Bedlam Burning (37 page)

The news came in a rather apologetic letter from Gregory, informing me of the wedding and telling me I wasn't invited. If he'd had his way, he said, I'd not only have been present, I'd have been his best man. The prospect sent my head reeling. Just what kind of fool
was
Gregory Collins? Fortunately Nicola had had the ordinary good
sense to veto the idea. Inviting the bride's ex-boyfriend to a wedding might just about be permissible in certain circumstances, but having him as best man was just plain stupid. When said ex-boyfriend and potential best man is currently working in an asylum pretending to be the groom – well, no need to catalogue the objections.

The absurdity of Gregory's desire to have me there distracted me a little from the less spectacular, though no less real, absurdity of the wedding itself. I found it all but impossible to believe that Nicola would marry Gregory. Sleeping with him, going out with him, that was bizarre enough, but marrying him, that was just incomprehensible.

What people ‘see' in their partners is always inscrutable, but again, Nicola and Gregory's case created a new level of inscrutability. In one way, it was easy to see why Gregory might want to marry Nicola. She was much the best he was ever going to get, and in my opinion she was far better than he deserved. But that only made more urgent the question of why Nicola wanted to marry Gregory. It's not unknown for beautiful women to marry unattractive men – Jackie K and Aristotle O spring to mind – but these things are generally explained by money or power or the urge for a father figure. These didn't seem to apply in Nicola and Gregory's case.

I also think that the very beautiful often distrust their own beauty and seek out its opposite. But I didn't think Nicola was quite beautiful enough to need a man who was quite so unbeautiful as Gregory. So what were the other options? That Gregory was great in bed? No, that didn't bear thinking about and even in those days I knew that marriage has very little to do with what goes on between the sheets. Maybe Nicola was pregnant, but that was no reason to get married either. It would just be making a bad job worse; Nicola wasn't that silly. So maybe she was doing it to piss off her parents. That seemed a bit extreme. To piss me off? No, I didn't flatter myself that much.

So what other explanation offered itself? The only one I could think of was that it had to be about Gregory's writing. Maybe Nicola was smitten with his creativity, his literary pretensions. Maybe she thought he was a genius. Maybe. Just maybe.

I found myself thinking about their forthcoming wedding far more than I wanted to, and I wondered why. Was I jealous? Well possibly, although not, I'd insist, because I wanted Nicola for myself, but
rather because I wanted someone to want me the way Nicola apparently wanted Gregory. I suppose I was envious of people who had a relationship that wasn't merely sexual and that didn't only happen on certain nights and largely consist of weirdish sex, as mine did with Alicia. I didn't want to get married to Alicia or to anyone else, but I was still sufficiently bound up in society's mores that I'd have liked to have someone who wanted to marry me. Naturally, I didn't say any of this to Alicia.

I certainly had plenty of other things to keep me occupied, but on the day of the reading I kept thinking about Gregory and Nicola, wondered if they were married yet, wondered if Gregory was making his speech, wondered who he'd found to be his best man. And when the twenty or so invitees arrived at the clinic for the literary evening, in a special bus that had picked them up at Brighton station, I kept thinking of them as wedding guests. An absurd notion; they didn't look remotely like well-wishers, and neither did they much look like people out for a literary evening. They looked more like sober, uncomfortable tourists who had signed up for a mystery tour with a disreputable travel firm and were now regretting it. They were a serious, strangely homogenous bunch; a lot of suits, a lot of distinguished silver hair, and as they got off the bus it was surprisingly hard to tell who was who, which were the psychiatrists, which the academics, which the journalists, which the trustees.

Kincaid and Alicia were waiting for them, ready to shake hands and exchange pleasantries. The porters were there too, like a guard of honour, as were Byron, Maureen and Sita, judged to be the most presentable and least volatile of the patients. I kept my distance. I was watching from the library, peering out of the window, a little nervous and still a little resentful at being excluded. But then someone I knew got off the bus, someone who made my exclusion seem not only tolerable, but a stroke of infinite good fortune. It was Dr John Bentley, my old Director of Studies, the man who'd hosted the book-burning party at which I'd first met Gregory Collins.

