Bedlam Burning (19 page)

‘I can sort of see that,' I said.

‘You should rely on your own observations.'

‘But how are my observations going to tell me whether Raymond ever really tried to poison his passengers, or whether Charles Manning was really a cinema projectionist?'

‘You use your judgement,' she said.

‘Couldn't I use my judgement after I've seen the files?'

‘Gregory, I've tried to be polite. The fact is, I don't think someone who's been here no time at all and whose skills remain at best unproven should be given the complete run of the place. I don't think a mere writer-in-residence should be given free access to highly confidential medical and psychological data that he may not have the wherewithal to interpret. I don't think someone in your position has any right to be so bloody demanding. End of discussion.'

And it was. I hadn't even got as far as mentioning the orgies, and perhaps it was just as well. If she could get that angry about files, how angry would she get about sex? And yet, come Friday night, sure enough, perhaps strangely enough, certainly happily enough, Alicia came to my hut just as she had the week before. And it was in many ways a repeat performance. What people blithely refer to as ‘the physical side' was just fine. All the touching, the kissing, certainly the penetration, even the orgasms (not quite simultaneous, but close enough for beginners), took care of themselves. It was the verbal side I still had trouble with.

I had the sense that I was playing not a sexual game, but a word game, the rules of which Alicia knew much better than I did. It was a game she'd been playing for years, a game she'd invented; and although she was keen to have me as a player, she wasn't prepared to give me access to the rule book. So I had to learn as I went along. I tried to stay within the spirit of the game, but inevitably I infringed some of the subtler by-laws from time to time, committed the odd foul, said the wrong thing.

Alicia kept up her stream of obscene consciousness, and I joined in where I thought appropriate, echoing her words and sentiments. She'd say something like, ‘Stretch my cunt with that fat throbbing cock of yours,' and I'd say, ‘Yes, open your cunt for my fat throbbing cock,' and this sort of thing, while not exactly displaying wild creativity on my part, worked just fine.

However, there came a moment, well actually a period of some
minutes, when Alicia was not speaking at all. It was preceded by her saying, ‘Now feed that fat piece of meat into my mouth so I can run my tongue under the foreskin and taste the cum leaking out,' which I did, and which she did, but it meant I then had to invent some new dialogue without any help from her. So I said something like, ‘That's right, swallow that slimy monster, you filthy slut,' but that didn't work at all.

Alicia freed her mouth, pulled away and said, ‘I'm perfectly happy to swallow the slimy monster. And I'm perfectly happy to act like a filthy slut, to
be
a filthy slut, but I don't want to be
called
a filthy slut. Got it?'

‘Oh, OK,' I said. I could well understand why a woman wouldn't want to be called a slut, although given some of the things Alicia had called me, it seemed unnecessarily delicate. I had imagined we were in an area where notions of verbal nicety had been lifted. Call me a fool. It made me realise just how much I still had to learn about the game.

But we got through it, brought the game to a satisfactory conclusion, and as we lay together afterwards I felt relaxed enough and comfortable enough to say the wrong thing again. I asked Alicia, not very romantically perhaps, ‘Are the patients here allowed to have sex?'

I felt her body tense up and she said coldly, ‘Why? Which one do you want to have sex with?'

‘Nobody. That's not what I meant. I only want to have sex with you.'

‘Not that hippie girl, Charity?'

I was still finding it hard to think of Charity as a hippie, but I certainly didn't want to have sex with her.

‘Not Sita, maybe?' Alicia suggested.

‘I'm not even sure I know which one Sita is.'

‘The Indian woman who never speaks,' she snapped. ‘Or is it Max, maybe? Perhaps your tastes run in that direction.'

‘Don't be disgusting,' I said.

That was meant to be a joke, to lighten the mood a little, but it scarcely worked. I found it hard to believe that Alicia was genuinely angry with me. I knew better than to tell her I thought she was being ridiculous, but I really did find it incomprehensible, and I wondered whether it made Charles Manning's story more credible or less.

