Bedlam Burning

by Geoff Nicholson

  ‘You’ve earned a drink,’ said Max and he lurched over and handed me the whisky.

  It took quite an effort to prise my fingers loose from the edge of the parapet to take the whisky bottle, but I was in need of courage, of having my nerves steadied. The first mouthful didn’t do much, so I took another.

  ‘Things look very different from up here, don’t they?’ Max said.

  Well, yes. They looked terrifying. The ground appeared to be a million miles away. ‘Different,’ I said, ‘but not necessarily better.’

  ‘Everything looks better after you’ve remodelled your consciousness a little,’ Max said.

  Obviously I hadn’t done enough remodelling. The faces that looked up at us were hard to read but I knew Max was right; as a spectacle, as a drama, this episode was going to be far more satisfying to them if one or both of us tumbled from the roof. I was determined not to give anyone that satisfaction. I sat very still, made no sudden moves, while Max made nothing but sudden moves.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down?’ I said. ‘You’re making me very nervous.’

  ‘Oh well, I can’t be responsible for your nervousness, can I?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You’re entirely responsible.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Max, and this was an entirely new thought. He didn’t like the feeling of responsibility and he looked as though he felt bad about it. I, however, was starting to feel a little better. The benefits of the whisky were kicking in: a warmth, a glow, an unjustified feeling of moderate well-being.

  ‘You’re probably wondering why I’m out here on the roof,’ Max said.

  ‘Because you’re drunk?’

  Max looked at me and seemed disappointed. ‘I sometimes wonder if you’re as thick as you pretend,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure I am,’ I said.

  ‘I’m here because it’s as good a place as any,’ Max said, as though this explained everything.

  ‘I can think of better places,’ I said.

  ‘All right, yes, I suppose I can think of better too: Harry’s Bar, the Deux Magots, the Moon Under Water. But within the Kincaid Clinic, at least until they open a cocktail lounge or a snug, this place is as good as any.’

  ‘If it’s as good as any, then why not come inside?’

  ‘You have so much to learn, Gregory.’

  ‘That’s what everyone tells me.’

  Max offered me the bottle again. There was now only a little left in it. I drank half of what remained and passed it back for him to finish off. He drained it, then fished in his pocket and produced another bottle. ‘When I stated that one place is as good as any other,’ he said, ‘what I meant is that we’re all in hell, each in our own personal versions of hell that accompany us wherever we go. Alcohol doesn’t get you out of hell, but it occasionally deceives you into believing that you’re only in purgatory.’

  ‘I’m sure you don’t really believe that,’ I said.

  ‘Why would I say it if I didn’t believe it?’

  ‘I think it may be the drink talking,’ I replied.

  ‘You want to see something?’ he asked.

  When you’re sitting on the roof of an asylum with a drunken inmate and he asks you if you want to see something, you tend to be a little hesitant. There are so many things he might want to show you that you just wouldn’t want to see, especially after the penis incident. So I said, ‘Possibly’, and he put down the whisky, frugged up to the other end of the parapet and came back cradling something in the crook of his left arm.

  ‘What have you got?’ I asked.

  He turned towards me and I saw he held a bird’s nest. He carried it in both hands, as delicately as his lack of motor co-ordination permitted, and he offered it to me. I hesitated again. Why on earth would I have wanted it? Then I saw what it contained. There were four tiny birds sitting in the hollow of the nest. They were naked and their ragged open beaks looked bigger than their bodies. They seemed embryonic and macabre, and they were screeching at me, at the world, with a shrill impotence. I still couldn’t see what I’d want with them, so I refused Max’s gift and he took a couple of steps away from me.

  ‘Shouldn’t you put them back where you got them?’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘In case you drop them.’

  ‘I’m not going to drop them.’

  He reached into the nest and plucked out one of the noisy little things, as though it were a bite-sized morsel of dough. He weighed it in the palm of his hand for a moment, and then with a whip of his arm, flung the baby bird out into darkness, off the roof. There was a horrible thin splat somewhere below, out of sight, but this time the onlookers didn’t react.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ I demanded.

