Stanley and the Women (10 page)

The
last bit came quite fast and I had not considered the idea at all. ‘Is that
necessary?’ I asked at about the third try.

‘Desirable.
Highly desirable.’ Nash looked down at his hands, which were big and rather
battered, not upper-class at all at first sight. ‘It’s only fair to let you
know why and how. Briefly, then — your boy hasn’t offered any violence to
persons so far, but he’s plainly shall we say unpredictable and
needs
treatment
that’ll work fairly quickly. Which in practice means full doses of
tranquillizing drugs,’ he said with his voice going slightly singsong, ‘which
will probably have side-effects which may be alarming and even a little bit
risky if not professionally supervised and which may lead the patient to shirk
taking his pills, which again can be dangerous. For instance he might —’

Here I
interrupted him. I had been trying to follow what he said while fighting off memories
of visiting my mother in hospital three years previously. The place itself had
not been too bad and she had thought she was coming out in a few weeks — so had
everybody else until the last couple of days. What had stuck in my mind were
things like the sight and sound of those other sick people everywhere and my
mother’s feelings of being cut off and not in any control of the situation, and
she had been completely clear about what was going on. Steve had been confused
and scared in his mother’s sitting room, and where he looked like being sent
would be worse in some serious ways than where my mother had been, I thought,
and I said to Nash,

‘Can’t
he just stay here and go to the hospital as an out-patient? My wife and I could
give him his pills and see he took them.’

‘Do you
really think so? Can’t you hear him telling you he’s not a child, stop treating
him like an idiot, don’t stand over him like that, don’t you trust him? What
you actually have to do to see he takes his pills, to monitor compliance as I’m
afraid it’s called, is a rather undignified and intrusive business, you know. Much
better left to nurses. He’d agree.’

‘Surely
it can’t do him any good to be surrounded by …

‘All
those loonies. Yes. I can only say it won’t do him any harm. No doubt that
sounds rather a breezy remark. The fact is that mental illness isn’t
communicable.’

‘But he’ll
be frightened.’

‘He’ll
be under medication. Tranquillized. As I said. There’s really no need to worry
about that.’

‘What
happens then, doctor? Does he get some sort of therapy, or does he just go on
being tranquillized? I’m only asking.’

‘He
gets chemotherapy, which is drugs. As for what you probably mean,
psychotherapy, which is corrective training — not recommended in this case. But
let me explain about the drugs. They’re quite distinct from palliative
tranquillizers like Valium and Librium that you may have come across and which
are almost useless in treating schizophrenia. Over the last thirty years these,
these others have helped a great many patients to recover quickly and well. I
realize you may have gained the impression from me or in some other way that
all that can be done is keep the patient quiet until he either recovers or
doesn’t. No, much more than that.’ Perhaps he misread or read correctly something
in my expression, because he went on to say, ‘Or possibly you have ideas of
your own on the point.’

‘How on
earth would I have ideas of my own on that kind of point? All I’m doing is
trying to take this in. It’s rather a lot in one go and I’ll probably get some
bits wrong the first time round. If that, doing that, sounds like me having
ideas of my own it’s not meant to,’ I said. Christ, I also said, but not out
loud.

Nash
smiled for the first time, showing a couple of rows of old-ivory teeth and looking
like an unreliable dog. ‘I really beg your pardon, Mr Duke, but these days
everybody seems to think he knows something about the subject, about psychiatry
that is, usually after reading a newspaper article to the effect that all the
work so far done has been mistaken. A little crushing, you may think. I mean
all
the work? Imagine an astronomer hearing the same. I agree not a close
parallel. A jurist. To revert to your son. There’s at least one other good
reason why I want him in hospital —he needs various medical and neurological
tests which would be much better done with him there.’

‘Can’t
he have them done as an out-patient?’

‘Yes. Theoretically.
But finding the right building, and the right part of the right building, and
waiting for the clerk to come back if she isn’t there when you arrive, and don’t
be too upset if it turns out the machine isn’t working that day, and fix up
another appointment and turn up on time for that, but don’t be too sure, don’t
be too sanguine about its working then either, and don’t walk out in a huff if
they’re rude, and don’t lose the form I gave you because they won’t do it
without, and remember always to leave yourself plenty of … well …’

‘I
could take him myself.’

‘Mr
Duke, I must stress to you that it would be very much simpler and more
straightforward, and quicker which is important, if these tests were done in
the normal way, with everything organized by the hospital.’

‘Yes, I
can see,’ I said. What I said to myself this time was what it was I could see,
or a good half of it — that the ones it would be simpler for in the first place
were the doctors, the hospital staff, Nash himself, all of them, the other lot
as against Steve’s and my lot.

Nash
too seemed to have seen something. He said, quietly for him, ‘People in your
position usually find it hard to face the prospect of their child disappearing
for an indefinite period into the shadowy world of mental hospitals, which they
don’t understand in the way they feel they understand places you go to with
something wrong with your inside and have it cut out. They find the notion of
madness easier to accept than that of mental illness, which can’t be an illness
really, can it? Doctors and nurses for that? Something that just comes over
you? Then a lot of them feel they’d be abdicating the proper … Ah, here we
are.’

Steve
had put on one of the shirts Susan had got for him, in fact part of the
cardboard stiffening it had been packaged with was showing under the collar. I
noticed his trousers were very shiny as well as shapeless. His whole appearance
and manner seemed ordinary, not worth bothering about, so completely free of
strain that just for a moment I thought I was going to tell Nash we were not
going to need him after all. Then I caught Steve’s eye and he recognized me
instantly, which does sound like what he should have done in a way, and it was
not that he mistook me for someone else he knew or thought he knew, at least
that never occurred to me then. He looked at me in a contented, relieved,
friendly way that held not an atom of what gets built up and taken for granted
between a parent and a child who get on all right together, different from
anything else. After that he gave Nash a polite glance and dropped suddenly on
to the velvet settee, soon wriggling into one of his awkward positions.

