The Comforts of Madness

by Paul Sayer

  Soon, I began to tire of the tapes, and once I saw how harmless they were I was able to disregard them altogether. I did wonder, though, how many of the other residents, perhaps in possession of a less fibrous will than myself, might have been subjected to some similar treatment, the content of the dialogue tailored to each particular case, more intense maybe, harrowing enough to drive some poor soul out of his or her mind.

  The Major stalked around the quarry, cursing in the undergrowth, eventually re-emerging somewhere above me on a chalk mound down which he slid, scattering shale into the spokes of my wheelchair. ‘Come on, out of it,’ he said brightly. ‘Time we weren’t here.’

  Late in the afternoon Tom wheeled me into the kitchen to give me a haircut. A transistor radio on the window-ledge gave out the latest football scores together with garbled commentaries on some of the games. Tom put a towel round my shoulders. ‘Right, sir,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Short back and sides, is it? Or is sir in the mood for something a bit fancier, more modern? I have no catalogue, my good man, but if you were to indicate something of what you had in mind I will do my best to accommodate you. Sorry, Peter,’ he said, lightly embracing me. ‘A little joke you understand. Just old Tom playing the fool. Now then, where should we begin?’

  He snipped away peacefully. ‘Used to do this all the time at a place I was in. Maybe you’d know it. Cook Hall? Yes? No? Closed down now. Yes, used to do all the lads’ hair, two bob a time. Couldn’t do it now, of course. They’d stop my pay or benefit or something.’ He combed briskly, whistling to himself. Then he stopped, slowly drawing himself upright. ‘Needed doing, don’t you think?’ he said, addressing not me but a new presence in the kitchen: John.

  ‘Yes,’ said John. ‘Great improvement, Peter.’

  A ponderous silence fell between the three of us. Finally John spoke.

  ‘I wonder, Tom, if you might leave Peter and me alone for a few minutes? There’s something we’d like to discuss.’

  ‘Yes, sure,’ said Tom. He left immediately.

  ‘Peter,’ John said softly, kneeling at my side, ‘I’ve just had the Major in my office. He seems most distressed, and I’m damned if I can find out what the matter is. I understand you and he went for a little walk this afternoon, as you have been doing on a number of occasions, not that there’s anything wrong with that, on the contrary, it’s to be welcomed that you should get out and about with your fellow residents, fresh air, company, and all that. But I haven’t come about that, though I might suggest you pick your friends carefully. You see, Peter, the Major is a highly volatile man, he has his problems. Naturally, you must be thinking, or why else would he be here? He worries, you see; he’s given to thinking that people have it in for him, are conspiring against him in some way. He seems to think, Peter,’ he paused as if seeking the right words, ‘he seems to think that you may be plotting to kill him.’

  He stood up, made an empty gesture with his hands then shuffled to some place behind me.

  The minutes of silence passed. I thought he must have left the room. Then he coughed from somewhere by the sink.

  ‘Preposterous, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘What must be going on in the man’s mind? How could he think that you, an unmoving, dumb, no, not that, forgive me, you an un-speaking, utterly enigmatic man could possibly be planning to murder someone? It would be laughable if it weren’t so serious. We shouldn’t ridicule the Major. He is suffering from severe mental disturbance; it is his illness, not his fault. And he will recover. Tomorrow he’ll deny all knowledge of his accusation, if he’s not already doing so. Though what I must say, knowing the Major and his condition with such intimacy as I do, what seems remarkable is the fact that it’s unusual for him to get so upset without the aid of some precipitating, external factor. Do you see what I’m getting at, Peter?’

  I heard him move closer and felt his hands rest on my shoulders. I could smell his sweat as he leaned forward and spoke softly into my ear.

  ‘I have to know, Peter. When you were out with the Major this afternoon, did you speak to him? Please feel at ease. I should like it if you now decided to be frank with me, come clean as it were. Nothing would be held against you. And you are coming out of yourself, we have seen that. Now would be as good a time as any. What did you say to him, Peter? You did say something to him, didn’t you? He hinted as much. Come on, Peter, open your mouth. Speak to me.’

  He was now embracing me, nuzzling his mouth and nose in my neck and hair. He cuddled me tight, pleading quietly, ‘Tell me, dear boy. Tell me, your friend, the things I want to know.’

  I wondered if he was weeping. Then I realized that the noise he was making, burbling into my collar, was a giggle, a salivary, nasal laugh. He straightened himself up behind me and patted me on the shoulders.

  ‘So you won’t say anything to me, then, Peter?’ he asked as he came round in front of me. ‘No. No, of course not. It’s hardly your style. God, but you’re a cunning bastard. A cunning bastard and no mistake.’

  He laughed out loud, then turned and left the kitchen.

