Bedlam Burning

by Geoff Nicholson

  Alicia freed her mouth, pulled away and said, ‘I’m perfectly happy to swallow the slimy monster. And I’m perfectly happy to act like a filthy slut, to be a filthy slut, but I don’t want to be called a filthy slut. Got it?’

  ‘Oh, OK,’ I said. I could well understand why a woman wouldn’t want to be called a slut, although given some of the things Alicia had called me, it seemed unnecessarily delicate. I had imagined we were in an area where notions of verbal nicety had been lifted. Call me a fool. It made me realise just how much I still had to learn about the game.

  But we got through it, brought the game to a satisfactory conclusion, and as we lay together afterwards I felt relaxed enough and comfortable enough to say the wrong thing again. I asked Alicia, not very romantically perhaps, ‘Are the patients here allowed to have sex?’

  I felt her body tense up and she said coldly, ‘Why? Which one do you want to have sex with?’

  ‘Nobody. That’s not what I meant. I only want to have sex with you.’

  ‘Not that hippie girl, Charity?’

  I was still finding it hard to think of Charity as a hippie, but I certainly didn’t want to have sex with her.

  ‘Not Sita, maybe?’ Alicia suggested.

  ‘I’m not even sure I know which one Sita is.’

  ‘The Indian woman who never speaks,’ she snapped. ‘Or is it Max, maybe? Perhaps your tastes run in that direction.’

  ‘Don’t be disgusting,’ I said.

  That was meant to be a joke, to lighten the mood a little, but it scarcely worked. I found it hard to believe that Alicia was genuinely angry with me. I knew better than to tell her I thought she was being ridiculous, but I really did find it incomprehensible, and I wondered whether it made Charles Manning’s story more credible or less.

  ‘What brought this on, anyway?’ she demanded.

  ‘Charles Manning said something about orgies, that’s all,’ I said.

  ‘And that makes you envious, does it? You’d like to participate? You feel like you’re missing out?’

  ‘No, I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.’

  ‘Good. Because you’re not. Believe me.’

  It sounded knowing and portentous but I didn’t know what she meant. I was also aware that she hadn’t answered my original question about whether or not the patients were allowed to have sex. Alicia’s technique of becoming angry in order to avoid answering questions was crude but highly effective. It made me increasingly reluctant to ask her anything at all.

  Come the morning, as the previous week, she was not there. It was Saturday, and again I was woken unreasonably early by a knock at the door of the hut and I opened up to see the line of ten patients. The ceremonial handing over of the week’s work took place, and there I was stuck with another thousand pages or so of typescript.

  As before, I spent the weekend being driven to distraction by all this mass of bad, bad writing. There were more meaningless anagrams: I read about ‘absinthe’ in ‘the basin’, about a ‘military terror’ in the ‘territorial army’. There was more childhood reminiscence, more quasi-religious rambling, another account of a different (but not really so very different) football match, more supposedly amazing facts: that the mosquito has forty-seven teeth, that 90 per cent of American teenagers suffer from acne, that on 4 July 1776 George III wrote in his diary, ‘Nothing of importance happened today’.

  There was some nonsense about the world being like a beehive, another ‘confession’; this time the writer claiming to have suffocated his or her grandmother to end her sufferings from terminal cancer. There was a foul and violent account of life in a women’s prison with male guards who used the inmates for various scatological and sexual ends before murdering them. Did I assume this was written by Anders? Well, yes, I did actually. And I assumed that an obsessive account of a woman shaving her legs, her armpits, her pubic area, her head, her forearms, her eyebrows, her toes, and so on, was written by Charity. I also thought it reasonably likely that the rather well-written, if pointless, retelling of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was written by Byron. Of course, I knew I might be wrong about all this. These were certainly hasty and potentially misguided assumptions, but I didn’t much care any more. I’d had enough.

