The Tryst

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 she, Aileen, who had refused to be warm and open and intimate all along. Well, here was a perfect chance to set matters straight.

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 Daily Mail reader’s point of view, mental illness is like AIDS. Anyone who gets it had it coming to them anyway.’

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 you, do you?’

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?’

For a moment, a fraction of a second, Aileen was tempted to tell her, to open up completely and admit the mysterious and illicit identification of this boy with the ghostly child which had followed her about for over fifteen years. But she didn’t. It was partly the sheer magnitude of the task that daunted her, all the painful and confusing background details she would have to relate in order to make sense of what was happening now. But she was also checked by a chilling echo of Douglas’s voice in what Jenny had said. He too had asked her if she didn’t think there might be a danger of her becoming too involved in her work. Aileen winced internally. Jenny Wilcox and Douglas Macklin were so different in every way that the idea of their agreeing on anything at all seemed tantamount to a proof that it must be true.

‘I just can’t believe that in this day and age someone can just pop up from nowhere like this,’ she responded instead. ‘A person with no name, no identity. I mean, I thought we were all on computers somewhere.’

‘We are! The two things go together. There’s a whole class of invisible people out there now, people with no name, no address, no job, no hope. Their last contact with the world we live in is by claiming social security benefits, which is one reason why the Government is making it as difficult as possible for them to do so. Because once they let go of that, they disappear totally, which is exactly what Thatcher wants. You create an underclass with no rights or privileges whatsoever and then threaten the members of the lower divisions of the social league with relegation to it if they dare complain about the lousy rights and privileges they have got. Just take a walk along the Embankment down by the Festival Hall some evening! Upstairs in the big glass hi-fi the bow ties and fur coats are sipping wait wain in the interval of listening to Andre and the RPO cream off some more of possibly-the-greatest-classics-in-the-world. Meanwhile, twenty feet below, a few hundred human derelicts are huddling up for the night in their cardboard packing cases. It’s like a fucking George Grosz cartoon, except it’s not Berlin in the thirties, it’s London in the eighties, right here under our noses. And no one gives a fuck.’

‘We’re drinking white wine,’ Aileen pointed out.

Jenny looked at her with genuine puzzlement.

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

But before Aileen had a chance to reply, the bar was taken over by music loud enough to make it unnecessary if not impossible. Above a synthesized beat like the clanking of an electronic dustbin lid, a choir of disembodied ghouls wailed vaguely at intervals, random bursts of demented laughter zinged about like machine-gun fire and a voice straining upwards in a manic shriek urged everyone to ‘Go for it! Go for it! Hup, hup, hup!’ Aileen signalled for the bill, over which she and Jenny had a gentle tussle won by the younger woman.

‘I just can’t listen to that stuff,’ Aileen commented once they were outside.

‘You’re not supposed to listen to it. It’s like the background music to a film, the film of your life. You use it to add an extra dimension to the moment, to focus your style.’

‘I’m just too old,’ Aileen replied, putting on a slightly comic moue of self-deprecation.

‘You’re as old as you feel.’

‘That’s the whole trouble. I wish you only felt as old as you are. I’m not actually very old, not really, but I feel ancient. Sometimes I’m almost tempted to believe in reincarnation. It seems the only way of accounting for how tired I get. It’s as if I’ve had many previous existences and not stayed dead long enough in between.’

Jenny’s mouth opened to reveal an expanse of pink upper gum and the street echoed with her laughter.

Although the great heart-to-heart talk hadn’t happened, Aileen nevertheless felt better as she drove home. She’d had a chance to air a few of her preoccupations, at least, and the wine had made her feel pleasantly drowsy and inconsequential. The problems of the day no longer seemed quite so acute. In fact for some reason she found herself thinking about the graffiti she had seen on the door at the Unit that afternoon. She repeated the words over and over to herself as she drove along: eat, shit, die, box. They didn’t seem to make any obvious sense, but there was something intriguing about them. Perhaps the last two belonged together, she mused. Could ‘die-box’ be a poetic formula for a coffin, like the riddling compounds in Anglo-Saxon verse? In that case the words looked like a sort of street haiku, a bleak inventory of human life. You eat, you shit, they bury you. And if you’re a middle-aged childless woman, she thought, you bleed as well: uselessly, uselessly, month by month.

