Bedlam Burning (20 page)

‘No,' Raymond chimed in, ‘don't deplane at this time.'

‘What's the rest of the deal?'

‘We'd like you to help us get better,' said Byron.

‘To improve our talents with due care,' added Charity.

‘But we know things can't go on quite as they have been,' Byron said. ‘For one thing, we don't want to be told what to write about. We don't want to be given titles. We want to be free to express ourselves in any way we see fit.'

‘I thought you'd been pretty much doing that already,' I said.

‘Oh no. We can express ourselves much more freely than we have been doing.'

This sounded like a very mixed blessing.

‘And we still have to insist that we don't put our names on the work. Anonymity is very important to us.'

‘You're saying you just want to be free to do whatever you like without any interference from me, and without even putting your name to what you've done?'

‘That's it, Gregory,' Byron said.

The others made assenting noises, including a drunken belch of agreement from Max.

‘Then I'm not sure why you need me at all.'

‘Hey, Gregory,' said Cook, ‘don't start feeling persecuted.'

‘We find you inspiring to have around,' said Charles Manning.

‘Like a muse,' said Byron.

‘Or a mascot,' said Maureen.

I didn't want to fall for any of this. ‘And what do I get out of this deal?' I asked.

‘Well, I don't pull your fucking head off, for one thing,' said Anders, but he said it rather amiably.

‘The deal,' said Byron, ‘is that we're nice to you.'

Nice is such an odd word, a word it's hard to take very seriously, one that's lost most of its colour, if not its meaning; and yet it's a word everybody uses. Oh sure, novelists, journalists, broadcasters, people who are supposed to care about words, they don't use it, but the rest of the world uses it all the time. We use it about people, ‘He's such a nice guy'; about objects, ‘Nice shirt, Mike'; after sex, ‘Mmm, that was nice'. And so on. It's a blunt word, imprecise, blurred; but that's part of its virtue and we all know what it means. The idea of people being ‘nice' to me was very appealing indeed at that moment.

‘Give me five minutes to think about it,' I said, and I went away and thought for considerably less than five minutes. It felt good to be
wanted. The fact that the people doing the wanting were inmates of an asylum didn't make much difference. I didn't entirely take their reasons for wanting me to stay at their face value. I didn't really believe they wanted me as a muse or a mascot. On the other hand, not being much of a conspiracy theorist, I wasn't of a mind to see anything very sinister in it either.

I stayed. You know I stayed. If I'd left we'd be at the end of the book already, and you can see we're nowhere near. I went back to the lecture room and told them they had a deal. Alicia smiled at me. I liked to think she looked more pleased than anyone.

‘There's just one small condition,' I said. ‘You have to let me out of the clinic for the rest of the day.'

They didn't like it, none of them, not the patients, nor Alicia, nor Kincaid; but what could they do? They either let me go for the day or they let me go for ever. With rather more ceremony and solemnity than I thought appropriate, Kincaid used his electronic key to let me out of the clinic. The tall metal gate slid back, I stepped outside and the gate shut behind me. I was out and, in some senses of the word, free, but that included the freedom to return, which I intended to do once I'd completed a bit of business in town.

The clinic was six or seven miles outside Brighton, so walking there was out of the question, and if a bus ran along the road there was no sign of a stop. So I hitchhiked, and it was much easier than I'd have imagined. Frankly I wouldn't have stopped for me. What kind of person picks up someone hitching outside a lunatic asylum? Answer: a good-natured old chain-smoking plumber in a big white van with a heap of pipes, cisterns and boilers crashing around in the back. He asked no questions, made no conversation and dropped me off in the centre of town.

