her. I keep trying.’

  I’ll have a go too. And I’ll try my secretary.’

  He put through a call. Martha had been in to the Family Welfare Centre, but had just left, saying she was going away. She hadn’t said for how long. Tom tried her mobile, but it wasn’t switched on. Turning back to Danny, he said: ‘Look, we will get her. Don’t worry.’

  ‘I always knew it wouldn’t work. There’re too many people out there wanting to get me.’

  Tom settled down to listen to him, aware of Lauren in the background pulling a piece of furn
iture across the floor. Danny was most afraid, not of violence, nor even of having his false identity blown – though these were real fears – but of the raking up of memories. Every newspaper, every news bulletin. On the Metro, coming to see Tom, he’d heard people talking about the crime, and he thought he’d heard the name: Danny Miller. It had disturbed him so much that he got off the train at the next station and found a seat in another carriage. ‘I don’t want to know what they did. I’m thinking about Lizzie all the time anyway. I don’t need this.’

  ‘Do you want to stop our sessions for a few weeks till this is over?’

  No, he didn’t. In fact the exact opposite: he wanted to press on faster. ‘I’ve got to get it out now,’ he said. ‘Before all this muddies the water.’

  Tom could see the sense in this. He didn’t believe Danny would walk past the news-stands and not buy a paper. He didn’t believe he’d switch off the television whenever the case was mentioned, and such was the urgency of his desire to make sense of what he’d done, and so insurmountable the barriers preventing him from doing it, that there might well be seepage from the reported facts of the crime into his memory of Lizzie’s murder.

  The doorbell rang, and he heard Lauren go to answer it. Two male voices. He wanted to be able to see what was happening.

  ‘All right,’ he said, standing up. ‘Look, you can see things are pretty impossible here at the moment. Can you come back this evening? Say about seven?’

  Danny moistened his lips. ‘Yes, all right.’

  ‘There really is no danger, Danny.’

  Danny shook his head. ‘You didn’t see them banging on the van. They can’t get those two, but they can get me.’

  Tom showed Danny out, then stood with his back to the door, bracing himself. Lauren was in the living room, sitting on the arm of the remaining sofa. This perching, this waiting to take off, irritated him. Why on earth couldn’t she sit down?

  He started to say: ‘How long do you think it’ll take?’ but stopped halfway through, startled by the booming of his voice. Of course, the removal of furniture and paintings had altered the acoustics. It was like speaking into a phone, when somebody on another floor has forgotten to put the extension down.

  She answered the incomplete question. ‘Not long. About half an hour.’

  Her voice sounded different too. He realized he was going to remember this echo-chamber conversation as the sound of his divorce. Two people who used to love each other mouthing banalities in an empty box.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked, meaning, I’d like a drink.

  She hesitated. ‘Yes, why not?’

  He uncorked a bottle and came upstairs with two glasses. All these simple actions were so heavily invested with memories that he felt like a priest celebrating Mass. He searched for some way of making the handing over of a glass of red wine seem less sacramental, and failed to find it. ‘Well,’ he said, struggling to keep the irony out of his voice, and failing again. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Who is that boy?’ she asked, turning away from him and walking over to the window.

  ‘Ian Wilkinson.’

  She looked puzzled. ‘I know the face.’

  ‘Of course you do. You met him on the Quayside.’

  ‘No, before that.’

  Tom shrugged, but his heartbeat quickened. Danny was right. Lauren was strongly visual, far more so than most people, and something about Danny’s face tugged at her memory. She’d recognize him from the school photograph.

  And if she did, others would.

  To distract her, he said, ‘You know the most horrifying thing about all this? Only a few weeks ago we were trying for a baby.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve thought a lot about that. Thank God it didn’t work.’

  That for him, and perhaps for her too, was the moment when it ended. They were strangers now, not close enough to be antagonistic, trying to sort out the best way of disentangling their financial arrangements.

  ‘Will you want to sell?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t think so. I might let out the top floor. It wouldn’t need much doing to make it self-contained. And I suppose the lawyers’11 sort out what to do about your share of the equity.’

  ‘I don’t want a long wrangle.’

  ‘Nor me. It’s more a question of what they want.’

  They chatted for half an hour, finding it increasingly difficult to keep a conversation going. The topic he most wanted to raise – had she got somebody else? –was taboo. It wasn’t his business any more, though that didn’t stop him speculating. He scoured her face and body for signs of sexual fulfilment, but she looked as she always did, elegantly turned out, cool.

  He wondered how it felt to be leaving the house for the last time. She’d loved it when they first moved in. All those months spent painting the river in every possible light, and then she’d exhausted whatever it was she’d found here. After that, he thought, she hadn’t liked the house much. On one wet day recently, peering through mizzled windows at the swollen river, she’d said they might as well live on a bloody boat.

