Bedlam Burning

by Geoff Nicholson

  Now, you could argue that this need to read is actually a need not to be left alone with my own thoughts, and although on most occasions I’d disagree with that, my thoughts were certainly hard to live with at that moment, so I set out on a desperate mission to find some reading material.

  I went to the main entrance of the clinic, to the waiting area, where I vaguely remembered seeing some newspapers. They were still there and I seized on them hopefully, only to be immediately disappointed. They had been cut to ribbons. Virtually no news item, no article, no piece of text remained intact. I wondered why the clinic even bothered to have the papers there.

  The nurse who had been so snotty to me the previous night was still on the front desk. She watched me struggle with the loose strips and flaps of newspaper, and although she was far too miserable to give herself the pleasure of laughing at me, I sensed she was enjoying watching me suffer.

  ‘I’m just looking for something to read,’ I said, and instantly regretted it. Why did I feel the need to explain myself to this woman?

  ‘Maybe you should try the library,’ she said.

  ‘There’s a library?’

  ‘Obviously. Upstairs. The east wing.’

  I hadn’t thought of the clinic as having wings, and I wasn’t sure that in reality it did, but she explained to me, slowly, at length, in terms even an idiot might understand, how to get to the library. I followed them and in due course I came to a door with the word ‘Library’ on it. I opened it and found myself in a room not much larger than an ordinary domestic living room. It was pleasant enough, had a bay window that gave a view of the grounds, and it had shelves from floor to ceiling that could have accommodated a good few thousand books. But they didn’t. These shelves held nothing at all. They were all completely, bleakly empty: just bare stretches of dusty wood, not a book in the place. I felt angry and insulted and bitterly amused. How pathetic, how terrible, and yet how very typical of what I’d so far discovered about the Kincaid Clinic.

  Restless and frustrated, I went for a walk around the outside of the main building. As I saw it from different angles it seemed a less and less impressive structure. The front was presentable enough, recently painted and in so-so repair, but that was only a façade, a mask presented to the outside world. Round the sides and back, everything was dilapidated. Chunks of rendering had fallen from the walls and had not been replaced. Drainpipes and guttering clung to the edges of the building, hanging on by their fingertips. Broken windows had been patched up with cardboard and duct tape, and parts of the woodwork resembled flaky pastry. I couldn’t help noticing how many locked doors and barred windows there were, but perhaps it was naive of me to expect anything else; this was an asylum, after all.

  I turned my back on the clinic and concentrated on exploring the grounds. I investigated the tennis court. There was no net, and clumps of grass and dandelion had split the hard red surface. Elsewhere the fountain with the cement mermaid was full of dead leaves and glass fragments. There were signs that someone was trying to cultivate a couple of borders in the flower garden, but the attempt looked half-hearted. Neglect was rampant, and there was a surprising amount of rubbish and litter about the place, a lot of beer cans and broken bottles, but they didn’t look as though they came from the clinic, rather that they’d been chucked over the wall from outside, perhaps by drunken locals, the kind who sprayed graffiti and yelled at me in the rain.

  In the far reaches of the grounds there were various out-buildings: a couple of garden sheds, a greenhouse without a single pane of glass intact, and in the furthest corner there was an old metal shelter, like a Nissen hut. It could have been something left over from the war; maybe the Kincaid Clinic had been used to billet army officers. This impression was reinforced by the words ‘Communication Room’ stencilled on to the outside wall.

  The front door of this shelter was wide open, and even though I was reluctant to stick my nose in where it wasn’t necessarily wanted I didn’t see that any harm could come from looking inside. The interior was gloomy, windowless, bare, but there was a long table set in the middle, with ten chunky, battered manual typewriters arranged on it, and a chair set at each typewriter. Numerous unopened packs of typing paper were also stacked on the table, and although there was no sign that any typing or communicating had gone on here lately, the arrangement suggested all that was about to change. How long would ten mental patients have to sit working at ten typewriters before they produced something worth reading? Not too long I hoped. If I couldn’t get my hands on a book or even a newspaper, I would have to rely on what the inmates produced.