‘What brought this on, anyway?' she demanded.

‘Charles Manning said something about orgies, that's all,' I said.

‘And that makes you envious, does it? You'd like to participate? You feel like you're missing out?'

‘No, I don't feel like I'm missing anything.'

‘Good. Because you're not. Believe me.'

It sounded knowing and portentous but I didn't know what she meant. I was also aware that she hadn't answered my original question about whether or not the patients were allowed to have sex. Alicia's technique of becoming angry in order to avoid answering questions was crude but highly effective. It made me increasingly reluctant to ask her anything at all.

Come the morning, as the previous week, she was not there. It was Saturday, and again I was woken unreasonably early by a knock at the door of the hut and I opened up to see the line of ten patients. The ceremonial handing over of the week's work took place, and there I was stuck with another thousand pages or so of typescript.

As before, I spent the weekend being driven to distraction by all this mass of bad, bad writing. There were more meaningless anagrams: I read about ‘absinthe' in ‘the basin', about a ‘military terror' in the ‘territorial army'. There was more childhood reminiscence, more quasi-religious rambling, another account of a different (but not really so very different) football match, more supposedly amazing facts: that the mosquito has forty-seven teeth, that 90 per cent of American teenagers suffer from acne, that on 4 July 1776 George III wrote in his diary, ‘Nothing of importance happened today'.

There was some nonsense about the world being like a beehive, another ‘confession'; this time the writer claiming to have suffocated his or her grandmother to end her sufferings from terminal cancer. There was a foul and violent account of life in a women's prison with male guards who used the inmates for various scatological and sexual ends before murdering them. Did I assume this was written by Anders? Well, yes, I did actually. And I assumed that an obsessive account of a woman shaving her legs, her armpits, her pubic area, her head, her forearms, her eyebrows, her toes, and so on, was written by Charity. I also thought it reasonably likely that the rather well-written, if pointless, retelling of Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
was written by Byron. Of course, I knew I might be wrong about all this.
These were certainly hasty and potentially misguided assumptions, but I didn't much care any more. I'd had enough.

I was a lot less thorough in my reading this time. What did it matter? What was I supposed to get out of this torrent? What was I supposed to read into it? I found myself looking out of the window. I found my mind wandering far and wide. I found myself thinking about Alicia, about my future, about the job I'd given up at the bookshop, about my parents, about nothing. There were times when I realised I'd been staring at a page for ten minutes or more, and taken in nothing whatsoever; and I didn't care. My mind had been made up for me. I was leaving.

On Sunday evening Kincaid came to the hut again to ask me how it was going, but not to listen to my reply, and to tell me something I entirely expected, that he wanted a report on his desk first thing Monday morning, and that I'd be ‘confronting' the patients shortly thereafter. I told him this was no problem.

At nine next morning I was in Kincaid's office handing over my report. Once again it consisted of just one page. In fact it consisted of just one sentence, of just four words: ‘These people are mad.'

Quite a lot of work had gone into that sentence. I had considered various synonyms and euphemisms. I'd toyed with adding adjectives or qualifiers. I'd contemplated using a well-chosen and tellingly placed obscenity, but in the end I'd decided the simplest solution was the best. Kincaid looked at the single sentence for rather longer than he'd looked at the full page of writing I'd presented him with the previous week. Then he said, ‘I shall have to think about this.' That was fine by me since I didn't much care what he, or anybody else, thought.

I went to the lecture room where the circle of chairs was set out and all the patients were already in place. The porters had been posted by the door this time, no doubt in anticipation of renewed mayhem, and Alicia had installed herself at the back of the room. Was she there as my guardian angel, to stop me getting myself into further trouble, or was she a spy for Kincaid? Once again, I didn't care. I took my place on the single empty chair, balanced the heap of manuscripts on my lap and looked at the faces of the patients: violent, vacant, angry, hostile, as might be the case. I didn't know precisely what I was going to say, but I certainly knew the gist, and the moment I opened my
mouth the words started pouring out, sounding remarkably articulate and considered.

