Bedlam Burning (15 page)

I wasn't a complete robot. I was doing more than just obeying orders. I was my own man, and yet when a woman is telling you to suck her breasts, lick her clitoris, stick your tongue up her anus, it would take a very contrary man to insist on doing something different. And indeed, Alicia's commands (or demands) were so encyclopaedic, there was very little I could have done that she hadn't already covered.

And after I'd ‘filled her up with my giant load of hot, filthy, steaming cum', to use Alicia's phrase, we lay together in a welcome silence. When your partner has exhausted the possibilities of every sexual obscenity, it's hard to know what to say next. And the truth was I didn't need to say anything. I was perfectly happy lying there in the dark, with my arm around Alicia, not saying or doing anything. And I wondered if this was what Kincaid meant about freeing yourself from speech and response. I even remembered what he'd said about my time in the padded cell, how darkness and silence could be reassuring and supportive. Of course my experience of the padded cell would have been rather different if Alicia had been in there with me, and lying with Alicia now wasn't ‘doing nothing' in the sense that I'd been doing nothing in the writer's hut for most of the past week. Nevertheless, it occurred to me that Kincaid might possibly know what he was talking about. Then I realised how vile it was to be lying in bed with Alicia while thinking about Kincaid. I tried to clear him out of my mind.

Then Alicia spoke. She said, ‘This never happened, right? I was never here. We never had sex. Nobody must know: not Kincaid, not the staff, not the patients, not anybody. If anyone suspects, I'll deny it with my dying breath. If you ever tell anyone, I'll call you a liar, say you're making it up, weaving some sick little fantasy about me. Right?'

‘Right,' I said.

‘Good,' she said, and she softened, she curled into me and was
again her warm, affectionate, maybe even loving, self. I wondered how long this could possibly go on.

I don't know if Alicia and I literally slept together that night. I know that I fell asleep while she was in my bed, and I know that when I woke up she'd gone, so perhaps she never slept there at all. I also know that while I slept I dreamed of being in bed with her, and by the morning everything about the whole episode had taken on an utterly dreamlike quality.

I was brought abruptly into consciousness by a knocking at the door of the hut. I sat up, saw that Alicia wasn't beside me and in a way I was glad. Even though I didn't feel quite as intensely about secrecy as she apparently did, I didn't much want to be found in bed with her by any of the people likely to be knocking at my hut.

I got up and opened the door a couple of inches to see Raymond peering in at me. ‘Would you like any duty free, sir? Only joking.'

I stared at him fuzzily. This time he had no trolley, he wasn't offering coffee, and as I opened the door an inch wider I saw he wasn't alone. Accompanying him were the other nine inmates of the Kincaid Clinic. They stood in a silent, straggling line outside the hut. Some looked at me hopefully, some beseechingly, some with unconcealed excitement, some couldn't look at me at all. Anders, of course, looked at me as though he wanted to beat me up. But all of them seemed to be attaching an unnatural importance to being in my presence. That was when I looked at my watch. It was six in the morning.

‘What on earth do you want from me at six o'clock on a Saturday morning?'

For a time nobody spoke, but after a painfully prolonged silence Raymond was nudged forward and took on the role of spokesman. ‘We've brought you a little something to read,' he said.

A cardboard box was handed along the line, as though it were a fireman's bucket, and was deposited on the threshold of the hut. The
top was open and I could see it was full of paper, or rather typescript. The patients were delivering the week's work, ten versions of
The Moon and Sixpence
. I was impressed, indeed amazed and daunted by their immense productivity. There had to be a thousand pages or more in there, at least a hundred pages per patient. That wasn't just prolific, that was manic; well, what a surprise. Reading it all was going to be a big job, even if it was one I'd been looking forward to.

‘Thanks,' I said. ‘Thanks very much. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.'

‘We could taxi around out here until you've read it,' Raymond said.

‘No. You wouldn't have liked it if I'd stood over you while you wrote it, would you?'

