Mary Dunwich writes: It is Harry the Geek's twenty-eighth birthday tomorrow and I'm baking him a cake. I should like it known that it wasn't my idea to call him The Geek. He insists on it. He has considered the range of likely nicknames and decided that The Geek is probably the best he's likely to get. He is proud of being an electronics genius, and rightly so. Harry is tall, dark and Scottish, good-looking in a brooding sort of way, and fiendishly intelligent. He is quietly spoken, well-mannered and very good with children. He's just my type, although I daren't tell him how gorgeous I think he is because it would only embarrass him. He doesn't have much self-esteem. Ah, if only I were still single. If only I were younger. If only the Devil would stop stealing all his socks. For Harry the Geek has schizophrenia.
We met him four years ago now, when we were up at Sir Isaac's scrumping for apples. He had been an inpatient there for some time, and had just escaped from the ward for one of his regular shopping trips. The orderlies searching the grounds for him saw the Werewolf up an apple tree, and were understandably confused. My husband refused to be coaxed down from his tree, and by the time a nurse had fetched a ladder Harry had returned from "PC World" and was offering to hold it steady for them. It was the start of a beautiful friendship. We all took to Harry straight away. After all, hearing voices, seeing odd things or having peculiar ideas is hardly unusual in our house. Now that James is channelling the spirit of Albert Einstein, and the Devil now only talks to Harry on Father's Day, it's hard to say which of them is weirder. The medication they put Harry on at Sir Isaac's keeps him pretty stable, and he even managed to finish his master's degree while he was an inpatient there (that must have involved a lot of escaping). Charlie helped Harry to get his first proper job at the Council with him planning road crossings for badgers. In return, Harry has designed and built our doorbell out of an old Coke can and the insides of some musical greetings cards.
I have invited Harry round tomorrow for a proper birthday tea, with jelly and a cake and candles and everything. Minnie and James are very excited. So, I think, is Harry. He doesn't have a lot of friends or family (and certainly not family who are friendly) so he spends his birthday alone and gloomy unless forced to have a good time. He can't drink with his medication and anyway isn't a party animal, but he likes Doctor Who and stupid jokes and any toy with a battery in it. I might even ask James to take him for a ride in his space-time travel module. Hey, Harry's schizophrenic, he's not going to tell anyone he's travelled through time, is he? Not without getting his medication reviewed.
