The Tryst

by Michael Dibdin

  This shook Aileen.

  ‘What voices?’

  ‘The ones I hear in my head! I told you something would happen if you didn’t have me locked up. You’ll have to take me now, won’t you? There’s no saying what they might tell me to do next time.’

  ‘You’ve never said anything about these voices before.’

  She was confident of this. Such controlling voices are one of the textbook symptoms of schizophrenia. If Gary had ever mentioned them, Pamela Haynes’s diagnosis would not have been so swiftly dismissed.

  ‘What else do they tell you, these voices?’

  ‘They tell me not to believe what the doctors say, not to trust them. They tell me not to take those pills they gave me. They say I’m no good, useless, evil. They say I should kill myself.’

  Aileen sighed. ‘We just sat there and cringed for him,’ Jenny had said of one of Gary’s earlier performances. This was almost as embarrassing.

  ‘We can’t let you come and live in the Unit if you’re going to set fire to things,’ she pointed out.

  ‘I won’t, not in there.’

  ‘But you said that you had to do whatever the voices tell you. Suppose they tell you to do this again?’

  ‘They won’t.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘They just won’t!’

  Aileen walked over to the window, where an enormous rubber plant ran up to the ceiling and flattened out like a genie from a bottle. She wiped her finger over the surface of one of the leaves, skimming off a film of dust. There was a bed free in one of the admission wards until the weekend. That was only three days, but at least it would keep the boy out of the hands of the police for the moment. There was little risk of another arson attack, she was sure of that. Gary had set fire to the curtains in a carefully premeditated gesture, choosing a room where there was a fire extinguisher handy, leaving the door wide open and then waiting until someone was passing by before actually striking the match.

  Without committing herself to anything, Aileen made some reassuring noises and then slipped out to the hallway where the warden and Pamela Haynes were waiting. She told them that she would do what she could to have Gary admitted to the Unit and would be in touch later that morning.

  She had left her battered red Mini — a hand-me-down from Douglas, who had moved up to a Volvo — in the street opposite the Centre. The door of a lock-up garage nearby had been decorated with an assortment of graffiti, including ‘Take 2 you shit crew’, ‘Skin one up’, and ‘Hip hop don’t stop’. But for some reason Aileen’s eye was drawn to four words carefully printed one above the other.

  EAT

  SHIT

  DIE

  BOX

  As she completed her journey to work, Aileen repeated them over and over to herself. She didn’t normally take any notice of graffiti, but for some reason she couldn’t get those four words out of her mind. It wasn’t until the main hospital was in sight that she succeeded in bringing her thoughts to heel. Yes, she would probably be able to let Gary into the Unit until the end of the week, unless the consultant chose to object. Assuming that the boy’s idea that someone was trying to kill him was a delusion, then like all delusions it must have been a function. There must be some knowledge that he could not admit he had, some fact from his past which was too traumatic for him to accept. If Aileen was to help him, she would have to discover what this was, and that meant getting behind the boy’s defences, probing into his past. For it was there, she was convinced, that the source and explanation of his imaginary terrors lay hidden.

  3

  Eight months before, back in the dead of January, Gary Dunn had been two years younger. His name had been Steve then, Steven Bradley, and he’d been sleeping in a length of concrete tubing under the Westway flyover, between Wood Lane and the underground tracks, until the stotters took him in. They were older, big kids, almost grown-ups. He’d seen them before, the stiff robotic march, the swollen plastic bags clutched in their hands, the eyes glazed like those of the fish heads he sometimes came across, scavenging in bins for his supper. Nevertheless, it was they who’d saved him from the police. One was called Jimmy and the other Dave, and they’d been hauled in following a complaint from a woman they’d called a silly fucking cow because they didn’t like the looks she was giving them. The police had duly handed them a bit of harassment in return, but there was nothing much else they could do. Glue is not an illegal substance, and if the purchaser chooses to exploit its hallucinogenic rather than adhesive properties, he is perfectly within his rights to do so. Life, on the other hand, is something you need to be sixteen to consume without adult supervision. Steve couldn’t prove he was, so the constabulary thought they had him bang to rights until Jimmy, a plump toughie with curly fair hair and a face like a bent cherub, decided to throw a spanner in the works.

