The Tryst (4 page)

Aileen crushed out her cigarette and stood up, stacking their plates together.

‘Our cures work,’ she said.

‘Do they? The last set of figures I saw seemed to be something less than totally conclusive. In any case, witch-doctors don’t do so badly either, you know. Never underestimate the placebo effect. At least a third of all people suffering from anything at all will show some improvement on being told, for example, to gargle a mixture of tomato ketchup and hot lemonade last thing at night.’

This was wild enough to be ignored with safety. Recognizing that he had settled for a draw, Aileen pushed her way through to the kitchen and put the plates in the sink to soak. As she turned off the water she caught sight of the woman reflected in the glass. It was the end of September and the nights were starting to draw in rapidly. Aileen had always had a difficult relationship with those regular features of hers, that ovality so prized by the eighteenth-century land-owning class that they paid painters to clamp them on like a mask. The sixties had had very different ideals, and in her youth Aileen had worked hard to look striking and strange. She had learned that perfection is inflexible. The moment she tried to do anything with it, her face turned dumpy, common and ordinary. It was not until she met Raymond that she was able to accept that her features were
herself
, that there was no difference between the person others saw and the person she was. Until then, the most important parts of her body had seemed to be her hands and feet, whose size her mother was always bemoaning, and her eyes, which had traditionally been put forward as her ‘strong point’. She had thus grown up with the image of herself as a bug-eyed stick insect with boxing-glove hands, Army-boot feet and nothing to speak of in between. But Raymond told her she had a ‘neat ass’ and ‘cute tits’; Raymond told her he loved her pussy; Raymond told her that she was beautiful. In Cheltenham, ‘beautiful’ was a word without resonance, applied to a cup of tea or a vase of flowers or the weather. It indicated that the strictly limited degree of satisfaction which might reasonably be expected from such things had in fact been forthcoming. But when Raymond used it, the word
glowed
. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he told her. ‘You’re really beautiful.’ True, he had also used to joke that with someone so ‘typically English and straight’ on the pillion, he was always waved through Customs without question on their motorcycle trips across the Channel. But for Aileen his love had abolished the distinction between her private and public selves. When it returned, it was in a subtly different form. For although the image now thrown back by the darkened window reminded Aileen once again of those dead land-owners, it was no longer their fatuous insipidity that she read there, but the emptiness and tragedy of lives given over to externals. Those matching sets of rigid features had been as necessary an artifice as the protective masks doctors had once given soldiers whose faces had been erased by shrapnel.

A sound vibrated through the whole house. Starting somewhere upstairs, it slithered down, a long-drawn-out keening that finally turned over on its side and swirled away like a television picture being put through its paces by computer graphics. Someone less familiar with the house than Aileen might have thought that it was the cry of a baby in distress, but she was well aware that there was no baby in the house and never would be. As for the sound, it came from the water pipes. The mains feed to the storage tank in the attic had burst the previous winter, and the plumber who had come to mend it had allowed an assortment of noises to escape into the system. Aileen stood listening to it fade away, the dishwater already drying on her hands, staring at the woman reflected in the window. She looked deceptively normal. Only in her eyes, perhaps, was there a hint of something missing. She had survived, certainly, thanks to a miracle, but her life was to all intents and purposes over. At thirty-five, Aileen Macklin was absolutely certain that she was a person to whom nothing more would ever happen.

2

In fact things were starting to happen at almost exactly that moment, but Aileen was not to know about them until Pam Haynes telephoned her shortly after eight o’clock the following morning.

Aileen was sitting alone at the dining-table, smoking the first of the three cigarettes she allowed herself daily. Except when Douglas cheated her of it by leaving late, this interval between his departure for work and her own was like a second sleep, a moment of stillness and solitude that made everything that followed possible. It was a fine morning. The room was divided in two by a beam of sunlight through which the cigarette smoke unwound in lazy coils. At the extreme upper corner of the window a patch of blue sky was just visible. Aileen therefore felt particularly resentful when the phone went off like an alarm clock.

‘It’s Mrs Haynes,’ announced a breathy female voice. ‘I don’t know if you remember but I’m Gary Dunn’s social worker. I tried calling the Unit but there was no one there who knew about Gary and I found you in the book. I’m at the Assessment Centre, there’s been some trouble.’

Aileen listened to the dull thumping of her blood, amplified by the telephone receiver.

‘What sort of trouble?’

‘You couldn’t stop by here, could you? I wouldn’t ask except it’s actually quite urgent. It’s a bit difficult to discuss on the phone the way things are this end, if you know what I mean. It’s not far really. Only it’s got to be before nine, you see.’

Aileen stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray decorated with a design showing an eager swain pursuing a coy nymph through a pastoral landscape.

‘He’s all right, is he?’ she said.

‘Yes. Well, more or less.’

‘Give me the address.’

Outside, the sky was already filling up with cloud. By mid-morning it would be completely overcast. It never happened the other way round, she thought. There was obviously some law at work, one of the many whose effects she observed without ever understanding what had caused them.

The local authority Observation and Assessment Centre for Disturbed Adolescents was situated in Fulham, not far from Putney Bridge. Pamela Haynes had been strictly accurate in saying that it was not far, but in the rush-hour traffic every mile took the best part of ten minutes. Aileen spent the time reviewing what she knew about the case. Pamela Haynes had originally referred Gary to the Unit back in July, claiming that he ‘exhibited symptoms of confusion, disorientation and oral hallucinations of a schizophrenic kind’. Doctors value the rare and exotic as much as anyone else, and the prospect of a patient suffering from hallucinations of taste caused a brief flutter of interest, which promptly collapsed when further inquiry revealed that Mrs Haynes had confused ‘oral’ and ‘aural’. What she meant, as she put it in the course of a conversation with the consultant psychiatrist, was that Gary was ‘screwed up and hearing things’.