‘You know,' I said, slapping the bundle of manuscripts, ‘this is a pile of crap. It's rubbish. It's pointless, worthless. It's a waste of your time to write it. It's a waste of my time to read it. I don't know why you're doing it. I don't know if you're doing it out of some deep psychological need, or just to piss me off, but if it's the latter then it really gets the job done. I'm totally pissed off with it.

‘Which is not to say this writing isn't very revealing. I'm sure it is. But it doesn't reveal anything we don't know already. It tells me that you people are, how should I put this … mad. It tells me you're insane, crazy, raving, demented, deranged, psychotic, bonkers, wacko, screwy, cracked, gaga, barking, doolally, tonto, meshuga, bananas, loco, mental. It tells me you're a bunch of lunatics, nutters, maniacs, fruitcakes. It tells me you've got a few screws loose, that you're off your heads, off your trolley, round the bend, round the twist, that you're not playing with a full deck, that you're one volume short of the complete works.

‘And the truth is, if I have to sit in that hut week after week, day after day, reading what you've written, then I think there's every chance I'll finish up as mad as you lot, and that's a price I'm not prepared to pay. So what I'm going to do is take this bundle of verbal excretion back to my hut and I'm going to put it in the stove and burn it. And then I'm going home.'

And with that I left the lecture room, taking the typescripts with me, and I did indeed go to my hut. I didn't really intend to burn the patients' writing, and I wasn't sure why I'd said I would; for cheap dramatic effect, I suppose. But I was absolutely serious about going home, or at least going somewhere that was not here. I dropped the pages of writing on to the floor by the stove and that was that. I was done. I was ready to go. I had no bags to pack. I looked around the hut to see if there was anything worth stealing, as an act of petty revenge or as a souvenir. There was nothing I wanted. I left the hut and started to make my bid for the outside world, but as I slammed the door shut, Alicia came striding towards me.

‘Is that what you call using psychology?' she asked, and she sounded a good deal less angry than I'd been expecting.

‘I'm sorry about all this, Alicia,' I said. ‘I'll explain everything to you some day, but right now I have to get out of here.'

‘I don't think that's an option.'

I couldn't understand what she meant. Was she going to attempt to hold me to my contract or something ridiculous like that, perhaps threaten to have the porters lock me up again?

‘They're still there,' she said. ‘The patients are waiting for you. They won't leave the lecture theatre until you've been back and talked to them again.'

‘I don't have anything else to say to them.'

‘Come now, you're the wordsmith, as you've proved.'

‘That doesn't mean I have anything to say.'

‘You'll think of something,' she said, and she kissed me on the cheek, and placed her hand on my arm and pulled me back to the lecture room. I didn't know why she was doing it. I could see no point in it at all. As I walked into the lecture room again all ten patients were sitting there much as I'd left them, but the moment they saw me they broke out in noisy, enthusiastic, only somewhat insane, applause. I had absolutely no idea what they were applauding, and my confusion must have been obvious. Byron, who had apparently been made spokesman, stood up and shook me by the hand.

‘That was very good,' he said. ‘Thank you.'

‘I don't know what you're thanking me for,' I said.

‘For being honest, for one thing,' said Byron. ‘A lesser man would have read all this crap we've produced and told us it was interesting or promising or even good. You told us it was crap. We liked that.'

‘Did you?' I said.

‘Oh yes, and in the same way, a lesser man might have said that our writings showed that we were a little confused, or a little disturbed or a little disorientated. You told us we were carpet-chewers. We liked that even more.'

‘Why do you like to be called mad?' I asked.

‘Because that's what we are, and that's why we're ready to make a deal.'

I glanced over at Alicia. Was Byron really in a position to make deals? Alicia's knowing nod and smile suggested that he probably wasn't, but that I should hear him out nevertheless.

‘What sort of a deal?' I asked.

‘Well, first of all, obviously, that you don't leave.'