Bedlam Burning (8 page)

‘Very well then,' said Kincaid, ‘I'll let Alicia give you the tour of the facilities, and explain the precise terms and conditions, show you your accommodation. You'd be living-in, naturally. You know, you writers are a peculiar breed. Alicia suggested you might be rather resistant to accepting the post, that you might take some persuading, but as ever she was just being cautious. Good. I shall see you next month. You'll be very happy here. Goodbye.'

We exchanged a soft handshake, then I was dismissed and Alicia escorted me out. She had the decency to appear shamefaced.

‘You're quite an operator, aren't you?' I said.

‘Would you say so?'

‘A bit of a con-artist, in fact.'

‘Is that so terrible of me?'

‘Yes,' I said, ‘but it's also quite funny.'

This was clearly, obviously, transparently the moment when I ought to have come clean, when I ought to have said that I was a con-artist too, said I was a Gregory Collins impersonator. Then we'd have laughed about it, seen how ludicrous and impossible the situation was, seen that we were kindred souls, and fallen into each other's arms for one night of improbable, never to be repeated sexual bliss. But I didn't come clean. I remained dirty and deceitful, and for the best possible reason: I wasn't given the chance to be clean.

We had come out of Kincaid's office and Alicia was beginning her tour, but we were scarcely halfway along the clinic's central corridor,
a long, low-ceilinged conduit with ten or so identical grey doors leading from it, when one of the doors swung open violently and a demented-looking naked woman emerged and ran towards us. Actually, this was the most naked-looking woman I had ever seen: skinny and bare, ribs and tendons showing through the pale skin, a shaved head, an utterly hairless body, and although her demeanour was certainly wild and threatening, there was nothing but vacancy in the eyes. She was staring at Alicia and me, and despite, in one way, looking as though she had a potent desire to do us harm, in another way I wasn't sure she was really seeing us at all. I had the feeling that in her eyes we could have been any sort of grim hallucination.

‘Let's stay very calm,' Alicia said.

I couldn't tell whether she was talking to me or to the crazed patient or to herself, but it was a futile statement. None of us was remotely calm. Alicia talked quietly to the naked woman, calling her by name, Charity, repeating it often and sweetly, trying to placate her, but it was quite obvious to me, layman though I was, that it was doing no good whatsoever. Charity was not being placated. She was getting increasingly upset. She was jumping up and down and her arms were performing weird, uncontrolled semaphore.

‘Who's this?' Charity said, pointing at me. ‘Some new quack?'

‘This is Gregory,' Alicia said. ‘He's going to be working here from now on. You'll be seeing more of him.'

It seemed the wrong time to contradict her, to say I wasn't going to be working there. Solidarity with Alicia was all-important. It also seemed like quite the wrong time to say the other thing that had instantly come into my mind, that whatever Charity needed, whatever her mental problems were, a writer-in-residence appeared unlikely to be able to solve them; but I kept quiet about that too. Charity looked at me with uninterested hostility then, swiftly and athletically, made a lunge at Alicia.

What happened next was brief, confused and wholly instinctive on my part. As Charity went for Alicia, I went for Charity; and, as luck would have it, I was quicker than she was. I grabbed her in a smothering sort of rugby tackle. We landed on the cold hard floor of the corridor, though I suppose it was colder and harder for the naked Charity than it was for me, and we wrestled there for what seemed like an indecently long time. My hands were filled with body parts that I had no right to be touching, but I still
held on, and even though Charity was fierce and slippery, I was big enough and strong enough to hold her down until I heard the footsteps of two male hospital porters pounding along the corridor. They prised Charity out of my grasp, lifted her up off the ground, and carried her back into her room as though she were an awkward piece of folding furniture, a deckchair or an ironing board. The grey door closed behind them with a weighted gentleness. I expected to hear screams and the noises of a struggle, but no sound came.

‘You needn't have worried,' said Alicia. ‘She was only dancing.'

‘Was she?'

‘Yes. It's a religious thing with her. It can get a little Dionysian sometimes but it's never actually harmful.'