  ‘He’s me brother, isn’t he?’

  ‘Piss off,’ the desk sergeant told him tonelessly.

  ‘He fucking is! He keeps us half-way straight and all. He looks after us. We’d be ever so much worse if he wasn’t around.’

  ‘We’d be fucking monsters!’ Dave confirmed. He was tall and skinny and was wearing a torn denim jacket with ‘The Cult’ inked across the back, calf-length battledress trousers and large black boots. A line of swastika tattoos ran up his neck and cheek and across his shorn scalp like the footprints of some exotic bird.

  The sergeant didn’t believe a word of this, of course. He knew that the two stotters were just trying to get their own back for the aggro they’d sustained. But he’d been in the game long enough to know that it wasn’t worth his while trying to stop them. It was all a question of energy. Despite the horrendous things they did to themselves, these kids had so much, whereas the sergeant, for all his diets and keep-fit and early nights, was still knackered by tea-time. It wasn’t fair, youth. Besides, he was just wasting his time with this boy. Ten to one his parents wouldn’t want him back, either that or the boy wouldn’t go. Social services wouldn’t want to know, and as for the charity organizations, if he hadn’t stuck with them already it was because he couldn’t stand it and would run away again at the first opportunity. In short, it was nothing but a wind-up whichever way you looked at it. The sergeant repeated his previous comment to Jimmy and turned away dismissively.

  Outside the police station, Steve started to sidle off.

  ‘This way!’ Jimmy called, shaking his head scornfully, pulling the boy after him. He proceeded to go on at some length about the mentality of the wankers he was surrounded by, who couldn’t even find their way back to the fucking house unless he was there to hold their hands. He soon became so incensed about this that Dave suggested they stop off for a top-up. The filth had taken what they’d had on them — totally illegally, of course, but what were they supposed to do, call their solicitor? — so they dropped into Woolies to restock. A large sign informed customers that the management reserved the right to restrict the sale of solvent-based products, but the cashiers all looked as if they’d been at the stuff themselves and would have checked out a nuclear missile without a second thought as long as it had a price sticker on it. Back in the street, Jimmy pierced the foil membrane sealing the tube and squeezed some glue into the carrier Dave had taken without asking. Then they set out for home, taking turns to clamp the bag to their faces. When Dave had finished he automatically passed the bag to Steve, but Jimmy snatched it angrily away.

  ‘Not little Stevie!’ he cried. ‘Me mum’d turn in her fucking grave!’

  Steve tagged along behind the two stotters, although they appeared to have forgotten about him. He had nowhere else to go.

  At the junction of two streets just north of the Uxbridge Road, Jimmy and Dave disappeared. The property at the corner was fenced off by sheets of corrugated iron, and while Steve was standing there uncertainly, an arm suddenly shot out and pulled him through a gap between two of the panels. Inside, it was like being in the country: a rotting meadow of dead grass and spindly weeds. Overgr
own shrubs and bushes competed for space and light. The ruined vestiges of steps and a path were clogged with branches, green with mould. Jimmy stuck his pudgy forefinger into Steve’s face, just below the boy’s eye.

  ‘Count yourself lucky you’re not getting a good booting. You get us in trouble with the filth again, I’ll fucking kill you.’

  If Steve had been sure which panel in the fence opened, he might have tried to make a run for it, but it was too late. Jimmy led the way along a winding path trodden through the matted grass. The house seemed very large, close up like this, in the hushed wilderness inside the fencing. The windows and doors were all boarded up with plywood, but Dave prised back the screen on the back door far enough for them to slip inside. Had the house been for sale, rather than awaiting replacement by a block of retirement flatlets, the estate agents might have described it as ‘a rare opportunity to purchase a property offering considerable scope for imaginative refurbishment’. Alex, one of the other residents and good with his hands, had hot-wired the electricity supply, bypassing the meter, and at one time there had been talk of installing heating and even a cooker. But this had come to nothing, and the stairs, doors and skirting-boards, as well as much of the flooring, had been broken up for firewood. On the retreating island of intact floorboards, a number of mattresses lay scattered around a television and video recorder. These had been donated by a contact of Jimmy’s who occasionally needed help in enforcing his various business interests. Unfortunately he had ended up on the wrong end of a knife just before Christmas, since when things had been a bit tight.

