Bedlam Burning (32 page)

The situation was only made worse when I saw that Nicola seemed to be having some beneficial influence on him. I saw he looked less
like a nerd than he used to. The hair had grown and been styled, the clothes weren't so conspicuously unhip. He still didn't look like anybody's Prince Charming but he was much improved.

Before he'd even got out of his car he said to me, ‘Nicola sends her love.'

‘Really?' I couldn't believe she would have sent me anything so warm and unequivocal.

‘Really,' he said. ‘She's not bitter, not any more.'

‘That's nice.'

‘Her job's going well, and she's been promoted. She's an editor there now, and things are great between her and me, so she's got nothing to be bitter about, has she?'

I wanted to say that she never did have anything to be bitter about, that only I was entitled to be bitter.

‘Yes, well, send her my love in return,' was all I said.

‘I'll do that.'

Gregory was introduced as Bob Burns. He exchanged pleasantries with Kincaid and Alicia, then I led him through the clinic up to the library. He showed no curiosity as he passed through the building, showed no uneasiness at finding himself in an asylum, but as we walked I was aware of patients lurking in corridors and stairwells and doorways, pretending they were just there by chance, just happening to catch a glimpse of my pal the littérateur, the man who had the power to transmit their work to a waiting world.

It was with a peculiar, perhaps a perverse, pride that I showed Gregory into the library. Even an unemotional, dour Yorkshireman like Gregory would surely be impressed by the sheer quantity of paper, the sheer number of words he was going to have to deal with. But Gregory saw it all set out, spread out on the library shelves and table and floor, and he showed no signs of being impressed or surprised or challenged by the size of the task ahead. All he said was, ‘What I need you to do is fetch me a big pot of tea, and keep it coming at regular intervals. All right?'

‘All right,' I said grudgingly.

He sat down at the library table, without taking his coat off, and he started to read the first page that happened to come to hand. I could see it was one of the more disgustingly violent pieces, and I was about to explain that this maybe wasn't the ideal place to start. But Gregory hushed me and said something about not wanting to have his primary
response tainted, and after that his concentration was so awesomely fierce it was as though I, the library, the clinic, the world, had ceased to exist for him.

I went off to the kitchen to get some tea. Raymond and Cook were there already, and they fell over themselves to brew a fresh pot. I thanked them and took it up to the library. And that's how it went for the rest of the day. Gregory read and I served as his waiter. It was probably as good a role for me as any. What else would I have done? Sat and watched him read?

As I came and went I would always find a patient or two who just happened to be strolling past the library, sometimes even listening at the door, though I was baffled as to what they could be expecting to hear. Even Kincaid couldn't keep away and he asked me if there was anything my friend needed. Like what? ‘Oh,' said Kincaid, ‘a cushion, secretarial help, a massage, ear-plugs, an extra reading lamp.' Irritated by this concern, I assured Kincaid that my friend had a frugal, monkish disposition: he liked silence, isolation, a hard chair, a bright overhead light. I felt like Gregory's minder, his public relations man, his pander. These roles were far less appealing than being his waiter.

I saw, on my visits, that Gregory's progress through the pages was awe-inspiringly fast. I wondered if that was what came of being a schoolteacher and having to read dozens of boys' history essays. I was impressed by his concentration and his work rate. Even so, it was obvious he had much more than a day's work on his hands.

At five in the afternoon he said, ‘I'm supposed to be meeting Nicola in London at half past six. I'm not going to make it. Would you ring her for me?'

‘No, Gregory,' I said. ‘I think it should come from you.'

‘But I'm engrossed.'

‘Trust me. She won't want to hear it from me.'

Puzzled at my assessment of the situation, but willing to believe I knew more about these matters than he did, Gregory made the phone call. I stood some distance away and pretended not to be listening, but I heard him say things were very exciting and it was obvious he'd have to stay overnight. If Nicola raised any objections to this plan, and I assumed she would, Gregory did not respond to them.