  ‘No reason,’ he said, and he picked out a second little creature.

  ‘If it’s for no reason, then why do it?’

  He considered this. ‘OK, then I guess it must be for a reason.’

  ‘Oh come on, Max, stop it.’

  ‘Stop what?’

  He hurled the second bird down at the ground. There was another distant impact.

  ‘Don’t you think it must be kind of satisfying,’ Max said, ‘to be one of these birds? You’re sitting there in your nest when godlike fingers grab you, raise you up, spirit you away; then you’re flying through the air, you have a feeling of exhilaration, speed, wind. Then contact. Then nothing. Oblivion. That sounds OK. It sounds better than my life.’

  ‘Nobody’s killing you though, are they, Max?’

  ‘Aren’t they? Aren’t they? I think I’ve been wrong all this time. I thought I was drinking in order to remodel my consciousness. Now I think I was doing it because I really was depressed, like Kincaid thought. Alcohol sometimes helps, but not always. Sometimes it just makes everything worse. But I have a new therapy. Killing things. That never fails to make me feel better.’

  I was angry, not only because I disapproved (in a wishy-washy liberal way, no doubt) of cruelty to animals, but because I also disliked the pleasure Max was taking in that cruelty, more so since he was using his own condition, his own anguish, as a justification.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re so upset about,’ Max said. ‘They’re only birds. It’s not as if they had souls or anything.’

  ‘It’s not about souls,’ I said.

  ‘Then?’

  I found myself saying something I knew was going to sound absurd. ‘If the birds were trying to kill you then I’d try to stop them, just like I’m trying to stop you killing them.’

  I was imagining some sort of Hitchcockian scenario with flocks of flappy scavengers appearing out of a clear sky and swooping down horribly on Max’s cranium.

  ‘You’d try to save me, would you?’ said Max. ‘And how’d you do that? By reasoning with the birds? Or did you have some sort of physical intervention in mind?’

  The truth was I didn’t have anything in mind at all, yet when Max made a move to fling the third bird off the roof, I found myself standing upright, taking a couple of shaky steps along the parapet towards him, determined to do something, and I did manage to get half a hand on his throwing arm. It wasn’t enough. Despite my intervention the bird was thrown, much as before, but because I’d grabbed Max’s arm the throw was less powerful than the previous two. The descent was slower, the impact less of a splat, the death perhaps less instantaneous. Not at all what I’d intended.

  Down below the patients were getting restless. Even if they couldn’t make out exactly what was happening up on the parapet, they knew some kind of conflict was in progress. This stirred them powerfully.

  ‘Be careful, Gregory,’ Alicia called out, and I was touched.

  ‘One left,’ Max said to me. ‘Are you going to fight me for it?’

  I didn’t suppose I was. Standing upright on the parapet was already more than I’d ever bargained for. I had no intention of getting into a fight, not up there in those conditions where the loser, or even the winner, might fall to the same fate as the fledgelings.

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nbsp; ‘We don’t have to fight,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you just put the nest back and stop behaving like a twat.’

  That surprised him, and maybe it surprised me. I’d gone up there to reason with him, not to abuse him, but the situation had brought out the Anders in me.

  ‘Do you really care about this?’ he said.

  ‘I suppose I do.’

  ‘You care more about this bird than you do about me?’

  I’d had enough of Max’s self-pity.

  ‘Oh fuck off, Max. Stop being pathetic.’

  ‘You’re right. I’ll stop being pathetic.’

  He took a step towards me and I thought he might be about to call it a day and climb in through the window, but that wasn’t what he had in mind at all. He handed me the nest and then he walked off the roof. It was brilliantly undramatic. He simply took a step into the air. I was so taken aback, so horrified, that I almost lost my own footing. But not quite. I wobbled, then sat down on the parapet, holding on with one hand, clutching the nest with the other. The single remaining fledgeling squawked up at me and didn’t seem even slightly grateful.