When Aileen parked the red Mini opposite the house, Mr Griffiths, her next-door neighbour, was at work on the tall hedge which screened his property at the front. Standing on a short step-ladder, he was busily shaving away the last of the summer growth with an electric trimmer so as to make the hedge look as much as possible like a wall. Mr Griffiths’s lawn was mown so relentlessly that Aileen sometimes wondered why he didn’t just replace it with artificial turf and have done. But that was to miss the point, of course. Everyone needs a hobby. Mr Griffiths’s hobby was forcing Nature to play dead. They exchanged ritual greetings as Aileen passed. The nights were drawing in already, Mr Griffiths said. They were indeed, agreed Aileen. For a moment Mr Griffiths paused, regarding her with a vacuous smile as though about to venture some further confidence, perhaps to the effect that he wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t a frost. But in the end he must have decided that this would be coming on a bit strong, and turned his attentions to the hedge instead.

As Aileen opened the front door, the murmur of the television revealed that Douglas was home, lapping up his daily instalment of the thinking man’s soap opera.

‘… further details as they become known. And that’s the six o’clock news from the BBC. Mrs Thatcher told her critics, “We must make ourselves rich enough to be able to afford to be compassionate”, and the Duchess of York made quite a splash as she became the first Royal to try out a water slide when she opened Britain’s biggest-ever theme park. She said …’

To Aileen’s surprise, however, the living room was empty. Seeing a light on, she walked across to the kitchen, but there was no sign of Douglas there either, nor a half-finished glass of Scotch on the table in the living room. Then she realized that his coat and umbrella had been missing from the rack in the hall. Her puzzlement was just beginning to turn to alarm when the phone rang.

‘Yes?’

‘Why don’t you give the number when you answer the phone? It’s no use just saying “Yes.” ’

‘Douglas? Where are you?’

‘At work. I’ll be late tonight. There’s a lot of things to do before I leave for Boston.’

‘Douglas, the television’s on, and the light in the kitchen — ’

‘Well, of course. They’re on the automatic timer, aren’t they?’

Then Aileen remembered that after the second break-in, three months earlier, Douglas had bought a complicated electronic box of tricks that switched on and off at random to simulate occupancy.

‘Well, it doesn’t normally happen,’ she protested.

‘That’s because normally I get home in time to switch it off before the cycle starts. There’s a button which overrides the timer. I explained all this to you when we got it.’

After he had hung up, Aileen stood quite still for a moment, feeling the house gradually expanding all around her, unfolding like a flower in the knowledge that her husband would be absent for several hours. All its spaces were open now, all the lines of tension smoothed away. She found the switch controlling the timer circuit and turned it off. Then she poured herself a glass of wine and took it upstairs to her study, which overlooked the rectangle of gardens enclosed by the houses on the adjacent streets. Overhead, the landing lights of the planes on their flight path into Heathrow were picked out against the livid grey sky, three of them in line and a fourth just turning out of the holding pattern like a star far off in the east. Douglas was flying off to Boston the next day. At the thought, the relaxed spaces of the house turned chilly. For the paradox of their relationship, the bitter truth that Aileen had finally been forced to accept, was that after twenty-four hours away from her husband she began to suffer from withdrawal symptoms, notably the most terrible depression. Without her domestic bully around, Aileen’s mind started to wander. His presence increasingly drove her to distraction, but to her dismay she had found that his absence was even less bearable. Perhaps he felt something similar. That would explain why, despite everything, they had never actually broken up. There seemed to be no reason now why they shouldn’t just carry on as they were, eventually turning into another old married couple, too exhausted and frightened to do each other much damage.

