The Tryst Read online

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  In fact things were starting to happen at almost exactly that moment, but Aileen was not to know about them until Pam Haynes telephoned her shortly after eight o’clock the following morning.

  Aileen was sitting alone at the dining-table, smoking the first of the three cigarettes she allowed herself daily. Except when Douglas cheated her of it by leaving late, this interval between his departure for work and her own was like a second sleep, a moment of stillness and solitude that made everything that followed possible. It was a fine morning. The room was divided in two by a beam of sunlight through which the cigarette smoke unwound in lazy coils. At the extreme upper corner of the window a patch of blue sky was just visible. Aileen therefore felt particularly resentful when the phone went off like an alarm clock.

  ‘It’s Mrs Haynes,’ announced a breathy female voice. ‘I don’t know if you remember but I’m Gary Dunn’s social worker. I tried calling the Unit but there was no one there who knew about Gary and I found you in the book. I’m at the Assessment Centre, there’s been some trouble.’

  Aileen listened to the dull thumping of her blood, amplified by the telephone receiver.

  ‘What sort of trouble?’

  ‘You couldn’t stop by here, could you? I wouldn’t ask except it’s actually quite urgent. It’s a bit difficult to discuss on the phone the way things are this end, if you know what I mean. It’s not far really. Only it’s got to be before nine, you see.’

  Aileen stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray decorated with a design showing an eager swain pursuing a coy nymph through a pastoral landscape.

  ‘He’s all right, is he?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Well, more or less.’

  ‘Give me the address.’

  Outside, the sky was already filling up with cloud. By mid-morning it would be completely overcast. It never happened the other way round, she thought. There was obviously some law at work, one of the many whose effects she observed without ever understanding what had caused them.

  The local authority Observation and Assessment Centre for Disturbed Adolescents was situated in Fulham, not far from Putney Bridge. Pamela Haynes had been strictly accurate in saying that it was not far, but in the rush-hour traffic every mile took the best part of ten minutes. Aileen spent the time reviewing what she knew about the case. Pamela Haynes had originally referred Gary to the Unit back in July, claiming that he ‘exhibited symptoms of confusion, disorientation and oral hallucinations of a schizophrenic kind’. Doctors value the rare and exotic as much as anyone else, and the prospect of a patient suffering from hallucinations of taste caused a brief flutter of interest, which promptly collapsed when further inquiry revealed that Mrs Haynes had confused ‘oral’ and ‘aural’. What she meant, as she put it in the course of a conversation with the consultant psychiatrist, was that Gary was ‘screwed up and hearing things’.

  The boy’s social history made it clear that there was no shortage of reasons for his problems, whatever they might be. Quite apart from his involvement in the murder, the exact extent of which was still unclear, the seventeen-year-old seemed to be all alone in the world, without a home or a history, friends or family. Bureaucratically he didn’t exist. The various agencies concerned with housing and feeding the homeless had no record of a Gary Dunn, and the instances of the name thrown up by official databases all proved to be dead ends. The police lost interest once it became apparent that he wasn’t going to tell them anything they didn’t already know about the murder. He was taken into care by the local authority’s social services department, who assigned him to Pamela Haynes’s supervision. After a few weeks she contacted the Adolescent Psychiatric Unit. No one there took the social worker’s diagnosis of schizophrenia seriously, but there was no question that the boy did need care and treatment. The consultant’s psychiatric assistant, who conducted the initial interview, prescribed a course of anti-depressant drugs and arranged for out-patient treatment consisting of group and occupational therapy.

  Aileen’s first contact with the boy had been when one of the nurses brought him into the ward sitting room in the middle of her morning open group, a low-key affair providing general supportive counselling. The moment Aileen caught sight of him, she felt as though someone had laid a velvet-gloved hand on her heart: a touch that was soft, gentle, warm, yet almost unbearably intrusive and intimate. There were at least a dozen people in the room, yet she felt utterly isolated. The surroundings seemed to shimmer and tremble as though she were about to faint. Nor would that have been very surprising, given the strength of her conviction that the boy standing in front of her was her dead child.

  It lasted only a few moments. Then, as with deja vu, reality closed ranks and blandly asserted that nothing of the sort had happened, that she must have imagined the whole thing. Aileen’s new patient was an unremarkable adolescent with the puffy unfinished look of his age, like partially baked dough. His reddish hair was cropped close to the skull in one of the currently fashionable styles that Aileen, who struggled to keep up with these things like someone running after a bus, still associated with conscription or lice. He and the nurse were still only midway across the room, which was how Aileen knew that no more than a few moments had passed.

  In the course of this and subsequent encounters, Aileen noted her observations for the boy’s file. Apart from a predominantly blank or wary expression, his appearance was fairly normal. His level of education was evidently low to non-existent, although he was intelligent enough. He tended to be shy and withdrawn, never speaking unless spoken to, and then usually only a word or two at a time. It was what he said that revealed disturbance. As Aileen was so unwisely to announce to her husband, Gary Dunn had claimed that someone was trying to kill him.

  The Unit’s standard report form contained a box labelled ‘Delusions: systematized/unsystematized’, with space below for further details. Aileen ticked ‘systematized’ and added ‘persecution, guilt (?), ideas of reference’. The consultant psychiatrist would decide, but to Aileen none of this seemed schizoid. The hells in which schizophrenics suffer appallingly real torments look from the outside like a montage cobbled together from a variety of no-hope films featuring leaden plots, unconvincing special effects and rotten acting. But Gary’s story was simple, straightforward and consistent. ‘There’s this bloke, the one who did it. He knows I seen him. He’s after me. He’s going to do me too.’ When asked what this man looked like, the boy replied that he walked funny, like he needed to go to the toilet, and smiled a lot, only it wasn’t a real smile. Aileen highlighted this in her report. Unlike patients suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, who tend to identify their persecutors with anybody and everybody from one of the cleaners to a television announcer, Gary Dunn apparently had a specific individual in mind. As for the famous aural hallucinations, these proved to consist simply of a voice saying such things as ‘You’ll be sorry’, ‘I’ll get you’, and ‘You’ll wind up the same way’. This, too, was quite unlike the sadistic ranting or insinuating murmurs to which schizophrenics are subjected. Finally, Aileen noted that there was no inappropriacy of affect. One characteristic of schizophrenia is that emotional cause and effect gets out of synch. Patients laugh indifferently even as they describe in lurid detail the fiendish schemes which they claim are being devised to bring about their downfall. Gary, on the other hand, evidently found it almost intolerably distressing to talk about the supposed threat to his life. More than once, indeed, Aileen felt almost inclined to doubt whether this was necessarily a delusion. After all, murder had been done and no arrest had been made. The police had released Gary for lack of evidence, but they still suspected that he’d been involved in some way, and probably knew who had done it. Supposing he did, thought Aileen, and the murderer knew that he knew? Then the boy’s life might indeed be in danger.

  Paradoxically, the boy himself would have none of this.

  ‘I’m sick,’ he told Aileen firmly. ‘Sick in the head.’

  At first sight this see
med a positive sign. Psychiatric patients display varying degrees of insight into their 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 i
t 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 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.’