I didn't get down to business right away. I wandered around doing the sort of things you do in Brighton. I walked along the sea front, went through the Lanes, looking in the windows of antique shops. I went on the pier and, with what little money I had, I bought fish and chips, then washed the grease away with a pint of bitter in a dark pub that had a rattlingly loud jukebox. Someone kept playing ‘I'm Not In Love' over and over again, a song that had already started to sound dated, but I found it reassuring. I always hate it when you see a movie or read a book and it's trying too hard to give a period feel so that everything is absolutely from that time: all the cars, the clothes, the music, the houses, the furniture are precisely, quintessentially ‘seventies'. It's never like that. In the 1970s a lot of people were still
driving sixties cars, sitting on fifties furniture, living in forties houses. Clothes and music are obviously more temporary and contemporary, but not everybody consulted
Vogue
or
Melody Maker
and instantly adopted that week's trends. Styles seep in and they don't erase everything that went before; they're more a sort of semi-transparent veneer, an overlay that only gradually makes the past invisible.

I enjoyed my day in Brighton, but I wasn't sure I was enjoying it quite as much as I ought to be, and I had the sense that I was forcing myself to have a good time, so I decided I'd better do what I'd come for. I went to Ruth Harris's bookshop. It was harder to find than I'd have imagined but I located it eventually and fought my way inside. It was every bit as full of books and as empty of people as when I'd been there for the reading. Ruth Harris greeted me with surprising warmth. I wasn't certain she'd even remember me, but she did, and fortunately she seemed to have forgotten, or at least remodelled, important elements of the night of my literary début, and I felt that was going to be to my advantage.

‘It was rather a good night, as I recall,' she said. ‘The crowd was small but very enthusiastic, very knowledgeable.'

She made a pot of tea and we talked and I turned on the charm. I explained why I was back in Brighton, that I was living there after a fashion, told her in vague terms about what I was doing at the Kincaid Clinic, and even though I could see she found the idea of a writer-in-residence at an asylum faintly ridiculous, she was still impressed. Possibly she liked the idea that I wasn't some self-indulgent scribe who worked solely to satisfy my own ego. I was out there doing good, helping those less fortunate. Again I was encouraged.

I asked her if she'd read any good books lately, but she said she never found time to do any reading these days, being far too busy running the business. So I asked how business was, and she said it was fine, but I could tell she didn't mean it and I didn't think she really expected me to believe it either. A glance at the place confirmed that business wasn't fine at all.

I told her I'd once been a bookseller myself, although knowing her stated aversion to literary first editions I didn't say exactly what kind of bookselling I'd done. The fact that I'd worked in London impressed her, and I looked around the shop as though giving it some serious professional scrutiny, which in a sense I was. Obviously
nobody likes someone telling them how to run their business so I used my softest manner and said, ‘You know, in a way I think this shop may be too good.'

‘Oh yes?' she said, not quite as easily flattered as I'd hoped.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘You've got some very good stock here, quality in depth, but I wonder if possibly there are just too many good things.'

‘Can you have too much of a good thing? she asked.

‘You know, Ruth, I think you can. Sometimes a bookshop can be so full of good things that you can't see the wood for the wood pulp.'

I might also have said that in certain other cases a bookshop could be so full of crud that a person couldn't even get in the door, or walk round the shop, or turn a corner without demolishing a pile of books, but I was being kind.

‘So what do you think I should do?' she asked. ‘Burn some of the stock?'

I laughed falsely and said, ‘No, no, but there are other possibilities.'

‘Such as?'

I took a deep breath, hoped my charm was working at maximum throttle, and told her there was a library up at the clinic that was desperately in need of books. I said it would be an act of great charity to help the clinic, but that charity could work two ways, and once her stock had been streamlined, once people could actually see what she had for sale, business was sure to improve. I also said she'd have my undying gratitude, though I wasn't entirely sure I wanted her to have that.

‘Well,' she said, ‘you may have a point about some of the stock not being as accessible as it might be.'

‘And this need only be a loan,' I said. ‘Once you've sold some of your remaining stock and you've got more room in the shop you could have the books back.'

I had a feeling this could be years away. I knew I was asking a lot, but I thought what I was saying was actually true. Ruth Harris would have nothing to lose under this arrangement. And it wasn't as though I was demanding any of her premium stock – in fact, I wasn't sure she had any premium stock.

