The House of Sleep

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘As qualified facilitators,’ said Mark McGuire, ‘our task during these sessions will be to engage you in a series of role-playing modules and creativity enhancement procedures.’

  ‘These methods have been tested and approved by some of America’s most successful corporations,’ said Tim Simpson.

  ‘The exercises you will be performing should not be regarded as a training programme per se,’ said Mark McGuire.

  ‘Our aim is simply to open up your minds…’

  ‘Stimulate creative thinking…’

  ‘Engage your attention…’

  ‘Embed key points and concepts for long-term retention…’

  ‘And above all…’

  One more turn of the flip-chart, and then, in unison: ‘MOTIVATE YOU FOR CHANGE.’

  ‘Now,’ said Tim Simpson, ‘does anyone have any questions?’

  Most of the audience seemed too dazed and bewildered to ask questions at this stage, so the facilitators divided them up into groups of five and explained that the first exercise would provide a relaxed forum in which introductions could be made.

  ‘All you have to do,’ said Mark McGuire, ‘is to address the group, tell them your name – and your age, if you feel like it –and any job description that you consider relevant.’

  ‘Is that all, Mark?’ said Tim Simpson. ‘That sounds kind of dull and conventional to me.’

  ‘You’re right, Tim. I’ve forgotten something,’ said Mark McGuire. ‘And do you know what I’ve forgotten?’

  ‘I think I do, Mark. I think you’ve forgotten–’ and here Tim Simpson produced a cardboard box from behind the flip-chart, whereupon they both exclaimed:

  ‘– the SILLY HATS.’

  A number of party and fancy-dress hats were now extracted from the box and distributed at random among the astonished delegates, while Mark McGuire explained that they might find it easier and more liberating to assume a role appropriate to each hat when making their introductory speeches.

  The five members of Dr Dudden’s group sat in a circle, donned their respective hats and regarded each other mournfully before proceeding.

  ‘Well, I suppose I might as well start,’ said one bespectacled, grey-haired delegate, upon whose head was perched a papier mâché policeman’s helmet. ‘My name is Dr Christopher Myers, I’m forty-eight years old, and I’m a Senior Lecturer in Liaison Psychiatry.’

  ‘My name,’ said the woman sitting next to him, wearing a Valkyrie helmet, complete with horns, ‘is Dr Susan Herriot, MRC Psych. I’m forty-two years old, and I lecture in Perinatal Psychiatry.’

  ‘I’m Russell Watts,’ said the next man, who sported a deerstalker. ‘Self-employed counsellor and psychotherapist. Thirty-nine years old.’

  ‘Avast there, me hearties!’ Dr Dudden now shouted, pounding the table with a violence that made the others jump. He was wearing a pirate’s hat. ‘Hoist the Jolly Roger, splice the mainsail and man the poop. Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest, Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!’ His colleagues were staring at him in amazement, so he finished by announcing, in more subdued tones: ‘Dr G. K. Dudden, MRC Psych. Founder, manager and team leader of the Dudden Clinic. Aged thirty-six last birthday. At your service.’

  The others did not seem to be curious enough about his first name to insist upon hearing it. Besides, this reference to the clinic itself was enough to spark a glimmer of recognition in the last member of the group, who remarked, ‘Ah! The sleep man,’ before proceeding to address them all. He was the oldest of the five, with a mane of white hair and a fine, aquiline face, partially obscured at this point by the veil hanging down from his broad-brimmed wedding hat, which was topped with a multi-layered arrangement of pink and blue plastic roses. ‘My name,’ he said slowly, ‘is Marcus Cole, FRC Psych. I’m fifty-eight years old, I’m a Professor of Forensic Psychiatry, and I had to cancel a meeting at the Home Office to be here today. Now, shall we take these ridiculous things off?’

