The Tryst

by Michael Dibdin

  Steve suddenly twisted to one side in another convulsive shiver. Aileen waited, but he said nothing.

  ‘When Mr Matthews opened the door, they pushed their way in and told him to show them where he had hidden his money. He gave them about thirty pounds, which he said was all he had. But Dave didn’t believe him. He searched the house, looking for a trunk full of money which he thought was hidden there. When he couldn’t find it he got very angry. First he threatened the old man with a poker, and then when Mr Matthews still wouldn’t say where the money was, Dave started to hit him.’

  ‘No!’

  Steve spat the word at her.

  ‘It wasn’t him! It was the other one, the one with eyes that glow in the dark and burn you up! I seen him just before, just around the corner! He was on his way home after doing it. He opened him up like you’re supposed to, tapping and tapping, only he was wrong, it wasn’t like a golf ball inside, it was all messy.’

  Aileen frowned. She had had just about enough of the boy’s amateur mad scenes.

  ‘There’s no point in going on pretending, Steven,’ she said sharply. ‘I know you’re trying to protect the others, but there’s no need. Dave has already confessed. At first he denied knowing you and Alex, but the police showed your photograph to the security guards at the Tesco supermarket and one of them recognized it. He said you used to go there every week, and he remembered that one week two youths had an argument with you at the checkout. He was taken to the police station where he identified Dave and Alex. After that Dave admitted everything.’

  ‘But it wasn’t him!’ the boy insisted. ‘Why won’t you listen? Why won’t anyone listen? I didn’t listen either. I thought he was crazy. I thought it was all a story he’d made up. But it was all true! He killed the old man and now he’s after me too! I saw him leaving. He knows I know just like he knew what he done to him in the wood. That’s why I got to stay here, see? He won’t come near hospitals. He told me.’

  Aileen held the wild eyes with her own, trying to decode this jumble of words.

  ‘Mr Matthews told you this man would leave you alone as long as you were in hospital?’

  The boy nodded. Aileen tried to hide her satisfaction as the last piece of the puzzle dropped into place.

  ‘Now listen, Steven, there’s something else which you must know. When the crime was discovered, the police tried to trace Mr Matthews’s relatives. It turned out that he hadn’t got any, but in the process they found out quite a lot about him. When he was young, a long long time ago, Ernest Matthews was a soldier. There was a big war and lots of people were killed. Mr Matthews was badly wounded. It wasn’t his body that was hurt but his mind. He was suffering from what’s called battle fatigue. Shell-shock, they used to call it. You see, when things get too bad, too horrible and frightening, then after a while human beings break down and get ill. One of the things that happens is that they imagine that people are threatening them, trying to kill them. They go on thinking that even after the danger is over, when they’re perfectly safe and surrounded by people who care for them. That’s what happened to Ernest Matthews. He must have been very ill indeed, because he was sent to a special hospital and stayed there for almost twenty years.’

  ‘But I seen him!’ the boy cried. ‘I told you what he looked like, didn’t I? And I told him too, and he said that was him, the man that was after him!’

  ‘But we can’t believe everything Mr Matthews told you, Steven. You didn’t know that at the time, of course. He was older than you, so you naturally believed what he said. Perhaps he even believed it himself. Perhaps he really did still think that someone was threatening his life. Or perhaps that was just a story that was no longer real to him, which he told you so that you would keep on going to visit him. Perhaps he was afraid that you might get bored going to see an ordinary old man, so he tried to make himself more interesting. We’ll never know the answer to that. What we do know is that what happened had nothing whatever to do with any story he may have told you. Mr Matthews was killed by a violent and unpredictable youth called Dave who had already murdered his friend Jimmy and had nothing to lose by killing again, particularly since he thought that the old man had a lot of money hidden in the house which he could use to get away. That’s who killed Mr Matthews, Steven, not some character from a story. I think you know that. It’s difficult for you to admit it, even to yourself. But one day, perhaps quite soon, you’ll realize that there is no reason for you to feel guilty. Because that’s the problem, isn’t it? You feel guilty. If it hadn’t been for you, Dave and Alex would never have heard about Mr Matthews and so he would still be alive. That’s what you think, isn’t it? It’s almost as though you killed the old man yourself.’