  ELEVEN

  Food for my compliance, a straight exchange – that’s what the dream promised. I might have been in the house, it felt like I was, but I was elsewhere, had to be since I could see an image of the house and its attentive features through a window, a window of the place I was in, a familiar room, a cell, though I could never say for sure. Anna and Tom were there, happy, a festiveness about them. Outside there was a clanking and hammering - a gallows being built? No. Something else, more elaborate, though its purpose would be the same, namely my own execution. Tom was stirring a yellow pulp in a big drum. Anna took a lump of it in her hand and offered it to me, pressing it against my cheek, pushing her wet finger into my mouth. Tom seemed bored. He went to look out of the window at a mass of water in which floated expressionless heads and odd bodies. The water was rising, threatening to engulf us all. He looked on impassively. I wondered if I were dead. Anna walked round on her hands, skirts falling over her face. She fell to the ground laughing, rolling over to scoop up my wheelchair and send me sprawling. Others were present, I don’t know who. I was put on a toilet, my legs spread, my arse a wide cavern from which Anna dragged long, skin-coloured turds which turned to wriggling reptiles in her hands. These she put before my face.

  I was lying in the dark, my eyes open, my head still full of the images of that dream, all haphazard. I sought clearer pictures, looked for meanings that would be palatable to me. Eventually there was nothing, only a stain on my memory.

  The machine behind my head was quiet. It might have spoken in my sleep, but I had not heard it. The room was cold and all I could see was the door, black against the purple and silver of the wall, a tombstone set against an unpeopled land beneath a godless sky. From somewhere came a snore, a plaintive mumbling, someone else dreaming in this house of dreams, this place of inhuman alliances. The wardrobe cracked, cracked again, and then was silent. I could feel no heartbeat. Cold air lingered over my mouth, unused, uninvited. The blood was still in my veins, my flat, unexcited veins. The juices in my body were soured, heavy, needing the light. I could think of nothing, I was nothing, nothing alighting in nothingness, a dream of myself, no more. Not even that.

  TWELVE

  Another day.

  My sense of time is and was always bad. I had no idea how long I’d been at One World, many weeks, some months certainly. I would now be forgotten back at the hospital. My bed there, although officially classed as a leave bed, would be occupied by someone new, and might well have been filled the very afternoon of my departure, such was the way of things in that unlikely haven.

  Tom strode into the room and lifted the sash window wide open. The skies outside were fine and airy and this seemed to improve his mood as he went about the tedious business of dressing me and shaving me with the electric razor, which he did with particular care, bathing my face afterwards and patting it dry with a warm towel. I often wondered where he slept; it was somewhere on the premises
for he was certainly in attendance twenty-four hours a day, unlike John and Anna who left their cars at the front of the house in full view of anyone who might wish to monitor their comings and goings. Tom would be in some quarter, away from the residents as might befit someone who was no longer a resident himself, but a member of staff. There were many parts of the house to which I was not offered or allowed access.

  He eased me into the chair and pushed me out along the landing. He stopped at the top of the stairs to knock on the last of a row of brown-painted doors.

  In this room slept the man who pulled out his hair, Murray I think his name was, or perhaps it was something else, it is of no real consequence. He was a small, deferential man who normally rose without prompting, who liked his own company best of all. Tom found him hanging at the back of the door, a noose of finely plaited human hair drawn tight around his neck. Inside the room I could see more of the stuff, falling in brown clouds from open drawers, piled on the bed like a sleeping bear. A warm, animal smell came through the door, not unpleasant. Tom gawped and shocked himself into action, slamming the door on me as he took the weight of the man and lifted him down onto the hairy bed. He opened the door again, his happy mood badly dented though not, I suspected, completely destroyed, for despite the horror of his discovery he was an old man and as one gets older it becomes difficult simply to jump from one emotion to another, whatever the circumstances. He was also a hardened fellow, like myself, and he had probably seen dozens of such sights during the course of his life in places like this. And there was even an odd crazy humour in his voice as he said, before running off down the stairs: ‘I wish you would do something useful instead of sitting in that fucking chair all day.’

  I was left facing the man I thought might be called Murray. He was still on the bed, a moment of surprise caught on his face for all eternity, the hair rope twisting from his neck like an umbilical cord, a snake which had met its own end in finishing the poor man off. And it was a bad place for me to be, bad for me to witness such a thing, that black tongue pointing at me, accusing, saying, ‘Your fault, Your fault.’ I would be getting a reputation for being around at the scene of people’s demise. They would be saying I brought bad luck.

  This incident gave all the residents a free morning. The Major was commandeered by Tom to ‘see to him’, meaning me. He took me into the lounge where he read an old newspaper and said nothing. Later he wheeled me outside under the shade of the trees at the side of the house from where we could see John, Anna, Tom, and a policeman supervising the removal of the body into an ambulance. The vehicle’s radio crackled and the faint smell of its disinfected interior reached us on the light breath of the breeze. ‘Cold-blooded murder. Killers, every one of them,’ said the Major, his muttered words falling on the top of my head. Without actually having appeared to see us, John limped away from the departing ambulance in our direction. His face was dark and greasy, his tie askew. He showed his yellow teeth. ‘Get him away from here,’ he hissed.

