Chapter One
They were walking along the river path, away from the city, and asfar as they knew they were alone.
They''d woken that morning to a curious stillness. Clouds saggedover the river, and there was mist like a sweat over the mud flats.The river had shrunk to its central channel, and seagulls skimmedlow over the water. The colour was bleached out of houses and gardensand the clothes of the few passers-by.
They''d spent the morning indoors, picking away at their intractableproblems, but then, just before lunch, Lauren had announcedthat she had to get out. They might have done better todrive to the coast, but instead they donned raincoats and boots andset off to walk along the river path.
They lived on the edge of what had once been a thriving area ofdocks, quays, and warehouses, now derelict and awaiting demolition.Squatters had moved into some of the buildings. Others hadsuffered accidental or convenient fires, and were surrounded bybarbed-wire fences, with pictures of Alsatians and notices sayingDANGER. KEEP OUT.
Tom kept his eyes down, hearing Lauren''s voice go on and on, assoft and insistent as the tides that, slapping against crumbling stoneand rotting wood, worked bits of Newcastle loose. Keep talking, hesaid to clients who came to him for help in saving their marriages,or—rather more often—for permission to give up on them altogether.Now, faced with the breakdown of his own, he thought,Shut up, Lauren. Please, please, please shut up.
Bits of blue plastic, half-bricks, a seagull''s torn-off wing. Tom''sgaze was restricted to a few feet of pocked and pitted ground intowhich his feet intruded rhythmically. All other boundaries weregone. Though he did not raise his head to search for them, he wasaware of their absence: the bridge, the opposite bank, the warehouseswith the peeled and blistered names of those who had onceowned them. All gone.
A gull, bigger and darker than the rest, flew over, and he raisedhis eyes to follow it. Perhaps this focus on the bird''s flight explainedwhy, in later years, when he looked back on that day, he rememberedwhat he couldn''t possibly have seen: a gull''s-eye view of thepath. A man and a woman struggling along; the man striding ahead,eager to escape, hands thrust deep into the pockets of a black coat;the woman, fair-haired, wearing a beige coat that faded into thegravel, and talking, always talking. Though the red bps move, nosound comes out. He denies her his attention in memory, as he didin life. The perspective lengthens to include the whole scene, rightup to the mist-shrouded warehouses that rise above them like cliffs,and now a third figure appears, coming out from between thederelict buildings.
He stops; looks towards the river, or rather at a small jetty thatruns across the mud into the deep water, and starts to stride towardsit. And at this moment, seeing in memory what in life he did notsee, Tom freezes the frame.
In reality, it was Lauren who first noticed the young man."Look," she said, touching Tom''s arm.
They stood and watched him, grateful to be distracted from theirown problems, to be mildly interested, mildly puzzled by the behaviourof another human being, for there was an oddity about thisboy that they both recognized seconds before he did anything odd.His trainers bit into the gravel—the only sound except for theirown breathing—and then he was slipping and slithering over therotted timbers of the jetty. He stood, poised, at the end, a blackshape smudged with mist. They watched him drop his coat, scrapeoff his trainers, tug the sweatshirt over his head.
"What''s he doing?" Lauren said. "He can''t be going to swim."
People did swim here: in summer you saw boys diving from theend of the jetty, but surely nobody would want to swim on a raw,murky day like this. He seemed to be shaking pills into the palm ofhis hand and cramming them into his mouth. He threw the bottleaway, far out into the water, but his body got there first. A low,powerful dive that raised barely a splash. Almost immediately hishead appeared, bobbing, as he was swept further from the bank.
Already Tom was running, crunching broken glass, dodging half-bricks,jumping piles of rubble. Once he lost his balance and almostfell, but immediately was up again and running, the slimy wood ofthe jetty treacherous beneath his feet.
At the end, fumbling with buttons, he looked down into thedead water and thought, Shit. And realized this is what people dothink who meet sudden, violent deaths. Shit. This is it. Oh bugger.Lauren came panting up and said nothing, not "Don''t" or "Be careful"or anything like that, and he was grateful. "It''s September," hesaid, answering one of the things she might have said, meaning thewater wouldn''t be lethally cold.