The boy’s social history made it clear that there was no shortage of reasons for his problems, whatever they might be. Quite apart from his involvement in the murder, the exact extent of which was still unclear, the seventeen-year-old seemed to be all alone in the world, without a home or a history, friends or family. Bureaucratically he didn’t exist. The various agencies concerned with housing and feeding the homeless had no record of a Gary Dunn, and the instances of the name thrown up by official databases all proved to be dead ends. The police lost interest once it became apparent that he wasn’t going to tell them anything they didn’t already know about the murder. He was taken into care by the local authority’s social services department, who assigned him to Pamela Haynes’s supervision. After a few weeks she contacted the Adolescent Psychiatric Unit. No one there took the social worker’s diagnosis of schizophrenia seriously, but there was no question that the boy did need care and treatment. The consultant’s psychiatric assistant, who conducted the initial interview, prescribed a course of anti-depressant drugs and arranged for out-patient treatment consisting of group and occupational therapy.

Aileen’s first contact with the boy had been when one of the nurses brought him into the ward sitting room in the middle of her morning open group, a low-key affair providing general supportive counselling. The moment Aileen caught sight of him, she felt as though someone had laid a velvet-gloved hand on her heart: a touch that was soft, gentle, warm, yet almost unbearably intrusive and intimate. There were at least a dozen people in the room, yet she felt utterly isolated. The surroundings seemed to shimmer and tremble as though she were about to faint. Nor would that have been very surprising, given the strength of her conviction that the boy standing in front of her was her dead child.

It lasted only a few moments. Then, as with
déjà vu
, reality closed ranks and blandly asserted that nothing of the sort had happened, that she must have imagined the whole thing. Aileen’s new patient was an unremarkable adolescent with the puffy unfinished look of his age, like partially baked dough. His reddish hair was cropped close to the skull in one of the currently fashionable styles that Aileen, who struggled to keep up with these things like someone running after a bus, still associated with conscription or lice. He and the nurse were still only midway across the room, which was how Aileen knew that no more than a few moments had passed.

In the course of this and subsequent encounters, Aileen noted her observations for the boy’s file. Apart from a predominantly blank or wary expression, his appearance was fairly normal. His level of education was evidently low to non-existent, although he was intelligent enough. He tended to be shy and withdrawn, never speaking unless spoken to, and then usually only a word or two at a time. It was
what
he said that revealed disturbance. As Aileen was so unwisely to announce to her husband, Gary Dunn had claimed that someone was trying to kill him.

The Unit’s standard report form contained a box labelled ‘Delusions: systematized/unsystematized’, with space below for further details. Aileen ticked ‘systematized’ and added ‘persecution, guilt (?), ideas of reference’. The consultant psychiatrist would decide, but to Aileen none of this seemed schizoid. The hells in which schizophrenics suffer appallingly real torments look from the outside like a montage cobbled together from a variety of no-hope films featuring leaden plots, unconvincing special effects and rotten acting. But Gary’s story was simple, straightforward and consistent. ‘There’s this bloke, the one who did it. He knows I seen him. He’s after me. He’s going to do me too.’ When asked what this man looked like, the boy replied that he walked funny, like he needed to go to the toilet, and smiled a lot, only it wasn’t a real smile. Aileen highlighted this in her report. Unlike patients suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, who tend to identify their persecutors with anybody and everybody from one of the cleaners to a television announcer, Gary Dunn apparently had a specific individual in mind. As for the famous aural hallucinations, these proved to consist simply of a voice saying such things as ‘You’ll be sorry’, ‘I’ll get you’, and ‘You’ll wind up the same way’. This, too, was quite unlike the sadistic ranting or insinuating murmurs to which schizophrenics are subjected. Finally, Aileen noted that there was no inappropriacy of affect. One characteristic of schizophrenia is that emotional cause and effect gets out of synch. Patients laugh indifferently even as they describe in lurid detail the fiendish schemes which they claim are being devised to bring about their downfall. Gary, on the other hand, evidently found it almost intolerably distressing to talk about the supposed threat to his life. More than once, indeed, Aileen felt almost inclined to doubt whether this
was
necessarily a delusion. After all, murder had been done and no arrest had been made. The police had released Gary for lack of evidence, but they still suspected that he’d been involved in some way, and probably knew who had done it. Supposing he did, thought Aileen, and the murderer knew that he knew? Then the boy’s life might indeed be in danger.

Paradoxically, the boy himself would have none of this.

‘I’m sick,’ he told Aileen firmly. ‘Sick in the head.’

At first sight this seemed a positive sign. Psychiatric patients display varying degrees of insight into their condition: some stoutly maintain that there is nothing whatever the matter with them, others claim that their symptoms are the side-effects of a purely physical illness; a third group, usually the more hopeful cases, can see that something has gone wrong and that it is connected with what has happened to them in the past. But Gary Dunn did not fit into any of these categories.

‘What do you think is the matter with you?’ Aileen asked him one day.

‘I got schizafreakout, haven’t I?’

She repressed a smile.

‘What makes you think that?’

He shrugged impatiently, as though the answer was both obvious and unimportant.

‘You know when you’ve got something, don’t you? When you’re ill.’

‘How do you mean, ill?’

‘Like a cold and that.’