Border Crossing (5 page)

Wellies, that day. It wasn’t raining, but in spring all the paths were deep in mud. Once they’d got to the pond they saw that the frog spawn – newly laid, standing proud above the water – was five or six feet away from the bank. Too deep for wellies, so they pulled them off and stood on the edge of the pond, barefoot, cold goose shit oozing up between their toes. Neil prattled away, poking at the sandy bank with a stick, ignored by both of them.

The pond was on a farmer’s land, though not visible from the farmhouse. You weren’t supposed to play there, because the pond wasn’t a proper pond at all, but a flooded well. Out there, in the clear centre, where no weeds grew, there was a drop of a hundred feet.

Thirty years later, standing on the edge of the same pond, Tom wondered if that were true. It sounded like the kind of story adults might tell to frighten the children away, but he couldn’t be sure. They’d waded out up to their waists once, daring each other to go further, but then Jeff stubbed his toe on a stone, and, panicking, they’d splashed back into the shallows. Behind the fringe of willow trees on the far bank was a road, quiet, since the building of the bypass five years ago, but then, busy, cars, buses and lorries roaring past.

No geese today. Then, they’d honked and hissed and swayed off, to stand at a slight distance, malevolent and watchful, as Tom started to wade into the pond. His feet raised clouds of fine mud. Frogs kicked away into the weeds, tiny males clinging to the fat females, even in the emergency of this invasion unable to let go. They dived into the mud and reappeared further out, croaking mournfully, their eyes like blackcurrants breaking the surface.

New spawn, the jelly still firm with tadpoles like full stops. Old spawn, slack jelly, tadpoles like commas. Tom lowered the jam jar beneath the surface, easing mounds of silvery slobber over the rim. Some of it was too firm to flow; he had to pull it apart to get it in. When he’d got enough, he turned round and saw Jeff, scooping spawn into his own jar, and behind him, wobbling precariously, still wearing his wellies, Neil.

It started as a joke. A cruel joke, yes, but still a joke. Whose idea was it to put frog spawn into Neil’s wellies? He couldn’t remember. Jeff’s, he thought, but then he needed to think that.

Neil screamed as the heavy jelly slopped over the tops of his boots and filled them to the brim, pressing in on his bare legs. He wasn’t hurt, he just couldn’t bear the cold slime on his skin. He screamed and screamed, jumped up and down, fell over, got up again, soaked, face smeared with snot, piss coursing down his legs. There was no way out. The more he screamed, the more they panicked. They couldn’t take him home like this, and they couldn’t clean him up. Jeff scrambled on to the bank, Tom followed, but Neil couldn’t move. They shouted at him to get out, but when he tried to move the spawn shifted and squelched inside his wellies, and he screamed again.

Jeff threw the first stone. Tom was sure about that. Almost sure. Little stones, pebbles, plopping into the water around the screaming child, who backed further out towards the centre of the pond. Why did they do it? Because they were frightened, because they shouldn’t have been there at all, because they knew they were going to get into trouble, because they hated him, because he was a problem they couldn’t solve, because neither could be the first to back down. Bigger clods of earth landed in the pond, not too close, they weren’t trying to hit him yet. The frogs submerged and did not reappear. The geese retreated, honking and swaying, as they made their way up the hill.

And then a bus came past. A man, glancing up from his paper, peered through the window, hardly able to credit what he saw, and immediately jumped up and rang the bell. The driver, who could have decided to be awkward, stopped the bus, and minutes later the man – Tom never knew his name – careered down the bank, waded into the pond up to his knees, and gathered Neil into his arms. He carried him all the way home, having got the address out of a subdued and frightened Jeff. They followed him, stomping along behind, too shocked to speak, leaving the jam jars marooned in muddy footprints by the side of the pond.

Three children were saved that day. A man glances up from his newspaper, sees what’s going on, acts on what he sees. Accident. A more interesting news story, a thicker coat of dirt on the bus window, a disinclination to intervene, and it might have ended differently.

In tragedy, perhaps. It might have. He didn’t know. It was his good fortune not to know.

Had he known at the time that what he was doing was wrong? Yes, undoubtedly. His parents had been easy, tolerant, in many ways, but in all essential matters the moral teaching had been firm and clear. Cruelty to animals, deliberate unkindness, bullying smaller children: these were major crimes. What interested him was how little sense of responsibility he felt now. If somebody had asked him about that afternoon, he’d have said something like, ‘Kids can be very cruel.’ Not, ‘I was very cruel.’ ‘Kids can be very cruel.’ He knew he’d done it, he remembered it clearly, he’d known then, and accepted now, that it was wrong, but the sense of moral responsibility was missing. In spite of the connecting thread of memory, the person who’d done that was not sufficiently like his present self for him to feel guilt.

