The Tryst

condition: some stoutly maintain that there is nothing whatever the matter with them, others claim that their symptoms are the side-effects of a purely physical illness; a third group, usually the more hopeful cases, can see that something has gone wrong and that it is connected with what has happened to them in the past. But Gary Dunn did not fit into any of these categories.

‘What do you think is the matter with you?’ Aileen asked him one day.

‘I got schizafreakout, haven’t I?’

She repressed a smile.

‘What makes you think that?’

He shrugged impatiently, as though the answer was both obvious and unimportant.

‘You know when you’ve got something, don’t you? When you’re ill.’

‘How do you mean, ill?’

‘Like a cold and that.’

‘You mean that having a cold and having schizophrenia is just the same?’

‘Course it’s not the same!’ he exclaimed indignantly. ‘What I got, you get locked up for, right? It’s in the head, isn’t it? It’s dangerous. I might do things. There’s no telling what I might do.’

And he rolled his eyes as though appalled by the extent of his potential depravities. At the same time Aileen could hardly keep from smiling, but as the weeks passed it became apparent that the boy really meant it. This was a rarity indeed. The staff at the Unit were used to patients who were more or less unwilling to be admitted or unhappy about staying, but few of them had ever come across someone who was positively eager for admission. Gary’s hints that he should be ‘locked up’ gradually turned to demands which grew ever more strident. To bolster his case, he took to aping the behaviour of the other patients, mimicking their tics and fits. Jenny Wilcox, the occupational therapist whose office was next to Aileen’s, witnessed one of these demonstrations. ‘It was truly awful,’ she reported. ‘Unbelievably bad. Even brain-damaged yobs like Stan and Trevor could see that he was faking it. We all just sat there and cringed for him.’ Gary Dunn’s exhibitions failed to convince not only Jenny’s ‘yobs’ — her term for the more seriously disturbed male adolescents — but everyone else at the Unit from the consultant down. No one understood why he was so anxious to be admitted, but the fact remained that he was just one of many patients whose needs and wishes had to be taken into account. The pressure on beds was so severe that there could be no question of turning one over to a patient whose condition was not serious enough to warrant it. What worried Aileen as she drove down Fulham Palace Road that Tuesday morning was the thought that there was one sure way that the boy could gain instant admission, did he but know it, and that was by making a suicide attempt.

The Assessment Centre occupied two sprawling turn-of-the-century houses which had been knocked together and extended in various ways to form a shapeless mass burgeoning with odd excrescences. Inside, walls had been swept away and new partitions built, so that it was impossible to reconstruct the original shape or purpose of the rooms. In an attempt to make the place less institutional, these had been named rather than numbered. At one time there had been a rhyme and reason to the names, with ‘Mars’, ‘Venus’ and ‘Saturn’ all on one corridor, for example. But the signs had been defaced by generations of inmates — in this case, to ‘Wars’, ‘Penis’ and ‘Fatcunt’ — so that the layout of the building was as baffling as its external appearance suggested. Aileen had arranged to meet Pamela Haynes in the warden’s office, but her attempts to find it led her back again and again to a recreational area where four young men were playing table-football while two others sat in front of the television watching a man in a waxed jacket explain how to grow larger roses. They all turned to stare at Aileen each time she reappeared, and she realized that she was gradually losing caste in their eyes. Revealed as a fake figure of authority, unable to find her way about, she was acutely conscious of being just a woman alone among a pack of young males whose murky feelings for the opposite sex were quite evident from those renamed rooms. So when Pamela Haynes appeared, looking for her, she got a warmer reception than would otherwise have been the case.

The social worker was a gawky woman run aground in her late thirties. Her expression was drained and harassed, with the vampire-victim look of those who spend too much time giving to others and getting little or nothing in return.

‘Thanks ever so for coming,’ she gushed dully. ‘We should just be in time. The office opens at nine, you see, and Leonard, that’s the warden, will have to phone in then. He’s ever such a decent bloke, but it is a criminal offence, after all. They’ll have him charged unless we do something. It gets rid, you see, which is all they think about these days. But after what the poor little bugger’s been through already it would just finish him, wouldn’t it?’

‘What happened?’

‘They caught him trying to set fire to some curtains. Last night, it was, about nine o’clock. It wasn’t serious, but he’ll have to go, of course. The question is where.’

They exchanged glances.

‘You want us to take him,’ Aileen said.

‘It’s either that or the police. They’d love a chance to have another go at him. They still think he’s holding out about the murder. With this hanging over him, they could give him the works.’

Aileen stared for a while at the floor, which was clad in vinyl tiles of an indeterminate shade.

‘Where is he?’

‘In the warden’s office. That’s why I couldn’t talk on the phone. He was sitting at my elbow. Do you want to see him?’

‘I’d better speak to the warden first.’

Leonard was a thickset man wearing a faded tweed jacket with elbow patches, corduroy trousers worn at the knees, and Hush Puppies, which, like their owner, suffered from premature baldness. He looked like a schoolmaster who is resigned to being a figure of fun to his pupils but hasn’t yet realized that his colleagues despise him too. At Aileen’s request, he led her upstairs to see where the arson attempt had occurred. The dormitory was a large bare room whose glossy walls and flooring made it seem chilly, although in fact the air was almost suffocatingly close. The curtains had been removed, but the glass panes and the paintwork nearby were tinted more or less darkly with smoke, and the window frame was heavily charred on one side.

‘He sprayed the fabric with lighter fuel,’ the warden explained. ‘Luckily there was an extinguisher just outside in the corridor. ‘It’s only superficial, you see, the restructuring. If the flames had got at the woodwork underneath the whole issue would have gone up before anyone could have done anything.’

‘Who caught him?’

‘Well, luckily enough one of the other lads happened to be going to the loo at the end of the corridor. The door here was wide open and as he passed by the curtains went up, whoosh.’

As they walked back downstairs together, Leonard expanded on the difficulties of his situation.

‘What it comes down to at the end of the day is that we don’t have the staff to cope. Gary’s been lucky to have Pam. Most of them are just left to their own devices. We’ve had sixteen violent assaults on staff members during the last year alone.’

It was only after they entered the warden’s office and Aileen saw the boy, his face swollen and discoloured, that she understood why she was being told all this.

‘There was nothing I could do,’ the warden went on quickly. ‘While we were putting out the fire and cleaning up a group of them took him into the toilets. I don’t mean to condone violence of course, but, well, you can see their point. I mean, if he’d done it when there was no one around we’d all have ended up like Walls’ bangers.’

‘But he didn’t, did he?’ Aileen snapped. ‘Didn’t any of you have the wit to think of that?’

A rush of helpless love swamped her, an almost overwhelming urge to take the boy in her arms. She observed this lunatic impulse as one might the thought of hurling oneself from the top of a high building, knowing very well that it won’t happen but faintly appalled that one has even entertained such an idea. By now Aileen had come to terms with the fact that her relationship with Gary Dunn was characterized by the most powerful case of counter-transference she had ever come across. It is common for patients undergoing psychotherapy to transfer to the therapist the emotions they have felt for earlier figures of authority. Adolescents in particular tend to identify a female therapist with their mothers. Nor is it uncommon for the therapist to experience an equivalent counter- transfer of emotion, and as a childless woman working with young people Aileen had long realized that she was particularly vulnerable to this. But the feelings she experienced for Gary Dunn were of a different order from any she had previously had to cope with. Once the shock of the initial encounter had passed, she had been able to