Bedlam Burning (25 page)

We would congregate in the lecture room, I'd select a piece of the patients' writing more or less at random, then choose someone to read it. The law of averages suggested that once in a while somebody must have ended up reading a piece they'd actually written, but nobody ever admitted it. Raymond, Charity and Charles Manning were probably the best of the readers, whatever ‘best' meant in this context. Byron, for all his poetical looks, was surprisingly poor. Carla, predictably, was completely hopeless. She was quite incapable of reading what was put in front of her, and sometimes just made it up as she went along, which sounds like it might have been interesting but it never actually was. And Sita, of course, never read anything at all. I asked her to, gently and without pressurising her, but she just stared at me silently with those big, dark eyes and said nothing.

Once a piece had been read aloud, we'd talk about it in a very detached, abstract, practical criticism, I. A. Richards sort of way. We'd discuss what we thought the author ‘was trying to say', how the language was used, how the metaphors and imagery worked, if they worked, and if not why not. Then we'd talk about how the piece might be improved, how it could be tightened up or made more effective. We talked about structure. We talked about vocabulary and register and sometimes about the origins of words. This makes it all sound rather serious and literary and highbrow, but you have to remember we were in a lunatic asylum.

We were in the lecture room, in our circle of chairs, and I handed Maureen a text and asked her to read it out. She wasn't keen at first – they never were – but the piece didn't seem to present any particular problems. She read that the zip fastener was invented in 1893 by W. L. Judson of Chicago, that St Albans is named after St Alban, that
Tallulah Bankhead's father was a congressman and her grandfather was a senator, that Baron Georges-Euge`ne Haussmann rebuilt Paris in the 1860s, that peach melba was named after Dame Nelly Melba, the Australian Nightingale, that the Norwegians get rid of rats using slices of white bread coated with lye and syrup, that Chesterfield Football Club is nicknamed the Spire-ites, that Benjamin Franklin invented the rocking chair, that only seven of Emily Dickinson's poems were published in her lifetime, that at any given moment there are eighteen hundred thunderstorms taking place in the earth's atmosphere, that underground ice-houses were known in China as early as 1100 bc. And much more in similar vein.

When Maureen got to the end of the piece she sat down and I said, ‘Well, what do we all think of that?'

‘It's crap,' said Anders.

‘No, it's not crap,' said Raymond judiciously. ‘But it's not great.'

‘I wouldn't give it more than five,' said Charles Manning.

‘I wouldn't give it more than a hundred billion,' said Carla.

‘I like it,' said Cook.

Several others agreed that they also liked it.

‘Yes, I liked it too,' said Maureen. ‘I enjoyed reading it, especially the football reference.'

‘All right,' I said, ‘I suppose that could be one reason for liking a piece of writing, that it relates to our own interests and obsessions. What other reasons might we have for liking it?'

‘I don't know what it means to like or dislike a piece of literature.' It was Byron talking. ‘We don't judge literary texts. They judge us.'

This put a bit of a damper on proceedings, until Anders said, ‘I liked it because it was fuckin' funny.'

‘You just said you didn't like it!' Cook protested quietly.

‘I said it was crap. I didn't say I didn't like it. There's a time and a place for crap.'

‘What did you find funny about it?' I asked.

Anders shrugged and Raymond leapt in with, ‘It's funny because it's so true.'

‘But is it all true?' Charles Manning asked. ‘I'm not sure I believe there are eighteen hundred thunderstorms going on at any given moment.'

‘Yes,' Cook agreed, ‘and I'm not sure about Benjamin Franklin and the rocking chair.'

‘Does it matter whether or not it's true?' I asked.

‘What?'

‘Maybe that's the point, maybe that's the joke,' I suggested.

They looked at me baffled, and in truth I couldn't see where that line of thought was taking me, but then Byron pitched in at full strength.

‘I think Gregory is talking about indeterminacy here,' he said. ‘Unreliable narrators, the lie that tells the truth.'

