Double Vision by Pat Barker Read Free Book Online Page B

scene. He wanted to close the terrible eyes, but couldn’t bring himself to touch her face.
    He sat back on his heels. No way of telling whether this was a casual crime – a punter wanting his money back, a drug deal gone wrong – or a sectarian killing linked to the civil war. Increasingly crime and war shade into each other, Stephen thought. No difference to their victims, certainly, and not much either in the minds of the perpetrators. Patriot, soldier, revolutionary, freedom fighter, terrorist, murderer – cross-section their brains at the moment of killing and the differences might prove rather hard to find.
    ‘What do we do?’ he asked.
    ‘Nothing. There’s nothing we can do.’
    The building felt empty – of people anyway. It must have been rats they heard moving. He could feel them now, waiting, and scanned the shadows outside the wavering circle of light. Ben glimpsed one – its naked tail trailing through dust – and let out a roar of anger. ‘Don’t –’ Stephen had time to say before he hurled the torch. It hit the wall and fell, its single weak eye, yellowish now, picking out a blister in the wallpaper where damp had seeped through.
    Then it went out. Darkness, except for a strip of moonlight that fell across the floor and reached the girl’s eyes.
    ‘Come on,’ Ben said, getting hold of Stephen’s arm and pulling him to his feet. Far away the rumble ofgunfire started again. Stephen thought of black clouds over bright cornfields, the sheen of sweat on naked arms, lit by flickers of summer lightning.
    Then he was back on the stinking landing with the girl and the rats.
    ‘Come on,’ Ben said again. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’
    Ben went across the landing and Stephen followed, waiting while Ben picked up the torch, feeling the girl’s eyes boring into the back of his neck. Sweat prickled in the roots of his hair. Ashamed of the state he was in, he made himself go downstairs first and peer through the crack of the door. The air struck cold on his eyeball as he scanned the street.
    Behind him in the dark he heard the bustle of rats begin.
    ‘All right?’
    He turned to look at Ben, who nodded, braced. Stephen edged round the door, feeling the whole right side of his body cringe in expectation of the bullet that would come from that direction, if it came at all. His left side seemed almost relaxed, as if congratulating itself on its immunity. There was time to ponder this mad dislocation of awareness, to register it as a distinct sensation, before he hurled himself out of the shelter of the building into the white light of the crossroads. Ben’s gasping breaths behind him, their joined shadow on the snow, then he reached the other side, blind with fear, burrowing into the wall, and turned to take Ben’s full weight as he crashed into him. They stayed still forfive minutes, their breathing becoming gradually less painful, their eyeballs less congested, fingertips no longer shaken by the beating of their hearts. Swallowing had become impossible. Stephen let his mouth hang open and panted like a dog.
    Another hundred yards and they were home, bursting into the foyer to find the hotel in darkness. Candles on tables all around the bar illuminated the faces of people they knew well. Drink, food, conversation, laughter, but that night, while snow accumulated on the sagging polythene of his window, Stephen lay cramped and wakeful inside his sleeping bag, thinking about the girl, and the way her eyes had looked up at him, seeing nothing. Her head was beside his on the pillow, and when he rolled over on to his stomach, trying to get away from her, he found her body underneath him, as dry and insatiable as sand.
    Nothing else had ever affected him in the same way, though He’d seen many worse things. She was waiting for him, that’s the way it felt. She had something to say to him, but He’d never managed to listen, or not in the right way.
    He was still groggy from sleep when a banging on the