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 response, 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.