Bedlam Burning

by Geoff Nicholson

  She went on, ‘I don’t even understand how she was able to get at the files. Weren’t they locked away in the filing cabinet?’

  ‘The filing cabinet had been broken open.’

  ‘By Maureen?’

  ‘No, by Anders.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  I could have repeated Anders’ own version about him searching for pictures, but I wanted the story to sound more convincing than that. ‘Habit?’ I suggested. ‘Maybe he’s a man who likes breaking and entering.’

  She didn’t find that psychologically very plausible either. ‘It’s very odd,’ she said.

  ‘Aren’t there copies of the files?’ I asked. ‘Duplicates?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. If the medical profession kept duplicate copies of every bit of paper it produced, nobody would ever find anything.’

  ‘But the information in them must exist in some other form, surely?’

  ‘If it’s in a different form, then by definition it’s different information.’

  ‘But presumably you and Dr Kincaid between you could reconstruct the files.’

  ‘Presumably we could. But why would we want to? We already know what we know. What would be the point?’

  ‘Maybe so that other people could share what you know.’

  ‘You, for instance.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but not only me.’

  ‘How about this for an option, Gregory? Why don’t you reconstruct your own version of the files? Why don’t you write down what you know? It would be every bit as valid as what Dr Kincaid and I might do.’

  ‘That’s surely not true,’ I said. ‘There are all sorts of things I don’t know about them.’

  ‘And so you want to believe in some external authority, some files, some case histories, some text that will solve everything, remove all doubt, tell you everything you need to know. It sounds simultaneously naive and fundamentalist to me, Gregory.’

  ‘Does it?’ I asked. I really wasn’t sure any more.

  ‘Yes, it does,’ said Alicia. ‘You know, the ability to live with an amount of doubt and uncertainty is a fairly reasonable definition of maturity and mental health in my book.’

  I wanted to feel mature and mentally healthy, and it certainly appeared that I had no choice in the matter. The files were gone, and it was entirely my fault. Who knew whether they’d really have contained the great doubt-quenching revelation I’d been hoping for, but any such revelation would now have to come from some other source.

  When Kincaid eventually talked to me about it he took a different line from Alicia. He stuck to the story that he’d had no part in the burning of the files and, given how upset he seemed, I was at least somewhat inclined to believe him.

  ‘This is a great blow,’ he said. ‘Documentation is very important in our work. As a writer you understand that.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said.

  ‘But there may be something good to be salvaged, and I think you’ll soon see what. You’ll see that we have at our disposal another, far more telling form of documentation.’

  ‘We do?’

  ‘The patients’ own writing,’ he said triumphantly.

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said, but I’m sure I didn’t sound convinced. Given the nature of the patients’ writing, and its strenuous anonymity, I couldn’t see how it was any sort of equivalent to, or replacement for, files and case histories.

  Kincaid saw I was perplexed and said, ‘Gregory, I think it’s time to publish.’

  ‘Publish?’

  ‘Yes, Gregory. I want to see the patients’ literary efforts in print. A thickish volume: a preface from me, an introduction from you, an afterword by R. D. Laing or some such. It would be a sort of anthology to show how the clinic’s work took these mad people on a literary journey into sanity. It would look good on both our CVs. And it would do the clinic no end of good when it comes to applying for grants.’

  ‘Are you sure we’re ready?’ I said.

  ‘We’ve got many thousands of pages cluttering up the library. Don’t tell me we don’t have enough material.’

  ‘We have the quantity, yes, but—’

  ‘Come, come, Gregory. You submit it to a publisher and they publish it. I don’t know precisely how these things are done, but I’m sure you do. You’re the professional. You must have your contacts.’

  ‘I suppose,’ I said.

  ‘Good. Then I’ll leave you to sort out the chapter and verse, and I look forward to the publication party. These things don’t normally take very long, do they?’