I leapt back from the window. There was no way he could have seen me at that distance but I still felt the need to hide. My heart was doing a drum solo, my palms were wet, my ears felt unaccountably hot. I stood there trembling lightly, trying to think through the implications of Bentley's presence.

In one way it probably wasn't so surprising. Bentley was a scholar,
he read books, he kept an eye on what was happening in literature. He mightn't be the first person you'd invite to such an event, yet he was by no means the last. But surely there could be nothing accidental about his presence. He must have recognised the name Gregory Collins both as someone who'd burned a manuscript at his party, and also as the writer of
The Wax Man
. He'd been in correspondence with the author, for God's sake, and if he was as good as his word he'd even burned his book. That in itself would have made his presence problematic enough, even if I hadn't been involved in this ludicrous deception.

I didn't know if Bentley had ever seen a finished copy of
The Wax Man
, complete with dust jacket and author photograph of me. I thought it was reasonably unlikely. Gregory would have sent him a plain, unjacketed advance proof copy of the book. Therefore he was presumably expecting to meet the real Gregory Collins at this event. The moment he laid eyes on me he'd know everything. What would he do then? He would surely do what anyone else would in the circumstances, be they literary critics or journalists, scientists or trustees, or anything else. He would stand up and say this man is an impostor, this whole thing is a sham. The sky would come tumbling down around all our ears.

As I've said throughout, I knew this deception couldn't go on for ever. I knew a day of reckoning was on its way, and I knew that day would be painful and shaming; but Bentley's presence promised to make it painful and shaming in ways I had never imagined.

I told myself I could deal with my own humiliation, but what I really cared about were Kincaid, Alicia and the patients. Whatever resentments I felt towards Kincaid, I had no desire to make him a complete and public laughing stock. How could he be taken seriously if he couldn't tell the real Gregory Collins from an impostor, and that went for Alicia too, since she was the one who'd recruited me. And as for the patients, insane or not, malingerers or not, this was potentially their moment of triumph. I didn't want to let them down. So I desperately hoped I could hold things together just a little bit longer, a couple more hours until this ‘literary evening' was over, until the visitors had gone. After that it didn't matter; then I'd be willing to be exposed and vilified, and drummed out of the clinic. But how was I going to get through those essential couple of hours?

Chiefly by hiding, I hoped. I'd remain a back-room boy. If I could
manage to show my face to the patients while keeping it out of sight of Bentley, I thought I might get away with it. Just about. Maybe.

I left the library and took a slinking, circuitous route to the small office next to the lecture room, which was where the patients were already congregating, using the place as a dressingroom, although with the exception of Raymond, who'd somehow managed to obtain a pair of glittering false eyelashes, a candy floss wig and an air hostess's tartan uniform, they weren't doing much dressing up. They were tightly wound, however, pacing or twitching or being uncharacteristically vivacious, but none of them was tenser than me. Anders even came over and said, ‘I don't know what you're looking so tense about. You don't have to go out there and read this crap.'

That was true and it gave me some small cause for optimism. I stayed with the patients for the hour or so it took Kincaid to welcome the visitors, lecture them and give them the tour of the clinic. I wanted to be a reassuring presence, and I demonstrated some breathing exercises I'd learned in my days of amateur dramatics.

Then we heard the visitors coming along the corridor and entering the lecture room. The office door opened unexpectedly and Alicia came in, saw me looking terrified and said, ‘Are you all right?'

‘First-night nerves,' I said.

Perhaps she thought this was a good enough explanation, perhaps not; either way there was no time to discuss it. She told us the patients were needed ‘on stage'. Alicia escorted them out of the office. Sita was going along with them even though she wasn't reading, so I remained behind, alone, as nervous as I could ever remember being.