When he came off the phone I said I'd go and see about fixing up a bed for him, but he said no, that wouldn't be necessary. He intended
to continue reading right through the night. If he got too tired he'd cat-nap at the table for an hour or so, then wake up and carry on. He led me to believe he spent many nights like this at home, up all night reading history books, partly as teaching preparation, but mostly for the sheer fun of it.

I last looked in on Gregory at a little after midnight, to tell him I was going to bed and he was on his own as far as further pots of tea were concerned. Earlier in the day he'd scarcely looked up as I'd entered or left the room, but now he gazed at me with an affection that made me uncomfortable, and he said, ‘There's some bloody good stuff here,' and then he hesitated, considering whether he should say the thing that was really on his mind. He decided he would. ‘I want to thank you, Mike,' he said. ‘You're a right good pal.' I was deeply embarrassed and that seemed a suitable note on which to turn in for the night.

Next morning I took a fresh pot of tea to the library. When I got there Gregory was still sitting at the library table, much as I'd left him. His eyes looked a little red, but he was wide awake and excitedly alert. He had dealt with every piece of manuscript, read every bit of writing, and arranged the pages into beautifully neat, regular stacks, and he was looking at them with a benevolent, satisfied gaze. There was an air of smug modesty about him. He had an important verdict to deliver.

‘Well?' I asked.

‘I need to see your boss,' he said.

I took this as a big insult. Was I just the hired help around here? Was his judgement too grand to be shared with me?

‘No,' I said. ‘Anything you can say to Kincaid, you can say to me.'

‘All right,' he said. ‘I was going to tell him I think you've done a brilliant job of inspiring this writing; I think you've probably shown some genius, in fact.'

Now I felt bad, and yet I suspected that he'd deliberately planned it so I should feel bad.

‘If it was up to me,' he continued, ‘I'd say let's publish the whole bloody lot, exactly as it is, in all its sprawling majesty, don't change a word. But knowing the publishing trade I suppose it'll have to be trimmed down, made more palatable. But we mustn't grumble. We don't live in a perfect world. And I'd be right proud to do the job of trimming.'

‘So you think it's publishable?'

‘Of course. Nicola will publish it.'

‘Will she?'

‘If I tell her to publish it, she'll publish it.'

He said it with a ruthless pride in his own power. He was a man who could get things done, make things happen, make his girlfriend do what he wanted. Why did that annoy me so much?

We went along to see Kincaid and Alicia, and Gregory talked about ‘the work' as though its importance lay somewhere between
Ulysses
and the Dead Sea Scrolls. He insisted that his role would merely be that of midwife, that the honour was all mine, that he intended to interfere as little as possible, simply to make sure the baby came out whole and healthy. He said he didn't even want his name on the finished book. He was happy for it to say, ‘Edited by Gregory Collins'. Kincaid and Alicia were duly impressed by this selflessness, and by the promise of all the good work he was going to do for them, all the literary strings he was in a position to pull.

I was obviously a little less impressed. Yes, I was glad he thought the book was publishable, glad that he'd taken on a job I'd discovered I wasn't able to do, and I was pleased that he thought, or at least said, that I'd displayed a kind of genius, but I was still pissed off to be reminded of my own inadequacies. Why wasn't I a man who could get things done, make things happen? Why did I need Gregory to do them for me, and through an old girlfriend of mine, as it happened. I felt I was a person more entitled to connections and power and string-pulling than Gregory was.

I like to think I managed not to display any of this irritation and jealousy. The four of us, Kincaid, Alicia, Gregory and I, did a lot of smiling and handshaking and saying what we took to be the right thing. Then we loaded up Gregory's car with the whole mass of manuscript. A few patients gathered, wanting to know what was going on, and Kincaid told them he believed he had assured their place in history. Alicia gave them a more prosaic, more detailed explanation, and this made them very happy indeed; a little too happy, it seemed to me. Word spread and resulted in the kind of giddy excitement that I thought was all too likely to end in tears.