  As the morning’s activities continued, tensions between these five group members seemed to intensify rather than dissolve. Professor Cole and Christopher Myers already appeared to be quite well acquainted: they were on first-name terms, and treated each other with evident mutual respect. They were both openly suspicious of Russell Watts, however, and noticeably cool towards Dr Dudden. The next game, in which they had to find ways of arranging six matchsticks so as to make different combinations of equilateral triangles, passed relatively without incident. After that, in order to unblock their latent creativity channels (Mark McGuire’s phrase) they were asked to make personalized sculptures out of pipe-cleaners. This aroused some controversy, since Russell Watts’s sculpture was judged to be obscene and suggestive; as indeed were the gestures he started making with it towards Dr Herriot, which she did her best to ignore. Finally, just before lunch, they played a game called ‘Modify That Paradigm!’ which required them each to cut up a colour advertisement from a newspaper or magazine, and arrange the pieces into an original collage. The new pictures, they were told, should be representational rather than abstract.

  ‘Is that the best you could do?’ Dr Myers said at the end, looking over at Professor Cole’s collage.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said the Professor irritably. His fingers were covered with glue.

  ‘Well, it’s a bit basic, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s a perfectly good picture of an aeroplane, if you ask me.’ With a disparaging glance at Dr Myers’s effort, he added: ‘At least you can tell what mine is.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Well, what do you call that? Is it meant to be an elephant or something?’

  ‘It’s a horse, for God’s sake.’

  ‘It’s the wrong shape.’

  ‘What are you talking about, the wrong shape? It’s bloody… horse-shaped, that’s what it is. At least I took on a bit of a challenge. Anybody could do an aeroplane.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off, Myers. You always were a pompous old sod.’

  Their collective tempers did not improve over lunch. After washing the glue from his hands Professor Cole seemed slightly less fractious, and merely sat with a resigned, melancholy expression on his face, eating his meal in silence. Dr Myers was a good deal more vocal.

  ‘It’s like being back in a bloody kindergarten,’ he complained. ‘How much are these pre-pubescent clowns being paid to waste our time like this? I mean, has anybody ever heard of this company – Higgledy Piggledy, or whatever they’re called?’

  ‘Hingleton Pendlebury,’ said Dr Dudden, ‘is a firm with a considerable reputation within the business community. Personally, I’ve found this morning’s activities to be extremely stimulating. We shouldn’t knock these methods just because they seem to be a little juvenile at first. The success of American business is built on events like this.’

  ‘Oh, what bullshit,’ said Dr Myers. ‘For one thing, providing health care is not a business. And secondly, American business success is a myth. Look at their national debt. You don’t find the Germans or the Japanese messing around with matchsticks and pipe-cleaners during their working hours. On the contrary, this sort of thing shows you exactly what’s wrong with the Americans: their pathetic infantilism.’

  ‘What do you think, Professor?’ asked Dr Herriot. She was sitting next to Russell Watts, and leaning visibly away from him.

  Professor Cole laid down his knife and fork, and said dreamily: ‘In two years’ time, I shall be retiring. I shall have been in the profession for more than twenty-five years, and in that time I shall have seen psychiatry being transformed, in the public eye, from a serious medical science into a discredited wing of the civil service; the scapegoat for every ill which society happens to throw up. It seems to me entirely appropriate that I should end my career making collages out of paper and glue, under the supervision of a man ten years younger than my youngest son. Today,’ he continued, as the others listened with shocked concentration, ‘I should be meeting with the Home Office and with my trust manage
rs to discuss the case of a young schizophrenic on one of my wards. I am the only person qualified to give a medical opinion on this case, but the meeting will proceed without me. Such are the realities of psychiatric practice in London today.’

  ‘The managers want to release him, I suppose?’ said Dr Myers.

  ‘Yes. There’s a shortage of beds, and his condition has stabilized in the last few weeks.’

  ‘Permanently?’

  ‘No. Only thanks to our efforts.’

  ‘They won’t let him out, will they?’

  ‘I hope not. It’s possible.’

  ‘Is he dangerous?’

  ‘Very.’ Professor Cole rose tiredly to his feet, and said: ‘I’m going to lie down for a little while, I think. I’ll see you all in half an hour or so.’

