The boy considered for a moment.
‘He walks funny, like he wants to pee. He smiles all the time too, only it’s not really a smile.’
The old man was trembling with agitation.
‘And he was watching this house, you say?’
In the end Steve nodded again. It was too late to correct himself now. He would have to stick to the story he’d told. It might well be true, anyway. The old man seemed to have been expecting something of the sort.
‘Do you know him, then?’ the boy asked.
The old man sighed deeply.
‘Oh yes, I know him all right. It’s a long story, lad. A long sad story. But I suppose you must hear it. It wouldn’t be fair otherwise, asking you to come here and help me. It wouldn’t be right, not if — ’
He broke off, looking deeply troubled.
‘But how
‘That’s all right,’ Steve assured him. ‘The people I live with, they don’t care what happens to me.’
His only fear was that the old man might tell him to stop coming to the house every week. Matthews looked at him for a moment, as though considering what to do.
‘I’ll have to tell you the whole story,’ he said finally, nodding to himself. ‘Once you’ve heard it, you can decide whether you want to carry on coming or not.’
‘I do!’ the boy cried.
‘You can’t say that now. Not till you know what happened and who he is, that man you’ve seen. For now, just keep out of his way, if you can!’
He unbolted the front door and opened it cautiously.
‘Keep out of his way!’ he repeated as Steve scampered down the steps.
It was a clear freezing night. The sky seemed to be full of eyes.
5
The Adolescent Unit in which Aileen Macklin worked formed part of a psychiatric hospital in North Kensington, overlooking the canal. The Unit itself occupied a separate block, with its own entrance and car-park, in the grounds of the main hospital, from which it was separated by a row of tall evergreens. The two buildings thus appeared to turn their backs on each other. Physically, too, they could hardly have been more different. The hospital was one of those redbrick monstrosities beloved by the Victorians and used by them virtually interchangeably as prisons, factories, hospitals, schools and barracks. It was lugubrious, authoritarian and massively institutional. It was also warm, dry, indestructible and as functionally effective as the day it was built. The Adolescent Unit, thoughtfully screened from this vision of the past by the conifers, had been run up in the early sixties, seemingly with a view to reversing all the qualities of its Victorian parent. In this it had proved remarkably successful. Although its originally spacious rooms had been subdivided and partitioned under pressure for space, the building remained determinedly casual and easy-going. It was also damp, draughty, cold and slowly falling to bits. Aileen found its air of faded, tatty idealism as depressing as the broken-spined, brittle-paged paperbacks by Laing (‘Brighton, 4/10/68’) or Leary (‘Ya blow my mind — and other things! Ray’), which she occasionally came across on her shelves while looking for something else.
Her office was not in the Unit itself, which had proved to be hopelessly inadequate to the demands made on it as the years went by. As facilities elsewhere in the city closed down, patients who were too ill to be discharged were concentrated in those that remained open. Since there had also been a marked rise in the incidence of psychiatric disorder, particularly among young people, this resulted in the Unit throwing out annexes, wings and extensions whose construction methods and materials grew progressively cruder as budgets fell. Aileen’s office occupied half of a prefabricated hut supported on brick stilts that had originally been knocked up as a temporary storage space a decade or so earlier and then retained because it was there. It had a flat tarred roof which leaked, flooring that sagged underfoot, windows which contrived to rattle no matter how many cardboard wedges were jammed into them and doors you had to kick open yet admitted every draught going. It was sweltering in summer, freezing in winter, and stank obscurely all year round. Jenny Wilcox, the occupational therapist who shared the hut with Aileen, had once remarked that it was enough to drive anyone mad.
Aileen could usually tell what sort of day she was going to have by the way she felt as she turned into the driveway separating the Adolescent Unit from the main road. Sometimes it seemed like a horizontal level in a mine: a deep, dark, narrow tunnel leading to a place of relentless unrewarding labour. At other times the same stretch of tarmac reminded her of an old advertisement for a brand of children’s shoes, showing a straight open highway leading to worthy achievements and a brighter future. That Wednesday, the day after she had visited Gary Dunn at the Assessment Centre, the driveway seemed quite simply to offer refuge.
It had been a bad night. Douglas had had it all his way at the dinner table the evening before, although Aileen knew that she could and should have denied him. He had used one of his oldest and simplest ploys, piling up references to his own prestige and success until she was drawn into trying to retaliate. That was fatal, of course, for whatever she might think of him — and whatever he might think of himself, in his heart of hearts, where Aileen knew that he nourished the most tormenting doubts — there was no question that as far as the world was concerned, Douglas Macklin was a high-flyer. Wasn’t he off to America at the end of that very week for yet another top-level international conference? So when Aileen presumed to mention her own career it was easy for him — a smile, a glance, a raised eyebrow was enough — to make her look not only intellectually second-rate but vulgarly me-tooish into the bargain, insisting on equal time for her lacklustre accomplishments. As if that hadn’t been enough, Aileen seemed to be beginning one of the cycles of insomnia from which she had suffered since childhood, and in the intermittent patches of sleep which she had been able to snatch as she lay listening to Douglas’s ripe complacent snores, she had once again had the ‘flying’ dream.
As usual, she had no memory of the dream itself, but she knew what had happened the moment she awakened by the way she felt: blissfully relaxed and calm, as though something of the still pale glow that pervaded the dream had remained with her, casting a gentle luminance on all her thoughts. Then she had suddenly broken out in a cold sweat as she remembered the terrible significance this dream had acquired since Raymond’s death, how she had nearly died too, only surviving by a miracle which had cost the life of her unborn child. This was what always happened now, the beauty followed by the horror. The dream had lost its innocence. Deliberately, she had forced herself to get out of bed, go downstairs, make a cup of tea and listen to drivel on the radio until exhaustion calmed her.
It was thus with positive relief that she brought the red Mini to rest in the slot marked DR REITH, commemorating her predecessor who had died more than ten years earlier. She picked up Gary Dunn’s file, which she had taken home to study, and walked to her office with a feeling of anticipation. The day before her was filled with things to do, tasks to perform, duties to carry out and problems to resolve. Perhaps none of it was very glorious or noteworthy by her husband’s standards, but it was work that had to be done just the same. And doing it would be a sweet relief from the mental jumble she felt growing in volume all the time, as if all the junk she had accumulated in the attic over the years had started to breed and multiply, spilling out of its confinement, pushing down to invade the rest of the house.
When Aileen appeared in the doorway between their two offices, Jenny Wilcox was sipping a mug of Nescafe and throwing darts at a board printed with Mrs Thatcher’s features.
‘Fancy a game?’ she asked. ‘You get one for the hair, five for the chin, ten for the nose, twenty for the good eye and fifty for the wonky one. An arrow in the heart wins you the game.’
Aileen inspected the board more closely.
‘The point being …’ she began.
‘That there isn’t one. Exactly.’
Jenny beamed gleefully back at Aileen. The occupational therapist was a short, dark woman with an intensity and directness of manner usually associated with Latin blood, but which in Jenny’s case was an ideological choice: this was how she felt that women should relate to each other. A snub nose and straight black hair cut in the shape of a helmet gave her a rather engaging tomboy look, and when she smiled, as she did often, her upper lip rose to