A second later, the water enclosed him in a coffin of ice. Hismind contracted in fear, became a wordless pinprick of consciousness,as he fought the river that pushed him under, tossed himabout, slapped him to and fro across the face, like an interrogatorsoftening up his victim.
After the first few floundering strokes, he began to get used tothe cold. At any rate he could get no colder. Looking around forthe dark head, he realized he couldn''t see it, and thought, Good, becausenow he could get out, phone the police, let them dredge theriver or wait for the body to float. But then he saw the boy, driftingslowly with the current, thirty or forty feet away.
Water slopped into his mouth, skinning his throat, and then thecurrent pushed him under. Bubbles of released breath trickled pasthis eyes. He kicked his way to the surface and came up closer to theboy. Purple face hidden by a fall of black hair. The current threatenedto sweep Tom past, and he panicked, scrabbling at the waterlike a drowning dog. Then he let himself sink, and dimly, throughthe thick brown light, he saw the boy, hanging suspended, a dribbleof bubbles escaping from his gaping mouth.
Tom grasped him by the arms and propelled him to the surface,gasping for air as they broke through and floated, the sky rockingaround their drifting heads. Deep breaths. The river seemed tosqueeze his chest tight. He didn''t care, now, whether the boy wasalive or dead. The determination to get him out had become asmindless as a dog''s retrieving of a stick. The current made the turndifficult, but then he saw Lauren running along the path, and towingthe boy along, his eyes full of sky and river water, he struck outtowards the bank. He made slow progress at first, then, miraculously,felt the tug of another current pulling them in to land. Theyfloated, at last, into a fetid backwater, amongst a scum of rubbish thetide had cast up. A shopping trolley, knotted condoms, tinfoil trays,plastic bottles.
Tom pushed his face through it, to reach the edge of the mud.Thick, black, oily, stinking mud, not the inert stuff you encounter incountry lanes and scrape off your boots at the end of the day, but asucking quagmire, God knows how many feet deep. Lauren reachedout to him.
"Don''t come in," he shouted.
A tree had been washed up on to the bank, and she clung tothat, reaching out her hand. He began to inch his way towards her,keeping his weight evenly spread, dragging the boy behind him.The mud clutched at his elbows and knees.
Lauren''s spread fingers seemed a mile away, and she wouldn''thave the strength to pull them out even if he managed to reach her.The stench and taste of the mud filled his nose and mouth. He wasaware of not wanting to die and, quite specifically, of not wanting todie like this. Heart shaking his chest, he squirmed forward, andfound the new ground firmer than he''d thought. Lauren, still clingingto the dead tree, had waded in to her knees. His outstretchedfingers closed over hers, and slipped. "Get my sleeve," she said. Heknew he should be keeping the boy''s mouth clear, but there was noway he could do that and drag him out at the same time. Anotherfew inches and he was able to grab Lauren''s coat. The effort exhaustedhim and he lay still, panting for a while, then started tocrawl across her until his hand closed round a branch of the tree.He tested it, found it locked fast in a groyne of the bank, and slowlystood up, hauling the boy behind him out of the mud, which surrenderedhim with a belch of protest. Tom lay gasping, head andshoulders on the grass, feet trailing in the slime. Then he told himselfthe job wasn''t done, and turned to look at the boy.
Black and glistening, he lay there, a creature formed, apparently,of mud. Lauren knelt beside him, supporting his head, while Tomraked an index finger round the inside of his mouth, checking thatthe airways were clear. Then he pressed two fingers against theslimy neck, but his hands were so numb with cold that he couldn''tfeel anything. He shifted his hold, dug deeper.
"Yes?" Lauren said.
"No."
"Shit."
Immediately she placed her hands one on top of the other onthe boy''s breastbone and pressed down. Tom tilted the head backand—aware of a momentary frisson of distaste that surprised him—pinchedthe nose, fastened his mouth over the flaccid lips, and blew.Through the spread fingers of his left hand he felt the ribcage rise,then he came up for breath, counted, went down again. The boy''smouth jerked under his, as Lauren pressed again. He heard hergrunt with effort. This time when he came up he looked at her.Her eyes were glazed, inward-looking. Like labour, Tom thought,the irony as sour as the mud on his tongue. The boy looked like ababy: purple face, wet hair, that drowned look of the newborn, castup on to its mother''s suddenly creased and spongy belly. Distractedby thoughts and memories, Tom breathed too hard, detected from astruggle in the boy''s chest that the rhythm had been lost, checkedhimself, counted, went down again. His breath snagged in the boy''sthroat. He pressed his fingers to the carotid again and thought hedetected a flutter. "Got him."
