If by some sorcery I was now able to go back, knowing nothing of the intervening years, and meet the person I was then, I think I’d look at him and say, my God, what the hell is ever going to become of him? He has no prospects. He has no ambitions. He has no way of making a living. He completely screwed up his future when he took that job at the Kincaid Clinic. What’s he going to do with his life? And yet I suppose I’d be reasonably confident that somehow or other he’d survive. He mightn’t win any glittering prizes, but he surely wouldn’t end up entirely destitute and lost. Perhaps I could have looked at him as if at a character in a soap opera and thought, ‘Oh yes, it’ll be interesting to see how this plot develops.’ But I wouldn’t have held any hopes that it was going to be one of the great dramatic storylines.
The truth is I became a writer of sorts; not exactly the stuff of soap opera. When the Kincaid days were over, and after I’d eventually put myself back together, I returned to London and started to do some freelance journalism, nothing very exciting, nothing very cutting-edge, but eventually, by a minor fluke, I got a job working for an inflight magazine. I did everything: interviews, travel writing, book reviewing. I wouldn’t say these were areas where my looks didn’t matter – I suspect no such world exists. But let’s say this was a job where I didn’t have to show my face to the public. I wrote articles, I had a byline, that was all. I was just a name.
This went on steadily and unspectacularly until, when I was in my mid-thirties, one of those odd little arbitrary, life-changing things happened. I got the chance to interview a rather grand old English travel writer, one of those who rarely gave interviews, and he was only prepared to see me because I’d given his book such a ridiculously fulsome review in the magazine. I was granted an audience. According to his publisher it was quite an honour for me.
I’d always used a crappy little pocket tape recorder when I’d done interviews, but this time a friend at a local radio station offered to lend me a professional machine. It would provide a broadcast-quality tape they might be able to use on air. It was OK by me, but I wasn’t sure the grand old man would want to be recorded, yet oddly enough he agreed to it. It must have been my charm. Or something. It seemed like the most insignificant event at the time. I was still thinking of myself as a print journalist, not as a radio interviewer, and perhaps because I didn’t care about it too much I was very relaxed and the interview went well. It was friendly and funny and revealing, and when it was broadcast it was regarded as quite a coup; and that was the start of my career in radio.
I’d never given any thought to my voice. It was just a voice as far as I was concerned. But now people were telling me it had an engaging warmth to it, that it established an easy intimacy with the listener. It made individual members of the audience feel I was talking to them directly. This apparently is what good radio voices do. It’s not entirely unlike reading a book, I suppose.
My life got surprisingly easy from then on. I turned out to be a natural. I did a few more interviews as part of other people’s radio programmes but then very quickly I got my own show on local radio. Most of it was pretty banal, reading traffic reports and birthday requests; but once in a while I got to interview a novelist or biographer or playwright. I was damn good at it, and I got a bit of a reputation for being smart without being stuck up, a guy who seemed to have read everything but who wore his learning lightly, and who could fight his intellectual corner if he needed to.
I moved on to a late-night show on a small London station, and now I have an evening show on a much bigger London station. We do some round-table discussions, some film and exhibition reviews, even a few phone-ins, but books and author interviews are what I do best and what I’m known for. When big-time authors have a book they want to plug on radio, they plug it with me. People tell me I’m a cult. People tell me it’s a crying shame I can’t do TV. I say that’s OK, I do voice-overs instead; they help to top up the really pretty humble wage I get from the radio.
The title of my programme is I’m Afraid I Haven’t Read Your Book – a double bluff. It mocks all those crappy radio interviewers who say those words to their authors; and the real joke is that I always have read the book. I’ve read everything. I’m famous for it. If you get the joke you get the show.
I come across as this benign, well-informed, intelligent, warm-voiced host who makes the authors feel relaxed enough to let their guard down; and if they’re smart, modest, reasonable, then all well and good. But if they start being precious or pretentious or glib, then I fillet them, gut them and hang them out to dry. There are worse jobs.