Obviously Alicia knew a great deal more about Charity's condition than I did, but I wasn't sure she was right. Charity's ‘dance' had looked pretty dangerous to me, and not conspicuously religious.

‘You should see her with her clothes on. She's just a hippie at heart.'

‘Yes?'

‘Well, apart from the hair.'

I was shaken up. Wrestling with a mad, naked woman, even a mad, naked hippie, was not one of the things I'd been expecting on my night in Brighton. The event had been shocking, but so brief and so quickly over that I could almost believe I'd imagined it. I noticed my hands were trembling.

‘You need to sit down,' Alicia said. ‘Let me show you where you'd live if you were our writer-in-residence.'

I was glad she used the word ‘if' rather than ‘when', but a part of me didn't really want to see the accommodation. I knew it would make me envious. Whatever it was like, however humble, it would still be infinitely better than my own horrible room in London. What was the point in torturing myself? Yet I couldn't bring myself to refuse. We started to walk.

‘What exactly's wrong with the patients here?' I asked.

‘They're in an asylum, that's mostly what's wrong with them,' Alicia replied smartly.

‘But are they like schizophrenic, or manic depressive or …?'

Actually, that was about as far as I could go with naming varieties of madness.

‘What's in a name, Gregory?' Alicia said. ‘Words like schizophrenia or manic depression or paranoia, they're just labels, just narrow, reductive terms for things we don't really understand. By naming them we like to pretend we have power over them – like Adam in the Garden of Eden. What we now call schizophrenia we would not so long ago have called dementia praecox. Before that you might have called it being possessed by demons. Perhaps at some time in the future we'll be calling it Kincaid Syndrome, or who knows, Gregory Collins' disease.'

I wondered how it would feel to have a condition named after you. Was that a thing anyone would want? And were they named after the doctor or the patient, the poor bugger who suffered from it or the clever bastard who ‘discovered' it? Who were these people? Who was Tourette? Who was Down? What was the name of Pavlov's dog?

‘Put it this way, Gregory,' Alicia continued, ‘if you were a patient and you arrived here in distress, would you like it if I said, “Ah yes, I know what this is! What we have here is a case of Sydenham's chorea, or Marchiafava-Bignami disease, or Steele-Richardson-Olszewski syndrome.” Or would you rather we just helped you get better?'

‘Would it have to be an either/or situation?' I said.

‘You have so much to learn, Gregory. But it'll be a pleasure to teach you.'

We had left the clinic and were walking through the grounds. The writer's accommodation was apparently outside the main building. I could now see there was quite a bit of land attached to the clinic. There were some neglected flower borders, and then a much larger, overgrown area that ran all the way to the boundary wall. There were structures too: some outbuildings, a cracked and scruffy tennis court, and a dried-up fountain with a chipped cement statue of a mermaid at its centre.

We went just a little further and there, in front of a giant rhododendron bush, was the neatest, quaintest, most appealing little cabin I'd ever seen; the same style as the main building, but its qualities had been distilled and concentrated. It was a structure anyone could have fallen in love with.

‘This would be yours,' Alicia said. ‘It's always been referred to as the writer's hut. All it needs is a writer.'

Alicia unlocked the door and we stepped inside. The interior smelled musty, like mildewed fruit. The old rattan and wicker
furniture was careworn, there was some peeling yellow wallpaper and the overhead electric light provided only a feeble glow, but the place undoubtedly had charm. There was a desk with a typewriter on it, a chair, a frayed carpet, a pot-bellied stove. There was just one room with a sofabed: no bedroom, no kitchen, no bathroom. Alicia explained that I'd have to shower in the main building, just like everybody else, but that sounded like no great hardship. I'd lived with a similar arrangement at college. It wasn't luxurious by any standards, except mine, but to me it was a palace. I sat down on the sofabed, looked around me, and of course I felt tempted.