  This, she thought, is to proper psychiatric practice what an amputation with a handsaw and a tot of rum is to modern surgery. But there was no time, no money, and a queue of mutilated psyches bleeding to death at the hospital gate.

  ‘But of course that’s all nonsense! You never harmed the old man. On the contrary, you were his friend, you helped him. Even if you did tell the others where he lived, you couldn’t possibly have known what they were going to do, could you? It had nothing whatever to do with you.’

  The boy had resumed his unnatural stillness, locking himself away somewhere deep inside where he thought he could never be traced. Aileen shifted her grip on his arm, patting his wrist lightly.

  ‘Let me tell you a little story, Steven. One day I was driving home from work when a cat suddenly ran out across the road in front of me. I tried to avoid it, but there was a car coming the other way. I heard a noise under the car and felt a bump. When I stopped and got out, the cat was dead.’

  She moved a little closer to the boy, secure in her control of the situation, her mastery of the requisite skills.

  ‘I felt awful, just terrible! I’ve always loved cats more than any other animal and yet I’d just killed one. It was such a horrible shock that it took me ages to realize that it wasn’t my fault. There was absolutely nothing I could have done to prevent it. It took a long, long time to accept that, but in the end I managed to come to terms with it and stopped blaming myself uselessly.’

  She tugged at the inert body beside her, trying without success to draw his eyes back to her.

  ‘Now, of course, the shock you suffered was very much worse than mine, but one day the same thing will happen to you, too. It may take a long time, but one day you’ll realize that it’s all over. The past is dead, Steven. It’s over and done with, finished. We can’t reach it and it can’t reach us. All we can do is to try and forget and think about today and tomorrow instead. Now I know that being here has helped you, and that’s why I’ve arranged for you to go on coming every day, even though you’ll be leaving this afternoon to go to a new home which Mrs Haynes has — ’

  ‘You’re putting me out?’

  The boy’s face had gone to pieces again, all his composure fled at the notion of being expelled from his hard-won sanctuary.

  ‘No, not at all,’ Aileen speciously assured him. ‘You’ll be brought back here every morning and you’ll spend the whole day doing all the things you’ve been doing up to now. The only thing that’s going to change is that you won’t actually sleep here any more.’

  Steven stared at her bleakly. ‘I can’t stay?’

  ‘No, Steven. You can’t stay.’

  It was better that he should be quite clear about that, she thought. It would only make matters worse if he were allowed to harbour false hopes.

  ‘And you mustn’t think of pretending to set fire to your new home, either,’ she added, ‘or they’ll just hand you over to the police.’

  After a long pause, a small bent smile appeared on the boy’s lips, the first that Aileen had ever seen there. It startled her, because it was the absolute image of the way Raymond used to smile when he was about to say or do something mischievous.

  ‘I’ll have to be brave little Stevie, then,’ he remarked. Encouraged and relieved at this re
sponse, Aileen smiled too.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said warmly. ‘Try to be brave. I know how it’s hard, but — ’

  ‘Do you think I’ll get in the papers?’

  ‘The papers?’

  She was lost.

  ‘For being brave. They often used to have brave kids, the papers did. Brave means they’re going to die. Like when they get the wrong disease or something, and there’s no room at the hospital.’

  Aileen gripped the boy’s arm tightly.

  ‘Steven, you must stop dramatizing like this! It’s absurb to compare yourself with someone suffering from a fatal illness. You are not going to die, I promise you that. Certainly you’re to be pitied, certainly you need care and attention. But no one wants to harm you, no one wishes you anything but good.’