  I walked back towards my hut and looked up at the clinic. My knowledge of the building’s layout was still understandably sketchy but I could work out a few parts of the building, the lecture room, the patients’ rooms, the offices. I wondered where Alicia’s office was, and as if on cue I looked up and saw her face at a first-floor corner window. She looked away before I could wave at her, so I decided to go up and see her.

  Her office door was open and I looked in as I approached. It was not at all as I’d pictured it. It was a poky, inhospitable room, full of tight angles and unusable alcoves, and it was every bit as bare as Kincaid’s office. These doctors were surprisingly self-denying. I tapped on the open door and startled her.

  ‘I’ve come to apologise,’ I said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I hope I didn’t embarrass you in the lecture room.’

  ‘Embarrassment is of very little medical value,’ she said coldly. ‘But apologies can be therapeutic.’

  ‘I was nervous.’

  ‘No doubt.’

  ‘I was still pissed off about the way I was treated last night.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps I’m not the one to apologise to.’

  ‘Either way, I’d like to try to make it up to you somehow. We could have a drink.’

  ‘You drank all the champagne.’

  ‘Not all the champagne in the world.’

  ‘In any case, you can see I’m working. I’m in the middle of a twenty-four-hour shift.’

  ‘Then maybe I could come back when it ends.’

  ‘When I’ve finished a twenty-four-hour shift I don’t want to do anything except go to bed.’

  ‘That’s an option too,’ I said.

  It was a cheap and easy shot and Alicia wasn’t amused.

  ‘This isn’t a holiday camp,’ she said. ‘There’s some serious and important business going on here.’

  She was trying to dampen my puppyish enthusiasm, and it worked. I did my best to be serious. ‘Well, in that case,’ I replied, ‘if we’re being businesslike there’s certainly some business I’d like to discuss.’

  The prospect of my being businesslike didn’t please her much either. ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. I really need some clothes. Thanks to your goons I don’t have any. In fact, I don’t have much of anything any more.’

  She was no more interested now than she had been earlier.

  ‘The need to apportion blame is understandable, but ultimately futile,’ she said.

  ‘What if I went into town, paid for the clothes myself and then you reimburse me?’

  This was something of a bluff. I only had a few pounds to my name. The train fare to Brighton had pretty much cleaned me out. I didn’t have an overdraft or a credit card. People didn’t in those days, at least not people like me.

  ‘So now you want to go into town?’ Alicia said.

  ‘Well, yes. But only to buy some clothes.’

  ‘You’ve been here less than a day, done less than ten minutes’ work, if you could call it work, and now you want to go into town. That’s not exactly dedicated of you, is it?’

  When she put it like that it did make me sound a bit of a skiver, not that, in the circumstances, remaining at the clinic all day would make me any more productive.

  ‘All right then, is there something I ought to be doing he
re?’ I asked. ‘Any work you want to give me?’

  ‘What could you possibly do?’

  I didn’t rise to that one. After all, I hadn’t exactly forced myself on the Kincaid Clinic. I was there because she wanted me to be.

  ‘And whether I go into town now or later I’ll still need a key,’ I said.

  ‘To what?’

  ‘To the front gate. One of those little electronic devices like you’ve got. Or do you want me to climb in and out every time?’

  This made her very unhappy indeed. She simmered with anger.

  ‘Then I could come and go as I please and not bother you,’ I added, trying to make the request sound sweet and reasonable, which I thought it was.

  ‘Come and go as you please,’ she repeated.

  ‘Only if it didn’t interfere with my work here,’ I said. ‘Naturally.’

  ‘You want to be able to come and go as you please, do you?’ she said, and just saying the words made her furious. ‘Look, you’ve already alienated most of the staff, you’ve created a fire, you’ve caused distress to the patients, you’ve demanded money and now you’re demanding a key. Don’t you think you should slow down a little?’

