Bedlam Burning (12 page)

The other shaved head belonged to a far less threatening character, a floppy, long-limbed man whose bare skull was topped with a little silver helmet moulded out of tin foil. He looked absurd, like a space cadet in a budgetless science fiction movie. This was Cook.

Next to him sat a distinguished-looking older man with silky silver hair, and a crested blazer: Charles Manning. I never learned why people usually called him by both his names, but it suited his fatherly, patrician air. He gave the impression of a country solicitor on holiday, although the effect was sabotaged by the fact that he was bare-chested under the blazer. A ragged crop of somewhat less silky body hair pushed out between his lapels.

He said to me in clear, respectful, friendly tones, ‘Do you mind if I smoke?'

I didn't, although I wondered if I was supposed to, whether it was against some rule of the clinic, but before I could say anything, Anders shouted out, ‘He doesn't care if you spontaneously fuckin' combust.'

I laughed nervously, as indeed did Charles Manning, and then, since I obviously wasn't going to forbid it, he produced a cigarette, a cocktail Sobranie in pastel yellow paper. He took a lighter from his blazer pocket, handled it skilfully, as a practitioner of close-up magic might, lit the cigarette and inhaled blissfully.

The cigarette smoke drifted across to Maureen, a wide-eyed, bovine, chunkily built, middle-aged woman who was wearing full football kit, claret and blue: West Ham, I was fairly sure. She sat erect in her chair, arms folded across her chest as though posing for a team photograph, but as the smoke wafted into her nostrils she made a great show of coughing and choking.

The final member of the group was a moody, brooding, dandyish young blade, with flowing locks, wearing a sort of frock coat and knee-length boots. He looked like anybody's, or at least any second-rate movie director's, idea of the tortured poetic genius. He was called Byron; not his real name, I assumed.

As a group they were alarming though not, apart from Anders, especially frightening. I certainly didn't think they were the worst audience a lecturer or writer could have. It would have been easy to think of them as a freak show, but I was already smart enough to realise that once I got to know them they wouldn't appear freakish at all, and I hoped therefore they'd also cease to be alarming, cease to be a collection of quirks and symptoms. Chiefly what I got from them on that first day was an overwhelming sense of need. I thought they were looking at me beseechingly, wanting something from me, and I wasn't unwilling to give it, though precisely what it was and whether I had it was a different matter.

Other eyes were on me too. Alicia had taken up a place at the very back of the room, and the two porters who'd heavied me over the night before had positioned themselves on either side of the door, like bouncers. If they felt embarrassed or repentant at seeing me again they were skilled at not showing it. Kincaid was not in attendance, but I suppose that was understandable since he knew exactly what I
was going to say. I felt exposed and nervous, and I was glad I had the lectern to hide behind, but I think I managed to give a reasonable impression of a man in control. I smiled winningly but formally towards the faces in front of me, I tried to exude charm and I began to read the text Kincaid had prepared for me.

‘Good morning all. My name is Gregory Collins and I'm a writer. You don't know me yet, but over the course of your treatment you will come to know me very well indeed. You will come to trust me, to confide in me, to see that we're on the same side, a vital member of the team that's here to help you get better. This will make you happy.'

I thought this was laying it on a bit thick. Given human nature it seemed absolutely inevitable that some of the people I was facing would not come to trust or confide in me at all. As for making them happy, well, that simply seemed to be aiming far too high. But I read on, ‘It is my intention to help you plunge headlong into the wonderful world of language. I shall be asking you to do some writing for me, to express yourself in words on paper. You know, language is a great bulkhead against madness. At first you will find this process difficult and perhaps you will be reluctant, resistant, resentful, but eventually you will start to write, and you will enjoy it and this will become an essential part of the healing process. It will not be easy. It will not be pain-free. As you express yourself and set down your innermost thoughts and feelings you will experience swirling emotions …'

I glanced up at the patients and thought how unwise it might be to stir up any swirling emotions in them.

‘But these emotions will pass,' I read, my voice faltering a little now. ‘Writing will become your friend. You will write your way back to sanity. And this will make you happy.'

