Bedlam Burning (16 page)

By the end of the weekend I had completed my first seven days at the Kincaid Clinic. It had been a tough week in all sorts of ways, but I'd got through it, and by Sunday evening, satisfied that I'd dealt properly with the first batch of patients' writing, I felt I wasn't in such bad shape. The future looked possible.

And then Kincaid came to see me again, and even that didn't seem too bad. Whereas on his previous visit my desk had been completely bare, it was now stacked with a thousand or so pages of typescript. I looked like I was doing something.

‘How quickly life can change,' Kincaid said, as he stepped into the hut. ‘You're pleased it's such an impressive trawl.'

‘Well, there's certainly plenty of it,' I said. ‘Want to read some?'

He appeared to be debating with himself whether this would be a useful strategy, but I already suspected what the outcome was going to be.

‘No,' he said, ‘I don't think that would be entirely appropriate. I might be invading your territory. I'm keen to know what the patients are up to but …' more studied rumination, then, ‘I think it would be better if you simply wrote me a report.'

‘Yes, I could do that,' I said, ‘if you think you can trust me to analyse it properly. I'm no psychologist.'

‘I trust you totally,' Kincaid said, and he was about to retreat, but I
didn't let him get away that easily. ‘There is something I'd like your professional opinion on,' I said, and he couldn't resist that. ‘None of these pieces has the writer's name on it.'

‘Did you tell them to put their names on?'

‘I didn't tell them anything. You did.'

Another man might have thought I was accusing him of something or other, forgetfulness at the very least, but not Kincaid. He said, ‘You know, this is interesting. I think what we might be seeing here is a manifestation of the patients' group mind.'

I didn't know what that was, and I suppose it would have been easy enough to ask him what he meant, but I couldn't be bothered. I didn't want to give him another opportunity to show off.

‘I'll bear that in mind,' I said. ‘Though I can understand why they wouldn't want to put their names on some of it.'

‘How so?'

‘Somebody is writing some very sick stuff, violent murderous fantasy, dangerous stuff.'

‘Dangerous?'

‘Well, needless to say, I'm not so naive as to think he, or I suppose possibly she, has actually done or is going to do what he, or she, describes, but if that's what's going through his, or her, mind then—'

‘Then what?'

‘Then I think we should keep an eye on him or her.'

‘Yes, Gregory, we do keep an eye on our patients – that's why they're here.'

I felt nicely humiliated.

Kincaid said, ‘I don't think you need worry, Gregory. After all, they're only words on paper. Sticks and stones, they're not.'

‘Well yes,' I said, ‘but—'

‘But me no buts, Gregory. Perhaps the person writing these violent fantasies is doing so simply in order to worry you, to manipulate you, to make you have this very conversation with me.'

‘I can see that,' I said.

‘In which case we surely have a duty not to be manipulated, not to worry, not to have this conversation.'

I wasn't sure about that. I couldn't help thinking that if the writer of the piece committed some horrible sex crime, in or out of the clinic, now or later, it wouldn't be much defence, neither legal nor
moral, to say, ‘Oh, we didn't worry because we thought it wasn't sticks or stones.'

‘Up to a point,' I said, but Kincaid had already lost interest in me and our conversation.

He rumbled throatily. ‘So you'll let me have the report on my desk at nine o'clock tomorrow morning,' he said. ‘Then you'll see the patients and deliver your judgement of their work. Don't feel you have to be too gentle with them.'

And he was gone. I was left with the prospect of a report to be written and a class to be faced; two things to be daunted by, yet surprisingly I was undaunted. If Kincaid wanted a report by nine o'clock then he'd have one. It would be short, well-written and with a certain good humour and common sense about it; quite unlike the pages I'd spent the weekend reading. And as for seeing the patients and delivering a judgement, well, I preferred to think it would be more of a group discussion. I wouldn't be standing in judgement on them, wouldn't be giving them marks out of ten. It would be a getting acquainted session. I'd ask a few questions, get them to talk about what they'd written. I'd ask them to do some reading aloud. The time would soon pass. It would be like being back at Cambridge. Sort of. I thought I could cope with that.

