reveal a startling expanse of pink gum. But there was nothing childish about Jenny. She was bright, breezy, upbeat, combative and totally dedicated to her patients. Aileen considered her a good therapist, an excellent union rep and an invigorating and supportive colleague, but not quite a friend. There were various reasons for this, of which the most obvious was Jenny’s husband, a researcher for London Weekend Television whose one ambition in life was to get ‘front of camera’. Jon’s interest in other people depended entirely on whether he thought they might help him to achieve this. Aileen’s problem was not avoiding him — Jon wasted no time on those he couldn’t use — but coming to terms with the fact that Jenny had married him. That cast a shadow on her which Aileen could never quite forget. If Jenny was as nice as she seemed, how could she stand living with such a creep? Was her warmth to Aileen just a facade, a bit of feminist window-dressing? Or — and this was the really unpleasant thought — did she have Jon to thank for it? Did the Wilcoxes have an unspoken demarcation agreement whereby Jenny looked after being positive and jolly while Jon handled selfishness and insensitivity? Aileen was only too aware that couples didn’t stay together by chance. However ill-suited or unhappy they might appear, if the relationship lasted it was because it worked, although the exact nature of the work might well remain obscure to the couple themselves, perhaps necessarily so.
‘Do you remember a boy called Gary Dunn?’ she asked as Jenny sent her final dart winging across the room to embed itself in the Prime Minister’s ear.
The therapist pursed her lips for a moment, staring up at the warped insulation tiles on the ceiling of the hut.
‘Hang about. Wasn’t he the one with aural hallucinations of a schizophrenic kind and a taste for over-the-top mad scenes?’
‘He’s moved up to arson attempts now. Equally unconvincing, I’m glad to say. Anyway, he’s coming in for a few days and I’d like to try to make sure he settles down without too much difficulty. I seem to remember he used to like craftwork. Would it be all right to send him along as soon as he arrives this morning?’
‘Of course. The workshop’s just the place for an aspiring fire-raiser. Shall I leave some paraffin out or will he be bringing his own?’
Aileen was used to Jenny’s manner and made no reply beyond a smile. She made no attempt to explain her real reason for wanting Gary sent to the workshop immediately he arrived at the Unit. It was as if everything connected with the boy had been contaminated by the secret that Aileen concealed even from herself as far as possible: her irrational identification of Gary Dunn with the child she had conceived with Raymond. That simply wasn’t a matter she could mention, even to Jenny, and this prohibition created others, until Aileen found herself acting in a devious manner that was quite foreign to her.
After discussing the matter with the consultant the day before, Aileen had been able to phone Pamela Haynes and tell her that Gary would be admitted to the Unit for a period of ‘observation’. The social worker was due to bring him in between nine and ten o’clock that morning. Aileen was tied up with a therapy group until half past ten, but as soon as that was over she made her way to the ward where Gary had been allocated a bed which was unoccupied for a few days pending the arrival of a patient from another hospital. She hurried through the sitting room, painted in the deep pastel green from which the ward took its name, and quickly located the boy’s bed. On the counterpane lay a blue canvas bag containing Gary Dunn’s few worldly goods. Aileen sorted through them like a customs officer. She found what she was looking for almost immediately.
She did not speak to the boy until after lunch, when he was brought to the sitting room in Yellow Ward to take part in a group therapy session. She thought that she had prepared herself adequately for this further encounter, visualizing the moment again and again until its power wore out, but the moment the boy entered the room she felt as though she were standing at the edge of an abyss with him at the other side, calling out to her in a silent scream, like the whistles only dogs can hear. No preparation or visualization, nothing she could do, had any power against that naked reality. This time the resemblance to Raymond seemed, for the moment or two that the sensation lasted, so strong that Aileen was tempted for the first time to wonder if it might not be real. But she immediately dismissed the idea with horror. That way, she knew, lay madness.
Yellow Ward was on the second floor of the Unit. The outer wall, like all those in the building, consisted of a pattern of rectangular panels, half of them panes of glass and the rest opaque. This chessboard design covered the length of both sides of the Unit without concessions to the size or shape of the rooms inside. In the sitting room there was one sliver of window at floor level and a patch of another crouching in one corner of the ceiling, together with a whole pane set just too high to show anything but the tips of the trees lining the drive. The bright yellow paint gave the light in the room a slightly hysterical quality, accentuating the marks on the boy’s face from the beating the other boys at the hostel had given him. But there was a new calmness in his eyes and manner as he took his place in one of the vinyl-covered chairs, and it saddened Aileen to think of what she was going to have to do. But there was no help for it. The boy couldn’t stay, and that was all there was to it.
As on his earlier visits to the Unit, Gary took no part in the discussion, although he listened attentively and tried not to look bored. But Aileen was no longer concerned with involving him in the dynamics of the group. The ordinary rules and methods did not apply in this case. She made no attempt to speak to him until the session was over and they were alone.
‘Well, so here you are,’ she began brightly, sitting down in the chair next to him, its spongy seat still warm and sculpted from the previous posterior. ‘Do you still think it was worth all that effort to get in here?’
The boy frowned and said nothing.
‘What about those voices you were telling me about yesterday?’ Aileen continued. ‘The ones you said told you to set fire to the curtains and not to trust the doctors, not to take your pills and so on. Has anything else like that happened?’
Gary stared at the floor for a while, as though trying to remember.
‘That nurse who brought me here, she was talking to all the people we passed, telling them about me, all the bad things I’ve done. And they agreed. They all said I should kill myself.’
Aileen looked at him in silence.
‘If we’re to help you, Gary,’ she said at last, ‘you must tell us the truth.’
The boy looked up at her for the first time.
‘I
His tone was obstinate, resentful. His eyes held hers with stubborn persistence. Aileen opened her suede shoulder-bag and took out a book wrapped in a dirty sheet of brown paper torn roughly at the edges. She removed it, revealing a bright glossy cover with the title
‘ “Aural hallucinations”,’ she read aloud. ‘ “One of the commonest symptoms of schizophrenia. Patients may complain of hearing voices telling them to kill themselves, or not to take their medication, or not to trust their doctor. At other times their family or strangers may be heard discussing them in a cold and threatening way.” ’
‘You’re not going to send me away again, are you?’ the boy broke out.
His voice was trembling, his eyes a wild glitter.
‘That depends on you. This is not a hostel, you know. It’s a hospital. People come here to get better, and we can’t help you get better if you go on pretending. Do you understand?’
The boy nodded without looking at her.
‘Why did you borrow this book?’ Aileen asked casually.
‘She wrote it down, that word.’
He pointed to the title of the book.
‘Who did?’
‘Pam.’
‘Pamela Haynes? Your social worker?’
The boy nodded grudgingly.
‘You saw her write the word “schizophrenia”?’
‘She went outside to talk to someone.’
‘And you looked at her notepad while she was gone?’
‘You won’t send me away, will you?’ he pleaded. ‘He’ll kill me if you do!’
‘Who’ll kill you?’
