Bedlam Burning

by Geoff Nicholson

  The thick, bitter taste lingered in my mouth as I handed the cup of coffee back to Raymond. ‘Sorry, Dr Crowe,’ he said, and a great weight of subjugation fell on him, and he looked as though he might throw himself at Alicia’s feet.

  ‘Take your trolley with you on the way out, Raymond,’ she said.

  He went without another word, and I was left alone with Alicia.

  ‘God, I’m glad to see you,’ I said.

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, disappointed. She might have said she was glad to see me too. The last time we’d been in this place there’d been kissing and massage, a great feeling of intimacy and possibility, but Alicia’s manner told me there’d be none of that today. She was in professional mode, and although she said she was pleased I’d arrived safely, it didn’t seem she was pleased in quite the way I wanted her to be. I also had a sense that she was looking me over and finding my crumpled, rain and mud-splattered appearance a bit of a let down. I tried telling her about my arrival, the gate, the porters, the padded cell, the loss of my luggage, but she wasn’t at all concerned.

  ‘Teething problems,’ she said dismissively.

  ‘I also lost the books I was planning to use as part of my teaching.’

  She was even less interested. ‘You’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Actually, you’ll be addressing the patients in about five minutes’ time in the lecture theatre, telling them who you are, why you’re here, what you’re going to be doing with them and so on.’

  ‘I don’t know if I’m quite ready for that.’

  ‘Don’t worry. They’re not monsters. And to make things easier, Dr Kincaid has written an opening address for you. All you have to do is read it out.’

  She gave me a dozen densely typed sheets of paper.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better if I told them in my own words?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  She probably had a point, since I had no idea what I was going to be doing with them.

  ‘You might decide to take a couple of minutes to familiarise yourself with the lecture before you read it out,’ she said. ‘Or you might decide otherwise.’

  I must have looked discouraged, and Alicia responded by rubbing her hand against my unshaven left cheek. It was a welcome gesture, although I suspected my stubble might only confirm the impression that I wasn’t quite spruce enough for the forthcoming event. Then she saw the empty champagne bottle lying on the floor and said, perhaps disapprovingly, although I liked to think a little wistfully too, ‘I’d rather hoped we might share that.’

  I’d hoped that too, but if she’d really wanted to share it with me then she should have said so on her card, and she might also have been there to welcome me. I tried not to show my irritation. After all, I wanted her to like me.

  ‘There’ll be time for other bottles of champagne,’ I said.

  Her frown suggested she wasn’t so sure about that.

  ‘Any chance of a coffee that Raymond hasn’t adulterated?’

  ‘You want too much,’ she said.

  I didn’t think that was true, but Alicia wasn’t prepared to give me anything else.

  ‘Come on, you can cast your eye over Dr Kincaid’s introduction as we walk to the lecture theatre.’

  I wondered if I should protest that I needed a wash and a shave, but that all sounded too fussy. Grubby and sleep-creased as I was, I followed Alicia.

  Walking and reading simultaneously is never easy, and I couldn’t make much sense of the words on the pages. But I wasn’t too worried since I suspected this first appearance of mine wouldn’t be so much about what I said as about the way I said it, and about the way I presented myself. I would need to appear confident, competent, writerly, like someone who knew what he was doing. This would undoubtedly have been easier to pull off in clothes that weren’t streaked with rain and mud, and that I hadn’t slept in, but I told myself these things might be used to my advantage, part of an image as an unworldly, rumpled artist. I was making the best of a bad job.

  Minutes later I was in a room with the inmates of the Kincaid Clinic. The term ‘lecture theatre’ seemed a little grandiose given the smallness and meanness of the room. It was no more than thirty feet square. One wall had windows that looked out on sturdy, ragged bushes, the three other walls were bare and had been emulsioned white, though not recently. I was standing behind an unsteady lectern, facing what I couldn’t stop myself thinking of as an audience.

