1990 - Brazzaville Beach

by William Boyd; Prefers to remain anonymous

  But in the end ‘fun’ is not enough. There is play and there is work. And I see now—or at least the docs are helping me to see—that the problem with me over the last few months is that I’ve been screened from my work. There’s been a sort of screen, like a gauze screen, between me and what I’m trying to achieve in my field. It stopped me from seeing clearly. I’m sorry to say, my darling, that you were that screen. You were the shadow between me and the light. That’s why I went with Jenny L., you see, I didn’t know it but I was trying to push you out of the way. Trying to break the screen. I didn’t know it was there at the time, of course. The docs are helping me see these things now. Helping me see why I acted in the way I did.

  Anyway, that is why we had to part, so that my way ahead was no longer obscured. I could see where I was meant to go, but not clearly, and that was what was frustrating me and making me ill. Clarity of vision is vital in my field. You can’t do mathematics in a mist. (What kind of landscape am I in with my misty fields? You know what I mean!)

  What I hope will happen here is that clarity will return—and it is returning, I am beginning to do good work again. When it comes back, the docs say that it will be different and that you won’t screen or obscure the way ahead anymore. Then we can be together. And after this treatment, the docs say they have this great drug which will keep my eyes bright and beady.

  Come and see me. I’m fine. I’m getting better. I’m at Hamilton Clare’s neuropsychiatric hospital in Wimbledon. Ring up my doc, Doc Phene, and he’ll tell you when to come.

  Con amore, John.

  The gates to Hamilton Clare reminded Hope at first of the approach to a municipal crematorium. But beyond the low, cream-coloured walls, with their neat borders of geraniums, were rolling lawns and grouped poplars which looked more like the campus of a teacher-training college, she thought, or a model secondary school.

  The buildings of the hospital had been constructed in the fifties from a pale grey brick and were uniformly and unattractively boxy, every window the same size. They could have been a barracks or civil service offices. Closer to, she saw that they were already looking shoddy, and the wet weather had marred their sides with darker swags and streaks of moisture, like camouflage on a battleship.

  Inside there were brighter colours and framed prints of sketchy London views on the walls, but the uniform right angles everywhere, and the low ceilings, kept the mood of the place fixed at institutional rectilinearity. Hope’s own spirits had been low on the journey up; Hamilton Clare sunk them still further. As she sat on a hard chair outside Dr Phene’s office, waiting, she began to wish—selfishly—that she hadn’t come.

  When Bogdan Lewkovitch had phoned he told her that John had not come into college for three days. He didn’t answer his phone and, when a member of the department had gone round to knock on his door, John had screamed obscenities at her.

  A doctor was summoned and the door broken down. John was found in a ‘very disturbed state’, dehydrated and starving. He had been taking amphetamines and had not slept or eaten for over seventy-two hours. The flat was in a very unkempt, not to say squalid, condition, Bogdan added diplomatically. John was taken to Charing Cross Hospital where he was put on a saline drip and slept for twenty-four hours.

  He recovered quickly and seemed completely normal. He apologized unreservedly to his colleagues for the distress he had caused. He then told everyone he was taking two weeks’ sick leave. Confidentially, he had confided to Bogdan that he was checking himself into a clinic to seek psychiatric help for his condition.

  Dr Richard Phene was a younger man than Hope had been expecting. For some reason she had been imagining slightly too long grey hair, a thin face, a bow tie and a blue suit with too wide pinstripes. How this image of John’s doctor had established itself in her mind she could not say.

  Phene’s hair was greying, but was neatly parted and short. She guessed him to be in his early forties, but his skin was as fresh as a boy’s, and scarcely lined. He spoke in an unbelievably quiet, formal voice, almost without moving his lips, that had her leaning forward in her chair in an effort to catch his words, breathing shallowly so that the faint noise of her inhalations wouldn’t drown him out.

  “Your husband,” he whispered, “is clearly manic depressive. But the great advantage, from our point of view, is that he recognizes this. That’s half the battle. He asked Dr Fitzpatrick—”

  “Who is Dr Fitzpatrick?”

