The Tryst

5

The Adolescent Unit in which Aileen Macklin worked formed part of a psychiatric hospital in North Kensington, overlooking the canal. The Unit itself occupied a separate block, with its own entrance and car-park, in the grounds of the main hospital, from which it was separated by a row of tall evergreens. The two buildings thus appeared to turn their backs on each other. Physically, too, they could hardly have been more different. The hospital was one of those redbrick monstrosities beloved by the Victorians and used by them virtually interchangeably as prisons, factories, hospitals, schools and barracks. It was lugubrious, authoritarian and massively institutional. It was also warm, dry, indestructible and as functionally effective as the day it was built. The Adolescent Unit, thoughtfully screened from this vision of the past by the conifers, had been run up in the early sixties, seemingly with a view to reversing all the qualities of its Victorian parent. In this it had proved remarkably successful. Although its originally spacious rooms had been subdivided and partitioned under pressure for space, the building remained determinedly casual and easy-going. It was also damp, draughty, cold and slowly falling to bits. Aileen found its air of faded, tatty idealism as depressing as the broken-spined, brittle-paged paperbacks by Laing (‘Brighton, 4/10/68’) or Leary (‘Ya blow my mind — and other things! Ray’), which she occasionally came across on her shelves while looking for something else.

Her office was not in the Unit itself, which had proved to be hopelessly inadequate to the demands made on it as the years went by. As facilities elsewhere in the city closed down, patients who were too ill to be discharged were concentrated in those that remained open. Since there had also been a marked rise in the incidence of psychiatric disorder, particularly among young people, this resulted in the Unit throwing out annexes, wings and extensions whose construction methods and materials grew progressively cruder as budgets fell. Aileen’s office occupied half of a prefabricated hut supported on brick stilts that had originally been knocked up as a temporary storage space a decade or so earlier and then retained because it was there. It had a flat tarred roof which leaked, flooring that sagged underfoot, windows which contrived to rattle no matter how many cardboard wedges were jammed into them and doors you had to kick open yet admitted every draught going. It was sweltering in summer, freezing in winter, and stank obscurely all year round. Jenny Wilcox, the occupational therapist who shared the hut with Aileen, had once remarked that it was enough to drive anyone mad.

Aileen could usually tell what sort of day she was going to have by the way she felt as she turned into the driveway separating the Adolescent Unit from the main road. Sometimes it seemed like a horizontal level in a mine: a deep, dark, narrow tunnel leading to a place of relentless unrewarding labour. At other times the same stretch of tarmac reminded her of an old advertisement for a brand of children’s shoes, showing a straight open highway leading to worthy achievements and a brighter future. That Wednesday, the day after she had visited Gary Dunn at the Assessment Centre, the driveway seemed quite simply to offer refuge.

It had been a bad night. Douglas had had it all his way at the dinner table the evening before, although Aileen knew that she could and should have denied him. He had used one of his oldest and simplest ploys, piling up references to his own prestige and success until she was drawn into trying to retaliate. That was fatal, of course, for whatever she might think of him — and whatever he might think of himself, in his heart of hearts, where Aileen knew that he nourished the most tormenting doubts — there was no question that as far as the world was concerned, Douglas Macklin was a high-flyer. Wasn’t he off to America at the end of that very week for yet another top-level international conference? So when Aileen presumed to mention her own career it was easy for him — a smile, a glance, a raised eyebrow was enough — to make her look not only intellectually second-rate but vulgarly me-tooish into the bargain, insisting on equal time for her lacklustre accomplishments. As if that hadn’t been enough, Aileen seemed to be beginning one of the cycles of insomnia from which she had suffered since childhood, and in the intermittent patches of sleep which she had been able to snatch as she lay listening to Douglas’s ripe complacent snores, she had once again had the ‘flying’ dream.

As usual, she had no memory of the dream itself, but she knew what had happened the moment she awakened by the way she felt: blissfully relaxed and calm, as though something of the still pale glow that pervaded the dream had remained with her, casting a gentle luminance on all her thoughts. Then she had suddenly broken out in a cold sweat as she remembered the terrible significance this dream had acquired since Raymond’s death, how she had nearly died too, only surviving by a miracle which had cost the life of her unborn child. This was what always happened now, the beauty followed by the horror. The dream had lost its innocence. Deliberately, she had forced herself to get out of bed, go downstairs, make a cup of tea and listen to drivel on the radio until exhaustion calmed her.

