The Tryst (5 page)

‘You mean that having a cold and having schizophrenia is just the same?’

‘Course it’s not the same!’ he exclaimed indignantly. ‘What I got, you get locked up for, right? It’s in the head, isn’t it? It’s dangerous. I might
do
things. There’s no telling what I might do.’

And he rolled his eyes as though appalled by the extent of his potential depravities. At the same time Aileen could hardly keep from smiling, but as the weeks passed it became apparent that the boy really meant it. This was a rarity indeed. The staff at the Unit were used to patients who were more or less unwilling to be admitted or unhappy about staying, but few of them had ever come across someone who was positively eager for admission. Gary’s hints that he should be ‘locked up’ gradually turned to demands which grew ever more strident. To bolster his case, he took to aping the behaviour of the other patients, mimicking their tics and fits. Jenny Wilcox, the occupational therapist whose office was next to Aileen’s, witnessed one of these demonstrations. ‘It was truly awful,’ she reported. ‘Unbelievably bad. Even brain-damaged yobs like Stan and Trevor could see that he was faking it. We all just sat there and
cringed
for him.’ Gary Dunn’s exhibitions failed to convince not only Jenny’s ‘yobs’ – her term for the more seriously disturbed male adolescents – but everyone else at the Unit from the consultant down. No one understood why he was so anxious to be admitted, but the fact remained that he was just one of many patients whose needs and wishes had to be taken into account. The pressure on beds was so severe that there could be no question of turning one over to a patient whose condition was not serious enough to warrant it. What worried Aileen as she drove down Fulham Palace Road that Tuesday morning was the thought that there was one sure way that the boy could gain instant admission, did he but know it, and that was by making a suicide attempt.

The Assessment Centre occupied two sprawling turn-of-the-century houses which had been knocked together and extended in various ways to form a shapeless mass burgeoning with odd excrescences. Inside, walls had been swept away and new partitions built, so that it was impossible to reconstruct the original shape or purpose of the rooms. In an attempt to make the place less institutional, these had been named rather than numbered. At one time there had been a rhyme and reason to the names, with ‘Mars’, ‘Venus’ and ‘Saturn’ all on one corridor, for example. But the signs had been defaced by generations of inmates – in this case, to ‘Wars’, ‘Penis’ and ‘Fatcunt’ – so that the layout of the building was as baffling as its external appearance suggested. Aileen had arranged to meet Pamela Haynes in the warden’s office, but her attempts to find it led her back again and again to a recreational area where four young men were playing table-football while two others sat in front of the television watching a man in a waxed jacket explain how to grow larger roses. They all turned to stare at Aileen each time she reappeared, and she realized that she was gradually losing caste in their eyes. Revealed as a fake figure of authority, unable to find her way about, she was acutely conscious of being just a woman alone among a pack of young males whose murky feelings for the opposite sex were quite evident from those renamed rooms. So when Pamela Haynes appeared, looking for her, she got a warmer reception than would otherwise have been the case.

The social worker was a gawky woman run aground in her late thirties. Her expression was drained and harassed, with the vampire-victim look of those who spend too much time giving to others and getting little or nothing in return.

‘Thanks ever so for coming,’ she gushed dully. ‘We should just be in time. The office opens at nine, you see, and Leonard, that’s the warden, will have to phone in then. He’s ever such a decent bloke, but it is a criminal offence, after all. They’ll have him charged unless we do something. It gets rid, you see, which is all they think about these days. But after what the poor little bugger’s been through already it would just finish him, wouldn’t it?’

‘What happened?’

‘They caught him trying to set fire to some curtains. Last night, it was, about nine o’clock. It wasn’t serious, but he’ll have to go, of course. The question is where.’

They exchanged glances.

‘You want us to take him,’ Aileen said.

‘It’s either that or the police. They’d love a chance to have another go at him. They still think he’s holding out about the murder. With this hanging over him, they could give him the works.’

Aileen stared for a while at the floor, which was clad in vinyl tiles of an indeterminate shade.

‘Where is he?’

‘In the warden’s office. That’s why I couldn’t talk on the phone. He was sitting at my elbow. Do you want to see him?’

‘I’d better speak to the warden first.’

Leonard was a thickset man wearing a faded tweed jacket with elbow patches, corduroy trousers worn at the knees, and Hush Puppies, which, like their owner, suffered from premature baldness. He looked like a schoolmaster who is resigned to being a figure of fun to his pupils but hasn’t yet realized that his colleagues despise him too. At Aileen’s request, he led her upstairs to see where the arson attempt had occurred. The dormitory was a large bare room whose glossy walls and flooring made it seem chilly, although in fact the air was almost suffocatingly close. The curtains had been removed, but the glass panes and the paintwork nearby were tinted more or less darkly with smoke, and the window frame was heavily charred on one side.

‘He sprayed the fabric with lighter fuel,’ the warden explained. ‘Luckily there was an extinguisher just outside in the corridor. ‘It’s only superficial, you see, the restructuring. If the flames had got at the woodwork underneath the whole issue would have gone up before anyone could have done anything.’

‘Who caught him?’

‘Well, luckily enough one of the other lads happened to be going to the loo at the end of the corridor. The door here was wide open and as he passed by the curtains went up, whoosh.’

As they walked back downstairs together, Leonard expanded on the difficulties of his situation.

