Bedlam Burning

by Geoff Nicholson

  ‘You know, Gregory,’ I said, ‘I think you might be right.’

  I said I’d give the Kincaid Clinic another week, and this time I meant it.

  13

  In one way I could see that this second week was likely to be more of the same; more enervation, more feeling like a spare part, but it differed in this respect: throughout the first week it had been possible to have some optimism, to hold on to the quaint belief that there might be something to look forward to. Now I knew what was coming. I knew the patients were entirely likely to deliver more of the same old rubbish, and I didn’t have a clue how I was going to deal with it. All right, I could follow Gregory’s advice and adopt a persona, but I wasn’t sure exactly where that would get me, or for that matter where it would get the patients.

  They were now rather more in evidence than they had been the previous week, both in the clinic and around the grounds. I saw them wandering through the corridors, sitting by the dried-up fountain, on the couches in the reception area; and every time I saw them, they were carrying writing pads, apparently locked in agonies of creativity, and then I’d see them scurrying into or out of the Communication Room, a name that now seemed to be submerged beneath multiple layers of irony. When the patients noticed me, some of them still often looked at me with resentment or hostility, or sometimes in a way that seemed simply crazy, but once in a while I sensed them regarding me with what felt more like sympathy, maybe even pity, as if I was the sad, hopeless case and they were the concerned, perhaps condescending, visitors, as if they were just passing through and I was there for keeps.

  I spent long hours in my hut doing nothing. Sometimes Charity would dance by. Sometimes Max would stagger past, looking drunk. ‘How are you, Max?’ I’d ask. Occasionally Maureen would stroll past too, still in her football kit, but carrying a spade and a hoe. And once in a great while somebody would actually stop and have a conversation.

  The first was Byron, he of the poetic good looks. He asked me a lot of questions about my background, education and qualifications, which it would have been easy to regard as hostile, but I chose not to regard them that way and told him as much of the truth as I thought I could get away with.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I thought you must be a Cambridge man. I was at Oxford myself. The difference always shows. We must have a good long chat about literary matters before long.’

  That didn’t sound so terrible, and I almost found myself looking forward to it. Byron seemed the sanest of the patients by some way, and I wondered how and when his madness might manifest itself; perhaps in a long chat about literary matters? I also wondered which of last week’s pieces he’d been responsible for. None of them seemed to show the benefits of an Oxford education, though, unlike Byron, I wasn’t sure I would have spotted such an influence.

  Meals were much as before, grey, tasteless, homogenous, but Cook now talked to me too. ‘Sorry about the other day,’ he said. ‘I was feeling a bit paranoid. But wouldn’t you?’

  ‘It can’t be easy when you don’t know what’s in the cans,’ I agreed.

  ‘Well, the best things never are easy,’ he said. ‘And it’s not as if I absolutely never know. Like for instance, tins of anchovies look different from tins of corned beef. Baked bean cans have a certain look to them. You can always spot a tinned suet pudding. But when it comes to tinned new potatoes as opposed to tinned pineapple chunks, or tinned kidney beans as opposed to tinned savoury mince, it’s anybody’s guess.

  ‘And anyway, I think there’s something really symbolic about it. Because, when you think about it, life’s like a tin can without a label, isn’t it? You want to get into it but you never know whether you’ll like what you’re going to find.’

  ‘That’s sort of true,’ I said.

  ‘I realise I should say something about my name,’ he said. ‘Cook’s a funny name for a cook you might say, but why not? Even funnier name for someone who isn’t a cook, if you think about it.’

  I tried not to think about it.

  ‘And I also realise you must be wondering why I’m wearing this helmet made of tin foil.’

  Actually, I wasn’t. I could already guess. I’d heard enough about schizophrenia to know that sufferers often believe they’re receiving messages from distant, and usually malign, sources, that they’re hearing voices, that they think they’re having instructions put into their heads by aliens or MI5. I suppose this particular manifestation of madness must only have appeared when people began to understand something about radio waves. Prior to that, the notion of messages being projected through the ether would have been meaningless, although I suppose demons and spirits could have done something similar. The foil helmet, I suspected, was a shielding device to protect Cook’s mind from these evil broadcasts.