On the stroke of nine next morning I was knocking on Kincaid's office door and I had in my hand a neatly typed one-page report on the patients' outpourings. Kincaid summoned me in and I stood by his desk as he read the report, which told him what I've told you, that the writing was variously manic, depressive, obsessive, naive, self-referential, obscure, compelling in one sense, repellent in another. I couldn't help saying that I wondered if a title like
The Moon and Sixpence
hadn't had a stifling effect on the patients' creativity (although given that few of them seemed actually to have referred to the title, this probably wasn't a very telling criticism). And I ended by saying I thought it was far too early to report anything at all with any certainty. Kincaid's attention as he surveyed the report was intense yet cursory, as if he might be employing skills he'd learned on a speed-reading course.

‘It's quite well-written,' he said as he finished. ‘And there are one or two telling phrases, but frankly, given your considerable literary gifts, I suppose I'd expected more in the way of critical appraisal and value judgements.'

‘You mean whether or not I liked any of it?'

‘I mean whether or not it was any good.'

‘Good in what sense?'

‘In the sense of publishable.'

‘Publishable?'

I was taken aback. Did he really think there was some literary genius locked away behind one of the clinic's grey doors? Did he think they were likely to come up with something really good the first time out? And did he really think a writer was the best person to know what was and wasn't publishable? Most writers, I suspected,
had only the vaguest idea. Perhaps what he really needed was a publisher-in-residence, someone like Nicola.

I could only say, ‘I think it's still early days yet.'

‘I know it's early days,' Kincaid agreed, ‘but if a man can't envisage a future, then he may have no future at all.'

I wasn't sure if this was true or not, but I was soon back in the lecture room with the patients. It was just them and me this time. No porters were in evidence, Alicia was not poised at the back of the room, and to some extent this felt like a welcome vote of confidence. I could be trusted not to burn the place down.

I'd abandoned the lectern and arranged eleven chairs into a circle. It evoked memories of group therapy sessions I'd seen depicted in films, and perhaps also of King Arthur's round table, a way of saying there were no favourites here, and possibly no leader. The patients sat uneasily, fidgeting, preening, slumping, in accordance with their differing conditions.

I'd separated what I took to be the individual pieces of writing, and arranged them on the floor in the centre of the circle. ‘I'd like you to begin by retrieving your own work,' I said. It was a fairly lame and obvious ploy, but I thought it was worth a try. It didn't work in the slightest. Nobody moved. All ten sat there in inert silence. I was annoyed. I'd done my bit, spent the weekend wading through this verbal swamp of their making, and now they were refusing to play the game.

I remained in my chair and said nothing, thinking this was indeed just a game, a bluff to see who could sit it out longest, and I thought I ought to be able to play the game every bit as well as they could. I was wrong. They had the strength of numbers, madness and perhaps practice on their side. When I couldn't take it any longer, I said, ‘How about you, Charity? Surely this must be yours.'

I picked up the nude dancing piece and offered it to Charity.

‘Must it?' she said, and she twitched her top lip at me. How dare I make such a cheap, easy assumption? Her hands stayed in her lap and she refused to take the sheets of paper I was holding out to her.

‘How about you?' I said, addressing Sita, the Indian woman. ‘Which one of these is yours?'

She looked at me serenely and said absolutely nothing.

‘She doesn't speak,' Raymond said by way of explanation.

‘Never?' I asked.

‘Not so far, anyway.'

There was obviously a whole bundle of problems lurking here, and this didn't feel like the moment to go into them. I turned rapidly to the woman in the football kit. Today she was wearing a canary yellow shirt. Norwich City, I thought.

‘Then how about you, Maureen?' I said. ‘Is this your account of the football match? If it is, you should be proud. It's a very good piece of writing.'

She was unmoved, so I turned, not without anxiety, towards Anders.

