Bedlam Burning

by Geoff Nicholson

  As I’ve said throughout, I knew this deception couldn’t go on for ever. I knew a day of reckoning was on its way, and I knew that day would be painful and shaming; but Bentley’s presence promised to make it painful and shaming in ways I had never imagined.

  I told myself I could deal with my own humiliation, but what I really cared about were Kincaid, Alicia and the patients. Whatever resentments I felt towards Kincaid, I had no desire to make him a complete and public laughing stock. How could he be taken seriously if he couldn’t tell the real Gregory Collins from an impostor, and that went for Alicia too, since she was the one who’d recruited me. And as for the patients, insane or not, malingerers or not, this was potentially their moment of triumph. I didn’t want to let them down. So I desperately hoped I could hold things together just a little bit longer, a couple more hours until this ‘literary evening’ was over, until the visitors had gone. After that it didn’t matter; then I’d be willing to be exposed and vilified, and drummed out of the clinic. But how was I going to get through those essential couple of hours?

  Chiefly by hiding, I hoped. I’d remain a back-room boy. If I could manage to show my face to the patients while keeping it out of sight of Bentley, I thought I might get away with it. Just about. Maybe.

  I left the library and took a slinking, circuitous route to the small office next to the lecture room, which was where the patients were already congregating, using the place as a dressingroom, although with the exception of Raymond, who’d somehow managed to obtain a pair of glittering false eyelashes, a candy floss wig and an air hostess’s tartan uniform, they weren’t doing much dressing up. They were tightly wound, however, pacing or twitching or being uncharacteristically vivacious, but none of them was tenser than me. Anders even came over and said, ‘I don’t know what you’re looking so tense about. You don’t have to go out there and read this crap.’

  That was true and it gave me some small cause for optimism. I stayed with the patients for the hour or so it took Kincaid to welcome the visitors, lecture them and give them the tour of the clinic. I wanted to be a reassuring presence, and I demonstrated some breathing exercises I’d learned in my days of amateur dramatics.

  Then we heard the visitors coming along the corridor and entering the lecture room. The office door opened unexpectedly and Alicia came in, saw me looking terrified and said, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘First-night nerves,’ I said.

  Perhaps she thought this was a good enough explanation, perhaps not; either way there was no time to discuss it. She told us the patients were needed ‘on stage’. Alicia escorted them out of the office. Sita was going along with them even though she wasn’t reading, so I remained behind, alone, as nervous as I could ever remember being.

  Once everyone was settled in place in the lecture room, I crept along the corridor and listened at the door. I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear every word. It started well enough. Maureen read a bucolic piece about growing up in rural Lancashire in the 1900s. Then Anders delivered the shaving passage, then Raymond read a description of a football match. His outfit didn’t really fit with his account of pincer movements, long balls and crunching tackles, but I thought he got away with it. They all read well, just as we’d rehearsed. Sometimes they sounded hesitant, sometimes they gabbled a little, but in the main they were excellent, better than lots of authors I’ve heard reading their own work.

  Cook read a short and really very complicated passage full of puns and word play and anagrams, that came across like sound poetry or surrealist glossolalia. It was fine. It even got a couple of laughs. Then Charity read a piece about a sex murder in a nunnery. This was a bit of a test. I’d convinced her to leave out some of the gorier parts, and certainly it was no worse than large swathes of what passes for serious literature these days, but at that time, in front of an audience of the moderately great and good, it made me very nervous. But she got away with it too. She was good. Maybe some people in the audience were shocked, maybe some thought it was inappropriate but by the time Charity sat down I could tell the audience was on our side. We were now a little over halfway through the programme and I was almost able to let myself relax.

  I knew that the actual reading was only part of the story. I was just as worried about what some of the patients might do when they weren’t reading, when they were just sitting there ‘doing nothing’. Mightn’t Charity think this was a perfect opportunity for allowing her God-given body full exposure, mightn’t Carla decide to indulge in some fierce pathomimicry, mightn’t Anders dislike the way someone in the audience was looking at him? Well, undoubtedly they might have, but mercifully they didn’t. They held themselves together. They stuck to the script. The event was developing an intensity that was impressive and undeniable.

  Charles Manning read a slightly dull piece about the London blitz, but dullness was fine by me. I would settle for that. And Carla, as she’d requested, read out some ‘interesting’ facts about submarines and tapestry-making and wildlife in Kenya. This was dull too, and I feared she might try to enliven it by screaming or writhing on the ground, but no, and there was a surprising charm about her delivery, like the presenter of an uncondescending children’s TV programme. There was a little more sex and violence as Max, in a voice that was only slightly slurred, read a lurid passage about white slavery, and again I hoped nobody was offended.

  The end was in sight, or at least in hearing. Byron was reading what I knew to be the final piece – I’d let him read one of the confessions, one where the author claimed to have dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, since I thought it would be a good finale and yet nobody could mistake it for a real confession. He read very well, better than he normally did, in a way that made it seem accusatory and moving, but also somehow satirical. Then it was over and the audience broke out into prolonged, genuine applause. We’d made it. There were tears in my eyes. I ran back to the office to be there when the patients returned in triumph.

