Bedlam Burning

by Geoff Nicholson

  ‘If it’s of any interest,’ she said, ‘just as many women will find you attractive now as did before. They’ll have different reasons but they’ll be there.’

  I started to cry. I hadn’t dared articulate my fears about the future, of how I feared that my facial transformation might prevent me ever again being loved or touched. Ruth Harris’s words of reassurance opened the flood gates.

  Ruth Harris and I had sex in the back of her bookshop, in the dusty, rickety, lean-to room where I’d done the reading all that time ago. The sex was friendly and consoling and strangely passionless, yet it did me the world of good. Ruth Harris was big, soft and generous, and I had a lot to thank her for.

  And later I discovered she was right. A little facial disfigurement doesn’t stop you getting laid. Some women would see the scarring on my face and feel the need to mother me or protect me. Some thought I looked ruined and degenerate. Some, I’m sure, went to bed with me out of sympathy, because they imagined nobody else ever would, and some perhaps because they thought it was cool and exotic to be going to bed with a burns victim. The best of them would eventually see past the scarring and it would become irrelevant, but they always had to fix their gaze firmly on the scars before they could see the man beneath. And a surprising number did.

  In the end, there was no great mystery about what had happened to the Kincaid Clinic. The trustees had simply pulled the plug. What choice did they have? The doubts about Kincaidian Therapy, the doubts about the authorship of Disorders, the public display of group sex, these would have been enough, even without Gregory’s attempt to burn both books and people. But the medical profession being what it is, the closure was done very quietly and discreetly. There was no scandal, and everyone had to save face. Except, obviously, me. The patients, Gregory included, were redistributed among other institutions. Kincaid was given early retirement. Alicia was given a job at a hospital somewhere in Scotland.

  I learned these facts from a number of sources. Ruth Harris was a mine of information, putting out feelers among her many contacts in Brighton. The rest I gleaned from a letter Alicia eventually sent me. It was short and very unsatisfactory. It told me all too little. She said she was sorry, though she wasn’t sure what ‘sorry’ meant, and I certainly didn’t know which of the many possible things she was actually sorry about. There was no return address on the letter and I’m sure I wouldn’t have written even if there had been.

  For a long time I used to imagine I might see Alicia again, run into her by chance when I was least expecting it, but the years passed and it never happened. And I did very occasionally think of tracking her down. If she was still a doctor it wouldn’t have been all that hard, but in the end I never did anything.

  Naturally there were a lot of questions I had, and sometimes still have, about Alicia. For instance, do I think she really wrote Disorders? Well yes, on balance, most days of the year, I do. It’s convenient for me to think that, but I also happen to believe it’s true. I think she did dictate it to the patients. I think she invented stories for them, provided them with the words they couldn’t provide for themselves, had them write the sort of things they’d have written had they been writers. I know it wasn’t a very sensible thing to do, maybe even an insane thing to do, and the sheer number of words might be regarded as indicative of logorrhea or tachlogia, which are themselves, I now know, characteristic of the manic phase of what we these days call bipolar disorder. But I like to believe she acted out of the best intentions: to make Kincaidian Therapy look good.

  I have more difficulty deciding when she realised I wasn’t Gregory Collins. Was it when she saw I wasn’t writing anything? Or was it when the real Gregory turned up as Bob Burns? Or did she know all along? Maybe she’d looked at me at the reading in Ruth Harris’s bookshop, used her psychological training and said to herself, ‘This man isn’t Gregory Collins. He isn’t an author at all? But so what? He’ll do for what I have in mind.’ I was good enough to make Kincaid jealous.

  And do I think she ‘loved’ Kincaid? Do I really think she slept with me to get to him? Well yes, I suppose I do. I suppose I have to admit that I was used by a crazy woman; but on the whole, on balance, most days of the year, I’d be hard pressed to say I didn’t enjoy being used.

