Bedlam

by Greg Hollingshead

  “You might also want to glance at page 136.”

  “What?” He was already on his way. “Let’s see. ‘Dr. Monro, the present celebrated and judicious physician to Bethlem Hospital, (to whom I gratefully acknowledge many and serious obligations)…’” By the look he gave me then, this almost pleased him. I had worried the barefaced fiction of it would annoy him. It certainly annoyed me, who heard in it a slave grovelling before a nincompoop. But what rankled for him was its appearance so late in the volume. “Let’s hope your reader lasts this far,” he said, with a mean little smile.

  “Let’s hope he does,” I replied, bland and world-weary as a seasoned author.

  He was reading down the page. “So you don’t think much of vomiting them—?”

  “No, I never found any good from it. Bleeding, on the other hand-”

  “In all your months here.”

  I just smiled.

  “Me neither,” he admitted, continuing to flip. “But considering we still do it—” he looked at me—“I wonder if we should announce it in print—” He returned to reading. “My God, blisters neither? What do you believe in?”

  “I only say no blisters of the head—”

  “A funny thing, but Dad never saw value in blistering of any kind. That never stopped him, of course. He always said, ‘If she works, Tom, do ‘er,’ but the damned thing is, he never told me how I’m supposed to know what works and what don’t. Between you and me, Haslam, when it came to treatment of lunatics, the old man was as much in the dark as we are.”

  “Dr. Monro, my book’s simply a series of accounts of my own unmediated encounters with the insane. Each portrayal of a lunatic character I follow up with a description of their brain after they died.”

  “Who did your autopsies? Crowther—? How’s his head, by the by? Kicked by a patient, was he, and fell down the stairs?”

  “The kick was a nudge. Crowther was drunk at breakfast. His head’s mended. I do my own autopsies; he does his.”

  “And your conclusion?”

  “While as yet there’s no definite correlation between lunatic symptoms and brain state at death, that don’t mean we won’t find one, once medicine better understands the brain. In the meantime, recovery from insanity sometimes occurs, but the affliction remains intractable to cure.”

  “But I say, Haslam, what use to us is a book that admits nothing we do does any good?”

  “Only to keep in view the truth. Some nowadays—and I fear our colleague Mr. Crowther’s among their number—are inclined to pretend madness is a disorder of ideas, or mind alone. How something by definition incorporeal can be diseased they don’t say.”

  “Crowther too? I’d have expected better from him. What are these people thinking of?”

  “Money.”

  “Why didn’t you say so? What are we waiting for? Ideas it is! Ha ha!” He’d turned vexedly back to my book and was fanning the pages. There was something else he wanted to ask. “Speaking of brains, Haslam, you didn’t by chance examine anybody I tried the electrical machine on—?”

  “Possibly. You never told me who they were.”

  “Well, there was Rophy and Crawley, and Blackburn—who killed Crawley, didn’t he? Last summer? Did you do Crawley?”

  “I couldn’t do Crawley. The skull was crushed.”

  “And there was that fellow who used to take off people’s hats with his toes and destroy his food bowl with his teeth, to sharpen them, he’d say, for his next meal—”

  “Brody. I did him-”

  “Any splinters? Ha! ha!”

  “No splinters, but a milky fluid on one of the posterior cerebrum lobes, like a boil, with a corresponding depression in the convolutions, which was so marked they looked like the intestines of a child. But nothing to suggest an electrical current.”

  “No charring? No burns?”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “Because he was an extreme one. I used to give him ten minutes at fourteen cells, and he didn’t like it at all. Four keepers we needed to buckle the straps on him. And when they took them off he was more annoyed than ever.”

  “So far, Dr. Monro, I assure you I’ve seen nothing to indicate effects traceable to an electrical current.”

  “That’s good. So no harm’s been done. But I guess you know I’ve given up on it. Another Continental gimmick, if you ask me. Bloody Italians. Nobody here seemed to like it, and the staff was never keen. But did I tell you last month the committee approved my application for a shower-bath?”

  “Yes, I attended that meeting expressly to support it.” And initiated and wrote the application.

  “Now, that will be a good thing.”

