Bedlam Burning

by Geoff Nicholson

  I went off to the kitchen to get some tea. Raymond and Cook were there already, and they fell over themselves to brew a fresh pot. I thanked them and took it up to the library. And that’s how it went for the rest of the day. Gregory read and I served as his waiter. It was probably as good a role for me as any. What else would I have done? Sat and watched him read?

  As I came and went I would always find a patient or two who just happened to be strolling past the library, sometimes even listening at the door, though I was baffled as to what they could be expecting to hear. Even Kincaid couldn’t keep away and he asked me if there was anything my friend needed. Like what? ‘Oh,’ said Kincaid, ‘a cushion, secretarial help, a massage, ear-plugs, an extra reading lamp.’ Irritated by this concern, I assured Kincaid that my friend had a frugal, monkish disposition: he liked silence, isolation, a hard chair, a bright overhead light. I felt like Gregory’s minder, his public relations man, his pander. These roles were far less appealing than being his waiter.

  I saw, on my visits, that Gregory’s progress through the pages was awe-inspiringly fast. I wondered if that was what came of being a schoolteacher and having to read dozens of boys’ history essays. I was impressed by his concentration and his work rate. Even so, it was obvious he had much more than a day’s work on his hands.

  At five in the afternoon he said, ‘I’m supposed to be meeting Nicola in London at half past six. I’m not going to make it. Would you ring her for me?’

  ‘No, Gregory,’ I said. ‘I think it should come from you.’

  ‘But I’m engrossed.’

  ‘Trust me. She won’t want to hear it from me.’

  Puzzled at my assessment of the situation, but willing to believe I knew more about these matters than he did, Gregory made the phone call. I stood some distance away and pretended not to be listening, but I heard him say things were very exciting and it was obvious he’d have to stay overnight. If Nicola raised any objections to this plan, and I assumed she would, Gregory did not respond to them.

  When he came off the phone I said I’d go and see about fixing up a bed for him, but he said no, that wouldn’t be necessary. He intended to continue reading right through the night. If he got too tired he’d cat-nap at the table for an hour or so, then wake up and carry on. He led me to believe he spent many nights like this at home, up all night reading history books, partly as teaching preparation, but mostly for the sheer fun of it.

  I last looked in on Gregory at a little after midnight, to tell him I was going to bed and he was on his own as far as further pots of tea were concerned. Earlier in the day he’d scarcely looked up as I’d entered or left the room, but now he gazed at me with an affection that made me uncomfortable, and he said, ‘There’s some bloody good stuff here,’ and then he hesitated, considering whether he should say the thing that was really on his mind. He decided he would. ‘I want to thank you, Mike,’ he said. ‘You’re a right good pal.’ I was deeply embarrassed and that seemed a suitable note on which to turn in for the night.

  Next morning I took a fresh pot of tea to the library. When I got there Gregory was still sitting at the library table, much as I’d left him. His eyes looked a little red, but he was wide awake and excitedly alert. He had dealt with every piece of manuscript, read every bit of writing, and arranged the pages into beautifully neat, regular stacks, and he was looking at them with a benevolent, satisfied gaze. There was an air of smug modesty about him. He had an important verdict to deliver.

  ‘Well?’ I asked.

  ‘I need to see your boss,’ he said.

  I took this as a big insult. Was I just the hired help around here? Was his judgement too grand to be shared with me?

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Anything you can say to Kincaid, you can say to me.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I was going to tell him I think you’ve done a brilliant job of inspiring this writing; I think you’ve probably shown some genius, in fact.’

  Now I felt bad, and yet I suspected that he’d deliberately planned it so I should feel bad.

  ‘If it was up to me,’ he continued, ‘I’d say let’s publish the whole bloody lot, exactly as it is, in all its sprawling majesty, don’t change a word. But knowing the publishing trade I suppose it’ll have to be trimmed down, made more palatable. But we mustn’t grumble. We don’t live in a perfect world. And I’d be right proud to do the job of trimming.’

  ‘So you think it’s publishable?’