I was clearly not making anyone very happy at that moment. Ten glum, confused patients looked hopelessly at me. I was no longer in touch with the meaning of the words I was reading but I could hear my voice continuing. ‘We will tarry awhile in the groves of prose and poetry,' I said. ‘Perhaps some of you will find your inner Homer, your inner Joyce …'

I felt terrible. I felt I was insulting the patients' intelligence. There were still another eight or nine pages of this bumf to get through. I leaned over the lectern, the way I'd seen some of the more engaging
Cambridge lecturers do, and I made eye contact with the bare-chested old chap in the blazer.

‘Hi,' I said. ‘Do I remember right, your name's Charles Manning?'

‘That's very good,' he said.

‘Have you got a light, Charles?'

I knew that he had, and he stood up and passed me his cigarette lighter. He also offered me his pack of cigarettes but I didn't accept. I flipped the head of the lighter, flicked a sharp, concentrated blue flame into life and lowered a corner of Kincaid's pages into it. A band of fire trickled up them, growing, flapping, getting far too hot to handle. When I couldn't hold them any more I tossed them away, dropping them over the edge of the lectern. I looked at my audience and I smiled, as I hoped, wickedly. I thought I had performed a winning bit of theatre, demonstrated that I was going to depart from the prepared script, talk to them as a real person, but in the event I wasn't able to talk to them at all.

The two porters leapt into action, steamed up to the front of the room and started jack-booting the burning paper. They were eager but obviously a little slow, since by the time they got there enough smoke had risen to the ceiling to set off the smoke detectors and the fire alarm. All hell broke loose. The noise from the alarm was of an astonishing, ear-damaging loudness. It scared the wits out of me and it had a profound effect on the patients. They began to express themselves, not through the cool medium of writing, but rather by screaming, laughing, clapping, hooting, and in Charity's case by stripping naked and dancing. One or two appeared to be genuinely upset and frightened by the noise of the alarm and by the violent behaviour of the porters, but for the rest there was something exuberant and joyous in their reactions. They were showing off, playing to the gallery.

At the back of the room was one small locus of calm: Alicia Crowe. She was watching the mayhem as though from a million miles away. She hadn't reacted, hadn't tried to take control of the situation. Now she stood there running a weary hand through her hair, as if she'd seen it all before, and wasn't bored by it exactly, just very tired. Presumably she knew what was coming next.

Dr Kincaid bounced into the room, an ageing but sprightly and dignified super-hero, there at the first hint of trouble. It worked. The moment he entered, even before it seemed possible that all the
patients could have seen him, they became utterly calm, or perhaps becalmed. The porters stopped stamping and, coincidentally or not, the fire alarm fell silent.

‘Teething problems, Mr Collins?' Kincaid asked.

I wasn't sure whether to pretend the lecture notes had accidentally caught fire (not an easy pretence to sustain since there were witnesses) or whether to admit I'd done it deliberately as an extreme act of literary criticism, as a roundabout way of protesting about the shoddy treatment I'd received on my arrival. In the event I said nothing at all. I nodded and shrugged simultaneously, the two gestures cancelling each other out, and Kincaid didn't bother to ask me what I meant. He looked at the fragments of blackened paper that were now scattered around a wide area of the floor like satanic confetti, and said, ‘You will want to discuss this at length later.'

I wasn't at all sure that I would. Kincaid breathed deeply and pulled back his shoulders, creating the effect of having been suddenly inflated, and in a calm, powerful voice he addressed the patients.

‘I must confess that I'm really rather angry,' he said in a voice of utter equanimity. ‘You will go away now. You will write a piece of creative writing for me, and for Mr Collins. The title of this piece of creative writing will be,' – he had to think, but only for a second; here was a man used to making instant, irrevocable decisions – ‘the title will be
The Moon and Sixpence
. When you've finished your work, Mr Collins will evaluate it. Then we can proceed.'

The patients slunk away, broody and resentful, and why wouldn't they be? Their first writing assignment had been turned into a form of punishment, and it was all my fault. And I suppose I was expecting to receive some form of punishment too. I had, after all, set fire to the boss's lecture notes; not nearly as bad as punching the boss, but still, even in such immediate retrospect, not a very mature opening gambit. Already I couldn't for the life of me imagine why I'd done it. Was it to show how wild and subversive I was? That sounded pathetic. I knew I deserved a good bollocking, and in a way would probably have welcomed it.