  It was a relief when the removal men came in and said they’d finished.

  She stood up at once and looked at him. ‘Well, Tom, do you think we can wish each other luck?’

  For a moment the anger almost choked him. You’re going, he thought, and you want me to wish you luck? But then he folded her stiffly in his arms, and patted her shoulders. He was surprised by his reaction. She felt wrong against him. The skin of his chest and arms was saying, Wrong body, so that, in the end, seeing her off for the last time, closing the door afterwards, he was able to feel that this parting was, to some extent, his decision.

  A few minutes later, pouring himself another glass of wine, he realized that only a slight change of perspective was needed to make it all his decision. He could have gone to London with her and e-mailedchapters of the book to Martha and Roddy; they didn’t need to meet. And he could have made love to her, got her pregnant. Only his body’s apparently inexplicable refusal to perform had prevented it, and yet what a disaster it would have been. He would never use the word ‘dickhead’ again. It was grossly unfair. His dick was the only part of him that had shown the slightest spark of intelligence.

  All this was comforting, in a way. It raised his morale not to have to see himself as Lauren’s victim. Determined to start work on the book again, he went into his study, only to stop short in the doorway. For there, propped up on his chair, obviously not forgotten, left deliberately, was Lauren’s last painting of the river.

  The sun hung over the water, a dull red without rays and without heat, as it might look in the last days of the planet. Beneath was an almost abstract swirl of greys and browns, and in the bottom right-hand corner, barely in the picture, a dark figure, himself, looking out over the water.

  EIGHTEEN

  All the way through his conversation with Lauren he’d been aware of the answering machine’s irritating beep. When he finally played it back, the messages included five requests for telephone interviews about the Kelsey murder. Because of his special interest in conduct disorder he was usually asked for his opinion whenever a crime involving children hit the headlines. Some of these interviews he would have to do, but he didn’t feel like calling anybody back at the moment. Lauren’s departure was too raw, and he needed to plan how he was going to respond to questions about Danny.

  The person he needed to talk to now was Martha. He reached her at the third attempt. She said she’d come round and he went to the window to wait for her. Downstairs, in the kitchen, the answering machine clicked on again. He couldn’t make out most of the words, but he thought he heard Danny’s name. Leaning over the banister, listening to thevoice, he felt a tremor of foreboding, and for the first time understood how hounded Danny must feel.

  A gust of wind buffeted the glass, and splashes of rain began to darken the pavement. He watched Martha park the car and run towards the house. She turst in, laughing, running her fingers through her short, dark h
air. ‘I hope to God it’s better than this tomorrow,’ she said, as he took her coat.

  ‘Why tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m going to a wedding. In fact I’m the chief bridesmaid. I won’t tell you how many times that makes it. But it’s a hell of a lot more than three.’

  They walked through into the living room. He saw her noticing the gaps, the absences.

  ‘Of course, I wish now I wasn’t going. Ian,’ she said, when he looked puzzled. ‘The murder.’

  ‘You’re allowed a private life.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She sat down, and laughed. ‘I just wish I was better at it.’

  He glanced round the half-empty room. ‘Yeah, me too.’

  The rain was heavier now, pelting against the glass, sealing them in. It was dark in the room, but Tom didn’t want the glare of electric light. Maltha’s face was a pale oval. He sat down opposite her, lowering himself into the chair. That was another thing he’d noticed: he was moving like a much older man, levering himself out of bed in the mornings, leaning on the banisters when he climbed the stairs, as if the injury were physical.

  ‘As you can see,’ he said heavily, ‘Lauren’s moved out.’

  ‘Yes.’ She wasted no time on expressions of regret, and he was grateful to her for that. ‘And I gather Danny showed up in the middle of it?’

  That was the first time she’d used his real name. ‘Yes. I could’ve done without that.’

  ‘He’s frightened.’

  ‘Is he exaggerating the risk, do you think?’

  In the kitchen the answering machine clicked on again.

  ‘I’m being pursued,’ Tom said, listening.

  ‘Well, that’s the answer, isn’t it?’

  ‘They’d be ringing me anyway. Every time there’s a child involved in a serious crime…’ He waved in the direction of the voice.

  ‘Like this?’

  ‘No, this is a bit worse. I’m not returning the calls. But no, you’re right. Something happened when Danny came to the house. A lot of things had gone, so it looked empty, and I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but it sounds different as well, hollow, and Danny was in the middle of all this, and I suddenly thought, I shouldn’t be doing this. I mean – what I’m trying to say is, You don’t want an empty space at the centre of your life when you’ve got somebody like Danny prowling round the edges. He’s always pressingfor more, you know? And the emptiness gives him a way in.’