  There were ten of them, ten patients; I had expected a greater number than that. There were six men and four women, a cross-section, though not a strictly representative one, in a variety of sizes, shapes and ages. They were all white-skinned except for two: a very young, agitated black woman, not much more than a girl really, who was bouncing up and down in her seat; and an older Indian woman sitting placidly beside her, a model of quiet and calm by comparison. These, I would later find out, were Carla and Sita.

  I looked the group over, trying to make unthreatening eye contact, trying to make some sort of connection, although I didn’t want to stare, didn’t want to appear to be too curious about them. They, however, had no such inhibitions. They gawped at me with great interest and some anticipation, as though I was a cabaret act, there to entertain them, although nobody had told them quite what my act was. So they watched me expectantly, as if they thought I might be about to begin juggling or tap-dancing or singing unaccompanied blues ballads. I suspected I was going to disappoint them.

  Alicia made introductions. ‘This is Gregory Collins, a much-praised author, who’ll be working with us from now on. Gregory, I’d like you to meet Anders, Byron, Charles Manning, Raymond, Carla, Cook, Maureen, Sita, Charity and Max. Wake up, Max.’

  Max was a plump, sagging, baggy-faced man who had nodded off in the back row. He seemed to be not so much asleep as in a drunken stupor, though naturally I assumed the patients didn’t have access to drink. He woke up at the mention of his name and turned unfocused eyes in my direction. He acknowledged me blearily, then looked away, and I was sure it would be no time at all before he was unconscious again.

  There’s nothing like someone reeling off a list of names to make my mind go completely blank, but I did my best to remember them all. I could attach names to two faces. Raymond, the deliverer of the suspect coffee, was sitting in the front row, just a few feet away from me, gazing up in needlessly respectful awe, and next to him, somewhat less awed, was Charity, the woman I’d briefly wrestled with on my first visit. She was clothed this time, in a hippie peasant smock, although given that her head, and now that I looked more closely, even her eyebrows, were shaved, there was still something very bare and exposed about her.

  There were a couple of other shaved heads among the patients. Whether it was a style thing or some sort of medical precaution I didn’t know, but even the sanest person can look pretty strange when their scalp and the contours of the skull are revealed. One such scalp belonged to the man introduced as Anders. He was perhaps a little old to be the classic skinhead but even without the exposed skull he would still have been terrifying. He looked menacing, like very bad news. He was vast and pink and his face was puckered up like a fleshy gargoyle. His demeanour seemed to say he’d kill me soon as look at me, and I did my very best not to stare at him, but I must have looked at him just a moment too long, since he curled his bottom lip outwards and downwards at me, and I could see that tattooed on the soft inner flesh were the words, ‘F*ck you’. The asterisk was strangely touching.

  The other shaved head belonged to a far less threatening character, a floppy, long-limbed man whose bare skull was topped with a little silver helmet moulded out of tin foil. He looked absurd, like a space cadet in a budgetless science fiction movie. This was Cook.

  Next to him sat a distinguished-looking older man with silky silver hair, and a crested blazer: Charles Manning. I never learned why people usually called him by both his names, but it suited his fatherly, patrician air. He gave the impression of a country solicitor on holiday,
although the effect was sabotaged by the fact that he was bare-chested under the blazer. A ragged crop of somewhat less silky body hair pushed out between his lapels.

  He said to me in clear, respectful, friendly tones, ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

  I didn’t, although I wondered if I was supposed to, whether it was against some rule of the clinic, but before I could say anything, Anders shouted out, ‘He doesn’t care if you spontaneously fuckin’ combust.’

  I laughed nervously, as indeed did Charles Manning, and then, since I obviously wasn’t going to forbid it, he produced a cigarette, a cocktail Sobranie in pastel yellow paper. He took a lighter from his blazer pocket, handled it skilfully, as a practitioner of close-up magic might, lit the cigarette and inhaled blissfully.

  The cigarette smoke drifted across to Maureen, a wide-eyed, bovine, chunkily built, middle-aged woman who was wearing full football kit, claret and blue: West Ham, I was fairly sure. She sat erect in her chair, arms folded across her chest as though posing for a team photograph, but as the smoke wafted into her nostrils she made a great show of coughing and choking.

