Border Crossing by Pat Barker Read Free Book Online Page A

fit everything in.’ He’d meant, You’re used to coping with loss. You’re good at it. Now he looked at her and wondered whether she was coping at all.
    On the way over he’d been wondering whether to tell her about the dream he’d had about his father, and had almost decided not to, but sitting there, looking at the garden his father had started to make, and not lived to complete, he did tell her. It was one of their rules that his father’s name should be frequently on their lips, not obsessively, but casually, naturally, as absent friends are mentioned. But when he came to the ludicrous conclusion: that’s what a great love comes to, a rabbit running between graves, he hadn’t the heart to repeat it.
    ‘What an extraordinary dream,’ she said when he’d finished, and then, with barely a pause, ‘Of course the rabbits are a problem.’
    Tom felt himself go cold, a light chill, as if a cloud had drifted over the sun, but then realized she’d gone back to talking about the garden. Rabbits, from the gorse-covered hills behind the bungalow, regularly ate her new plants. You saw their bright, round, shiny pellets in clusters all over the lawn.
    This October would be the second anniversary of his father’s death. Some textbooks describe grieving for more than six months as prolonged. They were well into injury time, though they’d grieved like professionals: brought the body home, kept the coffin open, visited him frequently, in the cold room, with the windows wide open and a single light burning by his head. They’d touched his hands, become familiar with the density of dead flesh, watched the minute changes of expression as the rigor mortis wore off. And yet none of this had been enough to make them accept the reality of his going. He had been, even in his final illness, too large a presence. She still heard the hiss of wheelchair tyres along the wet paths, his voice calling for her from another room, because he’d depended on her totally in that last illness, not merely for the physical needs of life, but for her presence, her touch, her voice, her smell. As the sexual bond loosened, it had been replaced by this other, maternal, bond, equally physical, so that for her there had been no release from the white heat of bodily closeness in which their lives had been lived. It was too great a gap to be filled.
    But they persevered. They got the photograph album out as soon as they could bear to, and laughed and cried over old memories, guiding themselves gently past the last photographs of him in the chair, reminiscing about family holidays, the dogs they’d kept when Tom was a child.
    A year after his father’s death she still, occasionally, laid the table for two.
    On the first anniversary she went to the local RSPCA refuge and adopted Tyger, a three-year-old tabby whose previous owner had died. The owner’s other four cats had been rehomed without difficulty, but Tyger grieved ceaselessly, irreconcilably, turning his back – literally – on anybody who tried to make friends. In the end he’d been placed in a carer’s home, where he took up residence inside a doll’s house, glaring through its latticed windows, coming out only to eat and use his tray. ‘That’s the one,’ his mother said. ‘Come on, Tyger. Let’s go and be miserable together.’ Stage four of grieving: the transference of libido to another object, person or activity. Tom’s mother made more rapid progress with this than Tyger, who, for the first three months, retreated behind the sofa, and spat.
    The natural love object, the one that would have contributed enormously to her recovery, was a grandchild, but that he was, rather conspicuously, failing to supply. ‘How’s Lauren?’ she asked.
    ‘Fine. Fine. She seems to be enjoying herself.’
    ‘Coming home this weekend?’
    ‘No, she’s going to see her parents. It’s their fortieth wedding anniversary soon, so they’re all planning the party.’
    ‘You should go with her,