  ‘Of course. Nicola will publish it.’

  ‘Will she?’

  ‘If I tell her to publish it, she’ll publish it.’

  He said it with a ruthless pride in his own power. He was a man who could get things done, make things happen, make his girlfriend do what he wanted. Why did that annoy me so much?

  We went along to see Kincaid and Alicia, and Gregory talked about ‘the work’ as though its importance lay somewhere between Ulysses and the Dead Sea Scrolls. He insisted that his role would merely be that of midwife, that the honour was all mine, that he intended to interfere as little as possible, simply to make sure the baby came out whole and healthy. He said he didn’t even want his name on the finished book. He was happy for it to say, ‘Edited by Gregory Collins’. Kincaid and Alicia were duly impressed by this selflessness, and by the promise of all the good work he was going to do for them, all the literary strings he was in a position to pull.

  I was obviously a little less impressed. Yes, I was glad he thought the book was publishable, glad that he’d taken on a job I’d discovered I wasn’t able to do, and I was pleased that he thought, or at least said, that I’d displayed a kind of genius, but I was still pissed off to be reminded of my own inadequacies. Why wasn’t I a man who could get things done, make things happen? Why did I need Gregory to do them for me, and through an old girlfriend of mine, as it happened. I felt I was a person more entitled to connections and power and string-pulling than Gregory was.

  I like to think I managed not to display any of this irritation and jealousy. The four of us, Kincaid, Alicia, Gregory and I, did a lot of smiling and handshaking and saying what we took to be the right thing. Then we loaded up Gregory’s car with the whole mass of manuscript. A few patients gathered, wanting to know what was going on, and Kincaid told them he believed he had assured their place in history. Alicia gave them a more prosaic, more detailed explanation, and this made them very happy indeed; a little too happy, it seemed to me. Word spread and resulted in the kind of giddy excitement that I thought was all too likely to end in tears.

  Once Gregory’s car was loaded I experienced the terrible feeling that I was losing something very valuable and personal. I knew this was unreasonable. This writing was not in any sense ‘mine’ and it wasn’t being lost. It was making its first step towards being found. Barring a car crash, car theft, Gregory not being up to the job he’d set himself, Nicola not being quite as pliant as Gregory thought she was, her company going bankrupt, and so on and so forth, the manuscript was on its way to its public. Still I couldn’t help feeling sorry to see it go. I had grown attached to it, to its physical presence.

  I tried not to think of this moment as the end of anything. As soon as possible I would convene a meeting with the patients, insist that writing was about process, not about finished product, and I’d get them writing again, begin a second accumulation, volume two maybe. And yet, in retrospect, I now think it would have been much better to accept that this was indeed an end. It might even have been an ideal moment to call it a day. I could have said my job was finished, and left with my head held high. That would have shown some style and integrity. The only problem with this bright idea was that I had nowhere to go. Was I supposed to get another writer-in-residence job in some other nut house? I felt these were few and far between, and probably I had the only such job in the whole of England. Was I supposed to go back to bookselling? Retrain as something else? As what? My career options, my life options, seemed ruinously, laughably limited.

  Perhaps, more tellin
gly, if more reluctantly, I would have had to admit that I was actually happy at the Kincaid Clinic. I had a job, a wage, somewhere to live, a girlfriend of sorts, and if I didn’t precisely have friends or a social life, at least there were ten patients I got along with reasonably well. It wasn’t the perfect life, but it was a life, as much of one as I’d ever had at university, far more of one than I’d had in London. For the first time in a long time I realised I had something to lose.

  24

  Gregory Collins had been so certain, so blithely, immodestly confident he could do what he’d promised, that I almost wanted him to fail. Almost but not quite. Now that the idea of publication had been put into all our minds, I wanted it as much as anyone else. Kincaid talked as though it was a foregone conclusion, and the patients took his word for it. I was the only one who had any concerns about the difficulties of getting a book published.