‘Is this yours?' I asked, and I offered him the pages describing the violent rape and murder. He looked at me as though he might well do me some physical harm, but not now. For the moment his hands remained where they were, bunched into meaty but unmoving fists.

‘In fact,' I continued to lie, becoming more transparently desperate, ‘there's some wonderful writing here, things that any writer would be pleased to have written. I know I would. I'm surprised nobody wants to take credit for it.'

They weren't falling for any of this, and when I said, ‘So, would anybody like to read aloud what they wrote? Or something they didn't write?' I knew I was flogging an absolutely decaying horse. I embarked on a series of increasingly hopeless questions. Had they enjoyed doing the writing? Had any of them written before? Did anybody have a favourite author? All of these were equally useless. Nobody said a damned thing. I felt like some idiot student on teaching practice. I found myself at the centre of a ring of sullen, obstructive silence. I'd had enough.

‘Well, if there's nothing more to be said, then there's no point trying to say it,' I muttered.

I started to leave, and then gradually, slowly, the patients got up from their seats, moved into the centre of the circle and began to pick up pages of manuscript from the floor. At first I thought I must have made some sort of breakthrough, that they were taking what they'd written, but that happy delusion didn't last long. They were clearly not taking their own work since they would grab a single sheet here, a couple of pages there, a handful elsewhere. And when they had what they considered enough they didn't return to their seats. They stood ruminatively for a while, holding and shuffling the sheets of paper
they'd salvaged, and then, with a shared purpose, they all simultaneously tossed them energetically, intently yet playfully, into the air.

Once the pages were airborne they became much more desirable, much more fascinating to the patients. They tried to snatch them as they fell, diving to catch them before they hit the floor, then tossing them up again. Sometimes two people would make a grab for the same bit of paper, and then a little tug of war would ensue. Some patients clasped handfuls of paper to their bosoms, rubbed their faces with them. Others kicked pages around the floor as though they were dancing in piles of fallen leaves.

All this was done wordlessly, but not exactly silently. It was accompanied by what seemed to me rather predictable madhouse noise: whooping, screaming, hysterical laughter and so forth. The patients were ignoring me completely by now, and I stood hopelessly at the centre of all this frantic paper-orientated mayhem and I felt utterly dispirited.

And when, much as before, the porters came running in, adding to the chaos, and when Alicia came and viewed the scene with great weariness, and when Kincaid also eventually arrived and instantly put a stop to it all, I had a terrible feeling, not only that history was repeating itself, but that it might continue to repeat itself endlessly, indefinitely, that it would always be like this. I'd be constantly losing control, Kincaid would be constantly bailing me out, for ever and ever, or at least until such time as I couldn't face it any more and walked out, or until Kincaid fired me. One or other of these options surely couldn't be far away.

Kincaid commanded the patients, ‘Go away again, and write something else. This time your project is to be entitled …' He displayed a rare moment of indecision and said, ‘Oh, I don't know. Mr Collins will give you a title.'

I was speechless, my brain was dry. I was being asked to perform the tiniest creative act and the task was beyond me. After a long, though hardly pregnant, silence, and for reasons that I couldn't fathom, I found myself saying, ‘
Heart of Darkness
'.

Kincaid was well-pleased with my choice, but the patients didn't react to it at all. They simply shuffled off leaving the crumpled and abandoned manuscripts behind them. Kincaid and I stood together for a moment.

‘I'm really sorry about this,' I said.

‘I know you are,' he said.

‘If you want me to resign I will.'

‘Why would I want that?'

‘Why wouldn't you?' I asked.

He narrowed his eyes a little, to appear shrewd and powerful, as though he was looking into my inner self.

‘Because I have faith in you,' he said. ‘Perhaps more faith than you have in yourself. I know you, Gregory. I know you're no quitter. You'll give me another week. After that you can do what you like, but I know you and I know you'll give me another week.'

‘Oh, OK,' I said weakly, but I wasn't really sure I meant it.