It was something to be borne in mind, he thought, strolling back to his car, in talking to Danny.

SIX

He was watching the Channel 4 news when the doorbell rang. Looking through the peephole, he saw Danny, trapped in the distorting glass, like a fish in a bowl. ‘Hello, you’re early,’ Tom said, holding the door open.

Danny stepped across the threshold, his shadow, thrown by the porch light, leaping ahead of him as if it already knew the way. ‘I didn’t know how long it would take.’

‘Never mind. Come in.’

Tom took Danny’s coat and hung it up.

‘Can I get you a drink?’

‘What are you having?’

‘Whisky.’

‘That’ll do fine.’

Tom was remembering the other room, the one in which they’d first met. The shock of seeing the small boy walk in beside the warder. Now he was experiencing a similar shock. Danny’s height, the depth of his voice, the hunched power of his shoulders, the stillness – all these perfectly ordinary characteristics seemed bizarre, so powerfully did Tom sense the presence of that child, immured inside the man.

What was back, without effort, without his wanting it even, was the intimacy of that first meeting.

‘Well, how have you been?’ he asked, settling into an armchair.

‘Since I left hospital? Tired. I went to bed and slept for ten hours. Woke up, didn’t know where I was.’

Not an easy situation, this, Tom thought. You could hardly pretend it was a social call, and yet it wasn’t a consultation either. He was going to have to feel his way forward. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

A shrug, bringing memories of their first meeting flooding back. ‘Don’t mind.’

‘Quite a decision at your age. How old are you?’ ‘

You know how old I am.’ A pause. ‘Twenty-three.’

‘So what went wrong? After you came out?’

A faint smile. ‘I met a girl. I was living with a Quaker couple at the time, and they’re very nice but also quite elderly and a bit strait-laced, and I decided I’d rather live with the girl. It wasn’t a great big thing.’ He dropped his voice into the bass register.
‘We are
now committing ourselves to each other.
We were students, students live together. But Mike – the probation officer I had then – told me I had to tell her, and if I didn’t tell her, he’d tell her. So of course I broke it off. I didn’t dare risk it.’

‘Did she mean a lot to you?’

Danny pursed his lips. ‘Dunno. She was nice. Is nice. I don’t suppose it was… You know, some of it was just me proving I could do it with a girl. I mean the bulk of my experience… Uh, the bulk, he says. 99.9 per cent of my experience has been the other sort.’ A gulp of whisky. ‘Not all of it voluntary. It’s the one thing –’

‘No, go on.’

‘I was going to say it’s the one thing I’m bitter about, but then I’ve got no right to be bitter about anything. Have I?’

In the courtroom, Tom had seen Danny smile at his social worker, and thought, Don’t smile. Don’t laugh, don’t look pleased or excited, don’t fidget, don’t scratch your bum, don’t pick your nose, or wriggle, or do any of the things kids do all the time. Not now, not ever. ‘If that’s what you feel…’

‘Yeah, well, okay, I feel bitter. I think they should just come right out with it, you know? “I sentence you to be raped. By some big ugly bastard who’s built like a brick shithouse, uses his arm as a pincushion, and isn’t wearing a condom.”’

‘You don’t mean, you’re –’

‘Oh no. Got lucky there. I’m just naturally slim.’

Danny crossed his legs at the ankle, a conscious display that made Tom want to smile. Wasted on me, son, he thought. Though he could see it wouldn’t be wasted on everybody.

Rape was too intimate a revelation for the first ten minutes of a meeting. Either Danny had no sense of normal social distance and pacing (and where would Danny have acquired that?) or he too had a sense of falling through a trapdoor in the present, into the closeness of their first meeting. Tom kept using words like ‘intimacy’ and ‘closeness’ to describe the atmosphere of that meeting, but there’d also been massive antagonism. As there was now. And yet Danny had trusted him then, he thought, looking into the adult Danny’s amused and trustless eyes. ‘Anyway, the relationship broke up?’ he said.

‘Yes. And then I was told I couldn’t teach.’

‘Why not?’

‘Not allowed to work with children. Actually, not allowed to work with people.’