  And so, predictably, disappointingly, it proved. Cook explained at tedious length, in crippling detail, about these messages he was receiving, about their source, their bad influence, their compelling persuasiveness, how there was an underground cell, consisting of disenchanted Huguenots and Rosicrucians, living in Hayward’s Heath, who had built a machine, a cross between a printing press, a steam engine and a pinball table, that was being used to control and torture him. When I couldn’t stand to hear any more I said, ‘Maybe you should write about it.’ But as I made my getaway I knew this was a stupid thing to have suggested.

  Cook confirmed what I’d suspected all along, that whereas some mad people may no doubt be special and interesting, it isn’t the madness that makes them that way. The madness is quite separate from the specialness. People who are boring when they’re sane don’t suddenly become more interesting just because they’re mad. And this was obviously true of their writing too. Boring people wrote boring things. Boring mad people would write boring mad things. If writing was a means of self-expression (and I was certainly game to argue that it wasn’t; I mean, did Dante write the Divine Comedy because there was something he was dying to get off his chest?), then obviously it would be the medium for certain mad, dull people to express the true mad dullness of their natures. Perhaps I should have known this before I started work at the Kincaid Clinic.

  In general, life was now rather regular and calm. Nothing much disturbed the slow rhythms of the clinic, although there was one night when I heard the sound of loud, beery voices coming from immediately outside the clinic’s boundary wall, as though a group of drunks was out there having a party. A bottle got smashed, there was a lot of swearing and in other circumstances I might have felt vaguely threatened. But I realised how safe I was there in the clinic. What were a few drunks going to do? Climb the wall and break in? Let ’em try.

  The noises had stopped by the time Charles Manning came by. He was dressed as before, blazered and bare-chested, a pastel cigarette pressed between his lips.

  ‘Need a light?’ he asked, and I laughed and said no.

  Casually, he then said, ‘I suppose you’re here for the sex.’

  I wasn’t quick enough to come up with a reply.

  ‘Everyone knows,’ he continued, ‘if you can’t get crumpet in a mad house, you’ll never get it anywhere.’

  Something told me this might very well be true, and yet the idea that the patients were enjoying a frisky sex life seemed both improbable and distasteful.

  ‘Is that why you’re here?’ I asked, trying to make a joke.

  He looked insulted but he was determined not to be provoked, nor to answer my question.

  ‘They’re at it like rabbits,’ he said. ‘Like goats and monkeys. In twosomes and threesomes and foursomes and moresomes. Hetero and homo, plain and fancy, bi and tri, onanistic, inverted, orgiastic. You’d be surprised.’

  I agreed that I would. Now, I wasn’t so gullible as to take this at its face value, but Charles Manning was a reasonably plausible narrator and I worried he might be telling at least some version of the truth. It depressed me no end.

  ‘I try to stay above it all,’ he continued, ‘but I admit there are moments when I let my defen
ces down. I’m only made of flesh and blood. Hot flesh and pulsing blood and wet mucous membranes—’

  ‘Does Dr Kincaid know about all these goings on?’ I interrupted. I thought it was a reasonable question, one likely to connect Charles Manning with some sort of reality and stop his flow of free association.

  ‘I rather think he does,’ Manning said with lumbering irony. ‘Given that he’s usually there watching, making notes, standing in attendance, cajoling, encouraging, arranging his charges into tableaux vivants, posing in their midst, buck naked, his penis raised like a conductor’s baton, although clearly of somewhat different proportions. So yes, I think he probably has some knowledge of what goes on. Yes, I do.’

  I wasn’t sure I believed that at all.

  ‘And Dr Crowe?’ I asked gently.

  ‘Oh yes, she knows what goes on.’

  ‘But does she … attend?’

