Regeneration by Pat Barker Page B

everything. Rivers drew the file towards him. ‘We left you in billets at Beauvois.’
    ‘Yes. We were there, oh, I think about four days and then we were rushed back into the line. We attacked the morning of the night we moved up.’
    ‘Date?’
    ‘April the 23rd.’
    Rivers looked up. It was unusual for Prior to be so accurate.
    ‘St George’s Day. The CO toasted him in the mess. I remember because it was so bloody stupid.’
    ‘You were in the casualty clearing station on the…’ He glanced at the file. ‘29th. So that leaves us with six days unaccounted for.’
    ‘Yes, and I’m afraid I can’t help you with any of them.’
    ‘Do you remember the attack?’
    ‘Yes. It was exactly like any other attack.’
    Rivers waited. Prior looked so hostile that at first Riversthought he would refuse to go on, but then he raised the cigarette to his lips, and said, ‘All right. Your watch is brought back by a runner, having been synchronized at headquarters.’ A long pause. ‘You wait, you try to calm down anybody who’s obviously shitting himself or on the verge of throwing up. You hope you won’t do either of those things yourself. Then you start the count down: ten, nine, eight… so on. You blow the whistle. You climb the ladder. Then you double through a gap in the wire, lie flat, wait for everybody else to get out – those that are left, there’s already quite a heavy toll – and then you stand up. And you start walking. Not at the double. Normal walking speed.’ Prior started to smile. ‘In a straight line. Across open country. In broad daylight. Towards a line of machineguns.’ He shook his head. ‘Oh, and of course you’re being shelled all the way.’
    ‘What did you feel?’
    Prior tapped the ash off his cigarette. ‘You always want to know what I felt.’
    ‘Well, yes. You’re describing this attack as if it were a – a slightly ridiculous event in –’
    ‘Not “slightly”. Slightly, I did not say.’
    ‘All right, an extremely ridiculous event – in somebody else’s life.’
    ‘Perhaps that’s how it felt.’
    ‘Was it?’ He gave Prior time to answer. ‘I think you’re capable of a great deal of detachment, but you’d have to be inhuman to be as detached as that.’
    ‘All right. It felt…’ Prior started to smile again. ‘Sexy.’
    Rivers raised a hand to his mouth.
    ‘You see?’ Prior said, pointing to the hand. ‘You ask me how it felt and when I tell you, you don’t believe me.’
    Rivers lowered his hand. ‘I haven’t said I don’t believe you. I was waiting for you to go on.’
    ‘You know those men who lurk around in bushes waiting to jump out on unsuspecting ladies and – er-um – display their equipment? It felt a bit like that. A bit like I imagine that feels. I wouldn’t like you to think I had any personal experience.’
    ‘And was that your only feeling?’
    ‘Apart from terror, yes.’ He looked amused. ‘Shall we get back to “inhuman detachment”?’
    ‘If you like.’
    Prior laughed. ‘I think it suits us both better, don’t you?’
    Rivers let him continue. This had been Prior’s attitude throughout the three weeks they’d spent trying to recover his memories of France. He seemed to be saying, ‘All right. You can make me dredge up the horrors, you can make me remember the deaths, but you will never make me feel.’ Rivers tried to break down the detachment, to get to the emotion, but he knew that, confronted by the same task, he would have tackled it in exactly the same way as Prior.
    ‘You keep up a kind of chanting. “Not so fast. Steady on the left!” Designed to avoid bunching. Whether it works or not depends on the ground. Where we were, it was absolutely pitted with shell-holes and the lines got broken up straight away. I looked back…’ He stopped, and reached for another cigarette. ‘I looked back and the ground was covered with wounded. Lying on top of each other, writhing. Like fish in a pond that’s drying out. I