Tom said gently, ‘But you can see the point, can’t you? I mean if you were a parent and you found out your child’s teacher had been convicted of murder, how would you feel?’

‘I hope I’d think it was a long time ago.’

‘Would you?’

A silent struggle. ‘No, probably not. But it threw me, you see, because I’m just starting the third year –[ did three years of an Open University degree, inside, when I was in prison, and you can transfer the credits – and I thought teaching was what I’m going to do, and now I don’t know
what
I’m going to do. And, you know, the whole thing pisses me off, because last year, I was released in November and I couldn’t get a job, so I decided I’d be a gardener, only there wasn’t any work so I thought I’d be a tree surgeon. I was turning up at old people’s houses with a chainsaw, asking them if there was anything they wanted lopping off. Nobody worried about that.’

‘Did you tell – Mike, was it? The probation officer?

– about the chainsaw?’

‘No.’

‘Might be why he wasn’t worried.’

Danny smiled. ‘The point is, he had no need to be.’

‘But they have to be ultra-careful, don’t they? And so do you. One silly little incident, and you’re back inside.’

‘No, it’s not that. You see the real question is: can people change?’ Danny was leaning forward, meeting Tom’s gaze with an almost uncomfortable intensity. ‘And all sorts of people whose jobs actually depend on a belief that people can change, social workers, probation officers, clinical psychologists’ – he smiled – ‘psychiatrists, don’t really believe it at all.’

‘Well, yes – because those are precisely the jobs that furnish people with a good deal of evidence that it doesn’t happen.’

‘Do you believe it?’

Tom leant back, massaging the skin of his forehead, his face partially screened from Danny’s gaze. ‘It would be very easy for me to say yes, but I suspect in the sense you mean, I… don’t. Obviously, if you take a particular individual and change his environment, completely, for a long time, he’s going to learn new tricks. He’s got to, the old tricks don’t work any more, and he’s an organism that’s programmed to survive. If he’s capable of learning at all, he’ll learn. My God, he will. But I don’t think the responses are genuinely new, I think they were there all along. Lying dormant. Because they weren’t needed.’

‘So the logic is, if you put this “particular individual” back into the old situation, with all the old pressures, he’ll revert to the old responses.’

‘The old situation might not still be there.’

‘But if it was? He’d revert?’

‘Not necessarily. There’s always the hope that some of the new tricks might carry over.’

‘But he might revert?’

‘Yes. There’s always that possibility.’

Danny crossed his arms and leant back in his chair. ‘You’re a cynical sod, really, aren’t you? Under all :hat compassion you don’t actually give a toss for inybody.’

‘Whereas you believe in redemption.’

Danny was so startled his nostrils flared. ‘Oooooh,’ he said, midway between a sigh and a groan. ‘I don’t know that I do. I’d like to.’ He paused. ‘Of course in your terms that would be a genuinely new response.’

‘Yes.’

A short silence. Danny said, ‘Sorry.’

‘What for?’

‘Calling you a cynical sod.’

‘That’s all right, you don’t have to be polite.’

He didn’t. This was now definitely not a social call.

‘Tell me about going back to prison.’

‘Nothing much to tell. It was… impulse, really. I just thought, Sod it, I can’t make it work. And in a curious sort of way, I did make prison work, I’d got a job in the library, I was doing a degree.’ His expression hardened. ‘And I could work with people. If somebody wanted to talk, they talked. They knew bloody well I wasn’t going to pass it on.’

‘So you had a role?’

‘Yeah, which is more than I’ve bloody well got out here. So I went back. Hitched most of the way, walked the last ten miles. And then I bumped into one of the warders, one of the better ones, and he said, “Come and have a cup of tea.” And I told him what I was doing and he said, “Don’t be daft, Danny, they’re not going to let you back in.” And that was the first time anybody had called me Danny for months, so that didn’t discourage me. Anyway I banged on the door and I’ve no doubt he’d rung ahead and warned them I was coming. I was put in the visitors’ waiting room. There was this girl there with a baby, visiting somebody, she thought I was visiting too. And then Martha came and got me. Stupid.’

‘It was understandable.’

‘Gerraway, man. It was pathetic’

A sudden incursion of a Geordie accent. Why? ‘How long ago was that?’

‘Nine days.’

‘Is that what made you so depressed?’

‘No, I’d been feeling down for months. It’s always bad in the vacations when everybody else goes home.’

‘Can’t you go home?’

‘My mother’s dead.’