  I have no idea what Kincaid did next. Perhaps he enjoyed a long and happy retirement, finally able to give vent to his literary ambitions. God knows what he was up to in his office on all those evenings. I suppose he was working on his intractable magnum opus, just another unpublishable, not to say unwritable, book by someone who thinks he’s a genius. I suppose there’s a reasonable chance that he’s dead by now. Strange as it may seem, I tend to think he emerged from events better than any of us. Yes, he’d lost his job, his clinic, his therapy, but at least he’d retained his integrity. He may have been deluded, he may have been insufferable, but he wasn’t a fake like the rest of us. He was a true believer. He really was trying to do some good.

  And what do I think about Kincaidian Therapy these days? Well, what can I say other than that I think Kincaid may have had a point? You don’t need to be a raving Luddite to wonder if the tidal wave of images that washes over us is in any sense ‘good’ for us. God knows I’m not being holier than thou about this. I may make my living in radio, but I watch as much TV as anyone else. I have my video library, I paddle the Internet, I take photographs on a pretty good digital camera, and I’ve even been known to play the odd video game. It’s not a reaction against my days in the Kincaid Clinic, and neither does it feel like embracing Satan or going mad. It just feels like being part of what’s going on. I can understand why someone might want to lock himself away from it all, in a white room, in a block of wax. That doesn’t seem insane to me, but neither does it seem very smart. It certainly doesn’t seem very useful. It feels like rejecting the wheel.

  These days, from what little I know about the treatment of mental illness, nobody believes in fancy new therapies or grand theories any more. People believe in drugs, in making adjustments to brain chemistry. If it works, then why not? On the other hand, I tend to think Freud had it just about right: love and work are the only true therapy, but no doubt drugs are considerably easier to come by.

  As for the patients from the Kincaid Clinic, I’ve never seen any of them again. I think about them sometimes, wonder whether they’re alive or dead, free or locked up, mad or sane. And sometimes I still wonder what they were up to at the Kincaid Clinic, what game they were really playing and why. These days I’m prepared to live with any amount of uncertainty, prepared to accept that I’ll never altogether know. I suspect there isn’t one answer that fits all the cases, but if I’m pressed, I tend towards the opinion that they were mad north northwest. I don’t think they were all sane people pretending to be mad, or all mad people pretending to be sane; but I do think by and large they could tell a hawk from a handsaw, whatever that means.

  I heard from Ruth Harris that some local vandals eventually got into the clinic and smashed what they could, but they must have been a pretty inefficient bunch. They managed to demolish the writer’s hut, but the fabric of the building wasn’t much damaged, and after a while it was renovated and turned into an upmarket, not to say fashionable, addiction clinic, with a swimming pool, hot tubs, and a TV in every room. How could it fail?

  Nicola and I sat in the hotel bar and she looked at my face with a steadier gaze than most people can manage.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s just skin,’ I said. ‘You can touch it if you want to.’

  She was hesitant. The etiquette of what to do when a man with a mutilated face asks you to touch his cheek is not well established, and you wouldn’t want to do the wrong thing. Nicola took a sip of her drink, then leaned across, pressed her lips to my scarred cheek, and kissed me. I was impressed.

  ‘Gregory’s dead,’ she said.

  I laughed in that way people do when they’re given a piece of news they can’t quite believe, and yet know must be
true. In fact, I’d heard from Gregory a few times in the intervening twenty years. He’d written me inappropriate, chatty, newsy letters without a hint of regret or remorse, without any sense of the horror of what he’d done to me. He had got on with his life. His brush with madness had been brief. From the Kincaid Clinic he’d gone to an institution in his native Yorkshire and made a remarkable ‘recovery’.

  He’d quickly returned to teaching, in a minor public school, where, to his own professed amazement, he’d found himself coaching football and swimming, and enjoying it. There had never been any reference in the letters to a girlfriend or wife, and there had been no mention of his doing any writing. He had certainly said nothing about Nicola, the Kincaid Clinic or Disorders. I had not replied to these letters.