  “His psychiatrist.” Phene looked at Hope’s blank face. “You didn’t know?” He took in her ignorance of this fact with a little cough and a brief examination of his spotless blotting pad. He began again.

  “John has been a patient of Dr Fitzpatrick for some weeks. He—John—asked Dr Fitzpatrick to have him admitted here for treatment. John had decided on his own course of treatment—which is enormously encouraging. Enormously.”

  “And what course of treatment would that be?”

  “A course of electro-convulsive therapy.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Phene was offended. He did not joke, Hope saw.

  She heard a rushing noise in her head, like a train. She started again. “I thought…I thought nobody had that nowadays.”

  Phene sat back and considered her observation seriously, as if he were leading a seminar on modern psychotherapy. “It’s less common, true. But it does have its adherents. I would have to say that it’s not part of the repertoire in contemporary clinical practice, but,” he gave her a tight pursed smile, “in special circumstances we feel it may be beneficial. Especially if the patient requests it.”

  “Even if the patient is manic depressive?”

  He smiled sorrowfully. “Mrs Clearwater. ‘Manic depressive’, I know, sounds grave. But mania takes many forms, mild and strong. Some of the most lucid and charming people I’ve met have been manic depressive…” He chuckled at some memory of a lucid and charming person.

  “But what if I object to the treatment?”

  “With great respect, I don’t really think you can. As it were.”

  Dr Phene paused at the door to John’s room.

  “I should say,” he began, in an even quieter voice, “that John, ah, underwent some therapy this morning. He may seem a little disorientated, vague…” He made a parting gesture with his clenched fingertips. “Some memory loss? But it wears off, in due course.”

  “How reassuring.”

  She saw him decide to tolerate her sarcasm. He showed her the door with a clean, flat palm. “Do go in, no need to knock. If…” He paused. “If you’d like to talk after, do come along.”

  He left her.

  Hope stared at the door for a few seconds, then knocked and heard John’s surprised ‘Come in’. She closed her eyes, opened them, put on a smile and turned the door-knob.

  He was sitting at a desk in a room that looked like the sort one would find in the plusher range of motel. Pale grey jute walls, orange curtains with a ‘modern’ design, smooth pine furniture. He jumped to his feet when he saw her, and to her huge relief he looked unchanged. He kissed her cheek, they hugged, and he pulled up a chair for her. They talked for a while, circuitously, about the progress he was making, and how—they were both sure about this—his admitting himself to Hamilton Clare had been the right thing to do. Absolutely.

  As they talked, Hope studied him more closely. She noticed that he looked a little pale, and that on his temples was a slight greasy shine. He seemed to be blinking at a somewhat faster rate than was normal.

  “What’s it like?” she said suddenly, interrupting him. “Is it sore?”

  John smiled with relief. “No. No, not at all.” He grinned, all at once he seemed more relaxed. “No whiff of burning flesh, either…It’s like—there’s a noise in your head, a kind of whooshing, shrilling sound, and you feel as if you’re being given a really good shake. You know, major vibration. I just have a couple of electrodes here.” He touched his temples. “They rub on a graphite salve.
You can have them all over the place, I think, if you want. But I just have them on my temples.”

  “Johnny, I just feel that—”

  “No, really. It’s helping. I know it sounds sort of inquisitorial. A torture, agony, all that. But it just gets everything…” He scooped the air with his hands. “Fizzed up. I feel so much better than I did.” He yawned. “Makes me a bit fuzzy though, for an hour or two.”

  “Well, you look good,” she said, striving for a chirpy bonhomie. “Have you had your hair cut? You look a bit thinner, somehow.”

  They talked on. After the ECT, John said, they wanted to give him Lithium, to keep him stable. He was looking forward to being on Lithium, he said, it was the fluctuating of moods that got him down. He wanted to talk only of himself, she realized, his illness, his prognosis.

  “I thought I might come down to Knap for a while,” he said. “Get my sea legs.”

  She thought: no. No you won’t. I don’t want you there. Then she felt ashamed.

  “Of course you must,” she said, a weakness overcoming her. She was thinking: I thought we were meant to be separated. I don’t want to—

  “The docs think that it’d be useful—”

  “Please don’t call them the ‘docs’, Johnny.”