  I was a lot less thorough in my reading this time. What did it matter? What was I supposed to get out of this torrent? What was I supposed to read into it? I found myself looking out of the window. I found my mind wandering far and wide. I found myself thinking about Alicia, about my future, about the job I’d given up at the bookshop, about my parents, about nothing. There were times when I realised I’d been staring at a page for ten minutes or more, and taken in nothing whatsoever; and I didn’t care. My mind had been made up for me. I was leaving.

  On Sunday evening Kincaid came to the hut again to ask me how it was going, but not to listen to my reply, and to tell me something I entirely expected, that he wanted a report on his desk first thing Monday morning, and that I’d be ‘confronting’ the patients shortly thereafter. I told him this was no problem.

  At nine next morning I was in Kincaid’s office handing over my report. Once again it consisted of just one page. In fact it consisted of just one sentence, of just four words: ‘These people are mad.’

  Quite a lot of work had gone into that sentence. I had considered various synonyms and euphemisms. I’d toyed with adding adjectives or qualifiers. I’d contemplated using a well-chosen and tellingly placed obscenity, but in the end I’d decided the simplest solution was the best. Kincaid looked at the single sentence for rather longer than he’d looked at the full page of writing I’d presented him with the previous week. Then he said, ‘I shall have to think about this.’ That was fine by me since I didn’t much care what he, or anybody else, thought.

  I went to the lecture room where the circle of chairs was set out and all the patients were already in place. The porters had been posted by the door this time, no doubt in anticipation of renewed mayhem, and Alicia had installed herself at the back of the room. Was she there as my guardian angel, to stop me getting myself into further trouble, or was she a spy for Kincaid? Once again, I didn’t care. I took my place on the single empty chair, balanced the heap of manuscripts on my lap and looked at the faces of the patients: violent, vacant, angry, hostile, as might be the case. I didn’t know precisely what I was going to say, but I certainly knew the gist, and the moment I opened my mouth the words started pouring out, sounding remarkably articulate and considered.

  ‘You know,’ I said, slapping the bundle of manuscripts, ‘this is a pile of crap. It’s rubbish. It’s pointless, worthless. It’s a waste of your time to write it. It’s a waste of my time to read it. I don’t know why you’re doing it. I don’t know if you’re doing it out of some deep psychological need, or just to piss me off, but if it’s the latter then it really gets the job done. I’m totally pissed off with it.

  ‘Which is not to say this writing isn’t very revealing. I’m sure it is. But it doesn’t reveal anything we don’t know already. It tells me that you people are, how should I put this … mad. It tells me you’re insane, crazy, raving, demented, deranged, psychotic, bonkers, wacko, screwy, cracked, gaga, barking, doolally, tonto, meshuga, bananas, loco, mental. It tells me you’re a bunch of lunatics, nutters, maniacs, fruitcakes. It tells me you’ve got a few screws loose, that you’re off your heads, off your trolley, round the bend, round the twist, that you’re not playing with a full deck, that you’re one volume short of the complete works.

  ‘And the truth is, if I have to sit in that hut week after week, day after day, reading what you’ve written, then I think there’s every chance I’ll finish up as mad as you lot, and that’s a price I’m not prepared to pay. So what I’m going to do is take this bundle of verbal excretion back to my hut and I’m going to put it in the stove and burn it. And then I’m going home.’

  And with that I left the lecture room, taking the typescripts with me, and I did indeed go to my hut. I didn’t really intend to
burn the patients’ writing, and I wasn’t sure why I’d said I would; for cheap dramatic effect, I suppose. But I was absolutely serious about going home, or at least going somewhere that was not here. I dropped the pages of writing on to the floor by the stove and that was that. I was done. I was ready to go. I had no bags to pack. I looked around the hut to see if there was anything worth stealing, as an act of petty revenge or as a souvenir. There was nothing I wanted. I left the hut and started to make my bid for the outside world, but as I slammed the door shut, Alicia came striding towards me.

  ‘Is that what you call using psychology?’ she asked, and she sounded a good deal less angry than I’d been expecting.

  ‘I’m sorry about all this, Alicia,’ I said. ‘I’ll explain everything to you some day, but right now I have to get out of here.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s an option.’

