The Tryst

‘The man I told you about! Hazchem.’

‘What did you say?’

But the boy’s moment of desperation had passed, and he would not repeat the word or phrase — was it ‘Ask him’? — which Aileen had failed to catch, merely shaking his head and rocking from side to side, hugging himself tightly.

On the way back to her office, Aileen ran into the consultant psychiatrist’s assistant, a tubby balding man whose attempts to look like a smooth City gent were defeated by a prominent bottom which stuck out like a belly turned the wrong way round. Aileen described the outcome of her interview with Gary Dunn.

‘It’s been the social worker’s fault all along. She got so excited about having made a diagnosis of schizophrenia all by her big self that she left her notes lying around where the boy could see them.’

‘Very unprofessional,’ the assistant agreed. ‘Still, you’ve got to hand it to the little bugger, haven’t you? Top marks for initiative and all that. But what’s his game? Why he’s so keen to be admitted to the Unit that he spends his spare time swotting up symptoms with a copy of Teach Yourself Schizophrenia?’

‘I don’t know. He claims someone’s trying to kill him. For some reason he seems to think he’s safe here.’

The assistant fingered his pudgy jowls.

‘As long as he doesn’t eat the food. Still, we can’t keep a bed tied up just to keep him happy. Out-patient care, of course, all he wants. But beds are just too precious.’

He was right, of course, and Aileen knew it. Even with its various annexes and extensions, the Unit was designed to house no more than eighty resident patients. By dint of placing beds in corridors and service areas this number had been increased to ninety-five. Over two hundred other patients on a waiting list were currently being housed in regional general hospitals, where they received little or no psychiatric care, with the result that their condition progressively deteriorated.

‘It’s only until Friday,’ Aileen stressed. ‘There’s a bed that’s free anyway.’

‘That’s the day after tomorrow!’ the assistant reminded her. ‘What do you expect to achieve in that space of time?’

‘Nothing, probably. But at least it’ll stop the local authority turning him over to the police for the arson attempt.’

‘And afterwards where will he go?’

‘I don’t know!’ she retorted crossly, feeling browbeaten. ‘I don’t know anything.’

But when she got home that evening, Aileen knew one more thing at least. She had stopped at the public library on the way and returned the book on schizophrenia, paying the fine herself. The librarian proceeded to give her a brisk lecture about withholding books needed by other readers, and to justify herself Aileen started to explain about Gary Dunn.

‘What has this Gary Dunn got to do with it?’ the librarian interrupted peevishly.

‘He’s the boy who borrowed the book.’

‘Not according to my records.’

The librarian’s tone suggested that if there was a discrepancy between reality and his records, then reality was most probably at fault. To clinch the matter, he showed Aileen the computer entry. Schizophrenia: What It Is And What It Isn’t had been borrowed on 6 July by Steven Bradley, of 2 Grafton Avenue. His ticket had been issued in February of the same year, the application being endorsed by Ernest Matthews Esq., a ratepayer at the same address.

6

‘It all happened very long ago and very far away. Whenever I think of that time I remember a trip we took once, to the seaside. It was the only time I was ever away from home, you see, and the first time I’d been on a train, so it stuck in my mind. I remember the doors were inches thick, as heavy as a gate. My mother warned me, “You catch your fingers in that and it’ll have them off as quick as trimming carrots.” My mother didn’t like trains. She said you got fleas off the seats. I don’t suppose mothers have changed much, have they? Anyway, I must have liked it, because here I am, near eighty years on and I can see it as well as I can see you, my lad. To open the window you had to pull down on a thick leather strap, like at the barber’s, only it had holes punched in it to take a brass peg. You let the strap run back inside the door, the window came rattling down and you could look out. There was a smell of smoke and a spray of wet steam in the air, and every once in a while you’d get a smut of soot in your eye that set you blinking. That’s what I remember most from that holiday, that and the pier where we went in the afternoon to listen to the band. There was a flight of metal steps, just like a staircase, which went down into the water at the end of the pier. As the waves passed, in the troughs between them, you could see that the steps went on down below the water, all covered in barnacles and seaweed, but still as solid as ever. If I close my eyes I can still see that staircase leading down into the sea and hear the band playing and see the clouds drifting across the sky, as big and calm as battleships …’

They were sitting in the snug clutter of the basement room in Grafton Avenue, the old man and the boy. To celebrate the commencement of the story he had promised to tell, Ernest Matthews had prepared a high tea of soft-boiled eggs with bread and butter cut into inch-wide fingers. Steve had been instructed at some length in the correct method of opening his egg, by tapping the shell repeatedly with his spoon and then peeling off the shards and the silky clinging inner membrane. When they finished eating, the old man had retired to his armchair and lit the pipe that now lay forgotten in his hand. Steve sat by the table, his eyes fixed on the stove, where rising currents of hot air made the tiles of the fireplace ripple like stones on the bed of a stream.

‘I remember the sea, too,’ the old man went on. ‘It seemed so big, so endless, and all in movement. I’d only seen the countryside before, and round our way that was all tucks and folds, so you couldn’t see far. Later on, I found out that once upon a time all that land had been under water too, and that the hills I used to walk upon were made of the skeletons of the creatures that lived in those ancient seas. Just imagine, those hills and valleys, the very houses, were all made of nothing but dead bodies! I lived in a cemetery, lad, and thought it a paradise.’

He put his pipe between his lips and torched it briefly with the lighter.

‘But we must get on, and keep to the story, or we’ll never have done. The trouble is, this skull of mine is packed with memories like the inside of a golf ball, and once I get started there’s no stopping me. First I must tell you about the Hall. Now take this house here. What we’re in now is the kitchen, as was. There’s two more rooms like it downstairs, as well as any amount of cupboards and larders and so on. On the first floor there’s the sitting room and dining room, and three bedrooms above that, making eight rooms in all, not counting the attic. There are many meaner houses than this, I dare say, and yet to call it by the same name as the one where I grew up seems a sort of insult to the language. I’m not speaking about the architecture, mind, though I dare say that there was plenty of that too. It was Elizabethan, you see, which is why the shape of it was like a capital E, with two wings at either end and the great hall jutting out in the centre. But all that meant nothing to me, though I liked the idea, Elizabeth being my mother’s name. What I never got over was how big it all was. Why, this place would have fitted into it twenty or thirty times over! When I was very young, I thought the Hall was a kind of plant that put out new growth each year, for there always seemed to be rooms I hadn’t seen before, doors I hadn’t opened. It wasn’t till I was ten or eleven that I began to understand how it all fitted together, and even by the end it was still full of surprises.’

‘Was your mother a princess?’ Steve asked.

The boy spoke so rarely, and only then in response to a question, that the old man glanced at him with surprise. Then he laughed out loud.

‘Good Lord above, you don’t think it was our house, do you?’ He pointed to the electric light above their heads. ‘You see that? And the stove here? And the water pipes? That’s what we were, my lad, nothing more nor less. For there was no light then, once the sun went down, but what you made yourself. That meant fifteen or twenty oil lamps to be cleaned and filled and brought to every room, scenting the whole place with their sweet, warm smell. As for the water, that had to be fetched from the spring, and if you wanted tea or a bath it had to be warmed on the stove. Wood had to be cut and hauled and stacked and laid for the fires, which had to be cleaned out early each morning and then relit. All of that