Bedlam Burning

by Geoff Nicholson

  ‘Oh, OK,’ I said.

  I did my best to oblige, though in the main I was one of those mute, fierce, drooling lunatics. On this occasion Alicia didn’t seem to object to my silence. She was verbose enough for both of us. And when it was all over, as we were lying together on her office floor with a chair leg pressed into my flank, Alicia said to me, ‘That was very good. You make a very convincing lunatic. Rather more convincing than some of the ones in the clinic.’

  Was that meant to be a clue? Was Alicia trying to tell me something about what was going on in the Kincaid Clinic, something that should perhaps have been obvious from watching Carla’s behaviour? I had always known that none of the patients was quite what he or she seemed. Some were perhaps, in Kincaid’s terms, malingering. They were exaggerating or even inventing symptoms. They wanted to appear madder than they really were, but I knew that didn’t mean they were completely sane. Just because someone claims to be adopting an antic disposition doesn’t mean they aren’t antic. Others were making great claims for their sanity, but in ways that tended to confirm their madness. When they told me their stories, when they made their confessions, their claims to madness or sanity, did they really think I believed them? Did they even want me to?

  And something else occurred to me. I remembered how everything had changed at that session in the lecture room at the end of the second week, right before I threatened to walk out of the clinic, right before the ‘new deal’. It embarrassed me to think of it now, to recall my easy, knee-jerk response, when I’d abused the patients and told them how crazy they all were. But they’d liked it, and maybe that was the whole point. The moment I called them insane they became very happy, as though they’d won, as though they’d managed to convince me, as though their performances of madness had worked. I felt very foolish, very gullible.

  So then I entertained another possibility. I tried to imagine what it would mean if all the patients were actually perfectly sane. What if they weren’t mad at all, but for one reason or another they’d decided to appear that way in order to be admitted to the Kincaid Clinic? It was easy enough to imagine reasons for them doing that: reasons to do with wanting to feel protected, of finding the real world too difficult a place. It would be a pretty eccentric thing to do but it wouldn’t necessarily mean they were mad. Once they’d convinced Kincaid of their madness and secured a place in the clinic they were therefore happy enough, they’d proved their point, but they still needed to display madness from time to time in order to avoid being pronounced sane, and sent home again. And they displayed it especially well in their writing.

  This had some profound consequences for Kincaidian Therapy. For a start it meant that the patients’ ‘madness’ had nothing to do with exposure to images. If their madness was all simply mimicry then both cutting off the flow of images and building this legendary linguistic bulkhead were a complete waste of time. The writing was not a means of alleviating their madness, but an opportunity for them to show it off.

  I would have liked to talk to someone about this, and although I didn’t feel I could ask Alicia directly, since I was fairly certain she’d fly into a rage, I did get up the courage to say, ‘If I wanted to prove to you I was completely sane, how could I do it?’

  ‘You couldn’t,’ she said. ‘And I wouldn’t want you to. Only the truly demented need to go around proving how sane they are.’

  Yes, that sounded coherent and yet it didn’t quite satisfy me. I suppose I was looking for a beautifully simple answer. I wanted all the patients to be completely mad or completely sane: either/or, yes or no. And I recalled a writing exercise that I’d come across in one of the lost textbooks I’d brought with me. The teacher asks the students to write down five true statements about themselves, and then a sixth statement that’s a lie. Then the others in the group try to identify which is which. The point of the thing is to show how easily fact and fiction can blend together. The book also warned that there’s always some clever dick in the group who tries to sabotage the exercise by writing five lies and only one truth or writing all lies or all truths. I wondered what kind of mayhem the patients would make of it, if they’d been prepared to write to order, which of course they weren’t.

  I spent a lot of time sitting in my hut, wandering round the grounds trying to think this thing through, wishing I had someone I could discuss it with, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. I was thoroughly preoccupied and as I walked past the clinic’s front gate I was only dimly aware of the car parked outside, and I took no notice of the woman who got out until she’d come right up to the gate and was shouting at me. And it still took me a moment to realise it was Ruth Harris, owner of the bookshop.