  When he had gone, Dr Dudden began to pour coffee for everyone and snorted: ‘Bit of a dinosaur, that one. He needs to move with the times.’

  Christopher Myers bridled. ‘You should remember,’ he said, ‘that not all of us have embraced the free market with quite your enthusiasm, Dr Dudden.’

  ‘You will,’ he said. ‘You’ll have no choice.’

  ‘The clinic is thriving, I take it?’

  ‘We’re getting by, we’re getting by.’

  ‘Not too much adverse publicity?’

  Dr Dudden paused in the act of stirring his own coffee. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I just wondered about the little spot of bother you had down there last year with that young man: the name was Webb, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Stephen Webb died in a road accident. Nothing to do with my clinic.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Still, it did attract a certain amount of attention, you know…’

  Dr Dudden shrugged. ‘That doesn’t surprise me. Or disturb me, to be perfectly honest.’

  ‘Maybe not.’ Dr Myers hesitated, as if about to raise a delicate topic. ‘All the same, I think you should know that I’ve been asked to chair a committee to look into that incident. You’ll be told about it soon, officially, by letter.’

  Dr Dudden paused, open-mouthed, in the act of sipping his coffee. His face was pale.

  ‘I see,’ he said quietly.

  Noticing the silence that had descended on their table, Dr Herriot turned to Russell Watts and asked him to pass the sugar. He handed her the little basin of brown and white sachets, and slipped his hand purposefully on to her thigh.

  ‘I put it to you,’ he whispered, ‘that your cunt is on fire.’

  ‘Time to go back to the conference room, I think,’ said Dr Herriot, standing up in a sudden, startled movement. Her voice was unusually high and strained.

  Most of their time, that afternoon, was spent playing a long and elaborate game called ‘Alien Babies’. For this purpose, Tim Simpson and Mark McGuire had pegged out a number of circles in string on the floor of the conference room. These circles were some twelve feet in diameter, and in the middle of each one was a small bucket filled with jelly babies.

  ‘Now, they may look like ordinary jelly babies to you,’ said Tim Simpson, ‘but in fact these are the embryos of an alien life form. They’ve just landed in your back garden, and in thirty minutes’ time they’re going to hatch out and turn into enormous, life-threatening monsters, capable of destroying the world.’

  ‘What’s more,’ said Mark McGuire, ‘they’re already giving out a powerful and deadly radioactive energy, so that anyone who steps inside one of these circles is going to be killed.’

  ‘There’s only one way of destroying these aliens,’ said Tim Simpson. ‘They have no immunity to water. Immerse them in water, and they die instantly.’

  Each group was provided with a bucket of water and five eight-foot lengths of rope. They were then told that they had thirty minutes to find a way of transferring the jelly babies from one bucket to the other, without stepping inside the dangerous radioactive field, without laying hands on the alien bucket and without bringing it out of the circle.

  Dr Dudden assumed command of his group.

  ‘Now, we’re not going to rush into this,’ he said. ‘Let’s keep a cool head, and allow five minutes to think of a strategy.’

  ‘Well, it seems clear enough to me,’ said Dr Myers. ‘One of us should walk into the circle and tip them straight into the bucket of water.’

  ‘But he’ll be killed,’ said Dr Dudden.

  ‘So? He’ll have saved the entire population of the world. That’s worth dying for, isn’t it?’

  ‘Let’s draw lots,’ said Dr Herriot. ‘Or toss for it.’

  ‘But you die as soon as you step inside the circle.’

  ‘They didn’t tell us that you died immediately. You might have ten seconds, or thirty seconds, or even a minute.’

  Dr Dudden consulted with Mark McGuire, who told him that once anyone stepped inside the circle, death was instantaneous; furthermore, individual sacrifices were not in keeping with the spirit of the exercise. He then returned to find that Professor Cole was busy tying a knot in his length of rope.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s perfectly obvious,’ said the Professor. ‘We’re going to have to put lassoes around the buckets. We put one around the bucket of water, and pull that into the centre of the circle. Then four of us have to lasso the bucket full of jelly babies, and if we all pull the ropes tight, we ought to be able to raise it and tilt it so we can get them into the water. Look –’ he pointed at the other groups ‘– they’ve already started.’

