Paper Cuts

by Stephen Bernard

  What to do about it? Whom can I trust? Already it is seeping into my mind that those I thought I could trust are also part of this conspiracy, this conspiracy against me. I know I have thought these thoughts before, that they were not right, that I took medications and the thoughts went away, but that is what they want me to do, to take the medications and to cease to see through their plan, their plot to undo me.

  I should take the medication. I have it here next to me, in my bag, in the Library. I always carry it with me, for such a time as this. It will take hours to work, but it will work (I hope). No, hope is not the right word. I can see the truth of the situation now as I have never seen before. I do not hope to know an untruth, for them to have their victory over me, for me to be compliant, them complaisant, in this situation.

  Can I take the medication? I do not know if I can trust it, can trust myself, to make the right decision in this situation. Whom can I trust? I think of my mother, what would she do? She would tell me to take the medication. But it is poisoning me. It is making me not see the truth about the world, of what is happening to me. This is happening to me. Something is happening to me, and I can stop this.

  I take the bag and go downstairs to the cloakroom. There is the water stand. There, in my hand, is the medication. Should I take it? I am only just now beginning to grasp the truth of the situation. To see entire and whole the overwhelming truth that someone, some people, everyone is out to get me. They want me to take the medication. I can see that. I want to take the medication, to believe the truth, a contradictory truth, to end this confusion, this complication, these complicated thoughts.

  Am I rash enough to take the medication? It is what they want (is it what I want? What do I want?) I am alone in this room, although there are people in it, washing their hands, looking at me (are they looking at me?) I am very aware that now I have to make a decision, to grasp a thought among many thoughts (what am I thinking? I am not even sure of that).

  Someone flushes the lavatory behind me, is coming out, into this room. We share a space, each of us aware of the functions of the body, but I am thinking now of the functions of the mind. I am aware that these thoughts, which press against my mind, trace their composition on the mirror in front of which I am standing. I see myself. I can see myself clearly, standing there, in a confusion of thought and alone.

  The man passes out of the room and leaves me with my thoughts. So many thoughts. What am I thinking? (No, what am I thinking?) I am thinking a thought which is not rational, although it convinces me now of its truth. There is also another truth, that I am not alone in the world, that I have been here before and am comforted, helped by the medications in my hand. I make a decision. It may be my downfall, or the downfall of my self, but I take the tablets, individually, one by one. This may be what ‘they’ want, but it is also what I want, to be away from these complicated thoughts, this complication.

  I look at myself in the mirror. I have done it now. Have acquiesced in my own destruction. If the minutes are intense, the hours will be surprisingly dull, I know, until the medication works, works its way through my bloodstream, into my mind, and corrects my perceptions of the world, which even moments ago was plotting my end. There is nothing to do now but wait, and already I am reassured that I have done the right thing. It will turn out to have been the right thing to have done. That I know, but I do not know yet. I know that there will be more complications in my day, in my life. I do not know what the day will hold yet, but I have taken charge, have let them take charge, have thought through, literally thought through those complicated thoughts and already I am more in control of myself.

  This is not getting it done. I return to Duke Humfrey’s Library. I must crack on.

  *

  It is past two o’clock in Oxford and an email arrives in my inbox.

  ‘Acknowledgements.’

  These are the acknowledgements for the Rowe edition, a work which has taken years, years in which I have lived in the eighteenth century. It is 14 January 1705 today and Betterton has a cholic and is not expected to last.

  *

  From the London Gazette for the day 14 January 1705:

  The French are fortifying Dezenzano. They attempted of the 22nd past in the Night to surprise Palazzuolo, another Town in the Province of Brescia …

  To the Duke of Marlbourough, on the

  Trophies set up in Westminster-Hall.

  For other Princes, let the Abbey be;

  Westminster-Hall’s a Monument for thee.

  ADVERTISEMENTS

  *‡ The Peculiar Use and Signification of certain words in the LATIN TONGUE: Or a Collection of Observations, wherein the elegant uncommon Sense of very near 900 common Latin Words (besides the various Sense of the same words) is fully and distinctly explain’d in English Sentences, translated from the truest Copies of the Purest Latin Writers. The Order Alphabetical …

  *

  Acknowledgements, I think, are the means of tracking the intellectual and personal histories of the individual, of the individuated academic, in relation to themselves. The lives of their minds.

  An edition like this is many years in the making and there are many people to thank …

  *

  This is not getting it done. The literature editor of the TLS will be champing at the bit in anticipation (I kid myself).

  *

  You are not in fact a well man. That wellbeing is also a lie, also created in the psychologist’s chair. Trauma can be the cause of psychiatric illness, and you have a psychiatric illness, it has a psychological cause, but it does not have a psychological cure.

  There are not two minds at work in the world, a psychiatric and a psychological. No, there is one infinitely complex mind, which I find I cannot ‘Print out’. I can see only the scars of these paper cuts. There is no simple solution to the questions posed in this dualistic/postmodern universe. This is not a failing in me – in us – but rather shows the limitations of the mind to understand, to understand itself.