  The final member of the group was a moody, brooding, dandyish young blade, with flowing locks, wearing a sort of frock coat and knee-length boots. He looked like anybody’s, or at least any second-rate movie director’s, idea of the tortured poetic genius. He was called Byron; not his real name, I assumed.

  As a group they were alarming though not, apart from Anders, especially frightening. I certainly didn’t think they were the worst audience a lecturer or writer could have. It would have been easy to think of them as a freak show, but I was already smart enough to realise that once I got to know them they wouldn’t appear freakish at all, and I hoped therefore they’d also cease to be alarming, cease to be a collection of quirks and symptoms. Chiefly what I got from them on that first day was an overwhelming sense of need. I thought they were looking at me beseechingly, wanting something from me, and I wasn’t unwilling to give it, though precisely what it was and whether I had it was a different matter.

  Other eyes were on me too. Alicia had taken up a place at the very back of the room, and the two porters who’d heavied me over the night before had positioned themselves on either side of the door, like bouncers. If they felt embarrassed or repentant at seeing me again they were skilled at not showing it. Kincaid was not in attendance, but I suppose that was understandable since he knew exactly what I was going to say. I felt exposed and nervous, and I was glad I had the lectern to hide behind, but I think I managed to give a reasonable impression of a man in control. I smiled winningly but formally towards the faces in front of me, I tried to exude charm and I began to read the text Kincaid had prepared for me.

  ‘Good morning all. My name is Gregory Collins and I’m a writer. You don’t know me yet, but over the course of your treatment you will come to know me very well indeed. You will come to trust me, to confide in me, to see that we’re on the same side, a vital member of the team that’s here to help you get better. This will make you happy.’

  I thought this was laying it on a bit thick. Given human nature it seemed absolutely inevitable that some of the people I was facing would not come to trust or confide in me at all. As for making them happy, well, that simply seemed to be aiming far too high. But I read on, ‘It is my intention to help you plunge headlong into the wonderful world of language. I shall be asking you to do some writing for me, to express yourself in words on paper. You know, language is a great bulkhead against madness. At first you will find this process difficult and perhaps you will be reluctant, resistant, resentful, but eventually you will start to write, and you will enjoy it and this will become an essential part of the healing process. It will not be easy. It will not be pain-free. As you express yourself and set down your innermost thoughts and feelings you will experience swirling emotions …’

  I glanced up at the patients and thought how unwise it might be to stir up any swirling emotions in them.

  ‘But these emotions will pass,’ I read, my voice faltering a little now. ‘Writing will become your friend. You will write your way back to sanity. And this will make you happy.’

  I was clearly not making anyone very happy at that moment. Ten glum, confused patients looked hopelessly at me. I was no longer in touch with the meaning of the words I was reading but I could hear my voice continuing. ‘We will tarry awhile in the groves of prose and poetry,’ I said. ‘Perhaps some of you will find your inner Homer, your inner Joyce …’

  I felt terrible. I felt I was insulting the patients’ intelligence. There were still another eight or nine pages of this bumf to get through. I leaned over the lectern, the way I’d seen some of the more engaging Cambridge lecturers do, and I made eye contact with the bare-chested old chap in the blazer.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Do I remember right, your name’s Charles Manning?’

  ‘That’s very good,’ he said.

  ‘Have you got a light, Charles?’

  I knew that he had, and he stood up and passed me his cigarette lighter. He also offered me his pack of cigarettes but I didn’t accept. I flipped the head of the lighter, flicked a sharp, concentrated blue flame into life and lowered a corner of Kincaid’s pages into it. A band of fire trickled up them, growing, flapping, getting far too hot to handle. When I couldn’t hold them any more I tossed them away, dropping them over the edge of the lectern. I looked at my audience and I smiled, as I hoped, wickedly. I thought I had performed a winning bit of theatre, demonstrated that I was going to depart from the prepared script, talk to them as a real person, but in the event I wasn’t able to talk to them at all.