  The professional in Aileen recognized that the moment had come to terminate the interview. There was nothing more she could achieve for the moment. It was time for Steven to start the long hard work of facing the facts. Recovery from a serious delusion state is a rather like coming off heavy drink or drugs. Deprived of the flash romance and sinister glitter of your fantasies, life looks pretty dull and drab at first. It’s terrible to believe that everyone is out to get you, but that way at least you’re the centre of attention. It can be almost more terrible to have to accept that most people simply don’t give a damn one way or the other. Meanwhile she had her own life to get on with. Friday afternoons were always particularly fraught: not only was it the moment when the things she had been putting off all week finally caught up with her, but there was also a large helping of bureaucratic roughage in the form of interdepartmental seminars, meetings of consultative review bodies and the like, which tested her boredom threshold to the limit. Nevertheless, regarded as occupational therapy the afternoon was a complete success, for Aileen thought no more about Steven Bradley until she was back in her office preparing to go home, and then it was only to congratulate herself on a job well done. Only that morning she had felt reality slipping away from her like the sand sucked out from under your feet by the waves on a beach. ‘Here I go,’ she’d thought. It had seemed so easy and restful to give in and stop trying to make sense of things. But she hadn’t. That was a victory to celebrate, a success to reinforce. Perhaps she should treat herself to a concert or an evening at the theatre. When she got home, she’d check the paper and see what was on.

  She was half-way out of the door when Mrs Haynes phoned.

  ‘You haven’t seen Steven, have you?’

  The social worker sounded breathless.

  ‘Seen him?’ Aileen snapped. ‘You were supposed to be collecting him at three o’clock.’

  ‘I was! I did!’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, he … he ran away.’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘I was driving him to the hostel, the traffic was quite bad — well, it always is these days, isn’t it? Anyway, Gary, I mean Steven, he said he knew a short cut so I turned off, even though it seemed to me that it wasn’t all that short — ’

  ‘Would you mind getting to the point, please?’

  Aileen’s tone of voice was a replica of one her mother used to intimidate people she considered socially vulnerable.

  ‘Well, all of a sudden he said he needed to go to the loo. We were just passing a park and he said there was a public lavatory by the gate so I stopped. When he didn’t come out again I went to the door and called. It was a bit awkward, it being a Gents and all, but in the end I went in but he wasn’t there. I knew he hadn’t come out of the door because I’d been watching, and then I saw that the window in one of the sit-downs was broken. He must have got out that way and run off through the park. I hoped he might have gone back there to the hospital, you see, that’s why I phoned.’

  Aileen squeezed the bridge of her nose between two fingers.

  ‘Why would he come here? He knows we’d just hand him straight back to you.’

  ‘But then where could he have gone?’ the social worker wailed. She too was probably exhausted and drained at the end of a long week’s work, Aileen reflected.

  ‘I don’t know. He showed some interest in a girl he used to know. He may have gone off looking for her. Anyway, don’t worry too much, Mrs Haynes. It’s not really your fault. He’d probably have run off sooner or later anyway. He’s got a history of this kind of thing.’

  She replaced the receiver, gathered together her belongings and walked slowly to the car. She knew only too well where Steven had gone. He had gone back to the street, back to the invisible people. The boy had tried to find his feet in the surface world, where people have fixed addresses and permanent names. But that world and its representatives, notably Aileen, had failed him. He had made his needs quite clear, and they had been rejected. And although that rejection was correct in the circumstances, Aileen’s heart was tormented with reproachful questions. What did it matter to Steven whether he had an adequate claim to a hospital bed or not? Does a mother turn a child away because its need for security exceeds the norm, because it has exhausted its quota of love? But, of course, she wasn’t his mother.

  As Pamela Haynes had remarked, the traffic in the area was always bad. That afternoon, when Aileen longed more than ever to be home, it seemed by some perverse logic to be even worse than usual. Frustrated and bored, the occupants of the stalled cars gazed vacantly at each other, sizing up make, model, age and condition and hence inferring career, status, income level and probable destination. Aileen felt the eyes scanning her like so many remote-control video cameras: L registration Mini, ropy bodywork, sixty thousand or so on the clock, she’s a bit second-hand and all, minor civil servant or administrative assistant, hit her plateau and stuck there, fifteen thou plus a few rubbishy perks, three kids and a semi in Greenford. She turned on the car radio. As she closed her eyes, the traffic jam melted away and they were cruising along the cliffs at Rottingdean, sunlight flickering and glittering on the waves as though the ocean were signalling to them. ‘What’s it saying?’ Ray shouted back. She hadn’t needed to answer. They both knew by heart the exultant and irresistible message that the universe had confided to their generation. The whole of human history had been leading up to this moment, when technology and consciousness finally reached a sufficiently advanced level to make possible the earthly paradise. Ray laughed and took his hands off the bars, letting the motorbike steer itself around the curves of the road winding eastwards along the cliffs, towards Newhaven and the ferry.