  *

  One tablet, two tablets. Four tablets. Nine tablets. Today will be the day. Today will be the day when it all gets right. You can put it right. Swallow. The self. In a bottle.

  *

  One day my father died. It was unexpected; a leaden hand in a kid glove. He was there, then he was gone. His body lived long after his brain had been irretrievably corrupted. Did the doctors kill him with kindness? One moment we were told to return to Midhurst from the hospital in Chichester to get some sleep. We would not sleep that night. (Or perhaps we did?) By the time we had reached their home, it belonged only to my mother. We were told he had been given some morphine to relieve a discomfort he could not possibly have felt, and that was that. Smothered in an opiate chamber, unconscious that he had long been no longer for this world.

  So, my father died and my mother bought me a flat, in Jericho, in Oxford. Jericho is the Oxford idea of bohemia, the bohemian life. It is there that they make the Turkish coffee of their youths, plot rebellion. The Times says it is a fashionable district, where you can ‘see Mark Haddon’. I’ve never seen him here, but I know they are essentially right, that it is the sort of place that you would. Sometimes, in interviews, he says that he writes in a coffee shop, listening to the music of the eighties. You can, in Jericho.

  My flat is almost a modern ideal of the typical Oxford ‘set’, although some say it is like an hotel. It has a study and a bedroom. There is no place to eat in, so I eat out, in a trattoria up the road from me. Everything in my flat is a brilliant white – the blinds, the walls, the sheets on my bed. It is a minimalist existence. The past hardly gets a look in, although there is one wall covered in eighteenth-century books, my library. I have there every edition of Pope and Dryden and the books in between, which you can buy at auction for their true worth, although I kid myself that I am buying bargains. The walls have on them a selection of prints of my colleges, with my precious Ingamells engravings taking pride of place. I like their clean precision, their
regularity. All architectural prints speak to me from the confines of the ink on the page. There is something refreshingly neat about them, that they contain the perfect image of an uneven world. Oxford is famous for having a curved high street, which is the only imperfection I will allow the city. It is there too, on my walls, in pale grey and dull burnished yellow Ackermann prints of the sunsets of the Regency over Oxford.

  My flat is also contained, adequate for my needs, which are simple. There is a television, unwatched, on one wall. BBC News 24 on a constant loop, only incrementally changing, is the hum of my study. Here is the site of quiet purpose and occupation. At my desk I send out messages to the other side of the world, about things that happened when first the high street was irregularly curved, when it had oak-beamed shops and coffee shops with fronts that spoke of its early medieval origins.

  Once a week I will venture out of my flat or from the Bodleian Library to go snacks with Jim Johnson. Between us we have the intelligence to put the world wrong, and busy ourselves with fruitless but urgent enquiries into the facts of a forgotten world. Some of the most pointedly sharp insights into not much have taken place in the coffee shops in Oxford. Coffee, that cool rebellion against conformity, that radicalism of the bourgeoisie.

  *

  What’s the time? I think I’ll go and have a walk in the back gardens of St John’s. I need a break. This is hard work. I have been very distracted today. Why do I let this happen?

  I go down the stairwell and through the Proscholium into the early evening air. It is chill out, and the light is fading. There is Katherine Duncan-Jones going home for the night, having skewered Sir Brian Vickers on the point of her Mont Blanc pen. That is a case where two people see the same thing and see something completely different. It goes back years. One it seems cannot write without the other writing back. The mind in dialogue with the other. I wonder what each would do without the other. There is a symbiosis in that relationship. Two of the world’s leading Shakespearean scholars, with two Shakespeares between them. Neither will ever be right, but neither is often wrong either. There she goes along Broad Street, back to Jericho, a drink, and Radio 4.

  I follow slowly after, which is hard as she is not so very fast these days. Not like when she and Andrew Wilson went snacks with Iris Murdoch and John Bayley in north Oxford. I wonder if anyone will remember my days in Oxford, as I don’t remember them, but index-like, as they may be thought to have been lived?

  *

  I reach the corner of Balliol and turn into Magdalen Street, past the Martyrs’ Memorial of the morning – darkened now, though restored to its Victorian splendour – and go into St John’s. Sir Howard Colvin wrote an entire book about the Canterbury Quadrangle – the ‘historian with modern views’ – what a mind! To be pleased with fifty square yards, and delighted in it. I look up at the gutters which he writes about, and wonder at the workmanship of the seventeenth century. I walk under the statue of Charles I in his glory and out to the back, the immense lawns at the heart of Oxford, hidden in the city, hidden from the townspeople with their keenly felt disrespect.

  The late afternoon. The trees are conspiratorial and the lights from the Laudian Library fall lightly on the grass. It smells crisp. I light a furtive cigarette, from my youth, and move into the shadows. A gardener is at work, or leaving it, his rake leaning against the crumbling stone walls.

  I must get back to the Library. I leave, passing unnoticed into the early evening.

  *

  I am on Broad Street. Suddenly it comes upon me. Those racing thoughts, and a music. Loud beyond belief and insistent, pressing in my small, cramped mind. The lights are brilliant. But they keep flashing and then going out. That music.

