I am almost sure it’s true, and that you are the person I met in another town in a place called the Unit; I had the room next door to you. We used to play music together, and we told each other secrets; we also promised that when we got out of there, each of us would do something for the other person. We had a kind of pact.
I would really like to see you again and to talk about our pact, because I kept my side of the bargain, and I think you did too...
‘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.