  “A very good thing.”

  “Improvements, eh, Haslam? Always looking for ways to improve the place, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “My shower-bath, this ‘mouth-key’ I hear you’re at work on—no, don’t tell me about it now, show me when it’s ready—this little book of yours. We’re pioneers, you and me, and Crowther—”

  “Especially Crowther.”

  He looked at me close a moment and then laughed. “Who can say,” he continued, wiping his eyes, “that one day the mad won’t recover faster by the help of medicine than without it. Ain’t this what all this ‘observing’ and scribbling comes down to? Breaking ground, aren’t you, Haslam, just like a Monro? One day you’ll call me to the Dead House and say, ‘Look here, Monro, d’you see this inflammation on this lobe here? It always accompanies a general paralysis. I wonder what that tells us.’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, Haslam, why don’t we spread a little salve along there, a smear of clove perhaps, or maybe powders’ll do the trick,’ and the next thing we know another fellow’s up to an honest day’s work. Isn’t this the message about us your little book here’s intended to send out into the world?”

  “Something like that,” I said, as confused as he was if he thought we’d soon be dissecting living brains. “Though your version,” I added, “perhaps has more life and colour in it.”

  He beamed at this. “Why, that’s because I’m a painter. I work with colour all the time!”

  My chance. “Matthews—” I said.

  “What?”

  “James Tilly Matthews—”

  “He’s in your book? He ain’t dead yet, is he?”

  “Alavoine tells me you’ve ordered him to the incurable wing.”

  “That’s right. Hasn’t it been a year?”

  “He’s not dangerous.”

  “Lord Liverpool thinks so.”

  “So it is politics.”

  “Smells like it to me, but Jesus Christ, the bugger’s a lunatic.”

  “Did Liverpool put him in?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “What’s his crime?”

  “Another republican, I suppose. You’ll have to ask his Lordship if you want details.”

  “How long do we keep him?”

  “Long enough, I should think, so you can examine the boils on his convolutions.”

  “He was doing very well until he heard where he’s going.”

  “That’s because he’s lucid enough to know what it means. Did you ever notice a funny thing: they’re all insane, but only the idiots are fools? Which isn’t to say everybody except the melancholics don’t live in hope they’ve no right to, even as they object to any sort of change. Listen. If Matthews’ path of resistance is to sink and perish, it’ll be the sooner Camberwell’s relieved of the expense of him and the sooner his brain repays what he owes society for the useless bastard it’s made of him.”

  “His wife-”

  “Ah, yes. A pretty thing, and then she opens her mouth. What about her?”

  “She wants to visit.”

  “We settled that.”

  “Yes, but too long a solitary confinement in a dreary place can itself-”

  “Where else are we supposed to confine ’em? He is a madman by your definition, ain’t he? You’re not saying he’s not mad�
��?”

  Can there be anything more infuriating than a weak and doltish authority when it springs an inflexible No? “I’m only saying, Dr. Monro, in this instance, periodic visits from his wife might—”

  “Damn might. Let sleeping dogs lie.”

  “This one’s not asleep.”

  “Neither lately have we had the bitch yapping in our faces. The one thing we’re in a position to offer here, Haslam, the one thing that’s been any proven use at all, is quiet. Not silence—I’m not deaf. I mean removal from the unremitting din they’ve made of their lives. You let even a little of the old noise pursue them in here and nine times in ten the only worthwhile thing we have to offer flies straight out the window. She’s old enough to know a barred door when she comes to one. For God’s sake, she married a lunatic. What does she expect?”

  “Humanity.”

  “What?”

  “She expects us to treat her husband and herself with humanity.”

  “Which is exactly what we do, as you say so well in your little book here, and there’s an end on it!” Saying this, he pressed his watch, which sounding four o’clock amazed him. He threw the book across the desk at me and swung his boots to the floor. “Haslam, be a capital fellow and sign this squib of yours to me, as the physician of the place you do your precious ‘observing’ in. And this time don’t spare those sentiments of glitterary admiration you’re so dab a hand at—but quickly, like a good man? I needed to be out of here an hour ago—”

  EXALTATION

  The next morning, I invited the steward Peter Alavoine, my Bethlem eyes and ears, to my office to give me word of Matthews. It was raving.

