Free Another World by Pat Barker Page B

falling and it was cold and it was wet and it was noisy and you were fed up and you were frightened and you wanted to go home.” And of course the kids lapped it up. There were two little boys racing up and down the trench making machine-gun noises. You know?’ She rakes the room with an imaginary machine-gun. ‘And I said to Geordie, “Are you sure this is doing any good?”’
    ‘And he said?’
    ‘ “Yes.”’ She laughs. ‘He never doubted it.’
    Silence. Nick takes a gulp of whisky and waits for the question he knows is coming.
    ‘What do you think?’
    ‘I’m not a historian.’
    ‘No, but you must have an opinion.’
    ‘Well, you see the first thing is I don’t believe in public memory. A memory’s a biochemical change in an individual brain, and that’s all there is. There’s quite a lot of evidence that traumatic memories are stored in a different part of the brain from normal memories, and that’s what makes them so incredibly persistent. And so… almost hallucinatory. They’re not accessible to language in the same way. It’s like watching a film, or… or even worse it’s like acting in a film.’ He spreads his hands. ‘As for warnings and messages… I don’t know.’ A spurt of anger. ‘Anyway what is the message? You look back over the whole horrible blood-sodden mess. Isn’t the real message: You can get away with it .?’
    “And yet you went to the battlefields with him.’
    ‘Somebody had to. He couldn’t have managed on his own.’ Nick wants to tell her about Thiepval, but there’s no time, he ought to be going. And anyway he hasn’t succeeded in telling himself about Thiepval yet. ‘Thanks.’ He puts down the empty glass. ‘I needed that.’
    ‘I’ll look out the transcripts,’ she says, opening the door. ‘And you’ll let me know when he’s ready for a visit?’
    The August night’s cool, rather than cold, yet he shivers, an automatic reaction to the glitter of moonlight on cobbles and the stars pricking sharply through the telegraph wires that score the sky. The car smells musty, a mess of cardboard cartons left from the family’s last outing litters the back seats. Curried chips, his nose tells him. Gareth’s favourite. He wonders as he fumbles with the ignition key if he’s fit to drive. He’s well under the limit for alcohol, but he seems to be getting more tired by the minute, as if all the energy he’d expended over the last few weeks, moving and decorating, had been borrowed and the loan’s just been called in. His hands hurt where the wallpaper scraper rubbed off the skin. He yawns and yawns again, as the car at last sputters into life. He’ll go the back way, he decides. It’s a bit longer, but, at this time of night, there’ll be next to no traffic.
    It’s been raining. There are crescents of silver light trapped inside the drops that speckle the glass. It seems a pity to press the button and sweep them away. Almost as soon as he starts the engine the rain comes on heavier. Smears of orange light on greasy cobbles, the wipers’ swish and whine, make it hard to stay alert. He’s hunched over the wheel peering at the edges of the road for guidance, driving as if in a thick fog, though there’s no more than a slight mist.
    What he wanted to say to Helen, but couldn’t find a tactful way of phrasing it, was that she’d got Geordie all wrong. That she was so much in love with her thesis that she distorted his experience to make it fit. Geordie’s memories aren’t malleable: they don’t change to fit other people’s perceptions of the war. On the contrary. Geordie’s tragedy is that his memories are carved in granite. The nightmares of Harry’s death that had Geordie screaming back in 1919 are the same ones that wake him, sweating and terrified, in the sluice room now. And secretly, what he wants to say is that raking about in the detritus of other people’s memories is a waste of time and energy. The only true or useful thing that can