Some of my critics, and yes I’m a big enough name to have critics, say I hate books, which is clearly nonsense. Others say I hate authors, but that’s not exactly true either. The people I hate and the people I enjoy eviscerating on the show are those who adopt the pose of authors, who behave the way they think great authors behave.
‘Tonight we have with us David Bergstrom, author of A Light Rain in the Appalachians. Hello, David.’
‘A pleasure to be here, Mike.’
The author is American, smooth, deliberate in his speech. He considers himself an old hand at this interviewing lark. He doesn’t look at all like his author photograph.
‘I’ve read your book, of course,’ I say.
A nervous laugh from the guest. He doesn’t get the joke. He’s far too full of himself to imagine there’s anyone in the world who hasn’t read his book. Why wouldn’t they have when it’s obviously such a masterpiece?
‘Good,’ he says.
He tells us the plot, not that it’s exactly one of those plot-rich novels, you understand. The book limns (his word) the elements of a difficult father-son relationship. It’s largely autobiographical, based on the problems he went through with his own offspring. ‘It’s very hard,’ he says, ‘to love someone so much who hates you so much in return.’ But it’s better now. They’ve achieved a balance, a synthesis, a sort of redemption; just like in books.
‘What does your son think about the novel?’ I ask.
‘He’s proud,’ says the author. ‘He’s proud. And that makes me feel very humble.’
This goes on for quite a long time. I don’t challenge him, don’t mock him. I trust that my listeners are clever enough, cynical enough to find this man as preposterous as I do. We move on to more general matters.
‘And who are your influences?’
‘Faulkner, Walker Percy, Pynchon, Melville perhaps.’
‘Proust?’
‘Proust inevitably.’
‘And tell me, how exactly do you write?’ I ask. ‘What are the nuts and bolts of how you work?’
‘I get up every morning at six a.m., leave the house, go to the little writing cabin I have up on my land. There’s no phone, no heat, no electricity. I smoke one small cigar and then I start. I write by hand in unlined, hand-crafted notebooks that I have specially made by a local papermaker and bookbinder. I find it’s the only way.’
‘And what if you couldn’t get those books?’
‘Then I couldn’t write. And then I guess my life would be over.’
‘Your writing life?’
‘My life.’
‘Is he in good health, this bookbinder?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I mean, what if he dies before you do?’
‘It doesn’t bear contemplating.’
‘Oh, I think it probably does. Well thank you, David Bergstrom, you’ve told us all we need to know. A Light Rain in the Appalachians is available now in all good bookshops, and probably in quite a few crappy ones as well.’
That was it. I brought the music in, trailered the next programme, and it was over; not a great show, not a bad one. David Bergstrom’s publicity girl whisked him off to his next appointment. I unstrapped my headphones, came out of the studio, out of the padded silence and the flat lighting, exchanged a couple of long-suffering looks with my teenage-prodigy producer, picked up some faxes and e-mails, and went out into the lobby. It’
s comfortable in that airport lounge, cheap-but-durable-modular-upholstery kind of way and there’s a photograph of me up on the wall, taken from my good side, my name along the bottom edge, the station’s logo in the corner in a bigger typeface than my name.
There are always one or two people hanging around in the lobby waiting for who knows what. Even with the photograph, or perhaps because of the photograph, they don’t recognise me. That’s the beauty of radio. However, I was aware of a woman staring at me with more than just the usual curiosity. She stood up and moved towards me. The receptionist indicated that this woman was waiting to see me and suddenly I realised who it was, someone from a distant past: Nicola.