‘What it comes down to at the end of the day is that we don’t have the staff to cope. Gary’s been lucky to have Pam. Most of them are just left to their own devices. We’ve had sixteen violent assaults on staff members during the last year alone.’

It was only after they entered the warden’s office and Aileen saw the boy, his face swollen and discoloured, that she understood why she was being told all this.

‘There was nothing I could do,’ the warden went on quickly. ‘While we were putting out the fire and cleaning up a group of them took him into the toilets. I don’t mean to condone violence of course, but, well, you can see their point. I mean, if he’d done it when there was no one around we’d all have ended up like Walls’ bangers.’

‘But he didn’t, did he?’ Aileen snapped. ‘Didn’t any of you have the wit to think of that?’

A rush of helpless love swamped her, an almost overwhelming urge to take the boy in her arms. She observed this lunatic impulse as one might the thought of hurling oneself from the top of a high building, knowing very well that it won’t happen but faintly appalled that one has even entertained such an idea. By now Aileen had come to terms with the fact that her relationship with Gary Dunn was characterized by the most powerful case of counter-transference she had ever come across. It is common for patients undergoing psychotherapy to transfer to the therapist the emotions they have felt for earlier figures of authority. Adolescents in particular tend to identify a female therapist with their mothers. Nor is it uncommon for the therapist to experience an equivalent counter-transfer of emotion, and as a childless woman working with young people Aileen had long realized that she was particularly vulnerable to this. But the feelings she experienced for Gary Dunn were of a different order from any she had previously had to cope with. Once the shock of the initial encounter had passed, she had been able to rationalize what had happened to some extent. If her child had survived, it would have been about the same age as Gary. Moreover, there was a fugitive similarity between the boy and Raymond: the hair colour and certain facial expressions in particular. The real problem about the experience was that she couldn’t talk about it. Not to Douglas, for obvious reasons, but not to her colleagues either. Jenny Wilcox had been known to argue that the NHS could only carry on because women were so anxious to be indispensable that they were prepared to accept pay and conditions that no other workers would tolerate. But that didn’t mean that Aileen could safely air her feelings about Gary Dunn. The medical services might indeed depend on exploiting women’s maternal emotions, but they would no more welcome staff who really confused a patient with their unborn child than the Army draft board had welcomed Raymond when he told them he couldn’t wait to start killing people.

‘I told you!’ Gary told Aileen triumphantly as soon as the warden and Mrs Haynes had left them alone together. ‘They made me do it, the voices! I’ve got to do everything they tell me to.’

This shook Aileen.

‘What voices?’

‘The ones I hear in my head! I told you something would happen if you didn’t have me locked up. You’ll have to take me now, won’t you? There’s no saying what they might tell me to do next time.’

‘You’ve never said anything about these voices before.’

She was confident of this. Such controlling voices are one of the textbook symptoms of schizophrenia. If Gary had ever mentioned them, Pamela Haynes’s diagnosis would not have been so swiftly dismissed.

‘What else do they tell you, these voices?’

‘They tell me not to believe what the doctors say, not to trust them. They tell me not to take those pills they gave me. They say I’m no good, useless, evil. They say I should kill myself.’

Aileen sighed. ‘We just sat there and
cringed
for him,’ Jenny had said of one of Gary’s earlier performances. This was almost as embarrassing.

‘We can’t let you come and live in the Unit if you’re going to set fire to things,’ she pointed out.

‘I won’t, not in there.’

‘But you said that you had to do whatever the voices tell you. Suppose they tell you to do this again?’

‘They won’t.’

‘How do you know?’

‘They just won’t!’

Aileen walked over to the window, where an enormous rubber plant ran up to the ceiling and flattened out like a genie from a bottle. She wiped her finger over the surface of one of the leaves, skimming off a film of dust. There was a bed free in one of the admission wards until the weekend. That was only three days, but at least it would keep the boy out of the hands of the police for the moment. There was little risk of another arson attack, she was sure of that. Gary had set fire to the curtains in a carefully premeditated gesture, choosing a room where there was a fire extinguisher handy, leaving the door wide open and then waiting until someone was passing by before actually striking the match.

Without committing herself to anything, Aileen made some reassuring noises and then slipped out to the hallway where the warden and Pamela Haynes were waiting. She told them that she would do what she could to have Gary admitted to the Unit and would be in touch later that morning.

She had left her battered red Mini – a hand-me-down from Douglas, who had moved up to a Volvo – in the street opposite the Centre. The door of a lock-up garage nearby had been decorated with an assortment of graffiti, including ‘Take 2 you shit crew’, ‘Skin one up’, and ‘Hip hop don’t stop’. But for some reason Aileen’s eye was drawn to four words carefully printed one above the other.

EAT

SHIT

DIE

BOX

As she completed her journey to work, Aileen repeated them over and over to herself. She didn’t normally take any notice of graffiti, but for some reason she couldn’t get those four words out of her mind. It wasn’t until the main hospital was in sight that she succeeded in bringing her thoughts to heel. Yes, she would probably be able to let Gary into the Unit until the end of the week, unless the consultant chose to object. Assuming that the boy’s idea that someone was trying to kill him was a delusion, then like all delusions it must have been a function. There must be some knowledge that he could not admit he had, some fact from his past which was too traumatic for him to accept. If Aileen was to help him, she would have to discover what this was, and that meant getting behind the boy’s defences, probing into his past. For it was there, she was convinced, that the source and explanation of his imaginary terrors lay hidden.

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