Free Border Crossing by Pat Barker Page B

from the prison it had rained as if it would never stop. A smell of wet clothes, condensation on the windows closing them in, a constant patter of drops on the sunroof, and herself, hunched forward over the wheel, trying to see out through windscreen wipers that seemed only to spread the dirt more evenly across the glass. She leant back in her chair, with her hands over her face, and gradually the hum of the computer was replaced by the rhythmic squeak and whine of the wipers moving to and fro.
    It had been late evening by the time she reached the prison. Ian was sitting in the waiting room, looking lost. ‘You don’t half put yourself through it, don’t you?’ she’d said.
    He shook his head without speaking. The street lamps were on as she drove away. Rain bounced on the pavements. In the town she would have said it was dark, but out on the moors you realize what darkness is.
    Rain, endless rain, and mist. The snow posts by the side of the road flashed past, inducing an almost trance-like state. She would have welcomed conversation, if only to keep her awake, but Ian remained silent. The mist thickened. They were driving along a narrow road with a steep drop on the left. When she cornered, the headlamps swept across a hillside with heather and clumps of gorse and, scattered here and there, huge grey boulders. Erratic blocks they were called, she remembered, dredging up some geography lesson of long ago.
    Ian opened the window to throw his cigarette out, and drops of rain blew into her face. She heard the clank of bells on sheep grazing by the side of the road. In this light they looked like lumps of clotted mist, and any one of them could wander out into the middle of the road. As much as the rain and mist they forced her to slow down.
    Ian was angry. That curious blocked anger of his. Knowing he wasn’t the victim, knowing he had no right to be angry, and yet seething anyway. She felt his anger in the silence, heard it in the hiss he made drawing on the next cigarette. My God, and she thought she smoked too much. It was making her want one, though. ‘Could you get me one of mine?’ she asked.
    She was aware of the rasp and flare of the match. Why not a lighter? she wondered. But no, always matches. She saw his hands, briefly, in the orange glow. Then he put the cigarette into her mouth, his fingers brushing her lips. Watch it, she thought, and hardly knew whether the warning was directed at Ian or herself.
    Still silence. It was getting on her nerves, and she needed to concentrate. The road wasn’t just wet – it was greasy from the long hot summer. At that last corner she’d felt the car start to skid. Corrected immediately, but it was a nasty shock.
    ‘Do you mind if we stop?’ Ian asked abruptly.
    ‘No, I could do with a break.’
    She pulled up in the next passing bay and got out. Ian disappeared round a bend in the road, and she walked up and down, smoking and shivering and being rude to the sheep. After a while the darkness, the loneliness, the clunk-clunk of the sheep bells began to get to her, and she looked at the brow of the hill, impatient for Ian’s return.
    Then the oddity of it struck her. Here she was, a woman alone and nervous on a dark road at night, looking forward to the reappearance of a convicted murderer. She’d never thought of Ian like that – well, yes, perhaps before she met him. But she’d never felt threatened, and in her job she did feel threatened, now and then. Hell, she didn’t just feel threatened, she was threatened – though she’d learnt how to recognize anger seething below the surface, to spot the signs of impending violence, to know when to back off.
    Plenty of anger bubbling now, and nowhere to back off to. Extraordinary – she’d just this moment been thinking how she’d never felt threatened by Ian, and yet here she was – not frightened, nowhere near frightened – but certainly tense. She could have done without the sheep and their bloody bells, and the