I hadn’t seen her for a very, very long time. There was no reason why I should have. That’s what I mean about the pattern getting less strange. Your life gets set, you see the same few people over and over again. One day you realise you haven’t seen some of your ‘good friends’ for the best part of ten years, and somehow it doesn’t matter. You carry on and they carry on, and what difference does a decade make? And let’s face it, Nicola and I were never even ‘good friends’, and yet I felt pleased to see her again. The years had been very good to her. They had given her elegance, an attractive patina. She was a good-looking woman of a certain age: middle-age, my age. She looked sleek, efficient, and she carried a briefcase. Her clothes were expensive, the effect was worked on and knowing. I thought she looked great, better than she ever had.
‘Nicola. Amazing.’
‘Hello, Mike. Busy?’
‘No more than usual.’
‘Can we talk? It’s important.’
‘No time for the niceties, eh?’
‘Sorry, yes, there’s time for niceties. I’m a little over-eager. I was afraid you might not want to talk to me.’
‘Why not?’
‘Oh you know, everything.’
‘I’d like to talk to you,’ I said.
‘I’m staying in a hotel round the corner. They have a bar. We could talk there.’
The hotel was small, exclusive, costly. I knew I must have walked past it any number of times without noticing it. You had to pay a premium for that kind of discretion. Nicola had done well for herself, but who would have expected anything else? Gregory Collins had obviously just been a blip, a youthful indiscretion, as had I, for that matter.
We sat in the bar, in plum-coloured leather chairs, and a waiter took our order. Nicola quickly brought me up to date: living in Oxfordshire, married to a man who did amazing things that involved the Internet and Hong Kong. Two more or less grown-up children at university. She said she was comfortable, not unhappy, not unfulfilled, though sometimes a little bored. She did freelance editorial consultancy work, which required her to be in London occasionally, hence the stay at the hotel.
‘Your face is looking—’ and then she stopped. She didn’t know what to say about my face. It’s not exactly a new problem for me.
When I said that Gregory torched the library, the Kincaid Clinic and me, I was exaggerating a little. He made a game attempt to set fire to the books in the library, but he didn’t get very far. The library didn’t really burn, and the clinic escaped more or less unscathed, but for me it was a different story. Gregory managed to press his flaming torch right into my face so that the nylon bag over my head caught fire. My arms were strapped into the straitjacket. I could do nothing to help myself and, believe me, nylon sticks. You could argue about whether or not Gregory was of sound mind, about how responsible he was for his actions, but that’s not an argument I’m inclined to indulge in. The bag only burned comparatively briefly, but the nylon adhered to my left cheek and reduced that part of my face to the consistency of ruined pork.
I’m a bit vague about the exact sequence of events after that. Kincaid knew something was going on. He came running back to the library, saw the state I was in, dealt with Gregory in some fashion, and did what he could for me on the spot. Then, reluctantly I’m sure, he called for an ambulance. I was taken, in agony and shock, to the burns unit in Brighton, where they did rather more for me, though actually at the time it struck me as surprisingly little. They said it could have been much, much worse, but I suppose they say that to all their patients, and I suppose it must always be true.
My memories of the treatment are mercifully vague. I know there was endless washing and dressing of my face, which didn’t seem like sufficient intervention, but eventually there was an operation, excision they call it, then sheet grafting – taking stretches of my own skin from my buttocks to my cheek. That could certainly have been far worse. In some cases I understand they have to use skin from pigs or cadavers.
Sometimes I felt they weren’t taking my burns quite as seriously as I was. They were third degree, which is serious enough by anyone’s standard, but they were over such a small area, just part of the face, that they weren’t life-threatening, and it’s been my experience that once doctors know you’re not going to die on them they have a tendency to lose interest in you. I thought they’d want to know how it happened. I thought the police might get involved, but no, nobody showed anything other than professional concern. I was a routine and not very engrossing case.
The treatment took a long time but it was declared to have worked. There was scarring and contraction, all absolutely standard, I was told, and the left side of my face became, and remains, taut and fixed, setting into a pattern of livid, marbled pink and purple, like a minor work of Abstract Expressionism, though I couldn’t tell you in whose style; not Rothko, certainly not Pollock. The distortion of the skin has given a sad droop to my left eye, and pulled the corner of my mouth up into a twisted, asymmetrical little smile. There seems to be something very appropriate about that.
