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.