  When Steve and the others came in, Alex was flat out on one mattress watching TV. A girl with white hair and black lips, wearing a lime-green T-shirt, a short silvery skirt, zebra-stripe tights and pink socks, was lying on her belly on another mattress, listening to a Sony Walkman. Her legs were raised behind her and her left foot idly caressed the curve of her right calf. Her name was Tracy, and both she and Alex, a runty street urchin from Belfast, seemed mildly puzzled at first by Steve’s presence. But Jimmy was in charge — no one disputed that, except Dave when he had one of his turns — and like the glue itself, his fantasy proved stronger than the reality to which it was attached. Once the Woolworth’s bag had circulated a few times, no one except Steve himself had the slightest doubt that he was Jimmy’s younger brother and that he lived there with them, looking after them, keeping them half-way straight.

  Steve soon settled into the role in which he’d been cast. For the first time in his life — well, the first that bore thinking about, anyway — he filled a gap, completed a family, belonged. He went to the shop further down Trencham Road marked OOD S ORE. This satisfied most of the stotters’ needs, consisting as it did of a grocery and off-licence which also hired videos. He reminded them when it was time to go and sign on at the DHSS, and then trekked to a distant block of council flats early in the morning to extract the cheques from the broken letter-box which they used as a convenience address. He did his best to keep them from electrocuting or poisoning themselves when they were completely out of it, which was all of every evening and most of most days. Their mediator, their go-between, their shabbes goy, he ran errands between them and reality.

  Faithful to the letter of Jimmy’s scenario, the stotters never allowed Steve to take part in their rituals. He remained a spectator as they inhaled the muddling vapours and passed the plastic cylinders of cider from hand to hand. He watched them gibber and gesticulate, their faces distorted with terror or stupefaction. He watched them fight, usually with clumsy harmless blows that whirled astray, although one night Dave got Jimmy by the throat and squeezed and squeezed with those gristly hands of his until Alex pulled a burning plank from the fire and smashed him over the head with it. He watched them fuck, mounting Tracy one after another with expressions which suggested that the activity was a tedious necessity not unlike defecation. Afterwards they fell asleep where they lay, then got up next day and did it all over again. It was like sharing a cage with a pack of grouchy wild animals, violent and unpredictable, but not too bright. Steve was well aware of the risks he was running, but he reckoned that he could probably keep one step ahead, sensing the stotters’ mood shifts before they were aware of them themselves. All in all, he was better off than he had been for a very long time.

  Not that his memories went very far back, or were especially detailed. All he had was a selection of images as unconnected and apparently inconsequential as a handful of snapshots. As usual in photographs, everyone was smiling, but Steve didn’t make the common mistake of concluding from this that the past was a happy place. The camera often seemed to have been badly aimed, missing the main action, whatever that might have been, to focus instead on the leg of a chair, a section of carpet, or an electric fire with a gleaming concave back which reflected two elements, the lower of which sometimes glowed dully red. When people appeared in the photographs, it seemed to be by accident, as if they’d blundered in unexpectedly, so that only some odd bit of them — a shoulder, part of a dress, a length of hair — emerged clearly. Despite this, Steve was quite content with his memories, even though the crucial one, which would account for the existence of the collection and explain why it was in his possession, was missing.

  The finer points of Steve’s relationship with his past were, however, lost on Jimmy, who couldn’t understand why he didn’t just go down the fucking DHSS like everyone else. What did he think he was, some sort of special wanker? After the boy had been living there for a few weeks, he and Dave dragged him down to the offices with them, but as soon as Steve saw the row of cubicles where people sat being quizzed by officials he bolted. It was as bad as the police.

  That evening things came to a head.