  ‘Hello, handsome,’ she called to me. ‘How’s business?’

  ‘Oh, hello, Ruth. Business is just fine,’ I said. Yes, I needed someone to talk to but Ruth Harris wasn’t the one.

  ‘Mine too,’ she said. ‘It turns out you were right. Since I got rid of some of the dead wood things seem to be looking up a little.’

  ‘Glad to be of help.’

  ‘So I wanted to thank you. How about letting me buy you dinner?’

  ‘Thanks, Ruth, but no, I can’t.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I’m very busy. The patients need me.’

  ‘I need you too, Gregory.’

  She was joking, but it was one of those spiky, awkward jokes.

  ‘I’m very flattered,’ I said, ‘but I can’t.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to beg, Gregory.’

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  I couldn’t tell if she was really offended or not, but she pretended to be in quite a huff. ‘I was going to give you a little something,’ she said, and I looked embarrassed, and she added, ‘Don’t worry, it’s only a very little something.’

  She handed me a small, scruffy padded envelope that obviously contained a book. Books were always welcome, but I thought I had no need of another one at that particular moment. I thanked her without even bothering to see what book it was.

  ‘You have to open it,’ she implored.

  I opened the padded envelope and looked in. Ruth Harris had brought me a thin paperback dictionary of psychology.

  ‘Well, thanks very much.’

  ‘No, no, you’re missing something,’ she said, and she jabbed her finger towards the cover of the book to point out the name of the author: Dr Eric Kincaid.

  I admit I was surprised, but not totally. It was only to be expected that a man with Kincaid’s professed writing ambitions might already have written a book. I slipped it into my pocket, pretending to be grateful, and Ruth Harris twittered on a while longer before wishing me the best and returning to her car.

  It wasn’t until the evening that I thought again about Kincaid’s dictionary of psychology, when the obsessive reader in me reasserted himself. So, despite all the other more pressing and intractable things I had on my mind, I inevitably found myself thumbing through the book. According to the blurb it was ‘written for the general reader’, and reading a couple of entries confirmed this to be true. I was pleasantly surprised. Given Kincaid’s propensity for the grand statement, the dictionary seemed amazingly simple and clear. I thought it was actually well written. I found myself lingering over the entries for depression, schizophrenia, nymphomania; the easy stuff that everybody thinks they know about without really knowing anything at all. Then I found myself reading the weirder stuff: the Funkenstein test, hellenomania, memory cramp, bdelygmia (look ’em up). There was no entry for Kincaidian Therapy. And eventually I looked up some of the specific conditions I’d come across at the clinic: alcoholism, mutism, anal castration complex, paranoia, exhibitionism, pathomimicry.

  They were all there, all clearly and concisely described. It was amazing. If you’d had the book and the relevant patient in front of you, you’d have been able to make a perfectly sound diagnosis. It appeared that the inmates were textbook cases. Kincaid’s dictionary might have been describing the current population of his clinic. J
ust to make sure this wasn’t the case I turned to the front of the book and checked the date of publication. I was relieved to see this was the paperback edition of a hardback that had been published some years previously. Surely none of the patients could have been here that long. I jumped to the hasty conclusion that even though madness appeared to be wild and formless, it had the habit of fitting itself around some fairly rigid templates; when you’ve seen one case of polyglot neophasia you’ve seen them all.

  But that assumed that the patients were actually mad. What if they weren’t? If the patients were actually (in some sense of the word) sane but, for whatever reasons, wanted to appear mad, what could be a better guide to feigning madness than a dictionary of psychology? And if you specifically wanted to convince Dr Eric Kincaid of your madness, why not match up to his particular definitions and observations? Could it really be that the patients were acting out Kincaid’s script? Could it be that he was having his prejudices about madness confirmed by people who were trying very hard to confirm them?