There was general consent that I'd said something reasonable and the patients started to withdraw, going off in a solemn, mournful procession. I should probably have gone back to bed, resumed my dreams of Alicia, but this boxful of writing had me hooked. I got dressed and got ready for work. I felt good. Here at last was something to do. This was what I was here for.

I took the pages out of the box and separated them, arranged them into individual works, as it were. This was harder than it might sound. The pages weren't numbered, and not all of them had very clear beginnings or ends; but using common sense, intuition, and noting the different typewriter faces, I did my best.

Then I began to read. I didn't just sit down at the first page and systematically read my way right through to the end, since I was far too eager to get an overview of the types and varieties of writing. I picked a page here, an opening paragraph there, a couple of random sentences elsewhere. I got a taste, a flavour, a sense of things to come. But then I did indeed go back to the beginning, not that there was a beginning
per se
, and studiously, thoroughly, conscientiously, read and then reread the complete works.

Here was a version of God's plenty; most of it having absolutely no relevance to the title
The Moon and Sixpence
, for which I was somewhat grateful; although oddly enough there was one piece that seemed to make a pretty good stab at retelling the story of Charles Strickland and his adventures in Tahiti. I say ‘seemed' because my memories of the original weren't very fresh, Somerset Maugham being almost as unfashionable then as he is now.

The other pieces were more obviously ‘creative'. There was a childhood memoir about growing up in a softer, more bucolic age, a time with fewer cars, less crime and better weather. There was a strangely subdued erotic fantasy about a naive teenage girl who's invited to an English country house, a place much like the Kincaid Clinic, where she meets a family of eccentrics who engage her in elaborate but really quite mild and harmless forms of sexual activity.

There was a continuous stream of consciousness, a hundred or more pages: unparagraphed, underpunctuated, unmediated and strangely unrevealing meanderings about love, pain, despair, that sort of thing. Another piece recounted, at floaty length, the deeply spiritual joys of dancing naked.

There was an account of a football match, written in painstaking, mind-numbing detail, recording every move, every pass, every tactic, every disputed decision, every mood swing demonstrated by the crowd. It took about as long to read the piece as it would to have watched the match, although perhaps that was the point. It had a certain lumbering, anal power, but it was remarkably little fun to read, although I knew I wasn't there just for fun. More entertaining was a story set on a Boeing 747 where the pilot comes down with an attack of food poisoning and the plucky air steward has to land the plane on a tiny volcanic island and does so with dignity and aplomb.

One of the most curious and, surprisingly, one of the most readable pieces consisted of a list, rather a long list, of ‘interesting facts': the world's most prolific playwright was Lope de Vega; in 1873 Mark Twain patented a self-pasting scrapbook; the Amazon river has one hundred tributaries; Morocco was the first country to recognise the United States; and so on. Another piece, one of the shorter ones for fairly obvious reasons, was an endless series of anagrams, about the ‘avarice' of ‘caviare' and the ‘long leases' of ‘Los Angeles', and ‘Alfred' who ‘flared'. Parts of it were very clever, but it really made no sense at all. The anagrams didn't add up to anything. They were just anagrams.

Only two pieces struck me as genuinely disturbing, which I suppose is to admit that they were rather well written. One was a first-person account, a confession I suppose, from a woman who had got so angry with her baby that she'd picked it up by its feet and held it out of a fourth-floor window, and with her free hand tossed a coin
to decide whether or not she was going to drop it. The coin came up heads, the baby fell to its death.

The final piece seemed genuinely psychotic. It was a description of a murder: the pursuit, capture, stabbing, mutilation and anatomically precise dismemberment of a young female victim, in the car-park of a pub called the Moon and Sixpence. I wasn't quite stupid enough to assume this was describing events that had actually taken place, or even that the writer wanted to take place, but to have described these events at all suggested to me that the writer was potentially sick and dangerous, although at the same time I knew I might be over-reacting and over-dramatising.