  Dr Dudden frowned judiciously. ‘That might work,’ he said.

  It was a surprisingly difficult operation, and more than twenty minutes had gone by before they had secured the central bucket with four ropes, and were preparing to pull them tight under Dr Dudden’s supervision.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Now, on the count of three, we’re going to raise the bucket, and then –’

  ‘Can I just say something at this point?’ said Russell Watts.

  ‘What?’ Dr Dudden snapped. He was sweating profusely, and beginning to find the whole activity rather stressful. ‘We’ve only got another six minutes, you know.’

  ‘Well, I was just thinking: perhaps we’re going about this in the wrong way.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, we’re assuming that these creatures have to be destroyed.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘But perhaps we should try reasoning with them.’

  Christopher Myers and Susan Herriot put down their ropes and looked at each other despairingly. Professor Cole, on the other hand, appeared not to be listening. The dreamy expression had returned to his face. He was thinking, in fact, of the meeting he had been forced to miss that afternoon; thinking about the schizophrenic patient who had been in his care for the last few weeks, and wondering what would happen if the hospital managers decided to release him.

  the assailant was six feet two inches tall, wearing black jeans and a green combat jacket

  ‘Reason with them? What are you talking about?’

  ‘This could be our first contact with an alien civilization, and we’re just going to kill them off without even trying to communicate with them?’

  he was pacing backwards and forwards along the platform, muttering to himself and occasionally shouting

  ‘For God’s sake, man, these are jelly babies, not real aliens. It’s only a game.’

  ‘Well if it’s only a game why are we taking the rules so seriously?’

  ‘Let’s just tip the bloody things in the water and be done with it.’

  the blade of his knife glinted in the evening sunlight

  ‘How do we know that water kills them anyway?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’ve just landed in our back garden. We know nothing about them. How do we know that the water’s going to kill them?’

  the victim remains in a coma, after receiving multiple stab wounds to the chest and throat

  ‘Look, just grab hold of the rope and get on with it.’
r />   ‘Yes. Stop being childish.’

  ‘Are you ready, Professor?’

  the patient’s release ran contrary to my own professional judgment, and contrary to the advice contained in my memo to the Home Office

  ‘Marcus, are you ready?’

  since there seems to be no prospect of improvement in your son’s condition, I can offer only my condolences for the grief this must have caused to you and your family

  Professor Cole realized that he was being spoken to, and looked up at the expectant faces of his colleagues. He found that he was sitting on the floor of the conference room, although he had no memory of getting there. Before struggling to his feet he took out a pocket handkerchief and wiped some pearls of sweat from his cheeks and brow.

  Professor Marcus Cole, FRC Psych., said reluctantly: ‘Yes, I’m ready.’

  Then the four rope-pullers took up their positions, and Dr Dudden counted to three in a careful but excited monotone. When they had successfully completed their task, they were allowed to eat the waterlogged jelly babies.

  15

  There was never any question of Terry hitting her, as Sarah was always careful to emphasize, whenever she discussed the incident later with one of her friends, or even with her analyst. All the same, she was frightened. She had never seen anger quite like it, not even from Gregory on the night they split up. Tables and walls were thumped. Short, high-pitched, inarticulate noises of rage were emitted. Small items of furniture were kicked and thrown around the room.

  ‘But it’s not my fault,’ Sarah had protested, repeatedly. ‘It’s not my fault. I couldn’t help it.’

  Terry didn’t speak to her for almost a week after that. The flat they were sharing was not large, and it would have been difficult to avoid contact altogether, but he made his point by removing all his books and papers from the sitting-room, where he usually worked, and setting up a makeshift office in the dark and unheated spare bedroom. It was to no avail, anyway, because at the end of the week he was called into his editor’s office and told that he had lost his job; and since he had been paying the rent for both of them, that was the end of their flatshare. Frame had only employed him for three months.