  Why did I ask that, given that I couldn’t possibly have trusted any answer I received? But Charles Manning was more perceptive than I’d have given him credit for. ‘I don’t think you want to know the answer to that question,’ he said, and I agreed. ‘No, I’m not here for the sex actually,’ he said, now adopting a frank and man-to-mannish tone. ‘It’s a long story, but in round terms all you need to know is that I’m not mad at all. You see, I was working in the film industry. I was a projectionist. Responsible job. Bringing enlightenment and entertainment to the masses. Lord, I loved those old pictures, the Ealing comedies, the Edgar Lustgarten mysteries, the Pathé Newsreels. They don’t make them like that.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed.

  ‘These days they’re full of violence, which I can take or leave, and sex, which frankly I can’t bear. They kept sending all these dirty movies for me to project, all these bosoms and buttocks and flanks and so forth, many of them continental. You know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Emmanuelle showed for a whole year at a cinema in Cambridge while I was there.’

  ‘Precisely. And the more I complained the worse it got. They were trying to get rid of me, make me resign, but I wasn’t having any of that. Where was I going to get another job at my age, what with the unions and the unemployment and the strife and the emancipation of women and so forth? So I put on an antic disposition – that’s a Shakespearian allusion, you probably spotted it, I like the Olivier version best myself. Yes, I pretended I was mad. They can’t sack you if you’re insane, it’s company policy. So they decided I needed looking after, sent me to this place, very decent of them in a way, though they had no choice in the matter, of course, I saw to that. Damned if they did. Damned if they didn’t. So here I am. The wife’s a bit cheesed about it, but she’s adjusting. And you see, all I have to do is sit it out here until popular tastes change, till people abandon all this sex and so forth and return to good old-fashioned storytelling, and fun for all the family, Mary Whitehouse and Lord Longford and so on. Then they’ll come crawling back to me, saying you were right all along, Charles, old egg, have your job back, have a whopping great pay rise, and why don’t you join the British Board of Film Censors while you’re about it? Good plan, I think.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said.

  ‘Also,’ he said, ‘I’m suffering from anal castration anxiety, which is a lot like common or garden castration anxiety but it’s been displaced into the anal area through regressive distortion. A lot of so-called “toilet phobias” go along with it, fear of falling into the bowl, fear that some worm-like creature will crawl out of the S-bend and lodge itself in my anus and burrow into my gut and eat me up from the inside. Not that there aren’t times when being rid of the whole genital apparatus seems like quite a desirable option. But anyway, I’m dealing with it, thanks to Dr Kincaid.’

  He looked at me expectantly, but whatever his expectations were, I failed to live up to them.

  ‘Do you think I should write about it?’ he asked.

  ‘I think you’ve got to go with your instincts,’ I said, sincerely hoping that his instincts would lead him elsewhere.

  Charles Manning stared at me with the kind of contempt I felt I richly deserved. He bowed and withdrew and I was left alone in my hut feeling like a complete fool. I had no reason to believe that he was telling the truth about the sex life of the clinic, and perhaps I had every reason to believe he was lying. It was certainly possible he was trying to confuse me, to ‘psyche me out’ as we might have said in those days. But the fact was, I still had no idea what Kincaidian Therapy was, except that it involved doing something or other in an office with the blinds drawn. Was that significant? Did orgies come under the general heading of experimental techniques? I certainly hoped not.

  I’d be lying if I said the second week just flew by; no week that consisted of inactivity interspersed with bad meals and conversations with the insane was ever going to slip by on gossamer wings, but it passed less painfully than I might have expected, and certainly much quicker than the previous week had. I stopped making a fuss about my lost belongings, I stopped worrying about trying to get a key to the front gate and I stopped worrying about doing nothing. And I did my very best to stop worrying about Alicia, but that didn’t quite work.