  “He tells me,” Alavoine said, speaking not in the register of aggrievement that his queer unplaceable dialect was perfectly suited to convey but with a quality in it of enjoyment that surprised me so much I glanced up. It was the Alavoine I knew, a grizzled stick in tiered hat and filthy red jacket but at this moment with a tamped smile about the sunk cheeks. “I must now address him,” he told me, “as James, Absolute Sole and Supreme Sacred Omni Imperias Grand Arch Emperor of the Universe.”

  The delusions of lunatics, however fantastical or comic, did not normally win our steward’s indulgence. There was something in this one he relished. I am tempted to say already loved. It’s not every lunatic he makes sure is properly dressed when nobody’s paid him to do it—or can prove he’s paid him.

  “Does he approve his new quarters?” I asked.

  “No, he does not.” As he said this, a gleam in those gummy eyes lent the degenerate old face the look of a schoolboy’s. A toothless hoary schoolboy’s. “He considers them insulting even to the most unassuming of Absolute Rulers.”

  “Does he like the wood chair I found him, with the arms? Does he like the arms?”

  “His Omni Imperias Throne, you mean? I think he does. He sits in it doing ledgers of rewards he intends for the execution of would-be usurpers of his power: £300,000 for the death of the King of Portugal, a million for the Emperor of Persia—”

  “And of England?”

  “The Infamous Usurping Murderer George Guelph (as he calls him) he includes in a special package with his Majesty’s family and government—”

  “I thought he loved the King. I thought he was an unconfessed republican driven mad because he loves the King. Or claims he does.”

  “Not today. Today the King’s his mortal rival. Also included in the package for execution are the Lord Mayor of London and Council; all police officers and secretaries of state; you, me, Alf Bulteel (whom he particularly condemns for obstructing lawful intercourse in families), and all other employees of this place; everybody responsible for putting him in here; the directors of the Bank of England; all courtiers, etc. For everybody, four million pounds. Though he regrets the number who must die, he says it’s not half those murdered annually by event-working gangs. Today he revealed the gangs themselves prefer to speak of working feats of arms, since their main assaults are against individuals who claim heraldic bearings.”

  “In here they must work with lowered sights. Tell him I’ll drop by when I can.” Saying this, I bowed my head to the letter I was writing to Lord Liverpool, but I was thinking of Matthews, for this was painful news. Lunatic or not, he knew what the incurable wing meant and knew as well as I did he didn’t belong there. We should not have added to his suffering by putting him through that, even if it was only until I could return him to his wife.

  Hearing a cough, I glanced up. Alavoine was still before me, extending a fist.

  “Something, sir—” the fist opening to deposit on my palm something crumbly and reddish—“you might be interested to see.”

  I looked at it. “Pieces of brick, Peter? No. Not interested—”

  “With your permission, sir—”

  In my thirty months at Bethlem, one member of staff I had learned to listen to (aside from our clerk, Mr. Poynder, whose strengths were policy and precedent, and so rather different) was Peter Alavoine. I said he was my eyes and ears. He was also my nose, tongue, and whiskers: his cat to my old woman. When work kept me shut up in my office or the Dead House, who patrolled my world but Alavoine. Yet this feline had jackdaw blood in him, for he was ever spiriting things away. An inveterate thief. That was the hitch. I was not one of those who discover too late that what they’d thought was an employee’s love was embezzlement. I knew from the start Alavoine was crooked as walnut meat. His corruption was a cancer on a body already sick enough, and if I could have rid Bethlem of him I would have. But I couldn’t. Officially he answered not to me but to Monro, who though he rarely saw him wouldn’t hear a word spoke against anyone good enough to have worked for his father.

  After I finished my letter to Liverpool, I followed Alavoine to the basement, where some of the incontinents—what we called our dirty or straw patients—had lately been demoted, for lack of space. In one of the cells he indicated a gap in the ceiling arch. The brick could have struck and even killed the patient, who seemed frail. Mercifully she was locked by the arm to the wall, her only comment, “How can I catch larks when the sky’s falling?”