  The two porters leapt into action, steamed up to the front of the room and started jack-booting the burning paper. They were eager but obviously a little slow, since by the time they got there enough smoke had risen to the ceiling to set off the smoke detectors and the fire alarm. All hell broke loose. The noise from the alarm was of an astonishing, ear-damaging loudness. It scared the wits out of me and it had a profound effect on the patients. They began to express themselves, not through the cool medium of writing, but rather by screaming, laughing, clapping, hooting, and in Charity’s case by stripping naked and dancing. One or two appeared to be genuinely upset and frightened by the noise of the alarm and by the violent behaviour of the porters, but for the rest there was something exuberant and joyous in their reactions. They were showing off, playing to the gallery.

  At the back of the room was one small locus of calm: Alicia Crowe. She was watching the mayhem as though from a million miles away. She hadn’t reacted, hadn’t tried to take control of the situation. Now she stood there running a weary hand through her hair, as if she’d seen it all before, and wasn’t bored by it exactly, just very tired. Presumably she knew what was coming next.

  Dr Kincaid bounced into the room, an ageing but sprightly and dignified super-hero, there at the first hint of trouble. It worked. The moment he entered, even before it seemed possible that all the patients could have seen him, they became utterly calm, or perhaps becalmed. The porters stopped stamping and, coincidentally or not, the fire alarm fell silent.

  ‘Teething problems, Mr Collins?’ Kincaid asked.

  I wasn’t sure whether to pretend the lecture notes had accidentally caught fire (not an easy pretence to sustain since there were witnesses) or whether to admit I’d done it deliberately as an extreme act of literary criticism, as a roundabout way of protesting about the shoddy treatment I’d received on my arrival. In the event I said nothing at all. I nodded and shrugged simultaneously, the two gestures cancelling each other out, and Kincaid didn’t bother to ask me what I meant. He looked at the fragments of blackened paper that were now scattered around a wide area of the floor like satanic confetti, and said, ‘You will want to discuss this at length later.’

  I wasn’t at all sure that I would. Kincaid breathed deeply and pulled back his shoulders, creating the effect of having been suddenly inflated, and in a calm, powerful voice he addressed
the patients.

  ‘I must confess that I’m really rather angry,’ he said in a voice of utter equanimity. ‘You will go away now. You will write a piece of creative writing for me, and for Mr Collins. The title of this piece of creative writing will be,’ – he had to think, but only for a second; here was a man used to making instant, irrevocable decisions – ‘the title will be The Moon and Sixpence. When you’ve finished your work, Mr Collins will evaluate it. Then we can proceed.’

  The patients slunk away, broody and resentful, and why wouldn’t they be? Their first writing assignment had been turned into a form of punishment, and it was all my fault. And I suppose I was expecting to receive some form of punishment too. I had, after all, set fire to the boss’s lecture notes; not nearly as bad as punching the boss, but still, even in such immediate retrospect, not a very mature opening gambit. Already I couldn’t for the life of me imagine why I’d done it. Was it to show how wild and subversive I was? That sounded pathetic. I knew I deserved a good bollocking, and in a way would probably have welcomed it.

  There was another worry: Alicia. I felt I’d let her down. If she’d been cool to me before, she had every reason to be glacial now. I’d been her choice, and I’d been an instant failure. She had left the lecture room along with the patients and the porters, so that I was left alone with Kincaid. Now would have been as good a time as any for him to deliver a dressing-down, but he only looked at the scrub of burned paper on the floor and said, ‘Fortunately it wasn’t the only copy.’

  8

  I went back to my hut. I pulled the ramshackle old chair up to the equally ramshackle old desk, and sat there in silence, facing the redundant typewriter. I had nothing to do at the desk; nothing to write, nothing to read, and I could see this was going to be a problem. I suppose I’m what most people think of as an avid, not to say obsessive, reader. I always have been. I met a few people at university who read more than I did, but not many. If I’m not actively engaged with half a dozen books at any one time I feel guilty and bereft. A train journey without a book to read is absolute torture, and I don’t understand how people can just sit there and stare into space or listen to their Walkman, not that there was any such thing as a Walkman in the days when I was at the Kincaid Clinic.