She scrutinised me carefully. It seemed she wasn't altogether unwilling to do me a favour but she was weighing up what she might be able to ask in return.

‘Oh, all right,' she said. ‘If you're willing to spend the afternoon in
the shop sorting through the stock, then I suppose that would be all right. You're a very persuasive young man.'

‘And then I'll need you to take me and the books back to the clinic,' I said.

‘You do drive a hard bargain, dear boy.'

I don't think I'd ever heard anyone outside of a Noël Coward play use the term ‘dear boy'. I was amused to be thought of as dear and as a boy, though I didn't want Ruth Harris to find me too dear or too boyish. No doubt I was exploiting her, but it was a gentle form of exploitation and it was in a good cause, and when she patted me on the bottom at various times in the course of the afternoon I didn't feel I could complain.

By the end of the day we had a Volvo-load of grubby, unloved books packed into boxes and ready to be taken to the clinic. The load wouldn't by any means be enough to fill all the library shelves, and it was scarcely enough to have made much of a dent in the chaos of Ruth Harris's shop, but it was a start.

In a perfect world I'd have returned triumphantly to the clinic with a fine selection of classics ancient and modern, a range of reference books, encyclopaedias, atlases, dictionaries, books of poetry, a smattering of history and philosophy, a cookery book or two for Cook; and then a few potboilers and ripping yarns for the long evenings.

As it was I found myself to be the purveyor of a heap of drek that was heavy on dated showbiz biographies, cowboy novels, bodice-rippers, car manuals and chemistry textbooks. Ruth Harris offered to throw in a copy of
The Wax Man
, since the pile left after the reading hadn't reduced at all, but I declined. No point asking for trouble. She drove me back to the clinic, and I was aware of her becoming increasingly uncomfortable as we got near. She may have been vulnerable to my charm but she still found the Kincaid Clinic a bit creepy.

‘You should be careful they don't lock you in there and throw away the key,' she said and gave a theatrical shudder.

‘They don't like me
that
much,' I said.

Alicia was waiting at the gate when I returned. I was surprised, and was wise enough not to think it was because she'd missed me. She used her electronic key to open up, and we drove inside. Ruth Harris looked daggers at Alicia, then got out of the car, sprinted round to the
tailgate and began energetically unloading the boxes. Her enthusiasm was surprising, but then I saw her real enthusiasm was to be gone. The moment the boxes were out of the car, she planted a conspicuous wet kiss on me and she was back behind the wheel ready to go. I didn't mind that in itself, since I'd spent more than enough time in her company, but I hoped I wasn't going to have to tote the books up to the library all by myself. If the patients were going to be nice to me, here was a great way to start. Alicia brandished her electronic key, the gate opened, the Volvo accelerated away, and the gate slid shut again. I was back. The
status quo
had returned, almost.

‘What have you done?' Alicia asked.

‘Got some books for the library.'

‘What kind of books?'

‘All kinds,' I said.

She peeled back the flaps on the nearest box and looked inside. ‘Oh my God,' she said, before running off in a panic I couldn't possibly comprehend. I didn't understand it any better when she returned with Kincaid. He looked at me with exasperation and pity.

‘The first thing I want to say, Gregory, is that I'm not angry with you. If anything, I'm angry with myself. Before we go any further I need to look at these books you've got. You'll be kind enough to bring them to my office.'

He swept off and I was left with Alicia. I'd made
her
angry again and I had no idea how.

‘I didn't think there was much point having a library without any books,' I said, trying to justify what seemed to me to need no justification.

‘You have so much to learn, Gregory,' she said, and she followed Kincaid.

Unaided, I carried the first two boxes up to Kincaid's office and set them down in front of him and Alicia. They didn't accept them with any noticeable grace, and from Alicia's expression you might have thought I was carrying in boxes of raw sewage.

‘Is it because Dr Kincaid is black?' Alicia said.