Oddly enough, the knowledge that this was all it had been did nothing to calm Aileen’s agitation. Too much primal goo had been dredged up from the depths. The doll’s cry was not even particularly realistic, and although its connection with her childhood no doubt lent the sound emotional force, Aileen was only too aware that the experience had drawn most of its power from the events that had followed Raymond’s death. Lying tormentedly still in the constrained intimacy of the conjugal bed, she thought about the flashback experiences which some people reportedly had years after taking LSD, when for no apparent reason they would suddenly find themselves high again, the ground blurring away beneath them and the people around looking strange. It was almost as if something of the sort was happening to her. I’m no longer in full control of my life, she thought. A pattern has been indelibly engraved on my psyche and I perceive everything that happens to me in terms of that pattern. Which is madness, she concluded, proving her sanity with a joke.
The morning that followed had not helped to restore her equilibrium. As always when he went away, Douglas was in a foul mood, tense and snappy. Knowing that his wife was nervous about him flying, he taunted her with statistics which suggested that boarding an airplane was less dangerous than walking upstairs in one’s own house. Aileen said nothing. She drove Douglas and his fibre-glass suitcase — the manufacturer’s claims suggested that it would survive whatever happened — to Hammersmith tube and waved goodbye with a hollowly casual, ‘See you on Monday, then.’ But when one of the secretaries interrupted the discussion on the therapeutic merits of projective techniques to tell Aileen that she was wanted on the phone by the police, she felt her insides give a sickening lurch, as when you drive too fast over a hump-backed bridge, and she knew at once what had happened. It was then almost one o’clock. Douglas’s flight had left at eleven. It would have taken time to get hold of the passenger list, and they would first have called the Institute and then the Macklins’ home number. Aileen had a sudden vision of the slim white phone, like overlapping lovers’ hands, chirping plaintively to an empty house. As she followed the secretary along the corridor, the linoleum squelching like mud under her soles, her only real surprise was that the police hadn’t come to break the news in person. The last time, they’d sent a pair of rookies, callow insolent punks whose veneer of sorrowful concern swiftly peeled off as they looked round, taking in the colourful, indiscriminate, organic mess, the smell of dope and incense, the Dayglo posters and anti-war slogans, the books on Buddhism and vegetarian cookery, the endlessly repeated riff booming from the stereo where a record no one was listening to had got stuck in a groove. But, of course, Raymond’s had been just a single death. There would have been three or four hundred people on the flight to Boston: they couldn’t possibly inform all the next-of-kin personally.
‘Aileen Macklin speaking.’
‘Hello and good morning, Hammersmith CID, Detective Inspector Croom. I am calling pursuant to the matter on which you were in communication relative to one Steven Bradley.’
For a moment Aileen felt too surprised to speak.
‘Have you … have you found out something, then?’ she finally managed.
‘We certainly have, madam. In fact it would not be too much to infer that we’ve found out everything. Who he is, where he comes from, the works. Gary Dunn didn’t mean nothing to us, but Steven Bradley, well, that was different. Not to put too fine a point on it, we’ve been able to wrap up an assortment of unsolved cases, comprising of two murders, two GBH, and a string of assorted robbery with threat, uttering menaces, aiding and abetting, not to mention the odd taking and driving away and anything else they may ask to be taken into consideration.’
Aileen gripped the receiver tightly, forcing herself to concentrate.
‘What has this got to do with Gary — I mean Steven?’
‘Well, that’s a bit complicated, to say the least. I can’t enter into it on the phone, anyway. If you could pop down the station for half an hour some time, say late morning or early afternoon, I or one of my colleagues will be more than happy to map out the situation with regard to this one.’