They waited, Lauren''s hands still clasped one on top of the other,ready to start again. One breath, then another. And another. Noway of telling whether the colour was coming back. His face wasmasked by mud.
"All right," Lauren said. "Let''s get him over."
Together they heaved him into the recovery position. She stoodup, brushing pebbles from her knees, and looked up and down thepath, but the damp fog was enough to keep people indoors andthere was nobody to send for help.
"It''s probably quicker for me to run back to the house," she said.
"No, I''ll go."
"I think you''d better stay where you are."
Something in her voice startled him. He looked down and realizedhe was wearing a red glove. The blood had dried on his fingers,which felt tight and sticky. He had no memory of injuringhimself, and felt no pain, but he must have seemed shaky, becauseLauren said, "Are you sure you''ll be all right?"
"Yes, go on."
He watched her set off down the road, a tall, pale, blond figurefading rapidly into the mist, which had thickened and lay overeverything, smelling metallic, iron perhaps, unless that was the bloodon his hand. The boy''s eyes were closed. Tom took his pulse, andthen, hobbling over the sharp gravel, retraced his steps to the end ofthe jetty and picked up his coat and the little heap of the boy''sclothes. Then he stood still for a moment, looking out over the water.The mud smelt sharp and strong. He was conscious of his skinchafing against his wet clothes, and he was filled with joy.
The elation drained away as he walked back, tripping over danglingsleeves like a honeymooner in an old-fashioned farce. The cuton his arm had begun to ache. He knelt down beside the boy,wrapped the heavier of the coats round him, then huddled insidethe other, muttering under his breath as he rocked to and fro:C''mon, Lauren. C''mon. He was too cold to think or feel anything.
After a few minutes he heard an engine, then voices. He lookedup to see two black-clad paramedics negotiating a stretcher downthe crumbling steps. They worked their way along the bank, elbowingbranches of willow aside. Thank God, he could sign off now,have a hot bath, a whisky, two whiskies, climb back inside his ownlife.
A stocky woman with strongly marked eyebrows reached himfirst, followed by a bull-necked man with a ginger moustache, stillbreathless from the struggle to get the stretcher down the steps.
"My God," the woman said, kneeling down. "Wasn''t your Saturdaymorning, was it, son?"
They worked quickly. Within minutes they''d removed the coat,checked his pulse and breathing, wrapped blankets round him, establishedthat neither Tom nor Lauren knew who he was.
"We were just going for a walk," Lauren said.
"Lucky for him you were."
Gently, they transferred him to the stretcher. The small processionfiled along the bank. The boy''s head was hidden now, wrappedin the folds of a red blanket: a solitary splash of colour against thewaste of black mud. When they reached the steps, Tom pushed hisway forward and helped discreetly with the lifting. The mud on theboy''s face had begun to dry and crack, like a ritual mask or theworst case of psoriasis you could imagine.
The ambulance was parked a short way from the steps. Theytrudged over the gravel and set him down briefly on the groundwhile they opened the doors. At the last moment, just as they werepreparing to slot the stretcher in, the boy stirred and groaned.
"You''ll be all right," Tom said, touching his shoulder, but therewas no sign that he''d heard.
"You want to get that cut looked at," the woman said, gesturingat Tom''s arm. "We could take you in now, you know, if you liked."
"No, it''s all right, thanks. I''ll see my own doctor."
"Where are you taking him?" Lauren asked.
"The General."
The engine was running. Tom bundled the boy''s clothes togetherand handed them up to the woman. The doors slammed shut. Tomand Lauren stood and watched as the ambulance jolted along thepath, weaving from side to side to avoid the worst of the potholes,and then, reaching smooth tarmac, accelerated and disappearedround a bend in the road.
Continues...
Excerpted from Border Crossingby Pat Barker Copyright © 2002 by Pat Barker. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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