  I couldn’t believe Kincaid’s grasp on the way publishing worked was quite as slight as he pretended, and I wondered if this was his way of taunting and torturing me. Perhaps he knew I’d been trying to get into the files and he was saying, all right, if you think the written word is so meaningful, let’s see if you can give some meaning to the patients’ outpourings.

  ‘You’ll find Alicia and I and the patients are right behind you on this one,’ he said.

  He was right. Alicia came to me again that night and said she was delighted at what I was doing for the patients, that she was proud of me. The patients seemed proud too. Word of what I had apparently agreed to do was already all round the clinic. Raymond’s coffee deliveries became more frequent. Max slipped me a half-bottle of rum. Charity rolled me some of the fattest joints I’d ever seen. Byron offered me words of literary encouragement, and Anders said if there was any little problem I was having he’d be happy to sort it out for me. I thought I’d better do something.

  I was aware that this was a distraction from the real problems I’d been wrestling with, about the patients, about Alicia, about the point of Kincaidian Therapy, and I was also aware it might be a smokescreen. Yet I found myself welcoming the distraction. If I could neither prove nor disprove anything about the patients’ madness or sanity, it might be as well to get on with something else. I would be mature and healthy, and live with doubt, as Alicia had recommended. And even if I was taking that recommendation from someone who might not herself be an absolute model of mental health, that was all right too.

  My knowledge of the publishing world was hardly encyclopaedic, but one thing I was sure of, you couldn’t just bundle up this mass of writing, the raw material that rested on the library shelves, send it off to the publisher and hope for the best; well, you could, but it would be sent straight back, probably unread.

  It needed editing, though I wasn’t sure what form that editing should take. Even though I’d come to think of the writing as some vast continuum, that didn’t mean it was utterly homogenous and indivisible. Some bits were definitely ‘better’ than others. There were pieces that stood up on their own as memoirs or interior monologues or fantasies or even, at a pinch, as experimental short stories. I saw that it might indeed be possible, with judicious editing, to put these pieces together and form an anthology that was no worse than many collections of new writing by new writers.

  The disadvantage of doing it that way was all too obvious. Whatever else these pieces were, they weren’t simply new writing by new writers. Whatever doubts I might have about the authenticity of the patients’ madness, it was obviously impossible to send this anthology off into the world and expect it to compete on equal terms in the world of literature. If the patients were mad, even if they were only pretending to be mad, the anthology had to show that. It had to show the insanity, the mania, the obsession, the sex, the violence, the banality – the whole works.

  And if that was the case, I should try to make the selection as genuinely representative as possible. Choosing the ‘best’ stuff therefore seemed inappropriate. A true picture of what was going on in the clinic would of necessity include much that was tedious and repetitive and downright incompetent. But that raised other objections. I didn’t want this anthology to be just a freak show, the literary equivalent of going along to Bedlam to gawp at the amusing lunatics. I knew I had a job on my hands.

  I went to the library and spent th
e whole of the next week reading and rereading, arranging and rearranging, ordering and reordering the vast textual resources at my disposal. Very little of it was quite as I had recalled. My mind had played odd little tricks. The stuff that I’d thought of as being rather good now seemed nowhere near as good as I remembered, while some of the stuff I’d initially imagined could be dismissed out of hand, didn’t seem too bad at all.

  I organised the writing into piles all around the library. I began simply enough with groupings of yes, no and maybe; but I soon found the maybes were becoming far and away the biggest group. I found it hard to reject anything, hard to accept anything. I tried some thematic groupings: divided the writings into those about sex, violence, childhood, time, mortality, fantasy, obsession. But these categories refused to hold. Everything was related to everything else. There were fantasies about sex and violence, pieces that fretted about time and mortality, pieces that were obsessed with childhood.