It was thus with positive relief that she brought the red Mini to rest in the slot marked DR REITH, commemorating her predecessor who had died more than ten years earlier. She picked up Gary Dunn’s file, which she had taken home to study, and walked to her office with a feeling of anticipation. The day before her was filled with things to do, tasks to perform, duties to carry out and problems to resolve. Perhaps none of it was very glorious or noteworthy by her husband’s standards, but it was work that had to be done just the same. And doing it would be a sweet relief from the mental jumble she felt growing in volume all the time, as if all the junk she had accumulated in the attic over the years had started to breed and multiply, spilling out of its confinement, pushing down to invade the rest of the house.

When Aileen appeared in the doorway between their two offices, Jenny Wilcox was sipping a mug of Nescafe and throwing darts at a board printed with Mrs Thatcher’s features.

‘Fancy a game?’ she asked. ‘You get one for the hair, five for the chin, ten for the nose, twenty for the good eye and fifty for the wonky one. An arrow in the heart wins you the game.’

Aileen inspected the board more closely.

‘The point being …’ she began.

‘That there isn’t one. Exactly.’

Jenny beamed gleefully back at Aileen. The occupational therapist was a short, dark woman with an intensity and directness of manner usually associated with Latin blood, but which in Jenny’s case was an ideological choice: this was how she felt that women should relate to each other. A snub nose and straight black hair cut in the shape of a helmet gave her a rather engaging tomboy look, and when she smiled, as she did often, her upper lip rose to reveal a startling expanse of pink gum. But there was nothing childish about Jenny. She was bright, breezy, upbeat, combative and totally dedicated to her patients. Aileen considered her a good therapist, an excellent union rep and an invigorating and supportive colleague, but not quite a friend. There were various reasons for this, of which the most obvious was Jenny’s husband, a researcher for London Weekend Television whose one ambition in life was to get ‘front of camera’. Jon’s interest in other people depended entirely on whether he thought they might help him to achieve this. Aileen’s problem was not avoiding him — Jon wasted no time on those he couldn’t use — but coming to terms with the fact that Jenny had married him. That cast a shadow on her which Aileen could never quite forget. If Jenny was as nice as she seemed, how could she stand living with such a creep? Was her warmth to Aileen just a facade, a bit of feminist window-dressing? Or — and this was the really unpleasant thought — did she have Jon to thank for it? Did the Wilcoxes have an unspoken demarcation agreement whereby Jenny looked after being positive and jolly while Jon handled selfishness and insensitivity? Aileen was only too aware that couples didn’t stay together by chance. However ill-suited or unhappy they might appear, if the relationship lasted it was because it worked, although the exact nature of the work might well remain obscure to the couple themselves, perhaps necessarily so.

‘Do you remember a boy called Gary Dunn?’ she asked as Jenny sent her final dart winging across the room to embed itself in the Prime Minister’s ear.

The therapist pursed her lips for a moment, staring up at the warped insulation tiles on the ceiling of the hut.

‘Hang about. Wasn’t he the one with aural hallucinations of a schizophrenic kind and a taste for over-the-top mad scenes?’

‘He’s moved up to arson attempts now. Equally unconvincing, I’m glad to say. Anyway, he’s coming in for a few days and I’d like to try to make sure he settles down without too much difficulty. I seem to remember he used to like craftwork. Would it be all right to send him along as soon as he arrives this morning?’

‘Of course. The workshop’s just the place for an aspiring fire-raiser. Shall I leave some paraffin out or will he be bringing his own?’

Aileen was used to Jenny’s manner and made no reply beyond a smile. She made no attempt to explain her real reason for wanting Gary sent to the workshop immediately he arrived at the Unit. It was as if everything connected with the boy had been contaminated by the secret that Aileen concealed even from herself as far as possible: her irrational identification of Gary Dunn with the child she had conceived with Raymond. That simply wasn’t a matter she could mention, even to Jenny, and this prohibition created others, until Aileen found herself acting in a devious manner that was quite foreign to her.

After discussing the matter with the consultant the day before, Aileen had been able to phone Pamela Haynes and tell her that Gary would be admitted to the Unit for a period of ‘observation’. The social worker was due to bring him in between nine and ten o’clock that morning. Aileen was tied up with a therapy group until half past ten, but as soon as that was over she made her way to the ward where Gary had been allocated a bed which was unoccupied for a few days pending the arrival of a patient from another hospital. She hurried through the sitting room, painted in the deep pastel green from which the ward took its name, and quickly located the boy’s bed. On the counterpane lay a blue canvas bag containing Gary Dunn’s few worldly goods. Aileen sorted through them like a customs officer. She found what she was looking for almost immediately.