Aileen agreed hastily and hung up. So Douglas wasn’t dead. How odd. Not that the call hadn’t been about that, of course. It was her conviction that it had that was odd, or worse than odd. It was bad enough to wish your husband dead. When you started believing that your wishes had come true, you were in real trouble. Was she really losing that instinctive sense of balance which all sane people have without knowing it, but which is so hard to define and even harder to get or give back once it has gone? If so, it was all Douglas’s fault. he had been trying for years to drive her mad, and now — racked by sleeplessness, worry and doubt — Aileen was prepared to admit for the first time that he might be succeeding. She had been proud of her ability to hold her own in their daily battles, too proud to realize that she should never have agreed to take part in the first place. For the rules of that domestic warfare had been drawn up by her husband, and although Aileen had proved herself remarkably adept, she still had to force herself to do what came naturally to him. His defeats hardly troubled him, but she suffered even when she won. The continual separation of her thoughts into those that were admissible and inadmissible had become second nature to her, and the price she had paid was an equivalent separation within herself, a loss of wholeness. The essential question for her was no longer ‘Is this really what I think or feel?’ but ‘If I admit to thinking or feeling this, will he be able to use it against me?’ Her true motives and reactions had come to represent a danger to her, potential weaknesses that her husband would attack if he suspected their existence. After so many years of painfully carrying on an adulterous relationship with reality, it looked as though she had finally decided to break off the affair. It just didn’t seem worth the bother any more.
When Aileen got back to her office at lunch-time, the communicating door was open. Through it she could see Jenny Wilcox, dressed in a blue leotard. The occupational therapist’s heels were leaning on the top of a filing cabinet. Her head rested on the floor, cushioned by the E-K telephone directory.
‘Meeting of the action group this afternoon,’ she remarked in a voice constrained by the weight of her body. ‘Hope you can make it. It’s a bums-on-seats situation.’
Aileen dumped her files and folders on the desk and grunted ambiguously. After a while Jenny lowered her legs to the ground and sat up.
‘What’s wrong?’ she exclaimed. ‘You look like death warmed up.’
‘I think I’m going mad.’
Jenny grasped her right foot and leant forward, stretching her back.
‘Join the club. Any special reason, apart from living in Thatcher’s Britain?’
Aileen unwrapped her lunch, a cheese roll and a plastic pot filled with the raw vegetable that Douglas, laboriously whimsical, referred to as ‘raped carrot’.
‘Someone broke into the house last night. I’d just popped down to get something from the shops. When I got back he was still there. It gave me quite a turn.’
Jenny switched her attentions to the other foot.
‘Did you nail him?’
‘Not really. He rather sort of nailed me, actually.’
‘You should have done that self-defence course I told you about. I mean, you were lucky. I wish I’d had a chance to confront the fuckers who trashed my Fiat. Talk about a short sharp shock!’
Aileen sat looking without enthusiasm at her food. What she really wanted was a cigarette. Jenny’s comments had once again brought her up short against the disconcerting fact that political opinions apart, the younger woman’s character was that of her class, the service aristocracy, which once provided the nation with its officers, diplomats and explorers. Jenny had no patience with people who couldn’t cope. In that, despite the yawning gulf in ideology, she resembled the Cheltenham schoolmates whom Aileen bumped into occasionally and who always managed to leave her feeling spineless and incompetent. No doubt this bracing manner had a l
ot to commend it, but Aileen didn’t feel like being braced just then. Ironically, although she had a perfect excuse for getting away, she couldn’t use it with Jenny for fear of being criticized for collaborating with the police. As so often, a plausible fiction was the answer.
‘I must run, Jenny. I have to take the Mini to the garage. The brakes have been giving trouble.’
The driveway to the Unit was blocked by a delivery lorry, which was trying to reverse into the unloading bay by the kitchen. As she waited, Aileen thought about the unexpected breakthrough that had apparently resulted from her discovery of the boy’s real name. Full marks, she told herself. Give yourself credit where credit is due. Not everything was going to pieces. Despite the almost intolerable pressures on her over the last week, she had done her job. ‘We’ve found out everything,’ the policeman had said. ‘Who he is, where he comes from, the works.’ Armed with that information, Aileen was confident that the boy’s treatment could be adequately undertaken on a day-patient basis. It only remained to sell that idea to Steven himself, which she would do first thing that afternoon, before Pamela Haynes came to pick him up and drive him to the hostel where he was being housed until a permanent home could be found for him.