  At ground level, all hell was breaking loose. I hadn’t seen Max’s fall. I’d been too scared, too concerned with self-preservation, to watch. Now I looked down and saw that he hadn’t made it to the ground. There’d been no fatal impact, scarcely an impact of any kind. Anders had been there for him. Anders had not only broken Max’s fall, he’d actually managed to catch the drunken sot as he fell, and he was now holding him in his arms, pieta` style. It took all of us a long, frozen moment to see what had happened. Even Anders seemed not to be quite sure what he’d done or how; but then he clicked, and the moment he realised he was cradling Max, he said to him, ‘If I ever catch you doing anything like this again I’ll break your fucking neck,’ and he let him drop to the ground. Max landed heavily and stayed there, looking surprisingly comfortable, like any drunk who’s found a good place to crash out. Anders walked away in disgust.

  Kincaid squatted down beside Max, ran his hands over him, frisking him for a pulse and broken bones. He found the former and not the latter, so he stood up and turned away. Nothing here was worthy of his attention.

  ‘Is he all right?’ I called down.

  ‘He’ll live,’ said Kincaid, sounding disappointed.

  A handful of patients gathered up Max and carried him inside the clinic. The rest dribbled away, like the last stragglers at a party broken up by the police. I felt left out, and was experiencing a sense of anticlimax, feeling both guilty and foolish. I wondered where Alicia was.

  ‘The drink must have relaxed him, cushioned his fall,’ Kincaid shouted to me. ‘It does, you know.’

  Usually yes, but now in my own case the effects of the alcohol had worn off completely. I was not relaxed. I felt paralysed. I wasn’t sure I’d ever find a way down from the roof. I didn’t know what to do with the bird’s nest.

  ‘You’ll probably want to stay up there for a while,’ Kincaid called. ‘You’ll have a lot to think about.’

  It was true, I did. I asked myself why the patients were behaving this way. Well, you could have claimed that the process of writing had been incredibly therapeutic, so the moment it stopped, the patients went crazy again. But I didn’t really accept that. I thought it was more about attention. While the patients had been writing, they’d been given loads of attention, first by me, then by Gregory. Now that the writing had stopped they needed to draw attention to themselves in other ways. But the publication of a book is another way of gaining attention, and I hoped that when the book came out they’d calm down again.

  I suppose there must have been page proofs or galleys but I never saw them. I saw nothing until the finished copies and I think I preferred it that way. A box of twenty books was duly delivered to the clinic just before publication. Kincaid seized the box as though it were a bomb that needed defusing. Only when he was sure that the box and the books were all they seemed, did he distribute the copies, doling them out, one to each of us, like some medical Santa Claus. The patients formed a celebratory, self-congratulatory scrum, but I didn’t feel able to join them. I took my copy and retired to my hut with it.

  Once I was alone I found myself weighing the volume in my hand, staring at it, sniffing the paper and binding, then placing it on the desk, setting it in different positions and at different angles, trying to see it as others might see it. I thought it looked handsome enough, authentic enough, like a real book, and yet I was aware of a nagging and shameful sense of disappointment. At the time I found this inexplicable but with hindsight I’ve concluded it was because although it was a perfectly real and presentable book, the thing we’d been waiting for all along, it was still only a book, just a single object in a world of other objects. I had wanted it to be more special than that. I had wanted it to be unique, to glow with a sort of heavenly light.

  Things only got worse when I tried to read it. Despite all the correspondence Gregory had sent me, I had only the vaguest sense of what the book would actually contain. All its contents would surely be familiar to me, since I had read them so to speak at source, but I had only a patchy idea of what Gregory had finally included, and really no idea at all how the material had been arranged or structured. Shall we just say I was even more disappointed?

