Border Crossing

At last, exhausted, in the early hours of the morning, they started a full-scale row, only to stop in the middle of it, slightly embarrassed, realizing they no longer knew each other well enough.

It took Tom a long time to realize that Danny was not using his father’s violence as a way of excusing his own behaviour. It was rather more sophisticated than that. He was talking about moral circles, the group of people (and animals) inside the circle, whom it is not permissible to kill, and the others, outside, who enjoy no such immunity. For Danny’s father, dogs, cats and most people were inside the circle. Chickens, convicted murderers, rabbits, enemy soldiers, farm animals, enemy civilians (in some circumstances), game birds, children (in uniform), burglars, if caught on the premises, and Irishmen, if suspected of being terrorists and providing the appropriate warnings had been given, were outside. Danny simply presented the picture of a small boy, in short trousers, sitting on a bale of scratchy straw, listening. The question was implicit. You said I had a clear understanding that killing was wrong. Are you sure?

Nigel focused on the lowest common denominator of human behaviour, and over the years had become totally, devastatingly cynical. Which left him, Tomthought, not merely blind to the more-than-occasional goodness of human beings, but to the evil as well. His was a world where people looked after number one, and kept an eye on the main chance. He seemed unable to grasp that some people act out of a disinterested love of destruction. Evil, be thou my good… That had been left out of his repertoire. He was lucky.

Do you know, I honestly believe they think hospital beds breed like rabbits.

He’d learnt early, in his first few months of practice, that those who take the misery home with them burn out and end up no use to anybody. He’d learnt to value detachment: the clinician’s splinter of ice in the heart. Only much later had he learnt to distrust it too – its capacity to grow and take over the personality. Splinter of ice? He’d had colleagues who could have sunk the Titanic.

She’d wanted to talk, to polish the shared-but-different experience until it acquired an even patina, became theirs, rather than his and hers.

Keep talking, he said to clients who came to him for help in saving their marriages, or – rather more often – for permission to give up on them altogether. Now, faced with the breakdown of his own, he thought, Shut up, Lauren. Please, please, please shut up.