The Asylum (25 page)

The Unit

‘Look!’

Rami’s cry made Jan jump. He had been sitting on the floor, calmly and quietly drumming along to her guitar chords, almost lulled into a soporific state by the rhythm, but she had suddenly stopped playing. She had got up from the bed and gone over to the desk by the window.

She was pointing at something. ‘Have you seen my guardian animal?’

Jan stopped drumming. ‘What?’

‘He’s out there on the grass.’

Jan had no idea what she was talking about, but he got up and looked out of the window. He saw a small greyish-brown creature darting around on the lawn. Every so often it stiffened and looked around, then it was off again.

‘It’s a squirrel,’ Jan said.

‘Squirrels bring luck, according to my grandmother,’ Rami said. ‘I’ve conjured him up … I can send him off to freedom.’

And almost at that same moment the squirrel dashed off towards the fence. It jumped up and gripped the wire netting with its paws, then slipped through the barbed wire before taking an insane leap towards the branch of a tree outside the grounds. It grabbed the tip of the branch, swung itself inwards towards the tree and disappeared.

‘There you go, freedom …’ She looked at Jan. ‘Those were my thoughts, escaping over the fence. Now they are free!’

Jan gazed at Rami, wondering if she was serious. She was. She wasn’t smiling, at any rate.

He suddenly realized that he had leaned forward, and was standing very close to her now. He was aware of the smell of her, a mixture of grass and pine resin. It was beginning to feel slightly embarrassing. He had to say something. ‘So your … your name is just Rami?’

‘I used to be called Alice, but Rami is fine.’ She went back over to the bed and picked up the guitar, played a couple of chords and glanced up at Jan. ‘Do you know what we ought to do?’

‘No, what?’

‘We should do a gig. We’ll practise a bit more, then we’ll play for the ghosts.’

‘What ghosts?’

‘All those who are imprisoned in here.’

Jan nodded, but he didn’t regard himself as a prisoner. For him, the fence provided protection from the rest of the world.

Suddenly Rami’s door opened and a woman with black hair and big, shiny glasses poked her head in. ‘Alice?’

Rami looked defiant. ‘What?’

‘Don’t forget our counselling session today. Three o’clock.’

Rami said nothing.

‘We’re just going to have a chat,’ the woman said. ‘I know it will make you feel better.’

The door closed.

‘The Psychobabbler,’ Rami said. ‘I hate her.’

On his fifth morning in the Unit Jan was sitting in his room working on his comic strip about the Secret Avenger and the Gang of Four. The sheets on his bed were in a heap. They were dry now, but they had been wet when he’d woken up.

The diary was also beside him on the desk, the one Rami had given him. He had stuck the Polaroid of himself on the front cover, and had begun to write in it. He had written about things that had
happened
over the last week, things that Rami had said or his own thoughts, and he had ended up with several pages covered with line after line of words. Weird.

Suddenly there was a knock on his door. He did what Rami had done and refused to answer, but of course it was opened anyway.

A bearded face appeared – it was the psychologist. The one called Tony. ‘Morning, Jan. Time we had a little chat, you and I.’

Jan stiffened. ‘What about?’

‘About a boy called Jan Hauger, I think.’ Tony smiled in the middle of his beard. ‘Come on, let’s go up to my office.’

Jan stayed where he was, sitting at his desk with his pen and paper; he remembered the warning on the telephone. He had no intention of telling Tony anything.

But the psychologist waited patiently, and in the end he won. Jan got up and went with him. They walked through the dining room, then up the stairs to a corridor lined with offices.

The psychologist led Jan into one of them. ‘Take a seat.’

Then he sat down behind the desk and read through a folder for a couple of minutes. Jan sat in silence, staring out of the window. The sky was blue, the sun was shining on pools of melting snow and ice in the car park.

Suddenly the psychologist looked up at him. ‘Where did you get the sleeping tablets from?’

Jan was taken by surprise, and answered automatically, ‘They were my mum’s.’

‘And the razor blade – was that your dad’s?’

Jan nodded.

‘Should we interpret that symbolically in some way?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

Jan didn’t understand, and Tony leaned forward to explain. ‘Well … You swallowed your mother’s tablets and slit your wrists with your father’s razor blade; was that some kind of protest, perhaps? A protest against your parents?’

Jan hadn’t thought of that. He didn’t think about it now either – he simply shook his head and said quietly, ‘I knew where they were … Where they kept them.’