When she had finished her wine Aileen began to think about dinner. Only then did she realize that it was Thursday, when they normally did their weekly bulk buy, and so there would be little or nothing to eat in the house. She couldn’t face going to Waitrose, so in the end she decided to pop down to the Polish delicatessen at Turnham Green and get something simple for tonight. By the time she got back it was dark. She half-expected to see Douglas’s Volvo outside, but there was no sign of it. She got out of the Mini and started across the street, glancing up at the house. Aileen had never reconciled herself to the appearance of the place, quite unlike its neighbours, with fake Gothic doors and windows. The pointed arches and elaborate stone dressings, together with the slated roof and the black-painted trim, gave the place a look of hypocritical religiosity. The nearest street-lamp was some distance away, and largely screened by a large plane tree, but there was an almost full moon that night, as Aileen could have predicted from her recent insomnia. Its light silvered the path and the scrap of lawn, rendering them distinct but seemingly insubstantial.

Douglas Macklin regularly reminded his wife of her shortcomings, which included not giving the number when she answered the phone, not sheathing food in plastic before putting it in the fridge, leaving lights on and taps running, muddling his socks with hers in the wash, and slamming the front door so hard that it bounced open again. Since she had already been ticked off once that evening, Aileen was relieved that he had not come home while she was out, because when she reached the door she discovered that it was indeed open. She could just hear him say, ‘It does rather tend to undermine the value of having a sophisticated timing device to deter burglars if you’re going to leave the front door standing wide open, you know.’ This final exaggeration was designed to lure her into protesting that the door was not wide open, only a crack. ‘Oh, I see!’ Douglas would then reply, pulling out the sixteen-foot sarcasm stop. ‘Well, that’s all right, then, isn’t it? Perfectly safe!’

She pushed her way into the hall, set the bag of groceries down and groped for the light switch. It never ceased to surprise her that things in the dark remained where they were supposed to be, as though without the compulsion of the light they might go wandering about like untethered animals. The switch didn’t work, however. Aileen flicked the lever back and forth several times, but no light appeared. Then a sudden rush of sound in the darkness at her feet startled her as the bag of shopping subsided. The bulb must have gone, she thought. Unless in turning off the automatic timer she had somehow disturbed the rest of the circuits in the house. She stood there wondering what to do, listening to the murmurs of the night. A moment ago all had seemed dead quiet, but now she discovered that what she had taken for silence was in fact a patchwork of noises: the murmur of traffic from the main road, the fridge whining in the kitchen, the gurgles of the central heating, the rustle of her breath, her rapid heartbeats. And then, somewhere upstairs, a sound that made her skin crawl.

This time she knew that it was not the water pipes. The cry was brief and not repeated, but even in that instant it was piercingly familiar. To her amazement and horror, she found herself turning towards the stairs, putting her foot on the worn patch in the centre of the lowest step. As she moved upwards like a sleep-walker, the dimness of the hallway gradually closed up until it was wholly dark. Beyond the local clamour of the stairs and her thumping heart, all seemed silent, crouched and waiting. She was well aware that what she was doing was absolute madness, but she had no choice.

She continued to climb, one hand held out in front of her, until her groping foot could feel no further step. She could now see nothing, but knew she must be standing on the landing. Gradually her breath grew steadier and she felt her body relax. The reality of the sound she had heard began to grow abstract and doubtful. It must have been the pipes, she thought. What else could it have been? There was no baby in the house. Then a door opened and the accumulated darkness gathered itself up and rushed her. She was gripped by a terror so great that she could do nothing but stand there, trembling and ready to vomit, as it went barging past, sending her reeling backwards down the stairs, head over heels in a gradual graceless slither.

When she sat up, the front door was fully open and the hallway calmly illuminated by the moonlight. She crawled over to the phone and punched the numbered buttons. Only when Douglas came on the line, inquiring rather curtly what she wanted, only then, absurdly enough, did she begin to scream.