Another World by Pat Barker Read Free Book Online Page A

a friend, said, ‘You shouldn’t have said that.’
    Nick became a spectacularly devious child. Every second of every day was supervised by Da-Sir or Mu-Matron; the only privacy was inside his head. He lied automatically all the time about everything. Once when he was a teenager his mother came into his bedroom and asked him what he was reading. Kidnapped , he said, quick as a flash, pushing Treasure Island out of sight under his pillow. But lying, he soon realized, wasn’t enough. However good you were, you made mistakes. You had to be two people, one in each world, and in each world you had to forget the responses of the other.
    Only Grandad, silent, wreathed in blue cigarette smoke, never changed; belonged only to one world.
    His face, yellow against the white cloth of the pillows, doesn’t change much now either, though fugitive expressions pass across it rather like the mouthings of newborn babies, reactions generally to what’s going on in their guts. His are like that too, his whole attention focused inwards on managing the pain. A white line runs from his temple to the centre of his cheek, an old wound, as much a part of him now as the colour of his eyes. It’s difficult to believe he wasn’t born with it, though he’d lived the first eighteen years of his life without it. Another inch to the left and it would have taken out the eye.
    Nick wonders whether he should go now, or at least walk along to the visitors’ café and have a cup of coffee, give Grandad a break, but he no sooner stands up with this in mind than Grandad says, ‘Don’t go.’ It’s the first sign he’s shown in the last ten minutes that he’s aware of Nick’s presence.
    ‘Where’s the pain?’ Nick says.
    ‘Down there. Like always wanting to shit.’
    ‘Do they give you injections?’
    ‘Just pills.’ He rouses himself slightly. ‘Do you know they shaved me legs as well?’ He hoists himself up the bed. ‘I says, “What you shaving them for?” It was Ian. He says, “Don’t blame me. Sister’s a navel-to-knee woman. You lose your bush round here if you’re having your tonsils out.” ’
    The groin is hairless, infantile. He doesn’t seem to mind, but perhaps he does, it’s difficult to tell.
    ‘That bloody grub’s on its way through,’ he says.
    ‘Do you want the bedpan?’ Nick looks around for the bell.
    ‘No, I bloody don’t, I’ve had enough of that. How can anybody shit lying on their back?’
    ‘You’re not on your back.’
    ‘Good as. I’ll go to the toilet.’
    He looks daunted, though, even as he says it. For so many years now there’s been something almost miraculous about his body, the erect carriage – he has no arthritis – none – the eyes that still see, perfectly, the ears that still hear, perfectly – all this combined with an almost transparent thinness, a lightness, as if the next puff of wind would blow him away. He has seemed to be as fragile and indestructible as thistledown.
    They make the journey to the bathroom in slow stages. So much effort to get to the side of the bed, so much to push the red, shiny, scaly legs and feet into the slippers which Nick places ready for him. Then a rest before the slow shuffle along the ward, Nick at his rear bunching up the smock behind him like a bridesmaid holding up the bride’s train, concealing Grandad’s lean and pleated arse from the gaze of passing nancies. Ian in particular, though Ian rubs surgical spirit into it twice a day and hasn’t been carried away by passion yet.
    At last they make it to the loo. A cool gush of water from the next cubicle as Nick lowers Geordie on to the seat and retreats a few tactful steps to the standups, where he pees and then stares at himself in the mirror, listening to the grunts of effort and pain from the cubicle behind him.
    Another mirror, this time belonging to Grandad, a looking-glass made of steel, a hole punched through one end with a length of khaki ribbon threaded through. It hung on a hook in