Michael Dibdin - The Tryst

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.

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. Overgrown 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.