  I’d be lying if I said there hadn’t been times when I thought of hunting down Gregory Collins and revenging myself on him, and various people had suggested that I could have him arrested or sue him or sue Kincaid or the trustees of the clinic, or someone. But ultimately I hadn’t wanted to do any of those things. They would only have prolonged the agony. I liked to think I no longer had any unresolved feelings about Gregory Collins. Somehow or other, in my unscientific layman’s way, I’d explored and worked through my anger, my resentment, my murderous rage, and I’d come out the other side, not unscathed, but at least in working order. There were times when I still liked to imagine performing satisfyingly gruesome acts of vengeance on Gregory Collins, but the fact that I imagined them meant I would never do them. I liked to think of them as therapy. News of Gregory’s death shocked me.

  ‘Not all that recently, actually,’ Nicola said. ‘About six months ago. Died in hospital after a short illness. Liver.’

  ‘He drank?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘Poor bugger.’

  Gregory’s death was revelation enough and yet I knew Nicola hadn’t sought me out solely to deliver that particular bit of information. Both Nicola and I had complex and ambivalent feelings about Gregory, but his death alone would not have been enough to bring us together.

  ‘He left me something in his will,’ said Nicola. ‘Something for both of us.’

  ‘Oh shit.’ I knew what it was going to be. ‘The manuscript of an unpublished novel, right?’

  ‘Very good,’ said Nicola.

  ‘You’ve got it with you.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  She tapped her briefcase.

  ‘And you want me to read it,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not that simple.’

  ‘No, I didn’t think it would be.’

  ‘We’re in a bit of a Max Brod situation here,’ she said.

  Max Brod, friend, biographer, champion and literary executor of Franz Kafka. When Kafka died he left Brod all his books and manuscripts with instructions that he should burn them. It was obviously an absurd and duplicitous legacy. If you want your books burned you do it yourself, like Gogol did. It’s not a thing you get somebody else to do for you. Furthermore, Kafka entrusted the job to the one person he could be sure wouldn’t do it. Brod didn’t burn the books. He published and publicised them, spent the rest of his life spreading the good word about his dead friend. I wondered precisely how our situation resembled that of Max Brod.

  Nicola said, ‘Gregory left me the manuscript in his will. The instructions are that I read it, pass it on to you so that you can read it. Then we burn it.’

  ‘Can’t we burn it before we read it?’

  ‘In some ways you haven’t changed at all, have you, Mike? In any case, I’ve already read it.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I like it. A lot.’

  I thought I could see where this was going and I wanted no part of it.

  ‘I’ll bet you think it’s publishable,’ I said.

  ‘Publishable? What does that mean? When you see the crap that gets published these days.’

  ‘But you think it’s worth publishing.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So send it to a publisher.’

  ‘I want to do the right thing by Gregory. If he wanted us to burn the manuscript then I think we probably should. After you’ve read it. He obviously wanted that.’

  Was I irredeemably cynical or was Nicola unspeakably naive? I stood by my original analysis of the situation. If Gregory had really wanted his manuscript destroyed he’d have done it himself. The twist here was that Nicola and I were only to perform that destruction after we’d read it. Did that mean the manuscript contained something so private or scandalous that it was really for our eyes only?

  I said, ‘You’ve made a photocopy, obviously.’

  ‘Actually not. I thought that would complicate everything.’

  I was going to say something about Walter Benjamin or even, God help me, about Baudrillard, but I decided against it.

  ‘It looks like you trust me,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I suppose I do.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  She took the manuscript out of her briefcase. It was slim, neat, bound between black plastic covers. I was relieved to see it was so short. Twenty years was time enough for Gregory to have come up with something truly monstrous.

  ‘Does it have a title?’

  ‘Untitled 176.’

  ‘Ah well, what’s in a name?’ I said.

  ‘Are you a quick reader?’

  ‘I’m famous for it.’

  ‘Take it home with you. Read it overnight. Meet me here tomorrow. We’ll have breakfast.’

  ‘That’ll be nice,’ I said.

