‘Seen him?’ Aileen snapped. ‘You were supposed to be collecting him at three o’clock.’
‘I was! I did!’
‘Well?’
‘Well, he … he ran away.’
‘
‘I was driving him to the hostel, the traffic was quite bad — well, it always is these days, isn’t it? Anyway, Gary, I mean Steven, he said he knew a short cut so I turned off, even though it seemed to me that it wasn’t all that short — ’
‘Would you mind getting to the point, please?’
Aileen’s tone of voice was a replica of one her mother used to intimidate people she considered socially vulnerable.
‘Well, all of a sudden he said he needed to go to the loo. We were just passing a park and he said there was a public lavatory by the gate so I stopped. When he didn’t come out again I went to the door and called. It was a bit awkward, it being a Gents and all, but in the end I went in but he wasn’t there. I knew he hadn’t come out of the door because I’d been watching, and then I saw that the window in one of the sit-downs was broken. He must have got out that way and run off through the park. I hoped he might have gone back there to the hospital, you see, that’s why I phoned.’
Aileen squeezed the bridge of her nose between two fingers.
‘Why would he come here? He knows we’d just hand him straight back to you.’
‘But then where could he have gone?’ the social worker wailed. She too was probably exhausted and drained at the end of a long week’s work, Aileen reflected.
‘I don’t know. He showed some interest in a girl he used to know. He may have gone off looking for her. Anyway, don’t worry too much, Mrs Haynes. It’s not really your fault. He’d probably have run off sooner or later anyway. He’s got a history of this kind of thing.’
She replaced the receiver, gathered together her belongings and walked slowly to the car. She knew only too well where Steven had gone. He had gone back to the street, back to the invisible people. The boy had tried to find his feet in the surface world, where people have fixed addresses and permanent names. But that world and its representatives, notably Aileen, had failed him. He had made his needs quite clear, and they had been rejected. And although that rejection was correct in the circumstances, Aileen’s heart was tormented with reproachful questions. What did it matter to Steven whether he had an adequate claim to a hospital bed or not? Does a mother turn a child away because its need for security exceeds the norm, because it has exhausted its quota of love? But, of course, she wasn’t his mother.
As Pamela Haynes had remarked, the traffic in the area was always bad. That afternoon, when Aileen longed more than ever to be home, it seemed by some perverse logic to be even worse than usual. Frustrated and bored, the occupants of the stalled cars gazed vacantly at each other, sizing up make, model, age and condition and hence inferring career, status, income level and probable destination. Aileen felt the eyes scanning her like so many remote-control video cameras: L registration Mini, ropy bodywork, sixty thousand or so on the clock, she’s a bit second-hand and all, minor civil servant or administrative assistant, hit her plateau and stuck there, fifteen thou plus a few rubbishy perks, three kids and a semi in Greenford. She turned on the car radio. As she closed her eyes, the traffic jam melted away and they were cruising along the cliffs at Rottingdean, sunlight flickering and glittering on the waves as though the ocean were signalling to them. ‘What’s it saying?’ Ray shouted back. She hadn’t needed to answer. They both knew by heart the exultant and irresistible message that the universe had confided to their generation. The whole of human history had been leading up to this moment, when technology and consciousness finally reached a sufficiently advanced level to make possible the earthly paradise. Ray laughed and took his hands off the bars, letting the motorbike steer itself around the curves of the road winding eastwards along the cliffs, towards Newhaven and the ferry.
‘The Cream from 1969!’ frothed the announcer. ‘Wow, man, out of sight, too much, heavy, far out and all that stuff.’
Aileen swallowed away the lump of emotion in her throat. A chorus of horns sounded out behind her, and she looked up to find that the vehicle in front had moved forward a few yards. Before she could put the Mini in gear, a brand-new Ford Sierra cut into the space. The driver waved angrily at her as he passed, mouthing inaudible oaths, his eyes full of hatred. High-stress middle management, twenty-five thousand plus a company ulcer, new home on a Wates estate in Uxbridge, thought Aileen automatically.
About half-way along Wood Lane there was a way through the back streets avoiding Shepherds Bush Green. The snag was getting out again the other end, which was why Aileen didn’t often use it, but today the traffic was so bad that she couldn’t see what she had to lose. As she drew near the junction, however, she saw that the traffic this end was not moving at all. After sitting there for ten minutes without progressing an inch, she backed the Mini into a parking space and got out. There was a nice Young’s pub round the corner. She would go and relax over a drink and a cigarette until the rush-hour had passed.
About fifty yards along the main road, a knot of people blocked her path. A policeman was questioning some of them while another stood in the road directing the traffic. Aileen became aware of a siren in the distance and realized that it had been going on for some time without her noticing it. It was presumably an ambulance, stuck in the traffic jam caused by the accident to which it had been called. A white delivery van was stopped at an angle in the middle of the road, almost on the white line. Behind it stood a bus, stalled at the moment of pulling away from its stop. One of the men being questioned gestured towards the van.
‘He didn’t give me a bleeding chance, did he?’
‘How fast were you going?’ the policeman asked, pencil and notebook at the ready.
‘I don’t know! Twenty, twenty-five? It’s a van, not a bleeding Ferrari, you know. Just as I was passing the bus, out he comes like a dog out of the trap.’
‘That’s right,’ the bus driver confirmed. He pointed out a man standing nearby. ‘Him over there, he said something made him run off.’
Everyone turned to look at the man. Amid all the faces marked by anxiety or sorrow, the grin on his lips struck a jarring note. The policeman beckoned him over.
‘What did you say to him?’
The man laughed almost contemptuously.
‘Nothing!’
‘You bloody well did!’ the bus driver exclaimed. ‘I saw you!’
The man looked as though he was only able to restrain his hilarity because not even the most hysterical howls of laughter would be adequate to express the total absurdity of the situation. The whole thing was simply
‘What did you say to him?’ the policeman repeated coldly.
The man shrugged three or four times in quick succession.
‘I asked if he knew what time it was.’
‘That’s right,’ a woman with a dog put in. ‘I heard him.’
The policeman looked rather exasperated by the woman’s unsolicited testimony.
‘What’s so funny?’ he snapped at the man, whose grin vanished with insulting abruptness.
‘Where do you live?’ the policeman demanded.
‘Paxton Grove. Number twenty-nine.’
Up to this point, Aileen had been hovering on the fringes of the crowd, trying to work her way through. Now she stopped and gave the man a closer look. 29 Paxton Grove was a custodial hostel used to accommodate long- term psychiatric patients whose condition was more or less stable but unlikely to improve. This man was pretty obviously a chronic schizophrenic whose symptoms were being controlled by drugs sufficiently for him to be released into the community.
‘Excuse me, I’m a doctor,’ she told the policeman, exaggerating her qualifications to get his attention. ‘I think I may be able to help.’
He glanced at her briefly and shook his head, pointing towards a blanket-covered bundle lying in the road in front of the white van.
‘Too late for that.’
Aileen was about to explain that she wasn’t that kind of doctor but simply wanted to explain why the man