It took me far longer than it should have to realise that none of these pieces had the writer's name on it. That seemed odd. You might have put it down to modesty or lack of ego, but I felt it implied something more than that. I wasn't ready to start finding conspiracies, but presumably the patients must have got together and agreed to remain anonymous. I tried telling myself this was no bad thing, that it would allow me to come to the texts without prejudice. But who was I kidding? Even if I didn't want to become involved in some banal guessing game, it would have been unnatural not to want to know who'd written what.

Some assumptions were inevitable. You tend to think you can tell a man's writing from a woman's writing, an old person's from a young person's, the writing of the spectacularly insane from that of the more discreetly insane. But other, larger, assumptions offered themselves too. Surely Raymond had written the piece about the emergency plane landing. Surely Maureen, the woman in the football kit, had written the account of the football match. Surely Charity had written the piece about dancing naked. And if I'd had to guess who'd written the piece about the sexual violence in the pub car-park, I would certainly have gone for Anders.

But the moment I thought these things I also thought that perhaps I was being too facile. Perhaps a man like Anders who oozed violence so effectively in person mightn't have any need to write about it. Maybe this violent fantasy had been written by one of the quieter, more harmless-looking people – the quiet ones always, allegedly, being the worst – or perhaps it had been written by a woman trying to exorcise her worst fears. Similarly, in a less dramatic way, just because you dressed in football kit didn't necessarily mean you
wanted to write obsessive accounts of football matches. Maybe it meant the opposite. And again, if you spent a certain amount of your time dancing naked, perhaps you didn't need to write about that either. If you can't judge a book by looking at its cover, you probably can't judge mental patients by their literary output. But what then
could
you do with that output?

Well, you could spend a whole weekend poring and agonising over it. You could make notes and annotations. You could mark the bits you liked best. You could jot down suggestions for how things could be said more simply or more clearly. Without getting too pedantic about it you could correct a little spelling and grammar. And all of this I did.

Naturally, most of the writing didn't deserve or benefit from this length and depth of reading, but I thought I owed it to the patients to treat their efforts with the utmost respect. And besides, having been so idle and restless all week I was inclined to let the work take up as much time as possible.

I concentrated long and hard, but there were one or two distractions. Raymond came by at intervals to ask if I needed pillows or blankets, and Cook, in his tin helmet, brought me bowls of soup and stew. From time to time I was aware of being watched. Patients would position themselves some distance from the hut so they could look at me through the windows, trying to see how I was reacting as I read their efforts.

I did my best to show I was treating the job with the right degree of commitment and high seriousness, that I was reading thoroughly, intently and yet not too critically. But these weren't easy concepts to communicate non-verbally, and sometimes it was actually quite hard to read at all while aware of being watched. I became very self-conscious and lost all sense of how I might normally behave or appear while reading. I became someone who was performing the act of reading.

A far more important and welcome distraction was Alicia. I was not distracted by her actual presence, alas, not by the flesh and blood woman, that would have been too much to ask, but thoughts about her and the night we'd spent together were distracting enough. I kept reminding myself that she had come to my hut, that we'd had sex, that it had been great, if quirky, and maybe its quirkiness was part of its greatness. I had got what I wanted. Actually, I had got far more
than I had hoped or bargained for, but perhaps good sex is always like that.

And I found a lot of questions drifting into my head. I wondered if what Alicia and I had done ‘meant' anything. Did it mean she liked me, that she'd come to my hut again? Would that be regularly? Once in a while? Every night, whether I wanted it or not? Did that mean that my life at the Kincaid Clinic was going to be a lot more tolerable and enjoyable from now on? Or was it going to be more difficult and problematic? Did Alicia want the same things from me that I wanted from her? And did I have the slightest idea of what I really wanted, anyway?

These weren't merely rhetorical questions, but I knew there was no point in trying to answer them. For the time being I would have to live with an amount of uncertainty, and that didn't seem so terrible. The mere possibility of a future that involved more Alicia, more sex with her, more intimacy with her, was enough to sustain me, at least for now.