  “Oh. OK.” He looked hurt. “Sorry. Dr Phene thinks I’ll need some peace and quiet.”

  “Of course.” She made an effort. “Great. Well there’s masses of peace and quiet at Knap. No shortage of that. Stroll by the lake, that sort of thing.”

  “Lake?”

  “The lake by the old manor…where you dug the trenches.”

  He pulled down the corners of his mouth as he thought.

  “A lake?” he said. “Are you sure? I don’t remember a lake.”

  ECT

  I enjoy the beach in bad weather too. The waves hammer in, hurling themselves at the sand, the pines and the palm trees sway and thrash. Falling coconuts hit the beaten ground beneath them with a noise like a wooden mallet on a paving stone. Soft and hard at the same time. I take my longest walks in such windy, rainy weather, three miles south to where the mangrove creeks begin, where the silt from the Cabule gives the green water a curious mauve tinge. Then I turn and walk home. Out at sea enormous electrical storms flicker and pulse, too far away for me to hear the thunder.

  The theory behind electro-convulsive therapy is that psychopathic behaviour is caused by aberrant brain patterns. By submitting the brain to electric shocks of 70 to 150 volts muscular contractions are provoked in the cortex which unsettle the psychopathic patterns and allow healthier ones to take their place. During the treatment the patient might spontaneously urinate, defecate or even ejaculate. Possible side-effects include panic, fear, memory loss, personality change and poor concentration.

  There is no satisfactory explanation of just how this ECT is meant to work. In medical parlance the treatment remains ‘empirical’.

  Ian and I sat in the back of the Land Rover along with seven of the boy-soldiers. We faced each other, wedged against the cab, furthest away from the open back with its juddering ochre square of receding landscape. Through the rear window of the cab I could see Amilcar at the wheel. I felt cramped and uncomfortable and very hot. We were driving on a dirt road and were thrown about as we bounced over ruts and pot-holes. I had no idea where we were going: we had driven back up the road in the direction of Grosso Arvore for a few miles, and had then turned off on to this track, which seemed to be leading us roughly north-east. Amilcar had a map spread out on his knee, but I could not make out any details through the dusty window.

  The boys in the rear with us did not speak a great deal to each other. Their expressions were solemn and serious, and their remarks to each other terse and to the point. Not all of them were armed; there were only five Kalashnikovs between the nine of them. One of the boys had a bandaged arm and they all looked tired. They reminded me of a photograph I had seen once, of a group of passengers rescued from a sunken liner or ditched aircraft, sodden, sitting huddled in blankets, exhausted, faces set and eyes lowered, showing nothing of the exhilaration of rescue, all chastened instead by whatever ordeal they had been through in the water. These boys conveyed the same sense of having undergone such a profound experience. Perhaps that was why they were behaving with such propriety towards us. I could hardly believe we were hostages; we were treated more like guests.

  I glanced over at Ian, opposite me. He appeared upset and preoccupied, and he was chewing nervously on his lips. There were white flecks of dry saliva at the corner of his mouth. I caught his eye, and gave him a slight smile. He nodded briefly and then looked away.

  I shifted my position, bumping against the boy on my right. He was the one in shorts and big boots who had flagged us down. His thin brown thigh was pressed against mine. He had long delicate fingers, curled around the chipped and scratched gun-metal of his Kalashnikov’s barrel. He gave a faint smile of apology and told the boy next to him to move down. The row shuffled and rearranged itself. I gained an inch or two of extra space.

  I considered myself; analysed how I felt. My shoulder was still sore, but I was not frightened. I was tense, certainly not at ease, but these lanky boys with their rationed guns and the diminutive Dr Amilcar did not frighten me.

  I looked across at Ian again. He was leaning forward, elbows resting on his knees, head hanging, the very picture of a man in decline. Dr Amilcar had never once mentioned the word ‘hostage’ or ‘prisoner’ or ‘kidnap’. Somehow that refusal to classify us made me less worried. I had a strange confidence that we would remain unharmed.

