Double Vision by Pat Barker Read Free Book Online

said, looking round.
    ‘You should be able to work, at least. It’s quiet enough.’ He seemed to be debating whether to say anything more. At last he said, ‘Stephen, are you all right?’
    ‘I’m fine, Robert, honestly. Just a bit tired.’
    They looked at each other, slightly awkward, aware of the silence, then somewhere at the back of the cottage an owl hooted. As if this were a signal, Robert said, ‘I’ll leave you to settle in.’

Five
    As soon as Robert had gone, Stephen looked all over the cottage, feeling a surge of pleasure as he took in his surroundings. Despite the fire there was a chill in the air, but then the cottage had been standing empty for a year, the foot-and-mouth epidemic having destroyed the market for weekend breaks.
    A small kitchen and, upstairs, a tiny bathroom. In the front bedroom there was a desk and chair, useless for writing, at least in their present position, because they were too close to the window. Flying glass. He’d always felt bizarrely safe in the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo because the glass in the windows was long gone. He would lie curled up, fingers thrust into his armpits, hoarding warmth, and listen to the pitter-patter of rain on the polythene sheets that divided him from the thudding sky, until the mingled sound of rain and small-arms fire became a lullaby. He missed it when he got home. Surrounded by leafy trees and the hum of London traffic, he’d found it impossible to sleep. At the time he’d preferred to regard this as a personal quirk rather than as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. He still did.
    The back bedroom was larger. He stood at the small, ivy-fringed window, looking out over the garden. Apatch of lawn, shrubs, a path leading down to a gate and beyond that, on the crest of a hill, a copse of deciduous trees. Bare branches clotted with rooks’ nests stood out against the smoky red of the sky.
    He took off his trainers, shirt and jeans and stretched out on the bed, telling himself he couldn’t possibly sleep, and, almost immediately, slept. Once, he jerked awake at a sudden sound – the creak of a floorboard perhaps? – but the sound wasn’t repeated and he made himself relax. Somewhere near by an owl hooted, and he waited for the scream of a small creature finding dusk turn to night in the shadow of immense wings. Nothing. The owl hooted again. It must have a nest up there among the trees.
    Drowsily, he tried to catch the words that were drifting through his brain. Something to do with owls being restless in a place where people had met violent deaths, but he couldn’t remember, and anyway it was nonsense, nobody had died here, or only in their beds of sickness or old age. No violent deaths since the union of England and Scotland brought the long centuries of border raiding to a close. No skulls in the grass, no girls with splayed thighs and skirts around their waists revealing, even in the early stages of decomposition, what had been done to them before they died. No smell of decay clinging to the skin. Just a square of window fringed by dark leaves. He closed his eyes, and the window became a pattern floating on the inside of his lids, turning first to orange and then to purple before fading, at last, to black.
    His sleep was threadbare, like cheap curtains letting in too much light. He woke, slept, turned over, slept again, and then woke finally with a cry in the blackness, disorientated, thinking he could hear the patter of rain on polythene.
    But there was no sound of rain at the window, so the pattering must have come from his dream. Brutally awake now, he started to think about Ben, as he’d known he must sooner or later, coming here to Ben’s home ground.
    It had been raining that night in Sarajevo, heavy showers falling as sleet and blown across the road. The cold hit him as he came out of the television centre and stood, upright and exposed, on the steps leading down to the street. The snow was pockmarked under his feet. He