Aileen said nothing. She found Jenny’s ferocious cynicism hard to take in large doses, which is how it was usually administered.
‘That boy I talked to you about yesterday,’ she began tentatively. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve had time to observe him at all.’
‘You mean what’s-his-name, Gary? To tell you the truth, I haven’t even noticed he’s there.’
‘He won’t be, not after tomorrow. I haven’t got anywhere with him, apart from stumbling on his real name. He’s undoubtedly lying about other things too, but there’s no time to discover what they are. Actually lying’s not quite the right word. He seems almost to lack any clear sense of what’s true and what isn’t. That makes it all the more effective, of course, because there’s no sense of guilt to give him away. It’s as if he’s holding a pack of possibilities and he deals out this one or that, according to the situation, without bothering himself about whether they happen to be true or not.’
Aileen noticed a slightly glazed look come over Jenny’s eyes and realized that she was rabbiting on.
‘Anyway, perhaps the police will be able to find out something about him,’ she concluded.
The younger woman shot her a distinctly sharp look.
‘The police?’
‘I told them his real name,’ Aileen explained.
‘Really?’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
Jenny sipped her drink in silence.
‘They were very nice and helpful to me when I phoned,’ Aileen said defensively.
‘Of course they were! You’re a wealthy, middle-class, educated, white female. Why shouldn’t they be nice to you? If you buy a guard dog, you don’t expect it to attack you, do you?’
Aileen returned Jenny’s look with a growing feeling of resentment.
‘You’re all those things too, Jenny.’
‘I know I am! And I know exactly where I stand with the police, believe me.’
There was a momentary silence that was awkward in its intensity.
‘Anyway, what I don’t quite understand is why this particular patient matters so much to you,’ Jenny went on in a more soothing tone. ‘I mean concern is great, of course, but there are plenty of deserving cases at the Unit. You seem to have got very involved with this boy. What’s so special about him?’
For a moment, a fraction of a second, Aileen was tempted to tell her, to open up completely and admit the mysterious and illicit identification of this boy with the ghostly child which had followed her about for over fifteen years. But she didn’t. It was partly the sheer magnitude of the task that daunted her, all the painful and confusing background details she would have to relate in order to make sense of what was happening now. But she was also checked by a chilling echo of Douglas’s voice in what Jenny had said. He too had asked her if she didn’t think there might be a danger of her becoming too involved in her work. Aileen winced internally. Jenny Wilcox and Douglas Macklin were so different in every way that the idea of their agreeing on anything at all seemed tantamount to a proof that it must be true.
‘I just can’t believe that in this day and age someone can just pop up from nowhere like this,’ she responded instead. ‘A person with no name, no identity. I mean, I thought we were all on computers somewhere.’
‘We are! The two things go together. There’s a whole class of invisible people out there now, people with no name, no address, no job, no hope. Their last contact with the world we live in is by claiming social security benefits, which is one reason why the Government is making it as difficult as possible for them to do so. Because once they let go of that, they disappear totally, which is exactly what Thatcher wants. You create an underclass with no rights or privileges whatsoever and then threaten the members of the lower divisions of the social league with relegation to it if they dare complain about the lousy rights and privileges they have got. Just take a walk along the Embankment down by the Festival Hall some evening! Upstairs in the big glass hi-fi the bow ties and fur coats are sipping wait wain in the interval of listening to Andre and the RPO cream off some more of possibly-the-greatest-classics-in-the-world. Meanwhile, twenty feet below, a few hundred human derelicts are huddling up for the night in their cardboard packing cases. It’s like a fucking George Grosz cartoon, except it’s not Berlin in the thirties, it’s London in the eighties, right here under our noses. And no one gives a fuck.’
‘We’re drinking white wine,’ Aileen pointed out.
Jenny looked at her with genuine puzzlement.
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
But before Aileen had a chance to reply, the bar was taken over by music loud enough to make it unnecessary if not impossible. Above a synthesized beat like the clanking of an electronic dustbin lid, a choir of disembodied ghouls wailed vaguely at intervals, random bursts of demented laughter zinged about like machine-gun fire and a voice straining upwards in a manic shriek urged everyone to ‘Go for it! Go for it! Hup, hup, hup!’ Aileen signalled for the bill, over which she and Jenny had a gentle tussle won by the younger woman.
‘I just can’t listen to that stuff,’ Aileen commented once they were outside.
‘You’re not supposed to listen to it. It’s like the background music to a film, the film of your life. You use it to add an extra dimension to the moment, to focus your style.’
‘I’m just too old,’ Aileen replied, putting on a slightly comic moue of self-deprecation.
‘You’re as old as you feel.’
‘That’s the whole trouble. I wish you only felt as old as you are. I’m not actually very old, not really, but I feel ancient. Sometimes I’m almost tempted to believe in reincarnation. It seems the only way of accounting for how tired I get. It’s as if I’ve had many previous existences and not stayed dead long enough in between.’
Jenny’s mouth opened to reveal an expanse of pink upper gum and the street echoed with her laughter.
Although the great heart-to-heart talk hadn’t happened, Aileen nevertheless felt better as she drove home. She’d had a chance to air a few of her preoccupations, at least, and the wine had made her feel pleasantly drowsy and inconsequential. The problems of the day no longer seemed quite so acute. In fact for some reason she found herself thinking about the graffiti she had seen on the door at the Unit that afternoon. She repeated the words over and over to herself as she drove along: eat, shit, die, box. They didn’t seem to make any obvious sense, but there was something intriguing about them. Perhaps the last two belonged together, she mused. Could ‘die-box’ be a poetic formula for a coffin, like the riddling compounds in Anglo-Saxon verse? In that case the words looked like a sort of street haiku, a bleak inventory of human life. You eat, you shit, they bury you. And if you’re a middle-aged childless woman, she thought, you bleed as welclass="underline" uselessly, uselessly, month by month.
When Aileen parked the red Mini opposite the house, Mr Griffiths, her next-door neighbour, was at work on the tall hedge which screened his property at the front. Standing on a short step-ladder, he was busily shaving away the last of the summer growth with an electric trimmer so as to make the hedge look as much as possible like a wall. Mr Griffiths’s lawn was mown so relentlessly that Aileen sometimes wondered why he didn’t just replace it with artificial turf and have done. But that was to miss the point, of course. Everyone needs a hobby. Mr Griffiths’s hobby was forcing Nature to play dead. They exchanged ritual greetings as Aileen passed. The nights were drawing in already, Mr Griffiths said. They were indeed, agreed Aileen. For a moment Mr Griffiths paused, regarding her with a vacuous smile as though about to venture some further confidence, perhaps to the effect that he wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t a frost. But in the end he must have decided that this would be coming on a bit strong, and turned his attentions to the hedge instead.