At that time I had never read Gaston Bachelard's
The Poetics of Space
. If I had, I would have known he described living in a hut as ‘the taproot of inhabiting', and perhaps it would have helped me understand why I was so drawn to the place. As it was, I simply started to feel I could all too easily be happy here. This was a nice place in a nice town, and the fact it was located in the grounds of a lunatic asylum seemed like only the slightest drawback. Having Alicia close by, and especially if she was going to be as good to me in the future as she was being at that moment, would be an enormous attraction too. She was sitting close to me on the sofabed and she was gently massaging the back of my neck. She said it would help get rid of my tension. I was prepared for it to take some time.

‘So Charity isn't dangerous?' I said.

‘No. None of the patients here is actually dangerous, although some of them can be a little frightening.'

‘They aren't sex killers or axe murderers?'

‘These people are people,' Alicia said, suddenly earnest now. ‘That's the important thing to remember. In the old days it was said that asylums were like museums of madness. We like to think the Kincaid Clinic is more like an art gallery or an opera house.'

‘And what do you do for them?'

‘We do what we can. We use a variety of techniques, some traditional, some experimental; a series of treatments that add up to what we're proud to call Kincaidian Therapy. It would all become clear if you worked here.'

‘And what would
I
do?'

‘You would help the patients to use language as a bulkhead against madness.'

‘Come again?'

‘You'd get them to write, that's all.'

It sounded dangerously simple.

‘I know what you're thinking,' Alicia said. ‘You're worried about the responsibility. That's good. But don't worry. We're not asking you to be a doctor. We're not asking you to deliver a cure; not that we believe in cures, in the ordinary sense. Your job wouldn't be so hard. You'd have enough time to continue with your own writing. We don't want to own you body and soul. I'm sorry I took a few liberties. Sorry I told Dr Kincaid you'd already agreed to take the job. But I like to think of it as an act of creative imagination. If you believe strongly enough that something is true, then the very act of believing
makes
it true.'

I didn't wholly understand why she was so keen to believe that Gregory Collins was going to be their writer-in-residence. True, his book, with its combination of blankness and luridness, might be construed as having some vague relevance to madness, but that hardly seemed reason enough. A more suspicious man would have doubted Alicia's motives, and a more arrogant man might have thought she'd taken one look at my photograph on the back of
The Wax Man
and decided she had to have me. Being neither sufficiently suspicious nor sufficiently arrogant, I just felt confused.

However, as I sat on the sofabed with Alicia's fingers running complex patterns around the nape of my neck, I wasn't much inclined to question her motives. Perhaps I should have been questioning my own. I was starting to think that possibly, just possibly, I might be able to carry this deception a little bit further. I was foolish enough to start thinking I might be able to do a reasonable job of teaching creative writing to a group of lunatics. How hard could it be?

Was this unspeakable hubris? I didn't think so. Those who can't do, teach; and I certainly knew that I couldn't write – didn't even want to. However, the fact was, I'd studied literature for three years at university, I liked good writing, knew it when I saw it, and even had some notion of how bad writing might be improved. Back in those days, in the seventies, many a school would have welcomed an Oxbridge English graduate with open arms and allowed him to teach pretty much anything he wanted, and if I'd been enrolled for a Ph.D. I'd have been supervising Cambridge undergraduates; so surely I was up to teaching creative writing on a funny farm. And, anyway, the job presumably wasn't about turning patients into ‘proper' writers. Good
and bad probably didn't even come into it. I'd just encourage them, and the doctors, the Alicias and Kincaids of the world, would do the rest. So long as I tried to do a decent job, what did it matter if I wasn't the ‘real' Gregory Collins? What was in a name?

And then the obvious flaw in this scheme occurred to me. Even if I was capable of doing the job, even if the clinic wanted me to do the job, I certainly couldn't do it without Gregory's permission, and how could I possibly convince him to give it? And as for what Nicola would say or do …

I tried to clear my head of this stuff and concentrate on more immediate matters. My arms had snaked around Alicia Crowe and she had not pushed them away, and then we were kissing with passion, though not quite with abandon. It felt a little adolescent, like the consolation snog at the end of the party, but that didn't mean it wasn't fun.