‘Would you like to say more about that?' I asked, knowing that he would.

‘What I think the narrator is trying to do in the piece is set up a dichotomy between the created world and the observed world, between fact and fiction. The language is unemotive and yet the things described are dramatic and resonant. It tells us that the world consists of zips as well as saints, of lightning as well as peach melbas. There's an oscillation between the banal and the numinous; and perhaps the point is that there is no opposition here. Not only can poetry be made out of anything, poetry already exists
in
everything; there's no such thing as an unsuitable subject for art.'

‘You've said a mouthful,' said Max, stirring out of his alcoholic doze.

‘It's heavy,' said Charity.

‘So is he right?' Cook asked. ‘Is that really what it's about?'

I was tempted to say, don't ask me, ask the person who wrote it, but I'd said things like that before and it had never got me anywhere. So I said, ‘If that's what Byron gets out of it, then that's what's in it.'

‘What I get out of it is the desire to get naked and dance like a dervish,' said Charity.

‘You'd get that out of reading
Exchange and Mart
,' Maureen said.

‘What I get out of it is the desire to pull some fucker's head off,' said Anders. ‘That's only a personal interpretation, obviously.'

‘I get the desire to pull my
own
head off,' said Carla.

And so on.

I had no doubt that the patients were often toying with me, playing up their own madness, to see if I was capable of coping with it and, somewhat to my surprise, I soon found that I was. I wouldn't swear that I developed a new persona exactly, but I certainly found a means of not giving too much of myself away. I stopped being frightened of Anders. I stopped being disturbed when Charity tore her clothes off,
just as I stopped being made to feel uncomfortable by Sita's ominous silence. I ignored the silliness that Carla demonstrated, just as I ignored Max's drunkenness and Raymond's increasingly ornate use of make-up and his tendency to wear odd items of women's jewellery. I dealt with what they gave me to deal with.

Sometimes we talked more generally about writing, although it soon became apparent that the more general the topic, the more room there was for madness and idiocy. On one occasion Carla asked me, ‘How long is a short story?'

‘How long is a piece of string?' I replied, foolishly as it turned out.

‘Two foot six,' she replied with great certainty.

‘No,' I said gently. ‘I mean, yes, all right,
some
pieces of string are two foot six, but the point I'm making is that stories, like pieces of string, can be any length you like.'

Carla ploughed her finger-ends down her cheeks, giving the subject far more intense consideration than I thought it deserved.

‘No,' she said, sounding troubled, ‘a piece of string can't be
any
length. It can't be a million miles long, for instance, because no string factory would ever be able to manufacture it, and no lorry would ever be able to transport it, and just imagine the size of the ball it would make, and what shop would ever stock it and who'd ever buy it, and—'

‘All right,' I said, ‘I accept that a piece of string couldn't be a million miles long.'

‘And it couldn't be a millionth of a millimetre long either, because—'

‘I get your drift,' I said.

‘So you were wrong when you said a piece of string could be any length. So you were probably wrong when you said a short story could be any length.'

‘Yes,' I said, ‘I was wrong.'

‘So how long is a short story?'

‘Two hundred and fifty words,' I said.

‘No,' said Carla. ‘I think you're wrong about that as well.'

That was one of my amazingly naive attempts to get the patients to write at shorter length. I thought that if I could get each of them to write, say, just two hundred and fifty, or five hundred or even just a thousand words a week, life would be much easier for all of us. But it didn't work, not at all, not in the least. The words continued to come
as thick and fast as ever: scores of pages every day, a thousand or more every week. It was overwhelming, but in a way I had to admire it.

Kincaid still had me writing regular reports on what was being produced. I did my best to make it sound interesting or significant, and I'd occasionally quote a good line or phrase that had somehow crept in. I didn't offer any opinions about the mental health of the writers, I thought that was Kincaid's business, not mine. I also occasionally suggested in the reports that the best way for him to find out what was being written was for him to actually read some of the damn stuff, but he was always too busy or too grand or something. He said he trusted me.