I neither want to exaggerate nor underplay the extent of the scarring. I’m not the Phantom of the Opera. People don’t stop in their tracks and cover their children’s eyes; but they do sometimes stare in morbid fascination, and sometimes they can’t bear to look at me at all. If you’re the sort of person who’s alarmed by these things then I suppose I look alarming, though only from one side. Once in a while well-meaning morons ask me whether I couldn’t have plastic surgery to improve my face. I want to scream, ‘I’ve had plastic surgery, you fuck! What do you think I’d look like if I hadn’t?’ But I don’t say that. Nobody likes an angry, bitter burns victim.
My parents came to see me in hospital, but I only got one ‘real’ visitor, and it wasn’t Alicia. It was Nicola. She came down from London for the day, visited me in the hospital, visited Gregory, her recent fiancé, who was still in the Kincaid Clinic at that moment, though not for very much longer, and then very understandably she ran away from it all. At my bedside she told me another version of the wedding story. Hers was that neither she nor Gregory had turned up at the church, that they’d both independently made the same decision and both chickened out, but by then I wasn’t much interested in playing detective to work out which story sounded more plausible.
I eventually went home and stayed in my parents’ house. I had nowhere else to go. We called it convalescence, but really I was just hiding. I was afraid to show my face. I was offered some group therapy, some counselling to help me deal with the psychological trauma, but I turned it down. I’d had enough of psychology. I sat in my old room and watched television: old black and white films, horse racing, cricket, children’s nature programmes. It seemed to help. It stopped me thinking or feeling, and I needed that.
It was months later before I got up the courage to go out in the world, but as soon as I was able, I took a trip to Brighton, to the Kincaid Clinic. I had no idea what I’d find there. I’d heard nothing from anybody. As I got off the train at Brighton station it was raining and I could imagine it might be just like my previous arrival, standing outside the clinic, getting wet, trying to make somebody inside aware of my presence. I got into a taxi and told the driver where I wanted to go. He was one of those who preferred to keep his eyes averted from my face.
; ‘You don’t want to go there,’ he said. ‘They closed it down.’
‘When?’
‘A while ago.’
‘Who closed it down?’
‘I don’t know. The authorities, I suppose.’
‘What happened to all the patients?’
‘I don’t know. I’m only the bloody taxi driver.’
I had him take me there, nevertheless. I wanted to see for myself, although inevitably there was nothing much to see: a high wall, a locked gate, the main building visible inside, its doors tightly closed, its windows dark. I didn’t even bother to get out of the car.
‘Did you know somebody in there?’ the taxi driver asked.
‘I knew a lot of people in there.’
‘Sorry to hear that,’ he said.
He drove me back into Brighton where I walked round the town, feeling displaced and exposed, feeling people were staring at my mutilated face, as some undoubtedly were. But by chance, or at least it felt like chance, I found myself walking past Ruth Harris’s bookshop. I was about to hurry away but Ruth saw me through the window and came bustling out to drag me inside.
‘Oh my. What happened to you?’ she said, with a refreshing lack of inhibition. She was surprised by the state of my face, but she didn’t seem repelled. She was as warm as ever, and I had stopped expecting anyone to be warm to me.
‘Book-burning accident,’ I said.
She was happy enough with that as an explanation. If that was all I wanted to tell her she wasn’t going to press me.
‘Sometimes I think that might be the answer to all my problems,’ she said. ‘Set fire to this place. Burn it down for the insurance.’
‘Good luck,’ I said.
‘Is there anything you need?’ she asked.
I had no answer. I knew I had all manner of needs but I could barely articulate them, and I didn’t for a moment think Ruth Harris was likely to be able to satisfy them. As it happened, I was wrong. I said I’d like a drink and she opened a bottle of cheap red wine and we got a bit drunk.
Bedlam Burning Page 33