Once Bitten by Stephen Leather Page A

alive.”
    She laughed. “Well I do. Hold this for me.”
    I took her glass and watched as she squeezed onto the dancefloor, found what passed for a space and began to move. She danced well, well enough for some of the guys to stop looking at their partners and to watch her instead. She had a good sense of rhythm and used the floor and was soon lost in the music. A tall, black guy in too-tight trousers and a white silk shirt open to the waist eased towards her and she smiled at him and they danced together as if they'd done it many time before. I was jealous, they looked good, and what they were doing was just about as sexual as you could get without touching. I envied him the way he seemed to know exactly what she was going to do next and he knew how to react to her. They'd be great in bed together, it was blindingly obvious, and I wanted to kill him. I looked away and saw the barman looking at me. He smiled and I grimaced.
    Don't worry, he signed. They're just friends. They dance together, that's all.
    I smiled back and lifted up the glasses to show that I couldn't sign back to him. He waved and went back to serving drinks. She danced with the guy for the best part of half an hour and then he delivered her back to me, kissed her on the cheek and gave me a mock bow before disappearing back into the sweating throng.
    “You dance well,” I said to her.
    “I'd shitfire sure rather have danced with you, Jamie,” she said, taking her glass. She put it,
    untouched, on a side table. She looked at her watch. “Come on, let's go.”
    “Where?”
    “Trust me, Jamie. Just trust me.”
    She led me back outside, saying a dozen goodbyes as we left.
    “You've a lot of friends,” I said.
    She shrugged. “I've been coming here a long time. It's a really neat place.”
    We walked back to the car, arm in arm, our footsteps echoing in the still night air. “Your namesake had a cat, you know?” she said.
    “Who?”
    “James Dean. A Siamese kitten. Elizabeth Taylor gave it to him. The night before he died he took it a neighbour's house. Everyone reckons he was a real macho type, you know, but he loved the kitten.”
    “What made you think of that?” I asked.
    "Oh, I guess I was thinking about the questions you were asking me in the precinct house.
    Remember? Do you prefer cats to dogs? Funny question, that."
    “It's not the reply that's important, it's the fact that you can answer. Some psychotics can't make choices. It wasn't a trick question.” Overhead hung the moon, pockmarked and accusing. The occasional car drove by but it was almost three o'clock so they were few and far between. We walked between two apartment buildings and I held her closer.
    “Does that program, that Beaverbrook Program, always work?” she asked.
    “I like to think so.”
    “Because I still don't, like, understand why you need a computer program to tell if someone is right in the head, you know?”
    “Yeah, I know. Let me tell you a story.”
    “I'd like that,” she said, and squeezed my hand.
    “There was a guy called Rosenhan did some research in the early seventies. He told the staff of a teaching hospital that a number of fake patients would try to gain admission by claiming that they had symptoms of various mental illnesses.”
    “To check if they could spot them or not?”
    “That's right. Each member of staff was asked to rate each new admission as to whether they were an impostor or not. Over a three-week period just under two hundred new patients were admitted, and at least one in five were reckoned to be faking it by at least one member of staff.”
    “So? That proves they knew what they were doing, right?”
    “Wrong,” I said. “They were all genuine patients. Rosenhan didn't send any impostors.”
    “Wow!”
    “Yeah. He was making the point that often psychiatrists can't tell the difference between sane and insane people. Classification of mental disorders has always been pretty unreliable.”
    She turned her head to look