21

On Tuesday morning I kept my eyes on what I was doing while I worked. I tried not to look up so as to avoid meeting anyone’s eyes.

Jim was taken away.

I thought that perhaps he had guessed about me because he was once like me himself. I wondered if he had a sister.

I went to see Dr Strickland at half-past eleven.

He did not want me to leave the hospital. He said that he did not think that I was well enough to go home.

But I had decided. I was calm and I kept saying the same thing. ‘I want to go home.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s no use my staying here, I can’t be cured.’

‘Cured of what?’

‘I want what I want, not what I ought to want.’

He picked up a sheet of paper from his desk, looked at it for what seemed like a whole minute, and then screwed it up and dropped it over the edge of the desk into the waste-paper basket.

He looked at me. ‘I don’t want to keep you here if you really want to go home. This place isn’t a prison. I suppose I can only hope—for your sake—that you’ll behave sensibly. You’re not a fool. Try to remember that you won’t prove anything by behaving like a fool. Do you think you’ll start stealing women’s underclothes again?’

‘No.’

‘If you do, you might find the police tramping all over you. Would you like that?’

‘No.’

‘Neither would I. Very well, you can go home tomorrow. But I’d like to see you at the Wilberforce Hospital in Hull sometime. You’ll get a card through the post.’

I said, ‘I hope it doesn’t seem that I’m ungrateful for the help you’ve given me.’

‘Why should it? If you want to go home, you want to go home. There’s no point in your staying in hospital for the rest of your life.’

I said, ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t cooperate properly. I’ve been wasting your time. I’ve read about people like me. They go to psychiatrists but it’s never any use.’

He told me that when I got home I ought to go to see the local doctor, Dr Booth, who had sent me to the hospital. He also said that the psychiatric social worker, Mrs Turner, might visit me.

The interview ended. He could go home to his dinner. His wife would be waiting.

Whenever he had been talking to me he had been waiting for dinner time to come so that he could go home. Nothing he had ever said to me had been real. I was only a sickening boy with a sickening madness. I was not a girl. The bright coloured dream that I could see was to him a filthy abscess. Certainly he must feel contempt for me. He was a man, and what I was must be contemptible to any man.

I would not go to see him at the Wilberforce Hospital.