  I couldn’t understand what she meant. Was she going to attempt to hold me to my contract or something ridiculous like that, perhaps threaten to have the porters lock me up again?

  ‘They’re still there,’ she said. ‘The patients are waiting for you. They won’t leave the lecture theatre until you’ve been back and talked to them again.’

  ‘I don’t have anything else to say to them.’

  ‘Come now, you’re the wordsmith, as you’ve proved.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean I have anything to say.’

  ‘You’ll think of something,’ she said, and she kissed me on the cheek, and placed her hand on my arm and pulled me back to the lecture room. I didn’t know why she was doing it. I could see no point in it at all. As I walked into the lecture room again all ten patients were sitting there much as I’d left them, but the moment they saw me they broke out in noisy, enthusiastic, only somewhat insane, applause. I had absolutely no idea what they were applauding, and my confusion must have been obvious. Byron, who had apparently been made spokesman, stood up and shook me by the hand.

  ‘That was very good,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re thanking me for,’ I said.

  ‘For being honest, for one thing,’ said Byron. ‘A lesser man would have read all this crap we’ve produced and told us it was interesting or promising or even good. You told us it was crap. We liked that.’

  ‘Did you?’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes, and in the same way, a lesser man might have said that our writings showed that we were a little confused, or a little disturbed or a little disorientated. You told us we were carpet-chewers. We liked that even more.’

  ‘Why do you like to be called mad?’ I asked.

  ‘Because that’s what we are, and that’s why we’re ready to make a deal.’

  I glanced over at Alicia. Was Byron really in a position to make deals? Alicia’s knowing nod and smile suggested that he probably wasn’t, but that I should hear him out nevertheless.

  ‘What sort of a deal?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, first of all, obviously, that you don’t leave.’

  ‘No,’ Raymond chimed in, ‘don’t deplane at this time.’

  ‘What’s the rest of the deal?’

  ‘We’d like you to help us get better,’ said Byron.

  ‘To improve our talents with due care,’ added Charity.

  ‘But we know things can’t go on quite as they have been,’ Byron said. ‘For one thing, we don’t want to be told what to write about. We don’t want to be given titles. We want to be free to express ourselves in any way we see fit.’

  ‘I thought you’d been pretty much doing that already,’ I said.

  ‘Oh no. We can express ourselves much more freely than we have been doing.’

  This sounded like a very mixed blessing.

  ‘And we still have to insist that we don’t put our names on the work. Anonymity is very important to us.’

  ‘You’re saying you just want to be free to do whatever you like without any interference from me, and without even putting your name to what you’ve done?’

  ‘That’s it, Gregory,’ Byron said.

  The others made assenting noises, including a drunken belch of agreement from Max.

  ‘Then I’m not sure why you need me at all.’

  ‘Hey, Gregory,’ said Cook, ‘don’t start feeling persecuted.’

  ‘We find you inspiring to have around,’ said Charles Manning.

  ‘Like a muse,’ said Byron.

  ‘Or a mascot,’ said Maureen.

  I didn’t want to fall for any of this. ‘And what do I get out of this deal?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I don’t pull your fucking head off, for one thing,’ said Anders, but he said it rather amiably.

  ‘The deal,’ said Byron, ‘is that we’re nice to you.’

  Nice is such an odd word, a word it’s hard to take very seriously, one that’s lost most of its colour, if not its meaning; and yet it’s a word everybody uses. Oh sure, novelists, journalists, broadcasters, people who are supposed to care about words, they don’t use it, but the rest of the world uses it all the time. We use it about people, ‘He’s such a nice guy’; about objects, ‘Nice shirt, Mike’; after sex, ‘Mmm, that was nice’. And so on. It’s a blunt word, imprecise, blurred; but that’s part of its virtue and we all know what it means. The idea of people being ‘nice’ to me was very appealing indeed at that moment.

