She did not speak to the boy until after lunch, when he was brought to the sitting room in Yellow Ward to take part in a group therapy session. She thought that she had prepared herself adequately for this further encounter, visualizing the moment again and again until its power wore out, but the moment the boy entered the room she felt as though she were standing at the edge of an abyss with him at the other side, calling out to her in a silent scream, like the whistles only dogs can hear. No preparation or visualization, nothing she could do, had any power against that naked reality. This time the resemblance to Raymond seemed, for the moment or two that the sensation lasted, so strong that Aileen was tempted for the first time to wonder if it might not be real. But she immediately dismissed the idea with horror. That way, she knew, lay madness.
Yellow Ward was on the second floor of the Unit. The outer wall, like all those in the building, consisted of a pattern of rectangular panels, half of them panes of glass and the rest opaque. This chessboard design covered the length of both sides of the Unit without concessions to the size or shape of the rooms inside. In the sitting room there was one sliver of window at floor level and a patch of another crouching in one corner of the ceiling, together with a whole pane set just too high to show anything but the tips of the trees lining the drive. The bright yellow paint gave the light in the room a slightly hysterical quality, accentuating the marks on the boy’s face from the beating the other boys at the hostel had given him. But there was a new calmness in his eyes and manner as he took his place in one of the vinyl-covered chairs, and it saddened Aileen to think of what she was going to have to do. But there was no help for it. The boy couldn’t stay, and that was all there was to it.
As on his earlier visits to the Unit, Gary took no part in the discussion, although he listened attentively and tried not to look bored. But Aileen was no longer concerned with involving him in the dynamics of the group. The ordinary rules and methods did not apply in this case. She made no attempt to speak to him until the session was over and they were alone.
‘Well, so here you are,’ she began brightly, sitting down in the chair next to him, its spongy seat still warm and sculpted from the previous posterior. ‘Do you still think it was worth all that effort to get in here?’
The boy frowned and said nothing.
‘What about those voices you were telling me about yesterday?’ Aileen continued. ‘The ones you said told you to set fire to the curtains and not to trust the doctors, not to take your pills and so on. Has anything else like that happened?’
Gary stared at the floor for a while, as though trying to remember.
‘That nurse who brought me here, she was talking to all the people we passed, telling them about me, all the bad things I’ve done. And they agreed. They all said I should kill myself.’
Aileen looked at him in silence.
‘If we’re to help you, Gary,’ she said at last, ‘you must tell us the truth.’
The boy looked up at her for the first time.
‘I have!’
His tone was obstinate, resentful. His eyes held hers with stubborn persistence. Aileen opened her suede shoulder-bag and took out a book wrapped in a dirty sheet of brown paper torn roughly at the edges. She removed it, revealing a bright glossy cover with the title Schizophrenia: What It Is And What It Isn’t. On the fly-leaf there was a gummed sheet printed ‘Hammersmith Public Libraries’ with a list of rubber-stamped dates, the last being several months earlier, in the middle of July. Aileen consulted the index and flicked through the pages to a chapter headed ‘Symptoms’.
‘ “Aural hallucinations”,’ she read aloud. ‘ “One of the commonest symptoms of schizophrenia. Patients may complain of hearing voices telling them to kill themselves, or not to take their medication, or not to trust their doctor. At other times their family or strangers may be heard discussing them in a cold and threatening way.” ’
‘You’re not going to send me away again, are you?’ the boy broke out.
His voice was trembling, his eyes a wild glitter.
‘That depends on you. This is not a hostel, you know. It’s a hospital. People come here to get better, and we can’t help you get better if you go on pretending. Do you understand?’
The boy nodded without looking at her.
‘Why did you borrow this book?’ Aileen asked casually.
‘She wrote it down, that word.’
He pointed to the title of the book.
‘Who did?’
‘Pam.’
‘Pamela Haynes? Your social worker?’
The boy nodded grudgingly.
‘You saw her write the word “schizophrenia”?’
‘She went outside to talk to someone.’
‘And you looked at her notepad while she was gone?’
‘You won’t send me away, will you?’ he pleaded. ‘He’ll kill me if you do!’
‘Who’ll kill you?’
‘The man I told you about! Hazchem.’
‘What did you say?’
But the boy’s moment of desperation had passed, and he would not repeat the word or phrase — was it ‘Ask him’? — which Aileen had failed to catch, merely shaking his head and rocking from side to side, hugging himself tightly.
On the way back to her office, Aileen ran into the consultant psychiatrist’s assistant, a tubby balding man whose attempts to look like a smooth City gent were defeated by a prominent bottom which stuck out like a belly turned the wrong way round. Aileen described the outcome of her interview with Gary Dunn.
‘It’s been the social worker’s fault all along. She got so excited about having made a diagnosis of schizophrenia all by her big self that she left her notes lying around where the boy could see them.’
‘Very unprofessional,’ the assistant agreed. ‘Still, you’ve got to hand it to the little bugger, haven’t you? Top marks for initiative and all that. But what’s his game? Why he’s so keen to be admitted to the Unit that he spends his spare time swotting up symptoms with a copy of Teach Yourself Schizophrenia?’
‘I don’t know. He claims someone’s trying to kill him. For some reason he seems to think he’s safe here.’
The assistant fingered his pudgy jowls.
‘As long as he doesn’t eat the food. Still, we can’t keep a bed tied up just to keep him happy. Out-patient care, of course, all he wants. But beds are just too precious.’
He was right, of course, and Aileen knew it. Even with its various annexes and extensions, the Unit was designed to house no more than eighty resident patients. By dint of placing beds in corridors and service areas this number had been increased to ninety-five. Over two hundred other patients on a waiting list were currently being housed in regional general hospitals, where they received little or no psychiatric care, with the result that their condition progressively deteriorated.
‘It’s only until Friday,’ Aileen stressed. ‘There’s a bed that’s free anyway.’
‘That’s the day after tomorrow!’ the assistant reminded her. ‘What do you expect to achieve in that space of time?’
‘Nothing, probably. But at least it’ll stop the local authority turning him over to the police for the arson attempt.’
‘And afterwards where will he go?’
‘I don’t know!’ she retorted crossly, feeling browbeaten. ‘I don’t know anything.’
But when she got home that evening, Aileen knew one more thing at least. She had stopped at the public library on the way and returned the book on schizophrenia, paying the fine herself. The librarian proceeded to give her a brisk lecture about withholding books needed by other readers, and to justify herself Aileen started to explain about Gary Dunn.