There was another worry: Alicia. I felt I'd let her down. If she'd been cool to me before, she had every reason to be glacial now. I'd been her choice, and I'd been an instant failure. She had left the lecture room along with the patients and the porters, so that I was left alone with Kincaid. Now would have been as good a time as any for
him to deliver a dressing-down, but he only looked at the scrub of burned paper on the floor and said, ‘Fortunately it wasn't the only copy.'

I went back to my hut. I pulled the ramshackle old chair up to the equally ramshackle old desk, and sat there in silence, facing the redundant typewriter. I had nothing to do at the desk; nothing to write, nothing to read, and I could see this was going to be a problem. I suppose I'm what most people think of as an avid, not to say obsessive, reader. I always have been. I met a few people at university who read more than I did, but not many. If I'm not actively engaged with half a dozen books at any one time I feel guilty and bereft. A train journey without a book to read is absolute torture, and I don't understand how people can just sit there and stare into space or listen to their Walkman, not that there was any such thing as a Walkman in the days when I was at the Kincaid Clinic.

Now, you could argue that this need to read is actually a need not to be left alone with my own thoughts, and although on most occasions I'd disagree with that, my thoughts were certainly hard to live with at that moment, so I set out on a desperate mission to find some reading material.

I went to the main entrance of the clinic, to the waiting area, where I vaguely remembered seeing some newspapers. They were still there and I seized on them hopefully, only to be immediately disappointed. They had been cut to ribbons. Virtually no news item, no article, no piece of text remained intact. I wondered why the clinic even bothered to have the papers there.

The nurse who had been so snotty to me the previous night was still on the front desk. She watched me struggle with the loose strips and flaps of newspaper, and although she was far too miserable to give herself the pleasure of laughing at me, I sensed she was enjoying watching me suffer.

‘I'm just looking for something to read,' I said, and instantly regretted it. Why did I feel the need to explain myself to this woman?

‘Maybe you should try the library,' she said.

‘There's a library?'

‘Obviously. Upstairs. The east wing.'

I hadn't thought of the clinic as having wings, and I wasn't sure that in reality it did, but she explained to me, slowly, at length, in terms even an idiot might understand, how to get to the library. I followed them and in due course I came to a door with the word ‘Library' on it. I opened it and found myself in a room not much larger than an ordinary domestic living room. It was pleasant enough, had a bay window that gave a view of the grounds, and it had shelves from floor to ceiling that could have accommodated a good few thousand books. But they didn't. These shelves held nothing at all. They were all completely, bleakly empty: just bare stretches of dusty wood, not a book in the place. I felt angry and insulted and bitterly amused. How pathetic, how terrible, and yet how very typical of what I'd so far discovered about the Kincaid Clinic.

Restless and frustrated, I went for a walk around the outside of the main building. As I saw it from different angles it seemed a less and less impressive structure. The front was presentable enough, recently painted and in so-so repair, but that was only a façade, a mask presented to the outside world. Round the sides and back, everything was dilapidated. Chunks of rendering had fallen from the walls and had not been replaced. Drainpipes and guttering clung to the edges of the building, hanging on by their fingertips. Broken windows had been patched up with cardboard and duct tape, and parts of the woodwork resembled flaky pastry. I couldn't help noticing how many locked doors and barred windows there were, but perhaps it was naive of me to expect anything else; this was an asylum, after all.

I turned my back on the clinic and concentrated on exploring the grounds. I investigated the tennis court. There was no net, and clumps of grass and dandelion had split the hard red surface. Elsewhere the fountain with the cement mermaid was full of dead leaves and glass fragments. There were signs that someone was trying to cultivate a couple of borders in the flower garden, but the attempt looked half-hearted. Neglect was rampant, and there was a surprising amount of rubbish and litter about the place, a lot of beer cans and broken bottles, but they didn't look as though they came from the
clinic, rather that they'd been chucked over the wall from outside, perhaps by drunken locals, the kind who sprayed graffiti and yelled at me in the rain.