  It felt as though a light bulb had gone on above my head, a weary old image for brain activity, I admit. I was wary of adopting a grand theory, and of finding it so easily. I wasn’t sure what it meant, what its implications were, but it seemed to fit the case. It sounded crazy, but that was precisely why it made sense. Did that in itself sound crazy? And what should I do about it? Should I go running to Kincaid, and tell him what I thought, that he was wasting his time, that the patients were deceiving him, playing with him, and that he was too stupid to see it? I knew how that would go down. Even if it were true he’d be the last person who’d want to hear it, and he certainly wouldn’t believe it. Wouldn’t he think I was crazy? Perhaps I should start with Alicia.

  And that was when I learned the difference between coprolalia, coprophilia and coprophemia. The dictionary fell open at the right page and there it was. Coprophemia, in Kincaid’s words, is: ‘filthy speech, scatalogia, perhaps a paraphilia in which the patient uses obscene words and phrases as a means, or at least a major component, of sexual arousal.’ Yep, that was an accurate description of Alicia’s bedroom antics. Antics indeed. Oh fuck.

  Now, it seemed to me that being a coprophemic was by no means synonymous with being mad, but the fact that it was there in the dictionary at all gave me pause. I’d thought Alicia was just a little wild, but it appeared there was a psychological word for it, that it was a recognisable disorder. Did that mean she was crazy? Oh fuck again.

  I had a bad night. I didn’t know whether I was right or wrong about anything, and I certainly wasn’t sure that I wanted to be right. I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t think. I knew I couldn’t talk to anybody. I spent the night feeling as though my head was being turned inside out like an old woollen bedsock; not a condition that Kincaid’s dictionary had any word for. But round about daybreak, light finally dawned.

  I thought of a way of finding an answer, an easy answer, I hoped, and perhaps only a partial one, but one I reckoned I could trust, one that relied on textual evidence, on the written word. I still had a touching faith in that. I decided I was going to break into Kincaid’s files and read the patients’ case histories. That might not tell me absolutely everything there was to know but it would surely help prove or disprove my grand theory.

  I began by thinking I might try to break into Kincaid’s office in the middle of the night, but I soon saw that wouldn’t work. Kincaid’s sleeping quarters were right next to the office. He’d be bound to hear me. The middle of the day, in working hours was a much better bet, but a distraction was needed, a way of getting Kincaid out of his office and getting me in. I also needed some means of opening the filing cabinet.

  I decided to engineer a small crisis. I went and talked to Maureen while she was gardening. I wanted to see what tools she had and whether any of them could be used to jemmy open the filing cabinet. The best I could find was a small but sturdy pair of secateurs, not exactly the perfect instrument for the job, but I picked them up, apparently absent-mindedly, and slipped them into my pocket when Maureen wasn’t looking. Then I talked to her about gardening, about what a menace birds could be, always eating the seeds and pecking at seedlings the moment they came through. I knew this via my mother. Perhaps what was needed was a scarecrow. She liked the idea a lot, and decided she’d make one at once.

  I offered her a pair of my jeans and an old shirt and, leaving her to it, I sauntered up to Kincaid’s office, asked him if he was busy, then in a faux-casual sort of way asked him whether he thought sculpture constituted graven images. He most certainly did. Then how about scarecrows? No different, he said. So I suggested he might want to pop down to the garden and see what Maureen was up to; and he fell for it. He swooped out of the office and I found myself alone, impressed by the success of my simple scheme. I felt simultaneously scared yet reckless. The need to know what was in those files had become unbearable.

  I went over to the filing cabinet, jammed the point of the secateurs ineptly in the gap above the top drawer, and tried to lever it open. The metal bent and buckled but the lock remained intact. I tried again, no more expertly than before, and that was when I got caught – by Anders. He was standing in the doorway of Kincaid’s office, smiling delightedly.

  ‘A bit of breaking and entering,’ he said. ‘Nice one. Need a hand?’

  He looked like a man who was far more used to opening locks than I was, so I handed the secateurs to him and he enthusiastically jammed them into the cabinet, as though he’d been doing it all his life, as I suppose he probably had. The lock snapped and the drawer sprang open to reveal a row of thick manila files. I felt I was on the threshold of something very, very important. That was when I got caught for the second time – by Kincaid. He’d quickly lost interest in Maureen and the scarecrow and had returned to his office.