‘Oh, I am sorry.’ Tom remembered her clearly, a woman with mousy fair hair, wearing a blue cardigan that matched the faded blue of her eyes. In the course of the trial, her eyes seemed to become paler, as if tears could dilute the colour. She’d wept, quietly, persistently, into an embroidered handkerchief, the sort almost nobody carried any more, and Tom had been conscious of mounting irritation as the furtive sniffling went on and on. You’d have thought she was the victim. Danny looked round at her continually, more worried about her, it seemed, than he was about himself. And even that had counted against him, making him seem mature beyond his years. ‘When did it happen?’

‘Two years ago. Of course I was still inside. They took me to see her in the hospital, only they wouldn’t rake the handcuffs off, so she had all the shame of other people, nurses, seeing me like that. And we couldn’t talk, with the warder there. And then she got a lot worse, and I asked if I could go to see her again, and the governor hummed and hawed and… finally said yes. And I stood to attention, and said, “Thank you, sir.” I should’ve ripped his fucking liver out.’

Tom let a silence open up. Then he said, ‘I hope you’re careful who you say that to.’

A direct gaze. ‘I am. At the funeral I was in handcuffs again – of course. When I bent down to throw earth on the coffin, I had to kind of coordinate it with the warder, like a bloody three-legged race. It was ridiculous.’

‘So there’s no home base?’

‘No.’

‘What about your father?’

‘Haven’t seen him for years. He used to come and see me at Long Garth. You know, it was almost like a posh school, sort of place he went to. I think he quite liked that, so long as he didn’t have to remember why I was there.’ He stopped, patted his pockets. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘No, go ahead.’

He used matches still. Tom put an ashtray near him and went back to his chair.

‘I did try to talk to him once.’

‘About?’

‘The obvious. He got up and walked out. I can’t remember if that was the last visit. If it wasn’t, there weren’t many more.’

‘What about last Saturday?’

‘I woke up feeling quite good, actually. I’d got the second anniversary of my mother’s death over, and I thought, Right now, for Christ’s sake, start moving on. And then… I don’t know what happened. I just fell into the pit. I was wandering round, I’d had quite a bit to drink – that didn’t help – and I was near the river, and I thought, Sod it.’

‘Like when you went back to prison?’

‘It was a bit like that, yes. Except worse, because then I knew there wasn’t anywhere to go.’

‘So you didn’t plan it at all?’

‘No.’

Danny’s face was veiled in smoke. Not that it mattered. Any good liar – and Danny was exceptionally good – can control his expression. It’s the body that gives the game away. Tom thought he could discern a new tension in Danny’s posture, a choppiness in the movement of the hands. When he said ‘No’, he’d :ned to shrug, but only one shoulder moved. And who carries temazepam around with them in the middle of the day? No, Danny was telling, at best, a partial truth.

‘I’m glad it happened,’ Danny said.

‘Why?’

‘Because I met you. Again. And I know you’re going to laugh, but I still think that wasn’t an accident.’

You and me both, Tom thought. ‘So what was it, then?’

‘It was, I dunno, a sort of kick in the pants, I suppose, because I’d tried to go on ignoring it and pretending it didn’t happen and suddenly there it is, bang. Right in front of me.’

‘And that’s a sign you have to face up to it?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re putting an awful lot on coincidence, Danny. I mean, you get fished out of the river by a psychologist, so you decide it’s time for some psychotherapy. Suppose I’d been a tailor. Would you have ordered a suit?’

‘That’s not fair. And it’s not
a
psychologist, is it?’

Tom took time to think. ‘You know, if you’re really serious about this, there’s quite a strong argument for starting at the beginning with somebody else.’

‘No. It’s you or nobody. And by the way, I don’t want psychotherapy. Why would I want that? I want to work out why it happened.’ He waited. ‘It’s not as if we had a personal relationship.’

‘No, that’s true. Did you ever get any treatment?’

‘No. Don’t look so shocked. You were the one who told the court I was normal.’

‘I didn’t say you were normal. I said you were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.’

‘Yeah, well, they forgot about that. Look, it was made pretty clear you didn’t talk about it. Not to anybody. Mr Greene, that was the headmaster at Long Garth, actually said, on the first night, I don’t care what you’ve done. Nobody’s going to ask you about that. This is the first day of the rest of your life. And everybody did what he said. There was an English teacher there, and I wrote something for him, but not about the murder. I couldn’t talk to my mother.