  They were as moved as I was. ‘We fuckin’ killed ’em,’ said Anders, as they ran into the room. I found myself being hugged and kissed and shaken by the hand; and some way off I could hear Kincaid in the lecture room, addressing the audience again, blowing his own trumpet.

  The applause started again, and Alicia stuck her head round the door to say that the patients were needed for a ‘curtain call’. They didn’t need asking twice, but as they returned, Charles Manning, Anders and Maureen each grabbed bits of me and started to pull me along with them. I resisted, tried to fight them off, tried to assert my natural, if violent, modesty, but as I struggled other patients joined in, clamped down on me so that eventually I was immobilised, helpless, and I was carried bodily into the lecture room as though I were a mascot.

  They set me down in front of the audience. I kept my head lowered, and my eyes averted, but it was too late now. Raymond was saying, ‘The man to whom we owe everything, our pilot through these turbulent skies: Gregory Collins,’ and there was more applause and I knew it was all over. There was no longer any way of hiding myself. I looked up at all the faces. There, leading the applause, clapping louder than anyone, was Dr John Bentley, his face twisted in sly, impish glee.

  I couldn’t imagine what was going to happen next. What would Bentley do? How would he destroy me? I felt inert, and for a while nothing very dramatic happened at all. I was swept along as we all piled out of the lecture room into the canteen, where Cook had set up a necessarily plain buffet. The notion was that patients and visitors would now mingle informally before Kincaid drew events to a close and the guests were loaded back on the bus. This session in itself had always threatened plenty of scope for disaster but now that Bentley had seen me, I had a pretty good idea what form that disaster would take. I thought it was only a matter of time.

  In the way that you never quite know how you’re going to react to stress I found myself at the buffet table, stuffing myself with anonymous, flavourless sandwiches. The condemned man was eating a hearty plateful of finger food, wh
ite bread spread with who knew what. I became aware of Charity and Anders standing next to me, watching me intently. ‘Case of the munchies?’ Charity asked.

  I knew I sounded most unlike myself as I said, ‘Charity, whatever happens, how ever all this turns out, believe me, I did my best.’

  Anders snorted at this piece of cheap sentiment and Charity’s look was as blank as I might have expected. Neither of them knew what I was talking about, but Charity’s big wide eyes showed soft, slow-moving concern.

  ‘Are you in trouble, Greg?’ she asked. ‘Want us to pray for you?’

  I couldn’t reply because I felt someone’s fingers gripping my forearm, and I turned to see that Dr Bentley had laid hands on me and was steering me from the canteen, through the open back door, to the world outside. I didn’t resist. What would have been the point? We walked in silence until we came to the dried-up fountain. I sat down on the cold, rough lip and Bentley positioned himself at an appropriately detached distance. We made an odd couple sitting there in the shadow of the cement mermaid.

  ‘Well, Michael,’ he said.

  ‘Well, indeed,’ I replied.

  Bentley laughed. The bastard was finding this funny. ‘You present me with something of a problem,’ he said.

  ‘Do I?’ I couldn’t see what his problem was at all. I just wanted him to do his worst and get it over with.

  ‘Do you have anything to say in mitigation?’ he asked.

  I shook my head.

  ‘No extenuating circumstances you’d like me to know about? No claims of diminished responsibility?’

  I shook again.

  ‘I find your reticence disarming,’ he said. ‘I had thought you might argue that even though you’re not the “real” Gregory Collins, you do appear to have done a fair job of harnessing the creative abilities of these … lunatics.’

  He was right. I might once have argued something like that, but it sounded very flimsy now that he said it. And the word lunatic seemed needlessly cruel.

  ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘a corollary of that argument might be that since the patients obviously admire you so much, and since you’ve clearly done them, in some sense of the word, “good”, then discovering that you were a fraud might be detrimental to their continuing mental health.’

  ‘That’s an argument,’ I said.

  ‘And yet,’ said Bentley, ‘I think we owe it to the patients not to treat them as children or simpletons. If they’ve been victims of a deception they surely have a right to know.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m sure they do.’

  ‘What then of Dr Kincaid, Dr Crowe and the Kincaid Clinic? Their reputations might be severely damaged if you were exposed.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘It might seem vindictive of me to enhance my own reputation at the expense of theirs.’

  It had never occurred to me that Bentley’s reputation was at stake here, yet now that he mentioned it I could see it might be some tiny feather in his cap to be the man who’d exposed a literary and psychiatric hoax, even if he’d only done it by the purest fluke.

  He continued, ‘You might also argue that there would be those who’d accuse me of acting out of even worse self-interest, who’d say I was revenging myself for the occasion when you burned my book. For that matter I suppose you might also argue that I wouldn’t particularly want my book-burning parties to become common knowledge.’

  ‘I suppose I might,’ I said, though I wouldn’t have.

  ‘Equally,’ he said, ‘I suppose one might argue that since you’re a member of college, one of my former students, the scandal your exposure would create might be a worse evil than the one you’ve perpetrated, and might reflect exceedingly badly on the college and on me. You might think I had a duty not to destroy a college man.’