  “You can’t,” I told her.

  The brick landed in the centre of her cell where it broke in a dozen pieces, being like all the bricks of this place, of inferior and unseasoned composition. Alavoine’s point to me was not the badness of the brick or the uselessness of the mortarwork, nor was it the danger to the patient, but the larger consideration that no one who lived and worked in the building was safe.

  Walking ahead with a lanthorn, he led me past more straw-patient cells into an entire other world, the last you’d expect to find down here: the section of our basement we lease to the mighty East India Company, a treasure-trove of pallets and shelves stacked with sacks and baskets emitting every fragrance of spice, and with crates of pepper, tobacco, tea, fruit—all the way to where the shelves ended and the floor fell away to clammier air and different darkness.

  “What’s this?” I said. “Where are we?”

  “Under the east wing.”

  “But this space—?”

  “Fresh dug.”

  Fresh but with a sour reek of rotten metal from the ancient city dump Bethlem was built on. My first, shameful thought: How many straw patients we could fit down here! To Alavoine I said, “Who did it? Matthews’ magnetic villains, to set up their Air Loom for more precise beaming of mayhem into patients’ skulls?”

  “No,” he replied, not amused by raillery at Matthews’ expense. “By diggers hired by the East India governors.” And I followed him down a springing ramp of boards to witness how, out of greed for more space, they’d widened doorways, compromised exterior walls, and undermined piers intended to uphold the structure rising three storeys above us. I was shown leaning uprights, sagging joists, and universal dry rot, until it seemed at any moment a thousand tons of bricks, timbers, and lunatics would come raining down on our heads. In my nervous glances upward and repeated moppings of perspiration from my brow, Al
avoine discovered dramatic affirmation of his point. I would characterize his expression while lighting my hurried steps out of there as severe tending to grim, yet with a certain satisfaction about the mouth that betokened consciousness of a hand well played.

  Before reaching daylight, I resolved to argue again before the Saturday subcommittee the imperative of calling in a surveyor to tell us how or if the walls could be underpinned. If my words failed to convince them, I’d lead a delegation down there and let their own cold sweat do it. But I knew this time would be different: Even as I made the argument, I would understand it was too late.

  Let me explain. When at age thirty-one I had first took up this post, the fever of renown burning in my veins told me Bethlem and I would rise together. Monro thought Bethlem was his; I knew it wasn’t. He would ride in once a month; I would live on the premises. He would see patients now and then; I would visit them daily. I was the one who would make of Bethlem a masterpiece that would say to the world, Here is how you order a hospital for lunatics.

  But then one of various series of experiments I undertook on arrival issued very naturally in a small book. Though nothing new, this little opus was the thing of mine that got cried up as the masterpiece—which, by catapulting me to fame as an author on madness, demoted mighty Bethlem to my materials only. At the same time, it promoted my thoughts from her low, intractable galleries to a struggle more hygienic and winnable: the selection and arrangement of words on a page. Except, the more I grew used to rarer elevations, the more I wondered how I had ever been pleased to imagine nothing more for myself than a life spent shoring so dreadful a place against its final ruin.

  Such pride I wish to God was never mine. But it was, and now, if I am to grasp how my fortunes came to take the nightmare course they did, my only hope is naked candour, or as much as I can muster.

  As for Matthews, though his condition drastically worsened once he learned of his transfer to the incurable wing, that was only the crowning blow after a year of no visits from his wife. For this he blamed me and Monro, as the medical officers, and our porter Bulteel. (Why on earth, if she was so keen on his rescue, didn’t she at least write him? Did she think the quicker he sank, the stronger her case? Or was her life too crisis-filled to afford the luxury of uncut losses? I didn’t think that was it. Something about this one told me we were still under siege—invisibly only because she couldn’t get over the wall.) As for me, like Alavoine but in my own way, Matthews affected me more each day. My fear now was he had come to us an addled republican in a state of nervous collapse and would leave a barking lunatic. A lunatic who when first he knew me was intrigued and now he knew me better was revolted.