  In an act of blunt recalcitrance the Major took me back to the house, lifted me from the wheelchair at the foot of the stairs and carried me, slung over his back, to my room where he laid me on the bed beneath the open window. This, of course, suited me admirably, though I feared I might suffer later. The house could go about its business without me, in the rooms below, and I would have to partake of none of it. The air flowing over me was rich, fragrant, and to my surprise I began dozing, so relaxed did I feel -though that was probably just a frame of mind, born of the relief of not having to perform those foolish exercises.

  When I awoke I heard a new noise, a ferreting, scratchy sound, very close, somewhere in the room. A bird? Was it from somewhere closer still, from inside my own body? A tearing of my component parts? Sweat prickled in my hair: I had located the sound. It was under the blanket the Major had thrown over me, at a far corner of the bed, a rising and falling. My foot was moving.

  There was no hiding it. Over the pale dunes of my cheeks I could see the foot, its staccato lifting and jerking moving the blanket away, my toes wet and warm, the heel tapping into the mattress, a light playful movement like a faltering pulse. I bent my will towards it, trying in vain to halt it, weeping inside over the fact that I was losing control of myself. Hours passed. Tom came.

  He noticed it immediately, seemed almost to anticipate it. He examined me minutely for any further signs of movement, lifting my other leg and letting it fall, pressing the moving one down to try and make it stop. He was unsuccessful. He looked deep into my eyes, his own full of sobriety and reserve. Then he went for John and Anna.

  The Director of the One World Intensive Rehabilitation Centre grinned. ‘And what do we call this?’ he asked of the other two. He clamped my ankle down with his hand and I could feel the impulse working against his grip, throbbing the length of my leg. He quickly drew his hand away and my leg bounced off the bed before resuming its previous light momentum.

  ‘He’s not trying to communicate with us, by any chance?’ asked Anna.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said John. ‘It could be a trapped nerve. We should have it investigated but then again . . .’ he paused. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘perhaps we might subscribe to the theory that he’s trying to tell us something. Maybe we’ve reached a milestone, broken through somewhere. I wish he would say something, I’ve always been convinced that the vocal cords are intact, and yet nothing, not a murmur. Tell me, Peter, come on old man, say something. Say. Say.’

  He breathed deeply, smiling.

  ‘We’ll take it as a sign. Have to. There may never be another opportunity like it,’ he said. ‘Tom, you know the procedure for inducing amnesis, nothing to eat or drink for the next twelve hours. Understood?’

  Tom nodded, though his face was a picture of reluctance.

  ‘Right, Peter,’ said John. ‘I want you to listen to me very carefully. And I know you can hear me and can understand what I’m saying. We’re sending you on a little journey back to where you came from, to a life you once knew, to the times which made you as you are now. Nothing to be afraid of. On the contrary, we are in the business of relieving pain and suffering and that is how you should see this opportunity, this chance to go back to the beginning and make amends. You are privileged to be receiving this service, and I hope you will respond with the same grace as we are according you by snapping out of yourself, back in to the real world, the one world that is life for all of us.’

  Tom lingered when the other two had gone, looking down at my foot, puzzled, concerned, seeming to need to explain something to me. He covered me with the blanket and left the room.

  Once more it appeared I was being made to pay for someone else’s misfortune. Could any of it really have been my fault? Wasn’t I being brought to task just a little too often? Being held responsible for the madness around me, tried and convicted without anyone to say a word in my defence, could that be right? I don’t know. Nor did I really understand what was going to happen to me, though it was not long before I found out.

  They came in the early hours of the next morning, John and Tom, lifting me down the stairs and away into the cellar with the stealth of anxious murderers. This, I thought, really is the end. Now I was to be disposed of, dismembered perhaps, my pieces atomized and fed to the boiler or scattered in the woodland. The cellar was a suitable place, homely in a perverse sort of way with its sooty brick walls, a square of dawn light at one end boosted by the light bulb dangling from the ceiling, a pile of coke near a room which I guessed housed the boiler, a close, warm, barren smell, old air - this would do, I thought. I would be happy to go now.

  Tom took hold of me, hugging me from behind, his customary strong grip squeezing at my innards, mulching them, turning them to soup. I became limp and fell forward but he countered this by crushing me tighter still, lifting me clear of the floor, my leg flapping crazily, banging his shins. John went over to the wall and began fiddling with a set of ropes and pulleys. From the shadows an ungainly framework suspended by an
intricate interweaving of ropes descended before us, rocking downwards till it was about knee-height above the floor. Tom shuffled me across and the two of them laid me on the frame, John stretching my arms out at my side. From a sack he produced pieces of canvas which he wrapped about my arms and legs, looping them underneath the frame, securing them with zips and laces. Both he and Tom found their work hard going and John stood back to give himself a rest and to ponder my position. He made minor adjustments to the fastenings. ‘Right,’ he said at last, and the two of them went over to the wall and began hauling on the ropes in unison.

  I found myself being raised, feet uppermost, before the apparatus suddenly groaned and twisted, and I was suspended looking at the floor, hovering like a bird, like someone frozen in the act of throwing himself from a height. Tom nudged a crate across the floor with his foot while John secured the hauling system. At a nod from John the old man produced a cotton bag, a hood which he placed over my head and drew lightly about my neck with a cord. I felt a needle in my arm then heard the door close as they left.