  ‘I feel as though I’ve ground to a complete halt,’ I said.

  ‘That may be no bad thing. Why don’t you go away and read a good book?’

  Much as I liked Alicia, and much as I wanted her to like me, and much as I didn’t want to prolong the conflict, I couldn’t stop myself saying, ‘And where would I find one? In the crappy old library?’

  ‘And now you’re criticising our library.’

  ‘What library? It has no books.’

  Alicia had had enough of me. ‘Then go away and write one,’ she snarled. ‘That’s what you do, isn’t it?’

  Was she mocking me? Was she finding me ridiculous as well as annoying? Why wasn’t my famous charm working?

  ‘All right. I’ll go away. We’ll talk later.’

  ‘Good. Fine,’ she said, but she didn’t sound good or fine, and I certainly didn’t feel good or fine.

  I went away. I was feeling as bad as I thought I could possibly feel. Talking to Alicia had only made things worse. There was something very different about her now. She was no longer the warm, serious, sexy woman who might make someone pack in his old life and start a new one based on impersonation and deceit. Or perhaps she never had been. Perhaps I’d misjudged her all along, and built some trite little fantasy woman in my head. I felt stupid. I felt like going back to her office, confessing everything and taking my leave. Surely they’d open the gates for me in those circumstances.

  But I didn’t go back to Alicia’s office. I wasn’t brave enough or desperate enough, not yet. I went in search of food. I consulted the nurse again and asked where I should go to get fed, and she said the canteen, obviously, and she was only mildly unpleasant as she told me how to get there.

  The door to the canteen was, perhaps inevitably, locked, but the door to the adjoining kitchen was open. There were no enticing smells issuing from within, but I could hear the rattle of pots and pans, so I looked inside. No doubt institutional kitchens are always bare, scrubbed places but this one seemed unusually stark: white tiles, gleaming stainless-steel surfaces, a bare stone floor. A man was toiling at one of the worktops. He was a patient, the floppy man with the shaved head and the tin-foil helmet, the one called Cook. What was in a name? I was a little surprised to find one of the patients doing the cooking. Was that part of the therapy? It seemed a little too homely and co-operative for what I understood of Kincaid’s regime, although I was aware I understood very little.

  ‘What’s cooking?’ I asked.

  Only a little resentfully, Cook replied, ‘The usual,’ and when I asked him what that meant he said, rather more resentfully, ‘Soup and stew.’

  ‘Great,’ I said. It sounded boring, but what else could I expect from hospital food? Boring was better than nothing. ‘What kind of soup?’

  ‘The usual,’ he said again.

  ‘And what kind of stew?’

  He brooded and fidgeted and I was expecting him to say ‘the usual’, but this time he shouted out, ‘I don’t know. All right? I don’t bloody know. Happy now? Satisfied, are you?’ and he flounced out of the kitchen.

  Even given the temperamental nature of cooks, sane or not, this seemed an over-reaction. Again I didn’t think I’d asked an unreasonable question and, more to the point, I didn’t see how he could be making a soup or a stew without knowing what kind. I looked into the pot, and I was certainly no wiser. The contents were intensely anonymous. There was a waste bin next to the worktop and I peered into that too. There were a dozen or so freshly opened tin cans nestling in a heap, and I picked one out. It was bare metal. The label had been removed, wasn’t to be found in the bin, and all the other cans were similarly naked and free of information.

  I went over to a store cupboard and opened the doors to discover hundreds of gleaming tin cans, every one of them stripped of its label. There was no way of telling what any of them contained. I’m tempted to say I stared at the cans in disbelief, but in fact I found it all too depressingly believable. Why in God’s name didn’t the tins have any labels on them? Had they been bought cheap as part of a defective job lot, flood damaged perhaps, the labels having been soaked off in a deluge at the warehouse? Or was it something more calculated than that, a deliberate ploy to make the patients’ lives simultaneously unpredictable yet constant? Then I heard Cook returning.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘I’m a bit emotionally labile at the moment.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. This must be very difficult for you.’