  I started to worry about my own prejudices too. If I only included pieces I liked, I might be turning the selection into a picture of my own tastes. That was no good. And was I being unfair? Perhaps I liked some patients’ writing better than others. How would those patients feel who were under-represented or even omitted from the anthology altogether? Would it make them hate me? Would they take some sort of mad revenge? For a moment I thought perhaps I should just offer each patient twenty or thirty pages of the anthology and say, ‘These pages are yours, do what you like with them.’ But that obviously wasn’t going to work either, not given their continuing desire for anonymity.

  I began to wonder whether some sort of arbitrary sampling mightn’t be appropriate, that I should just take sections at random, perhaps using some mechanical means of selection, dice maybe, and slam them together to make a collage or cut up. It could certainly be construed as fair, and the finished article would no doubt be convincingly experimental and demented. No, that didn’t seem good enough but, then again, neither did anything else.

  By the end of the week chaos had overtaken both the library and my head. My thoughts were as shuffled and as disarrayed as the mass of paper now strewn all over every part of the library shelves, floor, tables and chairs. I no longer felt able to make any judgements, literary or otherwise. I was too close. Everything seemed to be of a piece. Yes, some bits might briefly seem better written or more coherent than others, but what did that mean? What were the values I was attaching to good, better and best? Wasn’t I imposing my will, my narrow ideas of what constituted sanity? I was striving for clarity, for coherence, but after a while that seemed meaningless too. Maybe incoherence was the whole point.

  Time passed, words swirled around me. I drank lots of coffee, got wired, smoked a little dope to smooth off the edges, drank some of Max’s rum to make myself feel more relaxed. None of it did much good.

  When Kincaid eventually stuck his head round the door late one night I was confused, cranky, manic and just about ready to admit defeat, but I knew he wouldn’t let me do anything so pathetic. He expressed his continuing, unshakeable confidence in my abilities. He looked at the mass of disorganised paper and said, ‘Yes, this is a learning experience for me. You’re showing me how form comes out of chaos.’ I wanted to hit him. He must have sensed this, or at least detected some frantic, weary desperation in me, and he added, ‘You know, Gregory, you shouldn’t be too proud to ask for help.’

  The man was right again. I decided to call Gregory Collins.

  23

  What else was there to do? As I had quite effectively proved to myself, I was no editor, no anthologiser and, in reality, as far as I knew, neither was Gregory Collins, but who else could I turn to? Nicola? Dr Bentley? Oh sure. So I decided I’d ask Gregory to help me. I’d ask him to take a look at the patients’ work. And if he found the material as intractable as I did, then all well and good, we’d tell Kincaid that this whole anthology idea was a bad one and we’d put it behind us. It would be admitting failure. It would be disappointing quite a few people, but at least if we admitted defeat together I wouldn’t look like such a complete loser.

  I called Gregory at his school, and explained myself. He was flattered to be asked, and unnaturally excited at the prospect. The school holidays were about to start and he was driving down to London to spend a couple of weeks with Nicola. Things were ‘champion’ between them. He told me this rather less sheepishly than I thought courtesy demanded and I was a little surprised too to find he was either a car driver or a car owner. He looked like a man with public transport written all over him. Anyway, he said it would be simple enough for him to drive down to Brighton for the afternoon and cast his eye over the material for this putative anthology.

  I tried to describe the vast quantity of writing and its capacity to provoke despair, but I couldn’t make him understand, and after a while I stopped trying. If he really thought he could just breeze in and assimilate this whole mess in one afternoon, he had a shock coming. We set a date for his visit. I asked him to indulge me and to get there as early as he could, just in case the job proved to be bigger than he was anticipating, and grudgingly he agreed.