  ‘The Cream from 1969!’ frothed the announcer. ‘Wow, man, out of sight, too much, heavy, far out and all that stuff.’

  Aileen swallowed away the lump of emotion in her throat. A chorus of horns sounded out behind her, and she looked up to find that the vehicle in front had moved forward a few yards. Before she could put the Mini in gear, a brand-new Ford Sierra cut into the space. The driver waved angrily at her as he passed, mouthing inaudible oaths, his eyes full of hatred. High-stress middle management, twenty-five thousand plus a company ulcer, new home on a Wates estate in Uxbridge, thought Aileen automatically.

  About half-way along Wood Lane there was a way through the back streets avoiding Shepherds Bush Green. The snag was getting out again the other end, which was why Aileen didn’t often use it, but today the traffic was so bad that she couldn’t see what she had to lose. As she drew near the junction, however, she saw that the traffic this end was not moving at all. After sitting there for ten minutes without progressing an inch, she backed the Mini into a parking space and got out. There was a nice Young’s pub round the corner. She would go and relax over a drink and a cigarette until the rush-hour had passed.

  About fifty yards along the main road, a knot of people blocked her path. A policeman was questioning some of them while another stood in the road directing the traffic. Aileen became aware of a siren in the distance and realized that it had been going on for some time without her noticing it. It was presumably an ambulance, stuck in the traffic jam caused by the accident to whic
h it had been called. A white delivery van was stopped at an angle in the middle of the road, almost on the white line. Behind it stood a bus, stalled at the moment of pulling away from its stop. One of the men being questioned gestured towards the van.

  ‘He didn’t give me a bleeding chance, did he?’

  ‘How fast were you going?’ the policeman asked, pencil and notebook at the ready.

  ‘I don’t know! Twenty, twenty-five? It’s a van, not a bleeding Ferrari, you know. Just as I was passing the bus, out he comes like a dog out of the trap.’

  ‘That’s right,’ the bus driver confirmed. He pointed out a man standing nearby. ‘Him over there, he said something made him run off.’

  Everyone turned to look at the man. Amid all the faces marked by anxiety or sorrow, the grin on his lips struck a jarring note. The policeman beckoned him over.

  ‘What did you say to him?’

  The man laughed almost contemptuously.

  ‘Nothing!’

  ‘You bloody well did!’ the bus driver exclaimed. ‘I saw you!’

  The man looked as though he was only able to restrain his hilarity because not even the most hysterical howls of laughter would be adequate to express the total absurdity of the situation. The whole thing was simply too stupid for words!

  ‘What did you say to him?’ the policeman repeated coldly.

  The man shrugged three or four times in quick succession.

  ‘I asked if he knew what time it was.’

  ‘That’s right,’ a woman with a dog put in. ‘I heard him.’

  The policeman looked rather exasperated by the woman’s unsolicited testimony.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ he snapped at the man, whose grin vanished with insulting abruptness.

  ‘Where do you live?’ the policeman demanded.

  ‘Paxton Grove. Number twenty-nine.’

  Up to this point, Aileen had been hovering on the fringes of the crowd, trying to work her way through. Now she stopped and gave the man a closer look. 29 Paxton Grove was a custodial hostel used to accommodate long-term psychiatric patients whose condition was more or less stable but unlikely to improve. This man was pretty obviously a chronic schizophrenic whose symptoms were being controlled by drugs sufficiently for him to be released into the community.