Border Crossing Read Free

Paracetamol, no.’
    ‘Do you think we should ring?’
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘We did what we could. It’s somebody else’s problem now.’
    ‘I’ll put these into wash,’ she said, picking up his clothes.
    He could see she was disappointed. 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. But he was used to switching off, to living his life in separate compartments. 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.
    Gingerly, he lowered his aching shoulders into the water. Looking along the length of his body, he saw his cock, slightly engorged from the heat, gleaming and bobbing in the foam like a cylindrical fish. Well, hello, there, he thought, slipping into the mid-Atlantic drawl he used to distance pain.
    ‘Are you any warmer?’ Lauren asked, coming back with an armful of towels.
    ‘Bit. Why don’t you get in? You must be frozen.’
    Dropping her clothes in a heap near the door, she climbed into the bath behind him, and lowered herself cautiously into the water. ‘Ouch.’
    ‘Sorry.’ He kept forgetting his ‘hot bath’ was Lauren’s idea of being boiled alive. ‘Would you like more cold?’
    ‘No, it’s all right. I’m in now.’
    Her breath came in little explosive bursts against his back. He could feel her breasts pressing against his shoulder blades, and then her hand crept round, burrowing between his legs until she found, and cradled, his balls.
    ‘Not fair,’ he said. ‘I can’t reach anything.’
    Groping under his arm, he found a nipple, and felt her laughter vibrate in his chest. A flash memory of cold mud sucking him in. ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to bed.’
    They dried each other, then he chased her upstairs, and they fell on to the bed, where they lay, gasping for breath. Her eye, an inch away from his, was a grey fish caught in a mesh of lines. For the first time in months he didn’t know or care where she was in her cycle. This had nothing to do with ovulation or getting her pregnant, and not much to do, if he were honest, with loving her. Everything to do with the moment when he’d seen the boy’s body hang suspended, like a specimen in a jar of formaldehyde, an umbilical cord of silver bubbles linking his slack mouth to the air. He saw him now. The boundaries of flesh and bone seemed to vanish. He was staring at his own death.
    Afterwards they lay side by side, a medieval knight and lady on a tomb.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He knew she hadn’t come.
    ‘It’s all right.’
    He felt the bed shaking and knew she’d started to cry. ‘Lauren
    She sat up. ‘Do you realize you risked your life back there for a complete fucking stranger?’
    If this had been said with a scintilla of admiration, he’d have felt obliged to pooh-pooh the idea, to point out that he swam further than that every other day of his life, but her tone was aggressive, and he matched it. ‘There was no choice.’
    A stubborn silence.
    ‘If I wasn’t a strong swimmer, I wouldn’t have gone in. But I am. And, anyway, I’m all right.’
    She wasn’t angry with him for diving into the river.She was angry about the botched sex, and about his failure to get her pregnant. ‘Let’s have a drink, shall we?’
    He didn’t expect her to follow him downstairs, and she didn’t. If only getting pregnant hadn’t become such an obsession. She reminded him of one of those female fish that, in times of environmental hardship, dispense with the male sex altogether, and carry his gonads in a purse on their sides. Well, sod that, he thought, glugging whisky. He