Once Gregory's car was loaded I experienced the terrible feeling that I was losing something very valuable and personal. I knew this was unreasonable. This writing was not in any sense ‘mine' and it
wasn't being lost. It was making its first step towards being found. Barring a car crash, car theft, Gregory not being up to the job he'd set himself, Nicola not being quite as pliant as Gregory thought she was, her company going bankrupt, and so on and so forth, the manuscript was on its way to its public. Still I couldn't help feeling sorry to see it go. I had grown attached to it, to its physical presence.

I tried not to think of this moment as the end of anything. As soon as possible I would convene a meeting with the patients, insist that writing was about process, not about finished product, and I'd get them writing again, begin a second accumulation, volume two maybe. And yet, in retrospect, I now think it would have been much better to accept that this was indeed an end. It might even have been an ideal moment to call it a day. I could have said my job was finished, and left with my head held high. That would have shown some style and integrity. The only problem with this bright idea was that I had nowhere to go. Was I supposed to get another writer-in-residence job in some other nut house? I felt these were few and far between, and probably I had the only such job in the whole of England. Was I supposed to go back to bookselling? Retrain as something else? As what? My career options, my life options, seemed ruinously, laughably limited.

Perhaps, more tellingly, if more reluctantly, I would have had to admit that I was actually happy at the Kincaid Clinic. I had a job, a wage, somewhere to live, a girlfriend of sorts, and if I didn't precisely have friends or a social life, at least there were ten patients I got along with reasonably well. It wasn't the perfect life, but it was
a
life, as much of one as I'd ever had at university, far more of one than I'd had in London. For the first time in a long time I realised I had something to lose.

Gregory Collins had been so certain, so blithely, immodestly confident he could do what he'd promised, that I almost wanted him to fail. Almost but not quite. Now that the idea of publication had been put into all our minds, I wanted it as much as anyone else. Kincaid talked as though it was a foregone conclusion, and the patients took his word for it. I was the only one who had any concerns about the difficulties of getting a book published.

But Gregory didn't fail. It took a little time for the publishing machine to gather momentum. I tried to imagine Gregory persuading Nicola, then Nicola persuading her bosses, of the project's viability; but her company was small and eccentric enough for decisions to be made quickly, and much sooner than I could have anticipated we received a formal letter from Nicola confirming that her company wanted to publish a selection of the patients' work. They had an unexpected empty spot on their forthcoming list and this anthology was just the book they needed to fill it. This meant things would have to move fairly swiftly, which I thought was good; a taste for delayed gratification not being one of the patients' strong suits.

I was delighted but surprised. I never thought it was going to be that easy. The letter went on to say that a draft contract would be sent in due course. Kincaid would be able to sign it on behalf of all the patients, since as head of the clinic he was acting
in loco parentis
. We were told it would be a standard contract and I didn't doubt it. Nicola surely wasn't going to rook us. Later there would be a cover design for us to approve, and in the meantime Kincaid and I were to buckle down and get on with writing our introduction and foreword, detailing our philosophy and methods. No more than that was required of us. We could leave all the donkey work to Nicola and ‘Bob Burns'.

I did wonder how Nicola felt about all this. Given how angry she'd been about my original impersonation of Gregory it seemed hard to believe she'd happily decided to publish a book that was built around that impersonation, but a number of possible explanations presented themselves. First, that the anger had simply worn off. That's what anger does sometimes, and how long can you perpetuate a grudge against an old boyfriend you never cared all that much about in the first place? A second explanation might have been that Gregory was indeed the Svengali he claimed to be, that one word from him was enough to make Nicola do his bidding. That didn't fit with my reading of either of their characters, although I knew that my character-reading could be pretty wayward. Another, perhaps more plausible, explanation presented itself: that Nicola's desire to publish the book didn't have anything to do with her feelings for me or for Gregory. Maybe she simply thought this was an interesting project, a worthwhile one, even a profitable one.