She did not speak to the boy until after lunch, when he was brought to the sitting room in Yellow Ward to take part in a group therapy session. She thought that she had prepared herself adequately for this further encounter, visualizing the moment again and again until its power wore out, but the moment the boy entered the room she felt as though she were standing at the edge of an abyss with him at the other side, calling out to her in a silent scream, like the whistles only dogs can hear. No preparation or visualization, nothing she could do, had any power against that naked reality. This time the resemblance to Raymond seemed, for the moment or two that the sensation lasted, so strong that Aileen was tempted for the first time to wonder if it might not be real. But she immediately dismissed the idea with horror. That way, she knew, lay madness.

Yellow Ward was on the second floor of the Unit. The outer wall, like all those in the building, consisted of a pattern of rectangular panels, half of them panes of glass and the rest opaque. This chessboard design covered the length of both sides of the Unit without concessions to the size or shape of the rooms inside. In the sitting room there was one sliver of window at floor level and a patch of another crouching in one corner of the ceiling, together with a whole pane set just too high to show anything but the tips of the trees lining the drive. The bright yellow paint gave the light in the room a slightly hysterical quality, accentuating the marks on the boy’s face from the beating the other boys at the hostel had given him. But there was a new calmness in his eyes and manner as he took his place in one of the vinyl-covered chairs, and it saddened Aileen to think of what she was going to have to do. But there was no help for it. The boy couldn’t stay, and that was all there was to it.

As on his earlier visits to the Unit, Gary took no part in the discussion, although he listened attentively and tried not to look bored. But Aileen was no longer concerned with involving him in the dynamics of the group. The ordinary rules and methods did not apply in this case. She made no attempt to speak to him until the session was over and they were alone.

‘Well, so here you are,’ she began brightly, sitting down in the chair next to him, its spongy seat still warm and sculpted from the previous posterior. ‘Do you still think it was worth all that effort to get in here?’

The boy frowned and said nothing.

‘What about those voices you were telling me about yesterday?’ Aileen continued. ‘The ones you said told you to set fire to the curtains and not to trust the doctors, not to take your pills and so on. Has anything else like that happened?’

Gary stared at the floor for a while, as though trying to remember.

‘That nurse who brought me here, she was talking to all the people we passed, telling them about me, all the bad things I’ve done. And they agreed. They all said I should kill myself.’

Aileen looked at him in silence.

‘If we’re to help you, Gary,’ she said at last, ‘you must tell us the truth.’

The boy looked up at her for the first time.

‘I have!’

His tone was obstinate, resentful. His eyes held hers with stubborn persistence. Aileen opened her suede shoulder-bag and took out a book wrapped in a dirty sheet of brown paper torn roughly at the edges. She removed it, revealing a bright glossy cover with the title Schizophrenia: What It Is And What It Isn’t. On the fly-leaf there was a gummed sheet printed ‘Hammersmith Public Libraries’ with a list of rubber-stamped dates, the last being several months earlier, in the middle of July. Aileen consulted the index and flicked through the pages to a chapter headed ‘Symptoms’.

‘ “Aural hallucinations”,’ she read aloud. ‘ “One of the commonest symptoms of schizophrenia. Patients may complain of hearing voices telling them to kill themselves, or not to take their medication, or not to trust their doctor. At other times their family or strangers may be heard discussing them in a cold and threatening way.” ’

‘You’re not going to send me away again, are you?’ the boy broke out.

His voice was trembling, his eyes a wild glitter.

‘That depends on you. This is not a hostel, you know. It’s a hospital. People come here to get better, and we can’t help you get better if you go on pretending. Do you understand?’

The boy nodded without looking at her.

‘Why did you borrow this book?’ Aileen asked casually.

‘She wrote it down, that word.’

He pointed to the title of the book.

‘Who did?’

‘Pam.’

‘Pamela Haynes? Your social worker?’

The boy nodded grudgingly.

‘You saw her write the word “schizophrenia”?’

‘She went outside to talk to someone.’

‘And you looked at her notepad while she was gone?’

‘You won’t send me away, will you?’ he pleaded. ‘He’ll kill me if you do!’

‘Who’ll kill you?’

‘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.