  Now I had to invent a fake identity for Gregory. Alicia, of course, had once been in the same room as him, at the reading I’d done in Ruth Harris’s bookshop. They’d never spoken, never been introduced, and I had the feeling she might not remember him at all, but to be on the safe side I kept the name he’d invented for himself then, Bob Burns. If Alicia started asking questions about how I now came to be friends with someone who had then been a complete stranger, I could either say that we’d become friends since the reading, or even, if I needed to get wildly inventive, that he’d been a friend all along and I’d planted him in the audience to say nice things about me. But Alicia was neither inquisitive nor suspicious. I explained to her and to Kincaid, and eventually even to the patients, that this was a friend of mine who had unfailing literary judgement, and who was kind enough to come along and help me. Nobody doubted me. Kincaid said it was no bad thing to have a second opinion, but he warned that I shouldn’t be too easily influenced by an outside source, that I should ensure the project remained ‘ours’, by which I assumed he meant ‘his’.

  News of the impending arrival of ‘Bob Burns’ produced a flurry of creativity in the patients. In the days before his visit they produced a further few hundred pages, pages I could barely bring myself to read. They were about to become Gregory’s problem.

  He arrived in his car exactly on time. Kincaid was there at the gate waiting to let him in. I was a bit miffed at this, considering the ignominy of my own arrival. Wouldn’t a few hours in a padded cell have been as perfect a welcome for Gregory as they had been for me?

  Why did I feel hostile towards Gregory? It was easy to think of reasons, not all of them very good ones, and none of them very noble. Perhaps I was resentful that he could do what I couldn’t; that he really was what I was only pretending to be: a writer. And now I would owe him something. He was doing me a favour by coming to the clinic. I had every reason to be grateful to him, and gratitude is the most difficult and troubling of emotions. And then there was Nicola. Did I wish I was spending two weeks in London with Nicola? No, definitely, positively not, and yet I still didn’t much like the idea of her spending two weeks with Gregory. It wasn’t that I thought, If I can’t have her then nobody can; I just thought that Gregory shouldn’t be the one to have her. He didn’t deserve her. He wasn’t good enough.

  The situation was only made worse when I saw that Nicola seemed to be having some beneficial influence on him. I saw he looked less like a nerd than he used to. The hair had grown and been styled, the clothes weren’t so conspicuously unhip. He still didn’t look like anybody’s Prince Charming but he was much improved.

  Before he’d even got out of his car he said to me, ‘Nicola sends her love.’

  ‘Really?’ I couldn’t believe she would have sent me anything so warm and unequivocal.

  ‘Really,’ he said. ‘She’s not b
itter, not any more.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Her job’s going well, and she’s been promoted. She’s an editor there now, and things are great between her and me, so she’s got nothing to be bitter about, has she?’

  I wanted to say that she never did have anything to be bitter about, that only I was entitled to be bitter.

  ‘Yes, well, send her my love in return,’ was all I said.

  ‘I’ll do that.’

  Gregory was introduced as Bob Burns. He exchanged pleasantries with Kincaid and Alicia, then I led him through the clinic up to the library. He showed no curiosity as he passed through the building, showed no uneasiness at finding himself in an asylum, but as we walked I was aware of patients lurking in corridors and stairwells and doorways, pretending they were just there by chance, just happening to catch a glimpse of my pal the littérateur, the man who had the power to transmit their work to a waiting world.

  It was with a peculiar, perhaps a perverse, pride that I showed Gregory into the library. Even an unemotional, dour Yorkshireman like Gregory would surely be impressed by the sheer quantity of paper, the sheer number of words he was going to have to deal with. But Gregory saw it all set out, spread out on the library shelves and table and floor, and he showed no signs of being impressed or surprised or challenged by the size of the task ahead. All he said was, ‘What I need you to do is fetch me a big pot of tea, and keep it coming at regular intervals. All right?’

  ‘All right,’ I said grudgingly.

  He sat down at the library table, without taking his coat off, and he started to read the first page that happened to come to hand. I could see it was one of the more disgustingly violent pieces, and I was about to explain that this maybe wasn’t the ideal place to start. But Gregory hushed me and said something about not wanting to have his primary response tainted, and after that his concentration was so awesomely fierce it was as though I, the library, the clinic, the world, had ceased to exist for him.