‘OK … But if we can just summarize what happened a few days ago: you took fifteen sleeping tablets, slit your wrists and jumped into the lake just below your house?’

Jan didn’t say anything. He supposed that was correct. But the things the psychologist claimed he had done already felt incredibly vague, like a dream. Like a comic strip.
The Secret Avenger and the Pond
.

‘It’s a pond,’ he said eventually.

‘OK, so the lake is a pond,’ Tony said. ‘But a person can drown perfectly well in a pond too, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Mm.’

Jan didn’t want to think about how it had felt down there when he couldn’t get any air into his lungs. He looked at the carpet underneath the desk. It was green.

‘Anyway, you were pulled out of the pond by a couple of kind people who happened to be passing, and you were taken to the local hospital in an ambulance. Then you were transferred here, to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Unit. And now we’re sitting in my office.’

‘Mm.’

Silence.

‘You wanted to die in that pond,’ Tony said. ‘Do you still want to die?’

Jan looked out of the window again. Beyond the car park he could see the huge buildings that made up the hospital complex, several storeys high and constructed of steel and glass. The sun was shining on the windows – it had felt like winter when he jumped into the icy water, but now it looked like spring out there.

This was a secure world. He was locked up, but he was
safe
.

‘No,’ he said. He knew it was true; here inside the Unit he didn’t want to die.

‘Good,’ said Tony. ‘That’s excellent, Jan.’ He wrote down a couple of sentences on his notepad. ‘But things were different a few days ago. How did you feel then?’

‘Bad,’ said Jan.

‘And why did you feel bad?’

Jan sighed. He intended to say as little as possible about this. He could have said a great deal about the Gang of Four and all the rest of it – he could probably have talked for several hours – but nothing was going to be improved by a lot of talk. ‘No friends,’ was all he said.

‘You haven’t got any friends?’ Tony said. ‘Why not?’

‘Dunno … They think I’m stupid.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because I sit and draw stuff.’

‘You draw?’ Tony said. ‘And what else do you do in your spare time?’

‘I read … and I play the drums a bit.’

‘In a band?’

‘In the school orchestra.’

‘So haven’t you got any friends in the orchestra?’

Jan shook his head.

‘So you feel very lonely, Jan … as if you’re the loneliest person in the world?’

Jan nodded.

‘And do you think this loneliness is your own fault?’

Jan shrugged his shoulders. ‘Suppose so.’

‘Why?’

Jan thought about it. ‘Because everybody else has got friends.’

‘Have they?’

Jan nodded again. ‘And if they can do it, then I should be able to do it.’

‘Have you
never
had friends?’

Jan gazed out of the window. ‘I used to have one friend, in my class. But he moved away.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Hans.’

‘And how long were you two friends?’

‘As long as I can remember … Since nursery, I think.’

‘So that means you
can
make friends,’ said Tony. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you.’

Jan stared down at the desk, and considered saying,
I wet myself at night, that’s what’s wrong with me
. But he kept quiet.

‘There is
nothing
wrong with you, Jan,’ Tony said again. He leaned back. ‘And we’re going to have lots of chats about how we can help you to feel better. OK?’

‘OK.’

Jan was allowed to leave. On his way back to the stairs he passed other doors and read the names and long titles: Gunnar Toll, Clinical Psychologist; Ludmila Nilsson, Medical Practitioner; Emma Halevi, Clinical Psychologist; Peter Brink, Counsellor. None of the names meant anything to him.

Lynx

Jan woke up on his back on a hard floor, and wondered for a moment where he was. Not at home. He had lain down somewhere fully dressed in his thick jacket, hat and scarf. Then he had fallen asleep. But where?

There was a low ceiling above his head – a ceiling made of reinforced concrete.

Then he remembered: he was inside the bunker in the forest. He had intended to have a little rest, that was all, but he was still here.

Stupid. Dangerous.

He looked down his legs and saw that the steel door was ajar, with his boots almost sticking out through the opening. Outside he could see the greyness of the forest, beneath an equally grey sky. The sun wasn’t up yet, but it was on its way.

Jan was suddenly afraid that William had crept out into the darkness, but when he turned his head he saw a thick bundle of blankets half a metre away. He could hear the sound of soft, regular breathing: William was still fast asleep.

The air inside the bunker was cold, and there was no warmth in Jan’s body either. His legs felt numb; he lifted them one by one, moving them slowly to try to get the muscles going. He sat up slowly. He didn’t feel rested, just stiff and dirty.