  I’d been hoping our night together might have made us better friends; I certainly wanted to see more of her, but I sensed she was keeping her distance. In the simple physical sense she certainly wasn’t at all conspicuous around the clinic, and on a couple of occasions when I went to her office I found the door locked. And as for sex, well, who knew whether last Friday night’s fun and games would ever be repeated? Not me. It would have been great if I could have run into her in the clinic and she had said something kind or encouraging or reassuring, but in her absence I suspected the worst: that she thought of it as a one-night stand, a moment of madness (her madness not mine), never to be repeated and never to be referred to again.

  When I did at last see her again, chasing after her as she went from the clinic to the Communication Room, I thought it best to appear professional, to discuss some topic that related to the business of the clinic. I said, ‘I’ve had a few conversations now with patients and I’m a little confused.’

  She looked at me as though I was precisely the sort of man she expected to be constantly confused.

  I said, ‘They’re always shooting me some line about not really being mad, or not being mad in quite the way they appear to be, and I’d like to know whether or not they’re telling the truth.’

  ‘In many cases so would we,’ Alicia said.

  ‘But you must have done some tests. You must have some case histories. There must be some files.’

  ‘Yes, there are. In Dr Kincaid’s office. In the filing cabinet. Under lock and key.’

  ‘And I think it might be really good if I saw them.’

  ‘You do, do you?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘If you have someone read a file, a text that purports to describe a patient, and then introduce them to that patient, there’s an unfailing tendency to find what the file’s told them is there. You find what you expect to find. You trust what you read, what someone else has written, rather than your own observations. It’s something to do with the hegemony of the written word. A fair amount of research has been done on this stuff.’

  ‘I can sort of see that,’ I said.

  ‘You should rely on your own observations.’

  ‘But how are my observations going to tell me whether Raymond ever really tried to poison his passengers, or whether Charles Manning was really a cinema projectionist?’

  ‘You use your judgement,’ she said.

  ‘Couldn’t I use my judgement after I’ve seen the files?’

  ‘Gregory, I’ve tried to be polite. The fact is, I don’t think someone who’s been here no time at all and whose skills remain at best unproven should be given the complete run of the place. I don’t think a mere writer-in-residence should be given free access to highly confidential medical and psychological data
that he may not have the wherewithal to interpret. I don’t think someone in your position has any right to be so bloody demanding. End of discussion.’

  And it was. I hadn’t even got as far as mentioning the orgies, and perhaps it was just as well. If she could get that angry about files, how angry would she get about sex? And yet, come Friday night, sure enough, perhaps strangely enough, certainly happily enough, Alicia came to my hut just as she had the week before. And it was in many ways a repeat performance. What people blithely refer to as ‘the physical side’ was just fine. All the touching, the kissing, certainly the penetration, even the orgasms (not quite simultaneous, but close enough for beginners), took care of themselves. It was the verbal side I still had trouble with.

  I had the sense that I was playing not a sexual game, but a word game, the rules of which Alicia knew much better than I did. It was a game she’d been playing for years, a game she’d invented; and although she was keen to have me as a player, she wasn’t prepared to give me access to the rule book. So I had to learn as I went along. I tried to stay within the spirit of the game, but inevitably I infringed some of the subtler by-laws from time to time, committed the odd foul, said the wrong thing.

  Alicia kept up her stream of obscene consciousness, and I joined in where I thought appropriate, echoing her words and sentiments. She’d say something like, ‘Stretch my cunt with that fat throbbing cock of yours,’ and I’d say, ‘Yes, open your cunt for my fat throbbing cock,’ and this sort of thing, while not exactly displaying wild creativity on my part, worked just fine.

  However, there came a moment, well actually a period of some minutes, when Alicia was not speaking at all. It was preceded by her saying, ‘Now feed that fat piece of meat into my mouth so I can run my tongue under the foreskin and taste the cum leaking out,’ which I did, and which she did, but it meant I then had to invent some new dialogue without any help from her. So I said something like, ‘That’s right, swallow that slimy monster, you filthy slut,’ but that didn’t work at all.