  But Gregory didn’t fail. It took a little time for the publishing machine to gather momentum. I tried to imagine Gregory persuading Nicola, then Nicola persuading her bosses, of the project’s viability; but her company was small and eccentric enough for decisions to be made quickly, and much sooner than I could have anticipated we received a formal letter from Nicola confirming that her company wanted to publish a selection of the patients’ work. They had an unexpected empty spot on their forthcoming list and this anthology was just the book they needed to fill it. This meant things would have to move fairly swiftly, which I thought was good; a taste for delayed gratification not being one of the patients’ strong suits.

  I was delighted but surprised. I never thought it was going to be that easy. The letter went on to say that a draft contract would be sent in due course. Kincaid would be able to sign it on behalf of all the patients, since as head of the clinic he was acting in loco parentis. We were told it would be a standard contract and I didn’t doubt it. Nicola surely wasn’t going to rook us. Later there would be a cover design for us to approve, and in the meantime Kincaid and I were to buckle down and get on with writing our introduction and foreword, detailing our philosophy and methods. No more than that was required of us. We could leave all the donkey work to Nicola and ‘Bob Burns’.

  I did wonder how Nicola felt about all this. Given how angry she’d been about my original impersonation of Gregory it seemed hard to believe she’d happily decided to publish a book that was built around that impersonation, but a number of possible explanations presented themselves. First, that the anger had simply worn off. That’s what anger does sometimes, and how long can you perpetuate a grudge against an old boyfriend you never cared all that much about in the first place? A second explanation might have been that Gregory was indeed the Svengali he claimed to be, that one word from him was enough to make Nicola do his bidding. That didn’t fit with my reading of either of their characters, although I knew that my character-reading could be pretty wayward. Another, perhaps more plausible, explanation presented itself: that Nicola’s desire to publish the book didn’t have anything to do with her feelings for me or for Gregory. Maybe she simply thought this was an interesting project, a worthwhile one, even a profitable one.

  The letter from Nicola made the patients very happy. What’s more, it made them behave relatively sanely, and that worried me a little, because it seemed that doing the writing hadn’t had that effect at all. It was only the prospect of seeing it in print that appeared to have done them any good, and that didn’t seem right. The relationship between cause and effect felt out of kilter. Perhaps this was publication therapy rather than writing therapy. Perhaps that was all you needed to do to cure people of their madness – just offer to publish what they wrote. But this, of course, assumed they’d been mad in the first place. To the extent that I still didn’t know whether the patients’ madness was phoney, I equally didn’t know whether their newfound (comparative) sanity was phoney either.

  Gregory was not troubled by these things. I received lots of correspondence from him. I knew he was the sort of person who wouldn’t undertake this project lightly, but even so I was surprised by his intensity. He sent me letters, memos, pages of notes, detailing the progress of his editing. He saw myriad possibilities, he spotted great literary themes and parallels in the work; one letter of his invoked Jung, Pindar and both John Fords. Although I was pleased that he was keeping me informed, I had the feeling these communications weren’t really for my benefit, but rather for the benefit of future scholars who might want to know precisely how he’d gone about his task; a feeling that was confirmed when he informed me he was keeping carbon copies.

  At the end of every bit of communication, Gregory wrote in large energetic letters, SEND ME MORE, and the patients were only too happy to oblige. Every day a new pile of writing would appear; and every couple of days I’d bundle it up and send it off to Gregory. I never dispatched it without first having read it, but I no longer gave it the sort of attention I once had. There seemed no reason to. This writing was no longer mine. It belonged to Gregory and to the world at large; at least some of it did, the parts that Gregory would edit and approve and include in the anthology. The patients knew this as well as I did, and now they treated me as little more than a messenger through whom they could gain access to Bob Burns.

  If anything the writing became even more manic. In person the patients may have behaved with a new restraint, but on paper they raved more extravagantly than ever. There was hideous sex and violence, idiotic confessions, paranoia, mystical druggy outpourings, castration anxiety, crazed word play, retellings of Gawain and the Green Knight and Black Beauty – the whole shebang. They were playing to a new audience, and Gregory just lapped it up. Each new batch of writing raised him to higher levels of excitement, and sometimes that worried me too.