Last night he had experienced a heady sensation of victory, when the plan worked and his fantasy became a reality. This morning everything felt completely wrong. He was lying in a bunker next
to
a child he had locked up the previous day – what the hell was he doing?

William shifted under his blankets, and Jan went rigid. Was he waking up? No, not yet.

Jan took Roboman outside and recorded three new messages, telling William that everything was fine. He set the toy to standby so that William’s own voice would activate it. Then he crept back inside and placed it on the floor.

He heard a faint cough, then a little hand emerged from the blankets and groped around on the floor. Jan quickly backed away, slipped outside and bolted the steel door shut.

Forty-six hours
, he thought, looking at his watch.

It was only ten to seven – which meant there were some thirty hours left before he would let William go. A long time.

Jan arrived at Lynx fifteen minutes later. No one else was there yet, but he had his own key and could let himself in.

The whole place was silent, with no children’s laughter echoing through the rooms.

He switched on the coffee machine, flopped down in an armchair and closed his eyes. The image of William’s hand groping around for someone to hold on to was still fixed in his mind.

Just before half past seven the main door opened and Nina walked in. They looked at each other wearily; Nina’s eyes were shadowed with anxiety. ‘The children aren’t coming in today,’ she said. ‘We’ve placed them with other nurseries temporarily.’

‘OK.’

‘Have you heard anything? Any news?’

Jan looked at her and opened his mouth. He felt a sudden desire to tell her everything. He would tell her that William was locked inside a camouflaged bunker deep in the forest, that he was bound to be a little bit scared but that he was completely unharmed, because Jan had planned the whole thing meticulously.

And the most important part: he would tell her
why
all this had happened. It wasn’t about William – not really.

It was about Alice Rami.

‘There’s something I need to tell you—’ he began, but he was interrupted by a sudden rattling noise out in the hallway as the front door opened. A police officer walked in, a uniformed constable. He was the same man who had told Jan the previous evening about a horrible discovery on a forest track some years ago.

Jan closed his mouth and straightened up. He was a reliable classroom assistant once more. It was a difficult role, but it still worked.

The police officer’s mobile started to ring. He moved into a side room to take the call.

Jan looked Nina in the eye. ‘I’m going to volunteer … to join the search party, I mean.’

Nina simply nodded – and she never asked what he had been going to tell her.

The sun slowly rose above the roof of Lynx. A blue and white police van arrived and began to function as some kind of liaison unit out in the car park. More and more police officers, military personnel and civilians began arriving at the nursery; they would have a cup of coffee, then head out into the forest. Jan went along too.

The search party got under way at quarter past nine. Police, members of the local army defence unit and volunteers in a long line. Two dogs would be brought in after lunch.

Jan stood somewhere in the middle listening to a police officer outlining how the search for William would be conducted: ‘Our approach is calm and methodical.’ Crevices in the rocks, dense fir trees, areas where water had collected – everything was to be searched.

The chain of people was going to begin with a broad sweep along the lake, Jan realized. When would they start searching on the other side of the ridge, where the bunker was?

The mood was subdued as they slowly moved forward through the forest.

At half past eleven a whistle suddenly blew. Evidently the search had been called off, and immediately there was a buzz among the participants. Had the boy been found? Dead or alive?

Nobody knew, but the orderly line began to break up as people gathered in smaller groups. Jan stood alone among the trees until he heard a woman shouting: ‘Hauger! Is there a Jan Hauger here?’

‘Yes?’ he shouted back.

It was a police officer; she came striding up to Jan through the undergrowth. ‘There’s a meeting down at the nursery,’ she said. ‘They want you there.’

It was an order, and Jan’s blood ran cold.
They’ve found him
, he thought. ‘Why?’ he asked.

‘No idea … Would you like me to walk you down?’

‘No,’ Jan said quickly. ‘I can find my own way.’

Nina, Sigrid and three other classroom assistants were sitting in the staffroom when he got back to Lynx. Two uniformed officers were also there, along with a man in civilian clothes; Jan realized immediately that he too was a police officer.

Jan unbuttoned his jacket and sat down next to Nina. ‘The search party is taking a break,’ he said.

Nina nodded; she already knew that. ‘Something’s happened … They want to talk to the staff, one at a time.’

‘Why?’

Nina lowered her voice: ‘Apparently the parents got a package in the post today, with William’s little hat inside … So the police think someone has taken him.’