  ‘Look at this muck!’ Jimmy exclaimed suddenly. He pointed to the stotters’ dinner, consisting of a pack of chicken loaf slices, a packet of crackers and the remains of a tin of cold rice pudding. ‘Make you sick! And it’s fucking near all gone.’

  ‘You know how they make this?’ Dave said, holding up the last slice of pale grey meat. ‘First they cut their heads off, then they chuck them in this acid bath, burns off all the feathers and that. Then they hose them down, cut them open, yoik out the guts and chuck them in this fucking great press which crushes them, bones and all …’

  Jimmy turned accusingly to Steve.

  ‘You been stuffing yourself, haven’t you? We go out to sign on and you eat all the fucking food in the house!’

  ‘To each according to his ability and from each according to his need,’ muttered Alex.

  Tracy looked up from painting her fingernails a penetrating shade of purple.

  ‘I’d do anything for a hamburger and chips,’ she murmured wistfully.

  ‘What a bunch of wankers!’ Jimmy exploded, pounding the floor. ‘Never take a single thought for the future, do you? Look at this place! What a dump! And they’re going to come and tear it down any day now. And what do you do about it? Bring this useless young prick home!’

  He pointed at Steve. The others turned to look at the boy as if seeing him for the first time.

  ‘But I thought he’s, like, your brother, isn’t he?’ Dave frowned.

  Jimmy gazed at him incredulously.

  ‘My brother! He’s not my brother! He’s nothing like my brother. I haven’t even got a fucking brother!’

  Dave’s frown deepened.

  ‘You mean he’s been pissing us about all this time? Oh well, that’s, fuck, that’s, I mean one thing I can’t stand is, I mean you can come up to me, face to face, man to man, and say anything you like …’

  ‘Any fucking thing you like,’ Alex echoed.

  ‘… and if I don’t like it then I’ll fucking do you, right? But one thing I can’t stand is people, people pissing me around, no really, that’s the one thing, I mean, that’s …’

  Dave’s voice mumbled to a standstill.

  ‘We can’t let him go now,’ Jimmy mused. ‘He knows too much.’

  ‘No one leave
s the organization alive,’ Alex said in his Ulster accent, as thick and bitter as a gob of phlegm. ‘If you’re not for us, you’re against us.’

  ‘You know the free papers?’ Steve said.

  Jimmy glared at him.

  ‘Which three papers?’ he demanded suspiciously.

  ‘They need people to deliver them. They’ll take anyone. It doesn’t pay much, but it would be something, for now.’

  They all sat staring at the boy for a long time. At last Jimmy nodded slowly.

  ‘Worth a try.’

  After that everyone relaxed again. Dave put on the new video, about a disfigured ghoul which tracked down everyone who had ever lived in a certain house and killed them in a variety of colourful ways. As usual, there were wanky patches where character was established and plot developed, and during these Steve’s idea gradually took off. By midnight, Jimmy had mapped out a scheme for establishing a distribution empire monopolizing the delivery of free newspapers throughout the country, the work being farmed out to an army of underpaid kids while the real money came straight to him.

  ‘Anyone who wants their fucking newspaper delivered, we’re the boys they’ll have to talk to!’ he enthused, finger stabbing the air to emphasize his point. ‘We can name our price! We’ll have the whole of England under our thumb!’

  ‘What about Ulster?’ Alex put in. ‘We gave our blood at the Somme too, you know.’

  But his comment was lost in the shrieks of a young woman who was being spectacularly dismembered by the video ghoul.

  As is their wont, things looked rather different the next morning. It was Tracy who brought the matter up again. She had a bone to pick with Jimmy, who had urinated in her mouth while she was trying to fellate him the night before. She relieved her feelings somewhat with a number of sarky remarks about the future empire builder, who was slumped in front of the TV watching Play School. Sensing a storm brewing, Steve said he would go and phone the Capital Advertiser. He returned with the news that there were no distribution vacancies available, which appeared to put paid to that idea. But Jimmy now felt that his credibility was at stake, and so the following Friday the two old-age pensioners who delivered the Advertiser to homes in the area were set upon and beaten up and the pram containing their stock of papers dumped off a railway bridge. When Steve phoned again he was told that a vacancy had unexpectedly become available.