Aileen tapped the steering wheel impatiently. She felt cold, having been misled by another fine morning into putting on a thin white sleeveless cotton dress which had proved totally inadequate once the clouds rolled up. Besides, it was getting late. Someone had thoughtlessly parked in such a way that it was almost impossible for the lorry to get into the space reserved for it. In the end Aileen did a three-point turn and drove along the link road to the main psychiatric hospital. At the front of that forbidding edifice she slowed to go over the speed bump. To the left, incongruously tacked on to the Victorian redbrick, was a compound full of storage cylinders and a mass of silver tubing. The wire fence that surrounded it was marked ‘WARNING HAZCHEM’. The words reminded Aileen of something someone had said to her recently. But as usual these days, she couldn’t for the life of her remember who it had been or why it had stuck in her mind. Despite its exotic appearance, the sign merely indicated the presence of hazardous chemicals, in this case the various explosive or inflammable substances used in the hospital. As she accelerated down the driveway to the street, Aileen recalled that Douglas liked to define the human brain as a bowl of chemical soup. In that case, she thought, perhaps we should all wear a sign like the one on that wire fence. For one thing that was certain was that those chemicals, too, were hazardous.
10
Uneasy hints of spring struggled against the wintry dusk like a river running feebly against the incoming tide. At the corner where Steve turned out of the main road, two men and two women were standing around an empty pushchair. The boy mechanically noted the tell-tale signs of impairment: the bodies swaying back and forth like plants in the wind, feet continually shuffling to maintain balance, the rigid tunnel-vision gaze, the blurred voices all spluttering away at the same time. The two men were grasping cans of Carlsberg Special Brew. One of the women was holding a baby in her arms while the other lit a cigarette. The quartet kept up a constant patter, a verbal scaffolding on which they leant, tilting in towards each other.
‘… do for him …’
‘… little darling …’
‘… wants he wants …’
‘… bet your life …’
‘… just the job …’
‘… little pet …’
‘… right as rain …’
‘… never worry …’
One of the men took a feeding-bottle from the pushchair and poured beer into it. The two women, feinting and weaving like wrestlers, were trying to pass the baby from one pair of outstretched hands to another. The shopping hurt Steve’s shoulder, which still ached from the beating he’d received the week before, but he was determined to keep going until he reached the public lavatory. There he could not only have a rest but also put to use the pen he’d bought out of the money the old man allowed him. The stotters wouldn’t be getting it any more, not after what they’d done to him. Dave and Alex had started in as soon as he got home. Jimmy hadn’t been there, and if it hadn’t been for Tracy, Steve was sure they’d have killed him. They’d stood at either side of the room, tossing the boy back and forth between them, but instead of catching him, they’d stuck out their knees or elbows or fists or stood aside at the last moment and let him hit the floor or the wall before kicking him to his feet again. His helplessness had excited them and they went about their work with grunts and squeals, like when they were labouring over Tracy late at night.
The worst of it had been their silence. Steve had expected angry questions which he would somehow satisfy, making up versions of the truth good enough for people who could hardly remember their own names half the time. But they hadn’t asked any questions. They had just hurled him about until he lost all sense of time and place, of who he was and who they were and why this was happening. Once the stotters got started on something, fucking or fighting or whatever it might be, it was almost impossible for them to stop unless someone came along and switched them off. That was normally Steve’s task, but now he had fallen into the machine himself, and it was slowly but surely beating him to a pulp. There was nothing personal about it. That was the whole problem. Dave and Alex couldn’t have stopped even if they’d wanted to. They wouldn’t have known how.
