it. It enveloped him like a fur coat, a luxury he had never been able to afford before and which might be taken from him at any moment.
7
Aileen had until Friday to find out why the boy she still thought of as Gary Dunn wanted so desperately to be confined in a psychiatric hospital. By the time she left work on Thursday afternoon, it had become clear that he wasn’t going to help her. She had played her big card that morning, telling the boy about her visit to the library, and her discovery that the book about schizophrenia which she’d found among his belongings had been borrowed by someone called Steven Bradley. He had reacted as though she’d struck him, which only confirmed Aileen’s conviction that this was not just another alias but his real name.
But nothing else had budged. She had probed and pushed, almost pleaded in the end, but all in vain. He had simply shrugged off her questions in his usual sulky, uncommunicative manner. By the end of their conversation, Aileen was beginning to feel that panicky sense of suffocation which overcame her in the course of her dinner-table duels with Douglas. Gary’s strategy and tactics were the opposite of her husband’s — the weapons of the poor, the uneducated, the inarticulate — but the result was much the same. Douglas made her feel depressed about being stupid and unsuccessful, Gary made her feel guilty for being powerful and privileged. She had already given him what he wanted — admission to the Unit — and he evidently felt that he had nothing to gain by making any further concessions. On the contrary, if he got well again he’d have to leave. He therefore had every reason not to co- operate.
In every other respect the boy was proving to be a model patient. He behaved rather as though the Unit were an exclusive club to which he had been lucky enough to be elected. He neither sought nor avoided attention, taking his cue from the other patients but keeping his distance so as not to offend anyone. He had proved to be an instant success with the hard-pressed nursing staff: not only did he give them no trouble, but on several occasions a nurse dealing with one of the more problematic inmates would find that Gary had quietly but effectively sorted out a minor crisis among the other boys while her back was turned. In short, everything was wonderful, except that his name wasn’t Gary and he wasn’t eighteen years old or mentally ill. Aileen saw no hope of solving the riddle of his behaviour before he was expelled from his fool’s paradise the following day. In a last desperate gesture she had phoned the police and passed on the boy’s real name in hopes that their Missing Persons section might be able to trace his family. But nothing altered the fact that the next day the boy would be taken away from her and handed back to the local authority, his secret still locked away inside him like an unexploded bomb.
By five o’clock that afternoon Aileen felt that she had to talk to someone. Jenny Wilcox was the only conceivable possibility. It even occurred to Aileen that this might be an opportunity for them to get to know each other better, to become real friends. It was no doubt her own fault that it hadn’t happened yet. She had always held back from the younger woman, maintaining a coolness and irony that were the classic hallmarks of defensiveness. As for the dreaded Jon, was Jenny, with all her virtues, to be discarded simply because Aileen didn’t approve of her partner? The fact of the matter was that it had been
Aileen’s route back to her office took her down a ground-floor corridor and out through a side door of the main building. The therapeutically uplifting colours of the wards had been abandoned here in favour of basic bureaucratic grey. Aileen had passed through the swing doors at the end of the corridor at least four times a day for over ten years, but she had never actually looked at them before. But now, as she raised her hand to grasp the handle, she saw four words written there at the edge of the door, one above the other, just at eye level.
EAT
SHIT
DIE
BOX
After a moment she pushed her way through, wiping her hands vaguely, as though they might have been contaminated by contact with the door. The words were somehow hatefully familiar. She knew she’d seen them before, and recently, but she couldn’t think where it had been. Not here at the Unit, at any rate. They were probably from some song or other, of no importance or significance.
Jenny Wilcox readily accepted Aileen’s offer of a drink and a lift home to Barnes. Her own car had been stolen a few weeks earlier, driven to a disused lot and set on fire, and until the insurance claim came through she was dependent on the unreliable bus service. As it was not yet opening-time, Jenny suggested that they do the drive first and go to a bar called Jewels which Jon had OK’d. This turned out to be a standard clone, like an antique shop which had started serving drinks on the side. There were lots of potted plants and brass rails and old furniture, and waitresses resembling French whores dressed as Edwardian chambermaids or vice versa flitted through the foliage. Eventually one of them was persuaded to bring the women two glasses of a Muscadet described on the blackboard wine list as ‘jolly quaffable’. While they waited for it to arrive, Aileen listened to Jenny discussing her project to get all the doctors working for the local health authority to sign an advertisement naming those categories of ‘non- urgent’ cases whose treatment would be deferred indefinitely if funding was not increased.
‘Divide and rule is the Government’s game, as usual. If we let them get away with it mental health will go to the wall. To get funding you’ll need publicity, which in practice means deaths. Hole-in-the-heart babies, fifteen- days-to-live kidney transplants, that sort of thing. There’s no way we can compete in that market. Madness doesn’t kill you, that’s the trouble.’
‘It can do.’
‘Not directly. Anyway, from a
Aileen said nothing. She found Jenny’s ferocious cynicism hard to take in large doses, which is how it was usually administered.
‘That boy I talked to you about yesterday,’ she began tentatively. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve had time to observe him at all.’
‘You mean what’s-his-name, Gary? To tell you the truth, I haven’t even noticed he’s there.’
‘He won’t be, not after tomorrow. I haven’t got anywhere with him, apart from stumbling on his real name. He’s undoubtedly lying about other things too, but there’s no time to discover what they are. Actually lying’s not quite the right word. He seems almost to lack any clear sense of what’s true and what isn’t. That makes it all the more effective, of course, because there’s no sense of guilt to give him away. It’s as if he’s holding a pack of possibilities and he deals out this one or that, according to the situation, without bothering himself about whether they happen to be true or not.’
Aileen noticed a slightly glazed look come over Jenny’s eyes and realized that she was rabbiting on.
‘Anyway, perhaps the police will be able to find out something about him,’ she concluded.
The younger woman shot her a distinctly sharp look.
‘The police?’
‘I told them his real name,’ Aileen explained.
‘Really?’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
Jenny sipped her drink in silence.
‘They were very nice and helpful to me when I phoned,’ Aileen said defensively.
‘Of course they were! You’re a wealthy, middle-class, educated, white female. Why shouldn’t they be nice to you? If you buy a guard dog, you don’t expect it to attack
Aileen returned Jenny’s look with a growing feeling of resentment.
‘You’re all those things too, Jenny.’
‘I know I am! And I know exactly where I stand with the police, believe me.’
There was a momentary silence that was awkward in its intensity.
‘Anyway, what I don’t quite understand is why this particular patient matters so much to you,’ Jenny went on in a more soothing tone. ‘I mean concern is great, of course, but there are plenty of deserving cases at the Unit. You seem to have got very involved with this boy. What’s so special about him?’