Once everyone was settled in place in the lecture room, I crept along the corridor and listened at the door. I couldn't see anything, but I could hear every word. It started well enough. Maureen read a bucolic piece about growing up in rural Lancashire in the 1900s. Then Anders delivered the shaving passage, then Raymond read a description of a football match. His outfit didn't really fit with his account of pincer movements, long balls and crunching tackles, but I thought he got away with it. They all read well, just as we'd rehearsed. Sometimes they sounded hesitant, sometimes they gabbled a little, but in the main they were excellent, better than lots of authors I've heard reading their own work.

Cook read a short and really very complicated passage full of puns and word play and anagrams, that came across like sound poetry or
surrealist glossolalia. It was fine. It even got a couple of laughs. Then Charity read a piece about a sex murder in a nunnery. This was a bit of a test. I'd convinced her to leave out some of the gorier parts, and certainly it was no worse than large swathes of what passes for serious literature these days, but at that time, in front of an audience of the moderately great and good, it made me very nervous. But she got away with it too. She was good. Maybe some people in the audience were shocked, maybe some thought it was inappropriate but by the time Charity sat down I could tell the audience was on our side. We were now a little over halfway through the programme and I was almost able to let myself relax.

I knew that the actual reading was only part of the story. I was just as worried about what some of the patients might do when they weren't reading, when they were just sitting there ‘doing nothing'. Mightn't Charity think this was a perfect opportunity for allowing her God-given body full exposure, mightn't Carla decide to indulge in some fierce pathomimicry, mightn't Anders dislike the way someone in the audience was looking at him? Well, undoubtedly they might have, but mercifully they didn't. They held themselves together. They stuck to the script. The event was developing an intensity that was impressive and undeniable.

Charles Manning read a slightly dull piece about the London blitz, but dullness was fine by me. I would settle for that. And Carla, as she'd requested, read out some ‘interesting' facts about submarines and tapestry-making and wildlife in Kenya. This was dull too, and I feared she might try to enliven it by screaming or writhing on the ground, but no, and there was a surprising charm about her delivery, like the presenter of an uncondescending children's TV programme. There was a little more sex and violence as Max, in a voice that was only slightly slurred, read a lurid passage about white slavery, and again I hoped nobody was offended.

The end was in sight, or at least in hearing. Byron was reading what I knew to be the final piece – I'd let him read one of the confessions, one where the author claimed to have dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, since I thought it would be a good finale and yet nobody could mistake it for a real confession. He read very well, better than he normally did, in a way that made it seem accusatory and moving, but also somehow satirical. Then it was over and the audience broke out into prolonged, genuine applause. We'd made it. There were tears
in my eyes. I ran back to the office to be there when the patients returned in triumph.

They were as moved as I was. ‘We fuckin' killed 'em,' said Anders, as they ran into the room. I found myself being hugged and kissed and shaken by the hand; and some way off I could hear Kincaid in the lecture room, addressing the audience again, blowing his own trumpet.

The applause started again, and Alicia stuck her head round the door to say that the patients were needed for a ‘curtain call'. They didn't need asking twice, but as they returned, Charles Manning, Anders and Maureen each grabbed bits of me and started to pull me along with them. I resisted, tried to fight them off, tried to assert my natural, if violent, modesty, but as I struggled other patients joined in, clamped down on me so that eventually I was immobilised, helpless, and I was carried bodily into the lecture room as though I were a mascot.

They set me down in front of the audience. I kept my head lowered, and my eyes averted, but it was too late now. Raymond was saying, ‘The man to whom we owe everything, our pilot through these turbulent skies: Gregory Collins,' and there was more applause and I knew it was all over. There was no longer any way of hiding myself. I looked up at all the faces. There, leading the applause, clapping louder than anyone, was Dr John Bentley, his face twisted in sly, impish glee.

I couldn't imagine what was going to happen next. What would Bentley do? How would he destroy me? I felt inert, and for a while nothing very dramatic happened at all. I was swept along as we all piled out of the lecture room into the canteen, where Cook had set up a necessarily plain buffet. The notion was that patients and visitors would now mingle informally before Kincaid drew events to a close and the guests were loaded back on the bus. This session in itself had always threatened plenty of scope for disaster but now that Bentley had seen me, I had a pretty good idea what form that disaster would take. I thought it was only a matter of time.