  I was lost for words; there wasn’t a thought in my head, no excuse I could come up with. I’d been caught red-handed and I was ready for the inevitable worst; but Anders, much cooler in a crisis than I could ever have hoped to be, was immediately on top of the situation.

  ‘All right, doc,’ Anders said to Kincaid. ‘You’ve got me bang to rights. You can’t get away with nothin’ in this place. A bloke tries to practise his craft and do an honest bit of thieving, and straight away he gets nabbed at it by the bloody writer-in-residence. I ask you. Then before I can worm me way out of that one, the boss hisself shows up. Maybe I’m just not cut out for a life of crime.’

  ‘Is this true?’ Kincaid asked, though whether of me or of Anders wasn’t clear.

  ‘Are you calling me a liar, you fucking arsehole?’ Anders demanded, and for once I found his sudden fury rather appealing, or at least useful. Whether it was real or feigned I was glad of it since it drew attention away from me. He fondled the secateurs lovingly as if he wanted to use them on flesh.

  ‘Why?’ Kincaid asked gently. ‘What did you expect to find in the filing cabinet?’

  ‘Pictures,’ Anders said, and his mouth trembled sluggishly and tears began to trickle from his eyes.

  ‘Oh, Anders,’ said Kincaid, ‘you still have such a long way to go.’

  Anders’ head sagged. ‘Will you go with me, doc? Will you?’

  ‘I’ll try, Anders, I’ll certainly try.’

  Anders appeared to find this unbearably moving. He meekly handed over the secateurs, which Kincaid received as though they were a thoughtful gift, an apple for the teacher. He patted Anders’ shoulder in a manly fashion.

  ‘Just as well you were here, Gregory,’ said Kincaid.

  I had no idea if he meant it, whether he’d believed Anders’ story or not, but if he hadn’t believed it then I couldn’t think why he was pretending he had. Equally, I had very little idea what reason Anders could have for taking the blame. Did he simply like me? Did he want to protect me, or was he doing it for dark reasons of his own, to put me in his debt? Either way, I was no nearer to getting my hands on the patients’ files, and since Kincaid would now be guarding them ev
en more carefully, the promise of textual evidence had receded considerably. I felt I’d acted pretty ineptly.

  Later that night I sat in my hut, still trying to tease out all the implications of what I thought I’d discovered. Then I heard some familiar rustling sounds outside. And when I smelled smoke I assumed it was Maureen doing some late-night gardening, getting rid of garden rubbish as before, maybe seeing some flames this time. I thought I’d go and have a word with her, apologise for the business with the scarecrow.

  I found her, and sure enough she was burning rubbish; but not just garden rubbish. She’d created a large bonfire, and the outer layers did indeed consist of twigs and clippings, but I could see that at the centre of the bonfire, was a stumpy heap of manila files: the patients’ case histories. And sitting on top of the fire, like a Guy Fawkes, was the now abandoned scarecrow.

  ‘What are you up to?’ I asked her as gently as I could, though I wasn’t feeling gentle.

  ‘He made me do it.’

  ‘Kincaid?’

  ‘Who else? The devil?’

  I stood watching the fire, and I thought of the line from Heinrich Heine, ‘Whenever they burn books, they will also in the end burn people,’ and I looked at the scarecrow who was turning black and folding in on himself, and I couldn’t help thinking he looked an awful lot like me.

  22

  ‘But Maureen claims that Kincaid told her to burn the files,’ I insisted.

  ‘She would say that, wouldn’t she?’ said Alicia. ‘She’s insane. She’s a pyromaniac.’

  ‘Is she?’ It was news to me. I’d seen her burning a bit of garden rubbish but that hardly seemed synonymous with pyromania.

  ‘Isn’t that just a word?’ I asked.

  ‘Let’s just say she has pyromaniac tendencies, shall we?’

  I agreed that we would say that. We were in bed together, and although we were in darkness, as usual, it was one of those rare moments when we were actually talking to each other rather than performing other verbal gymnastics. Alicia was seeming extremely sane.