The Tryst

rationalize what had happened to some extent. If her child had survived, it would have been about the same age as Gary. Moreover, there was a fugitive similarity between the boy and Raymond: the hair colour and certain facial expressions in particular. The real problem about the experience was that she couldn’t talk about it. Not to Douglas, for obvious reasons, but not to her colleagues either. Jenny Wilcox had been known to argue that the NHS could only carry on because women were so anxious to be indispensable that they were prepared to accept pay and conditions that no other workers would tolerate. But that didn’t mean that Aileen could safely air her feelings about Gary Dunn. The medical services might indeed depend on exploiting women’s maternal emotions, but they would no more welcome staff who really confused a patient with their unborn child than the Army draft board had welcomed Raymond when he told them he couldn’t wait to start killing people.

‘I told you!’ Gary told Aileen triumphantly as soon as the warden and Mrs Haynes had left them alone together. ‘They made me do it, the voices! I’ve got to do everything they tell me to.’

This shook Aileen.

‘What voices?’

‘The ones I hear in my head! I told you something would happen if you didn’t have me locked up. You’ll have to take me now, won’t you? There’s no saying what they might tell me to do next time.’

‘You’ve never said anything about these voices before.’

She was confident of this. Such controlling voices are one of the textbook symptoms of schizophrenia. If Gary had ever mentioned them, Pamela Haynes’s diagnosis would not have been so swiftly dismissed.

‘What else do they tell you, these voices?’

‘They tell me not to believe what the doctors say, not to trust them. They tell me not to take those pills they gave me. They say I’m no good, useless, evil. They say I should kill myself.’

Aileen sighed. ‘We just sat there and cringed for him,’ Jenny had said of one of Gary’s earlier performances. This was almost as embarrassing.

‘We can’t let you come and live in the Unit if you’re going to set fire to things,’ she pointed out.

‘I won’t, not in there.’

‘But you said that you had to do whatever the voices tell you. Suppose they tell you to do this again?’

‘They won’t.’

‘How do you know?’

‘They just won’t!’

Aileen walked over to the window, where an enormous rubber plant ran up to the ceiling and flattened out like a genie from a bottle. She wiped her finger over the surface of one of the leaves, skimming off a film of dust. There was a bed free in one of the admission wards until the weekend. That was only three days, but at least it would keep the boy out of the hands of the police for the moment. There was little risk of another arson attack, she was sure of that. Gary had set fire to the curtains in a carefully premeditated gesture, choosing a room where there was a fire extinguisher handy, leaving the door wide open and then waiting until someone was passing by before actually striking the match.

Without committing herself to anything, Aileen made some reassuring noises and then slipped out to the hallway where the warden and Pamela Haynes were waiting. She told them that she would do what she could to have Gary admitted to the Unit and would be in touch later that morning.

She had left her battered red Mini — a hand-me-down from Douglas, who had moved up to a Volvo — in the street opposite the Centre. The door of a lock-up garage nearby had been decorated with an assortment of graffiti, including ‘Take 2 you shit crew’, ‘Skin one up’, and ‘Hip hop don’t stop’. But for some reason Aileen’s eye was drawn to four words carefully printed one above the other.

EAT

SHIT

DIE

BOX

As she completed her journey to work, Aileen repeated them over and over to herself. She didn’t normally take any notice of graffiti, but for some reason she couldn’t get those four words out of her mind. It wasn’t until the main hospital was in sight that she succeeded in bringing her thoughts to heel. Yes, she would probably be able to let Gary into the Unit until the end of the week, unless the consultant chose to object. Assuming that the boy’s idea that someone was trying to kill him was a delusion, then like all delusions it must have been a function. There must be some knowledge that he could not admit he had, some fact from his past which was too traumatic for him to accept. If Aileen was to help him, she would have to discover what this was, and that meant getting behind the boy’s defences, probing into his past. For it was there, she was convinced, that the source and explanation of his imaginary terrors lay hidden.

3

Eight months before, back in the dead of January, Gary Dunn had been two years younger. His name had been Steve then, Steven Bradley, and he’d been sleeping in a length of concrete tubing under the Westway flyover, between Wood Lane and the underground tracks, until the stotters took him in. They were older, big kids, almost grown-ups. He’d seen them before, the stiff robotic march, the swollen plastic bags clutched in their hands, the eyes glazed like those of the fish heads he sometimes came across, scavenging in bins for his supper. Nevertheless, it was they who’d saved him from the police. One was called Jimmy and the other Dave, and they’d been hauled in following a complaint from a woman they’d called a silly fucking cow because they didn’t like the looks she was giving them. The police had duly handed them a bit of harassment in return, but there was nothing much else they could do. Glue is not an illegal substance, and if the purchaser chooses to exploit its hallucinogenic rather than adhesive properties, he is perfectly within his rights to do so. Life, on the other hand, is something you need to be sixteen to consume without adult supervision. Steve couldn’t prove he was, so the constabulary thought they had him bang to rights until Jimmy, a plump toughie with curly fair hair and a face like a bent cherub, decided to throw a spanner in the works.

‘He’s me brother, isn’t he?’

‘Piss off,’ the desk sergeant told him tonelessly.

‘He fucking is! He keeps us half-way straight and all. He looks after us. We’d be ever so much worse if he wasn’t around.’

‘We’d be fucking monsters!’ Dave confirmed. He was tall and skinny and was wearing a torn denim jacket with ‘The Cult’ inked across the back, calf-length battledress trousers and large black boots. A line of swastika tattoos ran up his neck and cheek and across his shorn scalp like the footprints of some exotic bird.

The sergeant didn’t believe a word of this, of course. He knew that the two stotters were just trying to get their own back for the aggro they’d sustained. But he’d been in the game long enough to know that it wasn’t worth his while trying to stop them. It was all a question of energy. Despite the horrendous things they did to themselves, these kids had so much, whereas the sergeant, for all his diets and keep-fit and early nights, was still knackered by tea-time. It wasn’t fair, youth. Besides, he was just wasting his time with this boy. Ten to one his parents wouldn’t want him back, either that or the boy wouldn’t go. Social services wouldn’t want to know, and as for the charity organizations, if he hadn’t stuck with them already it was because he couldn’t stand it and would run away again at the first opportunity. In short, it was nothing but a wind-up whichever way you looked at it. The sergeant repeated his previous comment to Jimmy and turned away dismissively.

Outside the police station, Steve started to sidle off.

‘This way!’ Jimmy called, shaking his head scornfully, pulling the boy after him. He proceeded to go on at some length about the mentality of the wankers he was surrounded by, who couldn’t even find their way back to the fucking house unless he was there to hold their hands. He soon became so incensed about this that Dave suggested they stop off for a top-up. The filth had taken what they’d had on them — totally illegally, of course, but what were they supposed to do, call their solicitor? — so they dropped into Woolies to restock. A large sign informed customers that the management reserved the right to restrict the sale of solvent- based products, but the cashiers all looked as if they’d been at the stuff themselves and would have checked out a