  ‘Wait till you taste it.’

  Half an hour later I did. The canteen was a cramped, low-ceilinged, L-shaped room. There was a hatchway through from the kitchen to the dining room, and one of the porters was serving out the nondescript soup. Each patient went to have his or her bowl filled, then sat down at the refectory table in the long arm of the L. In due course I got my own helping, and although I’d have much preferred to take my food away with me and hide in my hut, I thought it best to stay where I was, to show solidarity, or at least that I wasn’t a wimp.

  I was willing to sit down with the patients but all the chairs at their table were full, so I had to sit alone in the other branch of the L, on a little raised dais, at what amounted to a high table. I felt even more awkward lording it over them like that. I hoped Alicia or even Kincaid would turn up so I wouldn’t be completely alone, but they never arrived. Given the quality of the food it was hardly surprising.

  The soup wasn’t exactly bad, and it wasn’t exactly flavourless. I could taste salt and pepper, sweet and sour, meat and fish, fruit and vegetables, but they all seemed to be equal and opposite, reaching a kind of bland equilibrium, cancelling each other out. The stew, when it was served for the main course, tasted very much the same.

  I sat there and didn’t know where to look or what to do. Once again I wished I had something to read, not that the patients weren’t putting on a bit of a show. Carla, the flashily disturbed black girl, was spilling much of her food down her front, and some of it occasionally went over her shoulder. Anders, the violent skinhead, was attacking his food as though he was in some sort of eating contest, and Max, the man who looked drunk, had fallen face down in his plate.

  I tried not to stare, but the patients were certainly staring at me. I could feel multiple pairs of eyes on me and could think of nothing except bolting my food and getting out of there as quickly as I could. Doing some of the worst of the staring was the poetical young man, Byron. I thought of him as young, but in fact I suppose he was pretty much my own age. He had a face that managed to be simultaneously cherubic yet satanic. He had plump, wet lips, a fierce jaw and a headful of black curls. He looked both ravisher and ravished. I suppose he looked a little mad, bad and dangerous to know, though he didn’t have a club foot.

  When I eventually felt able to leave the canteen, Byron was leani
ng louchely beside the door and as I passed him he said, not precisely to me though I was sure for my benefit, ‘Wasn’t it Aristotle who asked, “Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholy?”’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think it was Aristotle. And didn’t he also say something about black bile?’

  Byron nodded with satisfaction, as though we’d shared a deep intimacy.

  These first occasional encounters with the patients were hardly very revealing, yet I assumed they were an important part of the process of becoming acquainted. I knew I couldn’t expect too much too soon. And if the patients sometimes deliberately made me feel uncomfortable, that was surely an indication that they were functioning as alert, active people. It was better than having an asylum full of heavily drugged zombies. Kincaid’s experimental therapy was obviously preferable to that, though there certainly weren’t many clues to what it actually was. The patients were often to be seen going into Kincaid’s office, and Alicia’s too, and sometimes I’d see the blinds being drawn on the office windows, but what happened after that remained a mystery.

  However, the patients were certainly throwing themselves into this writing business. I would see them wandering round the grounds, notebooks and pens in hand, and then they’d go to the Communication Room, and I’d hear distant typing, but they evidently weren’t ready to show me what they were producing. Nobody handed over their work, and much as I looked forward to having something, anything, to read, I didn’t press them.

  I didn’t speak to Kincaid at all for a good long while after the débâcle in the lecture room, and when I occasionally saw Alicia I tried to keep our conversations brief. They had a tendency to end in tears. One day she arrived at my hut with a bundle of clothes for me, and I was inclined to take this as a friendly gesture, until I looked at the clothes. They were my own, the ones that had been in my missing holdall, although I noticed that the Che Guevara T-shirt wasn’t among them.