My relations with Kincaid were never easy, but we found a way of rubbing along together, or at least of leaving each other alone. And he could still surprise me with small acts of understanding, and even concern. On one occasion he said he'd been worrying that he hadn't seen me write anything ‘creative' since I'd arrived at the clinic. He hoped that working with the patients wasn't affecting my ‘true vocation' as he put it. I assured him that being at the clinic had absolutely nothing to do with it and I came up with some lame, but not entirely unconvincing, guff about an author needing to lie fallow from time to time. Kincaid listened with unexpected interest. Tales of the literary life fascinated him.

‘I can't lie to you, Gregory,' he said portentously, ‘the truth is I do have certain literary ambitions. I'm working on a little something at the moment; that's what I do in my office in the evenings. Perhaps you've seen me pacing back and forth in the throes of composition.'

I admitted that I had.

‘I envisage a trans-genre, not to say transgressive work that's part autobiography, part scientific treatise, part prose poem. I see it as a synthesis of art and science, east and west, the conscious and the subconscious—'

‘Right,' I said, and I was aware of my head nodding tensely, a tight-lipped smile on my immobile face, pretending to be intrigued by this literary prospect.

‘Don't look so worried,' Kincaid said, ‘I shan't ask you to read it and give me your opinion.'

He laughed modestly, and once again I was pleased by his grasp of psychology. The idea of having to read and comment on something
Kincaid had written was daunting. At the same time I felt vaguely insulted. Would my opinion have been so worthless in his eyes? Did he regard himself as so possessed by genius that my comments would have been irrelevant to him? Well yes, I suspect he did. And for a moment I thought I ought to offer, perhaps demand, to be given a chance to read his great work in progress; but then I thought no, wait a minute, maybe he's using even cleverer psychology than I thought, manipulating me to read it when I really didn't want to. Life with Kincaid was never simple, although sometimes I suspected I was making my own complications.

Life with Alicia continued to have its complications too. By day she was the cool, not to say frosty, not to say hostile, medical practitioner. I was still not clear what she did to, or for, or with, the patients. They went into her office just as often as they went into Kincaid's, but I had little idea what they got up to in there since Kincaidian Therapy, as I currently understood it, seemed largely to involve doing very little. But I was prepared to accept that my knowledge was patchy, my understanding imperfect and certainly Alicia always seemed to be in the middle of doing something vitally important.

I would still occasionally make businesslike enquiries about the workings of the clinic. I wondered, for example, why the patients never received any visitors, why none of them ever received any mail; and in a tone that suggested I was a cretin Alicia told me there had once been a time when the clinic encouraged visitors, but they'd always arrived wearing floral dresses or ties with gun dog motifs or Mickey Mouse watches, and this visual chaos would set the patients back weeks or months. The same applied to letters; they'd arrive full of doodles and drawings, containing family snapshots, with stamps on the outside that depicted the Queen and who knew what else. All this was a horror and an intolerable risk, and apparently totally obvious to anyone with half a brain.

I didn't much like the way Alicia treated me at these times, but later she would make up for it. She would come to my room and be warm and sexy and extremely dirty-mouthed, and she expected the same from me. At times this coprophemia, as I only much later came to know it, seemed a shade rigid and formulaic, a bit too much like hard work, but I didn't complain. The glass was definitely half full rather than half empty. On the other hand, I did sometimes feel confused
about what was actually going on between us, and then I'd ask some different stupid questions such as, ‘Are we having a relationship, Alicia?'

We were in my bed, with the lights inevitably turned off, and I heard Alicia's laughter in the dark and then she said, ‘What do you mean by relationship?'

‘I mean the same as everybody else does,' I replied, thinking this wasn't a bad answer.

Alicia can't have thought it was too bad either, since she said, ‘Yes, we're having a relationship. We all have relationships with everyone we meet. How could it be otherwise?'