  ‘Give me five minutes to think about it,’ I said, and I went away and thought for considerably less than five minutes. It felt good to be wanted. The fact that the people doing the wanting were inmates of an asylum didn’t make much difference. I didn’t entirely take their reasons for wanting me to stay at their face value. I didn’t really believe they wanted me as a muse or a mascot. On the other hand, not being much of a conspiracy theorist, I wasn’t of a mind to see anything very sinister in it either.

  I stayed. You know I stayed. If I’d left we’d be at the end of the book already, and you can see we’re nowhere near. I went back to the lecture room and told them they had a deal. Alicia smiled at me. I liked to think she looked more pleased than anyone.

  ‘There’s just one small condition,’ I said. ‘You have to let me out of the clinic for the rest of the day.’

  14

  They didn’t like it, none of them, not the patients, nor Alicia, nor Kincaid; but what could they do? They either let me go for the day or they let me go for ever. With rather more ceremony and solemnity than I thought appropriate, Kincaid used his electronic key to let me out of the clinic. The tall metal gate slid back, I stepped outside and the gate shut behind me. I was out and, in some senses of the word, free, but that included the freedom to return, which I intended to do once I’d completed a bit of business in town.

  The clinic was six or seven miles outside Brighton, so walking there was out of the question, and if a bus ran along the road there was no sign of a stop. So I hitchhiked, and it was much easier than I’d have imagined. Frankly I wouldn’t have stopped for me. What kind of person picks up someone hitching outside a lunatic asylum? Answer: a good-natured old chain-smoking plumber in a big white van with a heap of pipes, cisterns and boilers crashing around in the back. He asked no questions, made no conversation and dropped me off in the centre of town.

  I didn’t get down to business right away. I wandered around doing the sort of things you do in Brighton. I walked along the sea front, went through the Lanes, looking in the windows of antique shops. I went on the pier and, with what little money I had, I bought fish and chips, then washed the grease away with a pint of bitter in a dark pub that had a rattlingly loud jukebox. Someone kept playing ‘I’m Not In Love’ over and over again, a song that had already started to sound dated, but I found it reassuring. I always hate it when you see a movie or read a book and it’s trying too hard to give a period feel so that everything is absolutely from that time: all the cars, the clothes, the music, the houses, the furniture are precisely, quintessentially ‘seventies’. It’s never like that. In the 1970s a lot of people were still driving sixties car
s, sitting on fifties furniture, living in forties houses. Clothes and music are obviously more temporary and contemporary, but not everybody consulted Vogue or Melody Maker and instantly adopted that week’s trends. Styles seep in and they don’t erase everything that went before; they’re more a sort of semi-transparent veneer, an overlay that only gradually makes the past invisible.

  I enjoyed my day in Brighton, but I wasn’t sure I was enjoying it quite as much as I ought to be, and I had the sense that I was forcing myself to have a good time, so I decided I’d better do what I’d come for. I went to Ruth Harris’s bookshop. It was harder to find than I’d have imagined but I located it eventually and fought my way inside. It was every bit as full of books and as empty of people as when I’d been there for the reading. Ruth Harris greeted me with surprising warmth. I wasn’t certain she’d even remember me, but she did, and fortunately she seemed to have forgotten, or at least remodelled, important elements of the night of my literary début, and I felt that was going to be to my advantage.

  ‘It was rather a good night, as I recall,’ she said. ‘The crowd was small but very enthusiastic, very knowledgeable.’

  She made a pot of tea and we talked and I turned on the charm. I explained why I was back in Brighton, that I was living there after a fashion, told her in vague terms about what I was doing at the Kincaid Clinic, and even though I could see she found the idea of a writer-in-residence at an asylum faintly ridiculous, she was still impressed. Possibly she liked the idea that I wasn’t some self-indulgent scribe who worked solely to satisfy my own ego. I was out there doing good, helping those less fortunate. Again I was encouraged.

  I asked her if she’d read any good books lately, but she said she never found time to do any reading these days, being far too busy running the business. So I asked how business was, and she said it was fine, but I could tell she didn’t mean it and I didn’t think she really expected me to believe it either. A glance at the place confirmed that business wasn’t fine at all.