‘Good
bath?’ Nash asked loudly, rather like somebody talking to a foreigner in a
sketch. ‘Splendid. M’m, now just, if you would …’ He made what were
probably encouraging movements with his hand. ‘Er … just …’

Without
any more prompting Steve said, ‘I told you I couldn’t blame her.’

‘Yes,
you did, but let’s go into it again. Why not? Why couldn’t you blame her?’

‘Well,
she couldn’t have done any different.’

‘Why
not? Why couldn’t she have done any different?’

‘She couldn’t
for my sake. She had to freeze me out.’

Nash
shook his head and drew in his breath. ‘I don’t see that,’ he said firmly.

‘She
didn’t want to know me,’ said Steve, with a lot of patience and a look in my
direction. ‘Did she?’

He
really seemed to be appealing to me. ‘Not when I spoke to her,’ I said.

‘You
what? You … spoke to Fawzia?’ That was what the name sounded like.

‘I
thought you meant Mandy,’ I said, blushing like a schoolkid.

‘Mandy?
That slag?’ He sounded quite good-natured, but was a bit bothered or suspicious
when he said, ‘What was she on about then?’

‘I rang
her, just to see if she could —’

Holding
his hands up now, shushing me, Nash said, ‘This freezing you out as you call
it, what was the point of all that, it makes no sense to me at all.’

‘Well,
you know, she was protecting me, wasn’t she?’

‘I’m
terribly sorry, but do you mean she was protecting you by freezing you out? I
should have thought …

Steve
nodded in a tolerant way, prepared to admit that parts of his story did need
some explanation. ‘This girl Fawzia, right? She and I had a big thing going,
not out in the open, but I knew, just from the little things she said, wouldn’t
mean a thing to anybody else, and even just the way she looked at me sometimes,
it was all there, I just knew. Then she became involved in certain undercover
activities, which made her extremely unpopular in certain quarters.’

‘When
was this?’

‘Year
ago.’

This
seemed to disappoint Nash. He smoothed his moustache and waited.

‘So
then they get after me, because I know too much. So she starts ignoring me,
see, to try and throw them off and to warn me. I know too much not only about
her but their systems. Also their organization, which is extremely
high-powered, extremely ruthless, and extremely … undercover. ‘Then, coming
to the climax of a horrendously embarrassing and pathetic take-off of a hundred
would-be brilliant films, he said, ‘The gentlemen involved … call
themselves … the chosen.’

Poor
old Steve of course belonged to one of the generations which had never been
taught anything about anything, and he obviously thought his reference to the
chosen was about as advanced and wrapped-up as words could get, well out of
sight of a poor bugger as cut off as his dad, let alone any associated other-worlders
like Nash. The next moment I remembered him once or twice just about a year
before bringing along to the house somebody who could have been a
fellow-student of his during his brief stint at the polytechnic, a remarkably
unaccommodating female with a short upper lip and a sallow skin and a name very
like Fawzia.

With
that established, a lot of things became as clear as they were probably ever
going to. Jews, or people who might have been Jews or counted as Jews or
Israelis, were after him because he had once known —not, I was sure, ever very
well — a girl who was quite likely one kind of Arab or another and on that
ground could, at the sacrifice of all the common sense and humour in the world,
have had them after her too, or something of the sort.

The realization
shoved me into a state of combined gloom and boredom. Had Steve really put
himself through the whole business of going mad just so as to be able to
believe that? At the same time its moderation was a relief — it was only
untrue, silly, ridiculously improbable, not mad in itself. There undoubtedly
were such things as Arab intelligence agents, even if a female one was a pretty
dodgy concept, and presumably Israeli counterintelligence went around trying
to do them a bit of no good. It was another relief that however confused he
might actually be he seemed not to feel confused for the time being, nor in the
least frightened.

He had
been looking at me with cheerful mild contempt, an expression I had never seen
on his face before. I tried to remember where he had finished speaking. ‘You
don’t believe any of that, do you?’ he asked.

‘You’ve
been going a bit fast for me,’ I said.

He
nodded as before. ‘Okay,’ he said, and got energetically to his feet. ‘We can
take a look outside now. Yeah, come on.’

Nash and
I followed him to the window, which gave a good view of the street. Hunched up
in the slight drizzle a man I immediately recognized was walking along it at
that very moment, a man who worked at one of the banks in the High Street and
whom I had seen a few times in the Pheasant and who looked like half the other
men you would expect to see in places like that. Otherwise there was nothing
moving in sight at all.

‘There
you are,’ said Steve.

After a
moment I said, ‘How do you mean?’ because he seemed to think I knew. I wished
Nash would join in.

‘Joshua,’
said Steve.

‘What?’

‘Oh
come on —
Joshua.’
For the first time he showed some impatience. ‘He’s
only just … You saw him with your own eyes.

‘I saw
a man. What … which Joshua are you talking about?’

‘More
than one, is there? That one’s the one that took out Jericho with ultra-sound
and saw off the Canaanites.’

He
mispronounced this name and I took a second to disentangle it. ‘How do you know
about Joshua?’ I asked. It was nowhere near the most urgent question I had for
him, but even now I could not imagine anything that would drive him to the Old
Testament.

‘There
are methods of obtaining the relevant information,’ he said, dropping back
into his master-spy act for a moment, but soon coming up lively and
self-confident. ‘Anyway, you saw him, didn’t you, what, twenty yards away? Less
than a minute ago?’