  For all Gregory’s fine words and professed hard work, it appeared to me he’d done a pretty sloppy job. It wasn’t so much that he’d taken pieces at random, a strategy that I could see had some validity to it, but rather that he’d wilfully chosen some of the patients’ least good work. The book seemed to be a series of unconnected, not to say disconnected, lumps of scrappy, ragged prose. Most of them were very short indeed and rather crudely hacked about. Stories started and stopped in mid-flow, occasionally in mid-sentence and with no apparent rhyme or reason. Then, to make matters worse, there was no logic to the arrangement, no patterning, no shape, no interesting juxtapositions. Yes, it was in some sense representative. There was sex and violence and anagrams and football matches and true facts and spiritual ruminations, but the examples he’d chosen weren’t the best ones. It was just a mess. What in God’s name did Gregory think he was up to?

  Now that I looked at this shoddy finished product I was absolutely sure I could have done a better job myself – I certainly couldn’t have done a worse one. Why had I been so feeble as to think that Gregory was any better than me? I felt angry with myself as much as with him. Why hadn’t I had a bit more self-confidence, a bit more arrogance?

  And yet I knew I had to put these feelings behind me, or at least keep them to myself. Bitching about the editing could only make me look bad and, besides, I didn’t want to spoil everybody else’s fun. Kincaid and Alicia, the patients, even the porters and the nurse weren’t experiencing any of my ambivalence. They were all totally in love with the book. They thought it was wonderful, simply wonderful. The jacket was great, the paper it was printed on was great, the typeface, the endpapers, the glue, all were towering achievements of British publishing. Everyone was besotted with the mere existence of the book. And somehow that made it easier for me to put my doubts, my literary objections, aside. I just smiled at everyone and told myself that perhaps it was enough to cherish the idea of the book without even having to think about its reality or its contents.

  In retrospect, I find it hard to remember what I thought would happen once Disorders was published. I suppose most people who have books published entertain fantasies or even, God help them, expectations that their books will become instant hits, will top the bestseller lists, that they themselves will become stars, be interviewed by all the right newspapers and magazines, that they’ll be invited on to radio, even TV. Being on TV was a much, much bigger deal in those days than it is now.

  My own hopes and expectations were different. My first intuition was that the book was all too likely to fall into the bottomless pit of neglect that consumes so many books. I thought we’d probably get a couple of short reviews, perhaps one in the local pap
er and another in some respectable but small circulation literary journal, and that would be the extent of it. I imagined these reviews would be friendly. Even if the reviewers hated the book, which I now thought they had every right to, they were surely going to be kind, weren’t they? It would take a very hard critic indeed to badmouth the inmates of the Kincaid Clinic. Why kick an author when he or she was already incarcerated in an asylum?

  In many ways I would have been happy with this limited reception, since I was well aware that the more publicity the book got, the greater the likelihood of my exposure, and I still very much didn’t want to be exposed. I knew it would have to come sooner or later, but I kept saying to myself, not now, not yet.

  It appeared that Kincaid was also conspiring to maintain the book’s decent obscurity. To nobody’s surprise, he had decreed that the patients needed protecting from the excesses of the mass media. They wouldn’t be allowed to do any of the usual publicity activities, even if they were invited to. There’d be no going off to do interviews, no bookshop appearances, no readings, no visits to local radio stations. He wasn’t going to let them go out in the world to be blitzed by created images. Bulkhead or no, they still weren’t ready for that.

  The book’s first mention in print had been in a trade magazine, noting that Gregory Collins, author of The Wax Man, that highly promising, if undoubtedly flawed, first novel, had now edited a collection of writings by the mentally ill. The tone suggested the book was an interesting and worthy project but not one to set the literary world alight.

  The clipping came through the post with a compliments slip initialled by Nicola and, to my surprise, more soon followed. The real reviewers got to work, and things started to happen. My expectations had been pitifully modest. The book was reviewed far more widely and in far more prestigious places than I could possibly have imagined. I’m not pretending we were up there competing with Anthony Burgess and Iris Murdoch, but a lot of literary editors seemed to think this was a book to be taken seriously, a book that mattered. More than that, reviewers actually liked the book, liked it a lot more than kindness to the mentally ill would have demanded or accounted for.