In the end he had been saved, though, and by Tracy, which almost made it worthwhile. After screaming at the two men in vain for some time, she’d eventually thrown herself on Steve, wrestling him to the ground and daring Dave and Alex to come and take him back. But they didn’t even try. They just stood looking about them with bewildered expressions, like children whose favourite toy has been snatched away. Then Alex turned on the television, Dave cracked open another can of lager and a few minutes later they had forgotten all about it.
But Steve didn’t forget, and during the week that followed he decided that the time had come to celebrate his feelings for Tracy publicly. If it hadn’t been for her he would have left, taken his chances sleeping rough again, or perhaps even asked the old man if he could stay there. But he felt that he had to stand by Tracy, ready to protect her as she had protected him, deflecting the stotters’ moods, playing them off against each other, managing them without their being aware of it. Steve saw it as a bond between them, and although they had never spoken about it, he was sure Tracy considered him her friend and ally.
Sometimes, despite his caution, she caught him looking at her, and then the look she gave him was so dense and heady, so charged with meaning, that it seemed to make words both impossible and unnecessary. So the following week Steve added a felt-tipped pen to his shopping list, and on the way back to Grafton Avenue he stopped at the lavatory to share his feelings about the person he loved. He didn’t yet know what he was going to say, although he knew that it would be different from the other stories on those closely covered walls. Steve was not interested in Tracy’s underwear or shoes, and there was certainly no point in imagining her carrying on like the women in the other stories: he saw all that at home just about every evening. In any case, that had nothing to do with love, so he’d just skip it, the way the other writers skipped the bits that didn’t interest them, and get straight to the point: the warmth, the tenderness, the cuddles, the love that grew stronger and stronger until it could hold the whole world at bay.
The moment he passed through the doorless portal, Steve knew that something strange and sinister had occurred. The building was bare, stripped and featureless. Even the familiar smells had been usurped by an alien odour. As for the walls, the change was almost too much to take in at first. The stories were gone! All those tightly organized patches and clusters of writing had been brutally erased, all that concentrated passion and pain diluted by powerful industrial solvents to a thin grey film smeared over the basic beige. Steve groped his way to the cubicle with the broken window and collapsed, his head in his hands and tears running
down his cheeks. How could they do such a thing? Those stories were like friends to him, as reassuring and predictable as the doors he’d got to know on his newspaper round; individual and interesting, yet perfectly safe. Any time he happened to be passing he could drop in and visit them. And now some faceless fucker in a wanker’s uniform had come along and said they had no right to be there! It was too cruel, worse than any pain the stotters had been able to think up. It made everything meaningless.
Several minutes passed before the boy noticed that a few words had miraculously escaped. They had formed part of the story about taking a schoolgirl out to eat. This had been a late addition to the collection, and so the writer had been forced to fit his story into the space left empty by those who had come before him. As a result, four of the lines had been pushed so far to the right that the final word had spilt over on to the doorframe and thus escaped the solvent. Steve read the words over and over, trying to remember how they had fitted into the rest of the story, and exactly what it had been about. But it was no good. He hadn’t even understood it at the time.
His plans to write about Tracy were forgotten. That expanse of blank wall terrified him. He had hoped to scribble a few words of homage that would have been lost among all the other stories, but to start again from scratch, to found a new tradition for others to follow, that was beyond him. Nevertheless, there was something that he could do. He snatched up the orange sling full of groceries and hurried back outside. Half-way down the street he stopped by a lamp-post with a bulbous base. He uncapped the pen and wrote the word EAT. After a quick glance to make sure no one had seen, he added SHIT underneath, as it had appeared on the door frame, then DIE and BOX. He put his pen away and surveyed his work with a satisfied smile. This was just the beginning. Those four poor orphaned words would come back to haunt the dark powers that had ordered and executed the destruction of the rest. They would appear everywhere, on doors and walls and public places all over the city, until no one could do anything or go anywhere without seeing them!
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