Double Vision by Pat Barker

Author:Pat Barker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2003-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

Next morning the book from Peter arrived, with a short note giving his address and telephone number. Normally Stephen would have put it aside to read later, but by now his curiosity had been awakened. This was Justine’s boyfriend – ex-boyfriend. Why on earth hadn’t she mentioned his name?

Peter’s story ‘Inside the Wire’ was longer than the other pieces in the issue, though the potted biography at the end of the book gave less information than other contributors had thought necessary. His MA was mentioned, but almost nothing else.

Andrea White teaches Art inside a high-security prison. When people expressed surprise that her entire working life was spent locked up with some of the country’s most dangerous men, and asked if she did not feel nervous, she replied that she often felt safer inside the prison than she did waiting at the bus stop after dark to start the long journey home.

Andrea lives in a one-bedroom flat, in an area that was supposed to rise but hadn’t risen yet. A year before, she’d split up with her boyfriend. Two years before that, she’d had an abortion after her boyfriend decided he was too young to be saddled with a family. Now, despite his fear of being a child bridegroom, he’s married and his wife is pregnant. Andrea passes her sometimes trundling her trolley round Sainsbury’s.

Once safely home, Andrea puts on soup for supper – home-made – warming it through, gently, as you should, while cutting the bread – home-made, warm from the oven. She knows all about the deep demoralization of the microwave, does Andrea, and she wants none of it – she’s fighting back. But it’s a precarious little life she leads – trying and failing to get over the boyfriend, getting drunk at a party and having a one-night stand, but lacking the emotional toughness not to feel bad about it afterwards. Next morning, getting up and staring at herself in the mirror, she notices that the creases at the corners of her eyes look deeper when she’s tired, and then she drags herself off to work.

She’s a good teacher, though she rarely encounters any actual talent. The prisoners generally go in for disturbingly sentimental portraits of children, chocolatebox flowers, gooey pictures of Christ – Peter was very good on the links between sentimentality and brutality. But one prisoner, James Carne, is doing something different. He returns again and again to a single image: a figure of indeterminate sex, the face hidden by bandages or tape, enclosed in a double helix of barbed wire. It’s a bit like the Amnesty International candle. ‘Did you,’ she asks James, ‘have the Amnesty International candle in mind when you drew it?’ ‘No,’ says James. ‘But you were thinking of imprisonment and the impossibility of escape?’ ‘Oh, yes.’

Andrea’s starved of meaning, so she attaches meaning to this. After a while she begins to suggest that perhaps he should do something else. ‘When I’m outside,’ he says. ‘Shut up in here I can’t think about anything else.

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