  I went home and told my girlfriend I had some important reading to do – nothing very unusual about that – and I spent the rest of the night with Gregory Collins’ Untitled 176. It was an extremely hard book for me to read, not because it was especially dense or impenetrable or because it had a difficult prose style, but because it was a little too close to home. It told the story of a good-looking but essentially empty scoundrel who impersonates our noble but absent hero, a northern schoolteacher who’s published a fine but misunderstood first novel. This scoundrel goes to work as a writer-in-residence at a lunatic asylum somewhere outside Brighton, where he gets all the love, sex, respect, glory and attention that’s not his due. Ultimately it all turns very sour and he dies in a horrible and very convenient fire. For obvious reasons it wasn’t precisely ‘my story’, since Gregory didn’t know all that much about life in the Kincaid Clinic, and his inventions were both more predictable and more lurid than what had actually gone on there. For instance, one of his female characters had religious visions, and regularly spoke in tongues, tongues that Gregory had lovingly invented. Another inmate had developed an infinitely complicated secret language, which again Gregory had been at pains to set down in print. I knew this had something to do with Wittgenstein, although I wasn’t sure what. There was also sex and violence, though not the kind I’d ever encountered in the Kincaid Clinic, and some of the ‘experimental techniques’ that Gregory invented and described were not only illegal and immoral, but by and large physically impossible. Mercifully the manuscript contained nothing that resembled my relationship with Alicia, and the head of the clinic wasn’t even remotely like Kincaid.

  Nevertheless, something about it was surprisingly accurate. Gregory had managed to create a convincing atmosphere of enervation and perplexity that rang absolutely true. His ruminations about what madness is and what madness does were very much the ones I’d had myself. I had to conclude that the book was pretty good. It certainly seemed much better than The Wax Man, although naturally enough I hadn’t read that book in a very long time. Unlike Nicola, I’d have hesitated to say whether or not it was publishable. What I was absolutely certain of, was that I didn’t want it to be published.

  I didn’t get a lot of sleep that night, but by the morning I knew what I was going to do. I didn’t turn up for breakfast at Nicola’s hotel. By the time she’d have realised I wasn’t coming I was already on the train to Cambridge, seeking out Dr John Bentley, a man I thought could
help me.

  I called him on my mobile from the train. He was surprised to hear from me, even more surprised than I’d been when I saw Nicola, but given our history he wasn’t going to say no to me, now was he? We talked only briefly on the phone but I thought I’d conveyed that something significant was afoot.

  I arrived at the college. I’d been there occasionally over the years, and my feelings were always much the same; a simultaneous familiarity yet strangeness, a nostalgia, a sense of loss, a dislocation. The college had been there since the sixteenth century. I’d been there for three years. I was nothing to the college, yet for those three years it had been more than enough for me.

  I walked through the main courtyard to Bentley’s rooms. He’d lived in the same place all these twenty-odd years, the place where we’d gone for our book-burning party, and when he opened the door to me, he looked remarkably unchanged; certainly he appeared no older than when he’d taught me. I felt as though I had aged and deteriorated while he’d remained in a state of delicately shabby preservation.

  He invited me in. His rooms were smaller than I remembered them. Perhaps they’d filled up over the years with the accumulation of books and papers, the clotting together of knowledge and scholarship. I noticed he owned a very sleek laptop. Bentley was quite chummy, as though I was one of his favourite, roguish students dropping in for one of my regular visits. In fact, we’d spoken just once over the years, shortly after I got out of the hospital. I’d called him on the phone and asked him who the author of that ‘Michael Smith’ review was: him or Gregory Collins or somebody quite else? Gregory, of course, had claimed authorship, but at a time when his grasp on truth and reality had been decidedly patchy.

  Bentley had categorically denied that he was the author, although he admitted he wished he had been. The review had provided him with an elegant solution, a way of ending my tenure as Gregory Collins, of exposing me to all concerned, without making himself look petty or vindictive. He thought the review was a very good joke. He had repeated that he liked jokes. I trusted him enough to believe he wasn’t the author. I could see no reason for him to lie. So I accepted that Gregory had written the review. I could live with that.