  *

  O. O. mag. num. mys. ter. i. um. through these. critical. editions. these. critical. editions. one. dark. one. dark. night. O. O. mag. num. critically. Bernard. Lintot. made. O. O. mag. a choice of. great. num. and. lasting. O. O. importance. O. O. great. and. lasting. importance. in darkness. and. secure. O. O. by the secret ladder. mag. num. in darkness. and concealment. O. O. mag. num. fired. with. love’s. urgent. longings. through. these. O. O. critical. urgent. longings. fired. with. love’s. O. O. urgent. critical. concealment. dark. night. O. O. critical. urgent. longings. mag. num. mys. ter. i. um.

  *

  I pass Matthew ap Gryffyd on the stairs in the Library. We do not have time to chat, although we have time for each other. Always. We pass in the early evening, each busy with our work. The Library is not a place for friendship.

  I think about Matt ap Gryffyd. One of my closest friends. A keen, intelligent, questioning, fresh, alert mind. Always open to the new in a constructive way. The only other disabled person I know in the University. He has an eye condition, a genetic condition which only he and his mother have in the UK. Doctors like him, they like his eyes. They like his genes. I like him, down to his genes. And I like his eyes too. Kind, intelligent eyes. Eyes of perfect friendship and acceptance.

  This is not getting it done.

  *

  Five o’clock. I said I’d submit it by the end of the day, today. I wonder if they mean by the end of today? They’ll probably leave the offices at London Bridge Street at six, but I could get this to them before the Library closes tonight. The wonder of the web! Malone’s letters would have taken almost a day to reach London from Oxford. But for me: click.

  I see the Keeper of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian, behind his neat, quiet, orderly desk in Duke Humfrey’s Library. He seems to know all the things deposited in his care, as they have been in the care of the Bodleian for centuries. He has an immense, humanistic knowledge and understanding. He is answering the phone now. Another academic calling in the night from Australia with an urgent question about the letters of Anne Finch. He knows the answer, but he is feigning ignorance. He is somehow, among all his papers, among all the papers in the Library, bored today. He will play with this person, but kindly and courteously, to pass the late hours of the afternoon, until he can go off, away from his possessions, not his possessions, into the night.

  I must crack on.

  … yet these efforts would have been meaningless, in the long run …

  *

  My personal and intellectual history begins that day, 8 September 1987. Before that little. A toy here. A face there. The son of the Dock Road in Liverpool? He was suppressed. I’m no Romantic, finding in innocence the truths of ages. Few memories as I say. But I miss nothing. You can’t remember what you’ve forgotten. Paris. Prague. London. Those cities are my hills, my mountains.

  *

  After twenty-five years of painful ignorance of the world around me, although living in it, and living in it well, things came to a crisis. I was planning to be on the Continent for a conference, but found myself planning how to return from that conference when everything fell apart. Repatriation is not the best plan to have for an international excursion.

  I was confused. I spoke to my friend Annie Repton on a telephone line urgent with need. What should I do? People don’t often tell me what to do, I decide for myself. But under the circumstances Annie told me what I wanted and did not want to hear, that I should go home to Sussex, to my mother.

  In the Times Literary Supplement that week, there had been a review of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor’s apologia. His justification for his actions, not to his God or even to himself, but in the court of common opinion. He was found wanting. The review told of a case in which a man had spoken to the two laws – that of the Church and that of the state – and had died by his own hand. How I knew how he had come to that end in such unaccommodating circumstances.

  I wanted to die, but although all reason told me I must, that I must rejoin the suicide club and this time pay my dues, friendship spoke out to me and offered me the reason of love and respect.

  I decided then to go to the police, but not yet. To involve the state in my actions, which had gone undetected in the world for too long. Years earlier I had had a similar vio
lent response to the news that Fogarty had had a stroke. From my long experience of my own father’s stroke and its debilitating and humiliating effects – which my father had faced with courage and determination – I knew that now was the time to strike. I went to the Church and made my complaint against him. Was I believed? I do not know. I did not care to be understood simply, I cared to be believed.

  One morning, before my father’s nurse arrived at my parents’ house in Sussex, I went downstairs and waited. I waited for my mother to come down. At six o’clock on that spring morning, I sat her and my father down and told them something of what had happened. My mother and father had their own religious convictions, but this shook them to their foundations. In their different ways they were both deeply religious. My father retained his faith, but at that moment my mother lost hers. I offered her instead a theology of the individual child victim, a sorrow which could not encompass the passion of the Catholic Church. Only when my father died would my mother return to the Church, once, for his sake. At that moment my own words carried their own metaphysical meaning, the meaning of a child wronged, which overwhelmed the truths of institutionalized religion.

  Fogarty declined over the following weeks, sometimes rapidly. The child protection officer in the diocese kept me informed, as my family and the Church waited for me to pounce, to report Fogarty’s crimes to authority beyond their reasoning. Would I go to the police, and speak out against this man who had done me such harm? He lost his movement, then he lost his voice. Silenced, I could not accuse a dumb man before the courts. Dying, I could only leave him to the judgement of a God in which he had robbed me of belief.