  I suppose it was because when you got right down to it I wasn’t sure I shared his lofty estimation of the writing. I wasn’t sure it was really as good or as fascinating as he was claiming. I liked it well enough, felt attached to it, but that was for personal reasons, and I thought that Gregory’s claims for it were at best excessive and over-optimistic, at worst pretentious, ridiculous and just plain wrong.

  Was this sour grapes? Was I angry because Gregory could detect literary quality where I’d only detected insanity? Did it piss me off that he was a better ‘literary critic’ than I was? I suppose the simple answer had to be yes. I could partly console myself by saying that I’d been too close to things, that it was easier for an outsider to come in and see them more clearly; but that didn’t mean I wasn’t pissed off. But neither did it mean that I wanted the book to fail. I didn’t. I wanted it to be good. I wanted Gregory to be right, even though I didn’t think he was.

  I couldn’t express my doubts to anyone; certainly not to Gregory or Kincaid, and not even to Alicia. Things had been going very well between her and me. She still wouldn’t admit we were having a relationship or anything like that, but her nocturnal visits had become more frequent and she was hardly ever angry with me these days. We continued to have highly verbal sex in which I was increasingly called upon to play the part of a sex-crazed lunatic. Was that a bit sick? No doubt it was, but what was I supposed to do? Say to Alicia, ‘I’m sorry, but I can only have normal, healthy, conventional sex with you.’? If I’d survived her initial fury I’d never have survived her demands that I define normal, healthy and conventional.

  There was only one occasion when Alicia really disturbed me. It was night. I’d been up in the library looking for a book to read. By this time I’d pretty much exhausted the resources of the Ruth Harris selection, so it took me a while to find anything. I finally settled on a biography of General Gordon. When I got back to my hut all the lights were out, and that seemed odd because I was sure I’d left them on. I thought maybe a fuse had blown. But then I saw the door was wide open and I’d definitely closed it. Someone had obviously entered the hut and turned off the light, and I naturally wondered why, and whether they were still there in the dark. Something told me they were. I stood at the open
door and listened.

  I could hear movement, the heavy sigh of the mattress on my sofabed, a regular, sexual rhythm; and I heard a voice, a familiar one, Alicia’s, and she was saying things (or at least variations on things) I had heard her say before: coprophemic utterances, dirty talk, obscenities, words of profane sexual encouragement. ‘That’s right, that’s right you filthy fucking lunatic, lick my cunt, suck it, devour it, stretch it, stick your tongue in, your fingers, stick your whole hand …’ And much more in a similar vein. And who, I wondered, was being sexually encouraged? I ran through an entire cast list of possibilities: all the patients, both male and female. Which one would she have chosen? Or maybe she wasn’t with just one; maybe there were three or four of them in there, both sexes, all persuasions, all enjoying the pleasures of Alicia’s filthy mouth. Maybe she was at the centre of one of Charles Manning’s orgies.

  Now wait a minute, hold on, I thought. This was getting out of hand. Alicia was supposed to be the one with the over-active imagination, not me. But in any event, whatever the cast, she’d seen fit to bring them back to my bed. Why had she done that? Was that meant as the final insult, the ultimate slap in my face, and was that some extra turn on for her?

  I tried to think of what to do or say. I couldn’t come up with anything rational. I didn’t feel entirely in control of myself. On automatic pilot, angry yet vulnerable, scared yet reckless, I stormed into the hut, switched on the overhead light, ready for the disgusting pornographic spectacle in my bed. But I was disappointed, or rather I was extremely pleased, since it seemed the light had chased away all the filthy images, all the sexual demons. Alicia was quite alone in my bed, between the sheets, apparently naked but completely covered, and she was masturbating and she was addressing her filth to the empty air above her. Her eyes, freed from their hornrims, squinted in the light. She was surprised to see me but not embarrassed. ‘Turn the light off. Get in here and fuck me, you madman.’ I did as I was told.