  ‘That never occurred to me,’ I said. I knew Cambridge colleges looked after their own, but I’d never felt I was one of their own.

  ‘However, if at some later date the truth came out and I appeared to have been complicit in the deception, then the scandal and the ignominy would be far worse.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said, but somehow I didn’t think all these filigrees of logic and consequence were very necessary or relevant. I didn’t think Bentley was really trying to decide on a course of action. I thought he was just showing off his brain power, torturing me slowly and exquisitely before doing what he surely had to do. And so he went on.

  ‘Now some would certainly say that the exposure of a fraud, be it literary or otherwise, is a universal good, and the very least that scholarship might aspire to. We scholars are supposed to love truth. And yet for those of us who are scholars of literature, truth is rarely quite so cut and dried. Art may aspire to tell the truth, may indeed do so, but it tells it via a series of illusions, deceptions, confidence tricks. Perhaps all artists are charlatans. Not that I think you’re claiming to be an artist, are you, Michael?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘So what, ultimately, am I saying?’

  I wished I knew and I certainly wished he’d stop prolonging the agony. He did that thing where you make a little church out of your fingers then press them against your lips. Very prudent and professorial. Very corny.

  ‘What I seem to be saying is that while there are indeed some persuasive arguments for exposing your little fraud, and even though I find the arguments against exposing you somehow specious, I nevertheless find myself having a great deal of sympathy for you. And I can’t help wondering why that is.’

  Neither could I.

  ‘Why?’ he asked himself. ‘Why do I feel inclined to help you? Could it really be simply because I like your face?’

  I can think of worse reasons, I thought, but I didn’t say that aloud.

  ‘Another reason,’ Bentley said, ‘might be that I like jokes. And I have to admit this is rather a good joke.’

  Well yes, there was his taste for Warhol’s Empire State but that seemed to be something altogether different.

  ‘I suppose what I’m really saying,’ Bentley said, ‘is that at this moment I’m confused. I don’t know what I’m going to do at all.’

  ‘No?’ I said.

  ‘No. But once I’ve decided,’ he said, ‘I’m sure you’ll be one of the first to know. Until then, what can I say? Keep up the good work.’

  He stood up, bristled slightly, turned his back and started walking towards the clinic. I remained immobile. It seemed to be over, at least for the moment, although the threat would continue to hang over me, and that would certainly be a punishment, though not necessarily punishment enough.

  27

  I know what I should have done. The moment the evening was over, once Bentley and the others were back on the bus, I should have gone along to Kincaid and confessed everything. The game was surely up. I’d had a good innings. I could have retired, not undefeated exactly, but at least on my own terms. I could even have just disappeared.

  So why didn’t I? Oh, all the usual reasons: pride, inertia, cowardice, sex. It was all too difficult. I was scared. I didn’t want everyone to know what a fraud I was. I didn’t want people to hate me. I didn’t want Alicia to stop liking me and having sex with me.

  And I admit there were moments when I hoped I was wrong, that the game wasn’t up, that something would happen to change everything and make it all right. Perhaps Bentley would decide not to do anything after all. Or perhaps he’d be run over by a bus. Perhaps some crazed undergraduate would slaughter him. Stranger things had happened in Cambridge. Or maybe Anders knew a good hit man I could employ. Or perhaps I should do it myself, set up some elaborate alibi at the clinic and then sneak off to Cambridge and kill Bentley in his rooms.

  But no, in general I didn’t really think any of these would happen. I was sure Bentley would tell all. Maybe not immediately but very soon, and no doubt in some clever, clever way. And that only made these last moments, these last days, all the more precious. I didn’t want to leave. What would I gain by confessing? I would
hold on as long as I possibly could. I hoped for another night or two with Alicia.

  Kincaid’s literary evening was heralded as a great success, not least by Kincaid. He was even more full of himself than usual. Oh well, that would change soon enough. The patients were pleased with themselves too. They’d been so good, so in control on the night of the reading, it was hard to know what to do with them next; not that I was exactly in a position to start any new projects. I felt a great fondness for all of them. I’d be sorry to lose them and I hoped they’d be sorry to lose me.

  The waiting was tough, and now more than ever I found myself becalmed and powerless. I kept thinking about Nicola and Gregory. I wondered how the wedding had gone, whether she’d looked beautiful in white, whether she’d even worn white, whether it had been a grand affair, where they’d gone on honeymoon. I certainly wondered how long it would last.

  While I was sitting in the hut the next night, thinking of these things, waiting for fate to do its worst, I heard a kerfuffle outside. I peered out and saw the porters struggling with someone who was trying to climb in over the front gate. It was reminiscent of my own ignominious arrival, though I couldn’t immediately think who, apart from me, would be crazy enough to want to get into the Kincaid Clinic. Perhaps it was some restless native up to no good.

  The porters dragged this new arrival down to earth and started to give him a good kicking. Booted feet were making repeated solid contact with the victim’s torso. He was trying to curl up in a ball to protect himself, but the porters weren’t allowing that. They opened him up, rolled him on to his back for ease of access, and then I was able to see his face. It was Gregory Collins.