Regeneration by Pat Barker Read Free Book Online Page B

leaves.
    Out in the field, splashing along the flooded furrows, he heard Rivers’s voice, as distinctly as he sometimes heard it in dreams: If you run now, you’ll never stop.
    He turned and went back, though he knew the voice was only a voice in his head, and that the real Rivers might equally well have said: Get away from here. He stood again in front of the tree. Now that he was calmer, he remembered that he’d seen trees like this before. The animals were not nailed to it, as they sometimes were, but tied, by wings or paws or tails. He started to release a magpie, his teeth chattering as a wing came away in his hand. Then the other magpies, the fox, the weasel, the ferret and the moles.
    When all the corpses were on the ground, he arranged them in a circle round the tree and sat down within it, his back against the trunk. He felt the roughness of the bark against his knobbly spine. He pressed his hands between his knees and looked around the circle of his companions. Now they could dissolve into the earth as they were meant to do. He felt a great urge to lie down beside them, but his clothes separated him. He got up and started to get undressed. When he’d finished, he looked down at himself. His naked body was white as a root. He cupped his genitals in his hands, not because he was ashamed, but because they looked incongruous, they didn’t seem to belong with the rest of him. Then he folded his clothes carefully and put them outside the circle. He sat down again with his back to the tree and looked up through the tracery of branches at grey and scudding clouds.
    The sky darkened, the air grew colder, but he didn’t mind. It didn’t occur to him to move. This was the right place. This was where he had wanted to be.
    By late afternoon Burns’s absence was giving cause for concern. The nurse who’d seen him walk out, wearing his coat, blamed herself for not stopping him, but nobody else was inclined to blame her. The patients, except for one or two who were known to be high suicide risks, were free to come and go as they pleased. Bryce and Rivers consulted together at intervals during the day, trying to decide at what point they should give in and call the police.
    Burns came back at six o’clock, walking up the stairs unobserved, trailing mud, twigs and dead leaves. He was too tired to think. His legs ached; he was faint with hunger yet afraid to think of food.
    Sister Duffy caught him just as he was opening the door of his room and bore down upon him, scolding and twittering like the small, dusty brown bird she so much resembled. She made him get undressed then and there and seemed to be proposing to towel him down herself, but he vetoed that. She left him alone but came back a few minutes later, laden with hot-water bottles and extra blankets, still inclined to scold, though when she saw how tired he looked, lying back against the pillows, she checked herself and only said ominously that Dr Rivers had been informed and would be up as soon as he was free.
    I suppose I’m for it, Burns thought, but couldn’t make the thought real. He folded his arms across his face and almost at once began drifting off to sleep. He was back in the wood, outside the circle now, but able to see himself inside it. His skin was tallow-white against the scurfy bark. A shaft of sunlight filtered through leaves, found one of the magpies, and its feathers shone sapphire, emerald, amethyst. There was no reason to go back, he thought. He could stay here for ever.
    When he opened his eyes, Rivers was sitting beside the bed. He’d obviously been there some time, his glasses were in his lap, and one hand covered his eyes. The room was quite dark.
    Rivers seemed to feel Burns watching him, because after a few moments he looked up and smiled.
    ‘How long have I been asleep?’
    ‘About an hour.’
    ‘I’ve worried everybody, haven’t I?’
    ‘Never mind that. You’re back, that’s all that matters.’
    All the way back to the hospital