The Tryst (9 page)

‘Hey!’ he called, his expression mocking and exultant. ‘Hey, do you know what
time
it is?’

As he spoke, the vicious pent-up laughter that glittered in his eyes and twisted the muscles of his sweating face to breaking-point burst out, mutilating the words almost beyond recognition. He stood there, jerking and twitching all over, staring at the boy with such intensity it seemed he might be about to explode. Steve shook his head. The man’s face screwed itself into a fierce grimace of contemptuous hostility, as if the boy was only pretending not to know, just to spite him. The sarcastic grin became bitterer than ever. ‘What’s the point in keeping up this pathetic farce?’ it seemed to say. ‘You don’t think you fool
me
, do you?’ A gap opened in the traffic and Steve took off, just beating a van that appeared out of nowhere. By the time he reached the other side and looked back, the man had gone.

Jimmy, Dave, Alex and Tracy were watching TV, the floor around them littered with cans of lager and take-out trays of chips with curry sauce. While he was wondering how they’d been able to pay for these luxuries, Steve realized that he hadn’t come up with a story to explain the extra money. To his surprise however, Jimmy – usually stingily suspicious where money was concerned – didn’t even bother to count the coins Steve gave him.

‘What’s this?’ he jeered. ‘You rob someone?’

For some reason this comment made Dave laugh, which effectively put an end to everything else for a while. Dave was not easily amused, but on the occasions when he did indulge he went all the way, whooping and yelping and howling, clutching his gut, drumming his heels on the floor and banging his forehead against the wall. But they were all in form that night, the stotters, for although the old woman Jimmy had selected as their target had been carrying less than he’d hoped, the hit itself had been a complete success and the take was still enough to pay for this modest celebration. The idea of using Tracy as bait had been fucking brill, if Jimmy did say so himself. People were always more trustful of girls, whatever they looked like. With attention focused on her, Dave was able to move in and get to work without any bother, while Alex and Jimmy kept look-out. No sweat! Jimmy couldn’t see any reason why they shouldn’t regularly supplement their income in the same way. Sooner or later they were bound to pick on someone who was carrying serious money, like that first time or even better. Then Jimmy would be off so fast these wankers wouldn’t see him for dust. In keeping with the stotters’ general policy towards the boy, Steve was kept out of this. All he knew was that everyone was in a good mood, that everything seemed to be going right. When Tracy passed out with one leg resting against his, warming him with a gentle radiance that penetrated his damp jeans like sunlight, the boy’s happiness was complete.

The tasks which Ernest Matthews asked Steve to do for him became increasingly various as the weeks went by. As well as the supermarket, Steve visited the chemist, the newsagent, the stationer, the ironmonger, and the tobacconist’s, where he passed as eighteen without any problem. He also went into the library and applied for a reader’s ticket in order to keep the old man supplied with books.

‘What do you want to read all these for?’ Steve asked with a touch of resentment one day, after carrying back a particularly bulky load.

‘They’re all about the war,’ Ernest Matthews replied. ‘Written by famous historians.’

Steve wondered what a storian was. Someone who told stories, presumably.

The ultimate accolade came when he was sent to the post office to cash a countersigned pension cheque. By then almost a month had passed, and Steve had become thoroughly at home in the house in Grafton Avenue, where Ernest Matthews lived all alone in one room in the basement. He had even been taught a special way of ringing the doorbell so that the old man would know it was him. He wasn’t quite sure why this was so important, and the question interested him the more in that he suspected that the answer might also explain why Matthews refused ever to venture outside the house itself. The old man’s attempts to account for this no longer satisfied Steve.

‘It’s my legs, you see. They’re not what they were. I find it hard to get about these days. Still, that’s the way it goes, isn’t it? Have you ever thought what it would be like if it went the
other
way, eh? If we were all born like I am now and then grew younger and healthier every day? And not just us, but everything around us too. Just imagine that! If every day a block of buildings disappeared and there was a green field there in its place. If there were fewer people around with every year that passed, so you’d get to know them better, of course, and every new face would be a great event. If the roads gradually shrank down to lanes where children could play the day away, and we all knew that tomorrow would be better still, and we’d be fresher and keener yet to enjoy it. Eh? Just imagine that!’

Steve nodded, although he couldn’t see the attraction himself. He knew that his problems would all be solved once he ceased to be a child. But in any case, that was beside the point, a deliberate attempt by Matthews to distract attention from his initial statement. Steve wasn’t fooled by the old man’s claims about the state of his legs. He moved about the house with no sign of awkwardness or discomfort whatsoever. Steve didn’t point this out, however, or demand to know the truth of the matter. In the end it emerged of its own accord one day as the boy was leaving.

‘You haven’t ever noticed anybody hanging about outside, I suppose?’ Matthews asked before opening the front door. His tone was casual, but the intensity of his eyes gave him away. ‘Anybody watching the house, following you when you leave, that sort of thing?’

Steve immediately thought of the grinning man, although he hadn’t really been watching the house or following him. Ernest Matthews had noticed the boy’s hesitation.

‘You
have
?’

Steve nodded.

‘When? Where?’

‘The first time. And after that, when I was going back.’

Something had happened deep inside the old man’s eyes, as if a blind had been drawn down.

‘What did he look like?’

The boy considered for a moment.

‘He walks funny, like he wants to pee. He smiles all the time too, only it’s not really a smile.’

The old man was trembling with agitation.

‘And he was watching this house, you say?’

In the end Steve nodded again. It was too late to correct himself now. He would have to stick to the story he’d told. It might well be true, anyway. The old man seemed to have been expecting something of the sort.

‘Do you know him, then?’ the boy asked.

The old man sighed deeply.

‘Oh yes, I know him all right. It’s a long story, lad. A long sad story. But I suppose you must hear it. It wouldn’t be fair otherwise, asking you to come here and help me. It wouldn’t be right, not if –’

He broke off, looking deeply troubled.

‘But how
can
it be right? What if your mum and dad found out? What would they think of me?’

‘That’s all right,’ Steve assured him. ‘The people I live with, they don’t care what happens to me.’

His only fear was that the old man might tell him to stop coming to the house every week. Matthews looked at him for a moment, as though considering what to do.

‘I’ll have to tell you the whole story,’ he said finally, nodding to himself. ‘Once you’ve heard it, you can decide whether you want to carry on coming or not.’

‘I do!’ the boy cried.

‘You can’t say that now. Not till you know what happened and who he is, that man you’ve seen. For now, just keep out of his way, if you can!’

He unbolted the front door and opened it cautiously.

‘Keep out of his way!’ he repeated as Steve scampered down the steps.

It was a clear freezing night. The sky seemed to be full of eyes.

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.