  I thought of Mallabar, briefly. Of what had taken place in the forest; of what he had tried to do to me. In a way he was responsible for my current plight. If I hadn’t fled the camp. If Ian’s Land Rover hadn’t been delayed departing…The ‘if clauses wound backwards through my life towards the day of my birth, tracing my personal route through the forking paths of happenstance and whim, my selections, willed and unwilled, from the spread deck of infinite alternatives and choices that the world and its time offered. I could hardly blame Mallabar.

  We drove on for another two hours on a succession of small bush tracks. The land was dry and bleached and the road surface friable and powdery. Often the view through the rear was nothing but an opaque screen of khaki dust. I considered that, from the air, we would be visible for miles, trailing this plume—this nebulous spoor—behind us. I thought suddenly of Usman, Usman in his Mig in the pale blue upper reaches of the sky, looking down on this corner of Africa and seeing our wedge of red dust inching across the landscape…

  I smiled to myself as we bumped and bucked along—Amilcar was driving as fast as he could—and I felt my sweat run down my sides beneath my shirt. I hit the warm yielding shoulder of the boy on my right, and then the hard frame of the cab on my left, as we swayed and shook in unison. Ian Vail looked up and caught my eye. His features were drawn, like a man who has had no sleep, and his lips were so dry they were beginning to crack.

  “Are you all right, Ian?” I asked.

  He nodded. I could see his tongue working behind his cheeks, trying to coax some lubricating saliva from his parched glands.

  “We’ll be OK,” I said. “I’m sure.”

  Ian nodded again and looked down.

  When we stopped we had driven continuously for over four hours. The boys clambered stiffly out of the cab and went into a huddle around Amilcar. We were allowed out of the Land Rover. I rubbed my numb buttocks and stretched and stamped. I felt curiously serene, distanced from what was happening to me, as if I was taking each minute, each second and observing it dispassionately for whatever information it might yield.

  Ian, I could clearly see, was occupying a different pole of experience. For him each tiny division of time passing was pressing down on him as a further weight, a burdensome reminder of his plight, a growing freight of potential danger and hurt. He looked stooped and wordless, suddenly a smaller, frailer man, all his efforts devoted to maintain
ing the functioning of key components of his body—heart, lungs, bloodflow, musculature. All that was important to him now was that he should not collapse.

  Amilcar led us over to the shade of a small mango tree and invited us to sit down. He was courteous and firm. We sat cross-legged on the earth with two boys to guard us and watched him and the others climb aboard the Land Rover and set off once more.

  A few flies hummed around us. I looked up into the dark centre of the tree above my head but saw there was no fruit. I would have liked a mango, to have sunk my teeth into its juicy yellow flesh. But it was not the season. After the rains, if they ever came. My stomach rumbled and I felt my hunger shift inside me like something alive.

  I looked around at the countryside trying to divert my attention from my appetite. We had left the savannah and were now in a flat terrain of bush and thin forest. The track we had been driving along was old and partially overgrown. I could see no hills in the distance, only a milky haze. The green slopes of the Grosso Arvore escarpment were far away. It felt warmer and stickier here too. If we kept heading north or northeast, I reasoned, trying to recall the geography of the country, we would soon reach the myriad watercourses and tributaries of the Musave River, beyond whose far bank was the frontier. Around it were thick forests and acres of marsh and mangrove. A detailed map I had once seen had shown a tormented writhing of silted creeks and dead-end lagoons, oxbow lakes and seasonal mudflats…

  I tried to remember other information. There had been some oil exploration in the delta, I thought, before the civil war. And some policy of retraining the local fishermen to grow rice, to which end marshes had been drained, rivers diverted, irrigation systems installed. Whatever had been achieved would have been undone by the war, in any event. And further up the Musave, I seemed to recall, was a huge copper mine, run by a Belgian company.

  The Musave River Territories were the main source of UNAMO manpower and the thick jungles and mangrove-clotted waterways of the river were the original UNAMO heartland. I looked over at our two guards. They were dark-skinned, long-necked boys with small round heads. The people from the River Territories were ethnically of different stock from the rest of the country, and Christians too, I seemed to remember.