by Tot Taylor
John Nightly could afford it, which was a good thing because during his second month in California he suffered a major relapse and spent most of the next three years in bed. At $300 per day ‘celebrity discount’ (special monthly rate), he was certainly getting the star treatment. Death would have been cheaper.
‘Hi…’ The visitor smiled politely. ‘And how are we…?’
The visitor angled her head towards the patient the way one might with an infant or dog. The patient rotated his index finger around the socket of his eye. The patient sniffled.
‘Maybe not quite so… “wonderful” this morning?’ the visitor continued.
‘… well… there isn’t… there’s nothing I can really put my finger on…’
The visitor pulled up a chair.
‘… obviously I’m not very, very well…’ The patient inhaled. ‘Or so they tell me. If I was… I wouldn’t be, “residing” here, would I?’
He massaged the bristle on his chin, … ‘don’t think I am really…’ He sniffed again. ‘I keep it in, though – probably. Not usually a very… “emotional” person.’ John smiled one of his half-assed smiles, ‘not given to… large or… demonstrative emotional displays, so they tell me. Even when…’
A longer-than-usual silence followed. The visitor leaned forward. ‘Excuse me?’
The patient looked blank. Johanna continued: ‘Even when… what?’
‘… even when… what… what?’ John sat up. ‘Oh, I see… Even when I am… “alright”.’ He bent down to slip off his sandals, took aim and slung them across the finely polished floor as if he were skimming pebbles. The visitor sat down, opened her casebook and positioned her Dictaphone.
‘You mean you don’t usually “feel” emotion, even when you’re feeling “reasonably” or – “averagely” well?’
‘Not “well”. I never said I was “well”,’ he replied, moving sideways on to Johanna as he eyed her up. ‘I said I was… alright.’
As he spoke, the patient turned away towards the long double-glazed window and the picture-perfect backlot masquerading as a cottage garden.
A pool guy was threading heavy power cables, cleaning up after the weekend, while a blue-aproned, suspiciously English-looking gardener crouched down in the winter rose garden, deadheading what looked like magnificent Queen Elizabeth roses, some still in healthy bloom. Two other men clipped parterre boxes on the lawn. Then the rainbirds came on, the men ducking and dodging the spray as they transported the fake Victorian planters across the tennis courts. A hippie girl, long-term patient – or ‘resident’, as she most likely preferred – sat cross-legged on the edge of the baseline, catching the odd wave of mist from the sprinklers.
John often sat on this exact same spot himself, hypnotised by the water cascading out of the rotary hoses. He would angle his chair so that he was positioned directly behind them, the warm California rays creating mimetic patterns on the grass. If he fixed on the cypress trees in the distance, then let his focus go, the water created a spinning, swirling, liquid light-show far better than any Sunday-afternoon UFO Club special.
A trippy but totally harmless animation danced and hovered across pools of blue and green in shades of medieval stained glass. If he allowed his mind to travel, and concentrated on the middle distance, the boy could be lost out there for hours, in nature’s own Dream Machine. Some afternoons he’d be completely ‘gone with it’, as he liked to say, as he often had been at Queen Square. John’s head would drop like an oldster dozing on a park bench. He’d be transported back to a dingy dressing room in the north of England, or worse still, an open-air stadium on some forgotten tour date full of people he didn’t recognise – onstage and off. He’d then suddenly feel himself drowning, falling, rapidly losing height, suffocating, a blue-and-white Tesco bag pulled tight over his head. He would struggle to get free of the thing but there was no escape – and also, in a way, no point in escaping. Outside of the bag, there was nothing but a deafening, distorted din. Inside, only ‘flashbacks’. Same bad old dream. Replayed and re-edited. Scenes that would never let him go. Then John would be awakened by the harsh whirr of a ’copter – emergency landing probably – or by a familiar voice, that of a nurse, intern or other patient, enquiring whether the old boy was okay.
‘You okay?’
‘… what? Oh… yes I am.’
‘We were talking about… anger, weren’t we?’
‘… were we? When?’
‘Just a moment ago…’
‘I don’t know.’ The man came round a little. ‘You’re the one supposed to be taking notes.’
Johanna slowly turned the pages.
John Nightly rubbed his tired old eyes again, ‘… it’s certainly an interesting object… subject… my…’
The consultant psychiatrist remained silent.
John lifted his head. He bit into his forefinger, making little nicks in each finger in turn as he progressed one by one along the worse-for-wear digits. He straightened himself out and cleared his throat. ‘Okay…’ he said dramatically. ‘Let’s do it……’ The CP sat up in anticipation.
‘… I wasn’t “angry”, until… that is an emotion, isn’t it? So yeh. You’ve got it right again, hit the nail on my head, and all that. You keep doing that…’ he whispered. ‘And… now that you are here… I’ve decided I am actually a bit… angry… frustrated… today.’
Johanna sat still and waited. A full sixty seconds passed.
John Nightly leaned towards her. ‘The fact of the matter is that I’m not really angry, Johanna… I’m…’ He faltered. ‘That’s the point. I’m just… I’m… I’m obviously just… bloody bored.’
The man treated his audience to a beautiful (and nowadays extremely rare) wider-than-wide, really-most-charming John smile.
‘Just joking… I’m joking with you… I’m playacting.’ He bit on his other hand.
‘Christ, I’m bored!’ he snapped. ‘BORED! Can’t y’ see? Bloody bored, I am. Until you leave that is, then I’ll be really…’
Johanna Zorn was one of the best-paid psychiatric consultants in the system. As well as her private practice, which for two days’ work per week brought in a pre-tax gross of more than $1.5 million per annum, she had her books, research programmes and lucrative advertorial promotions, which were worth five times that. And, though she would sometimes admit that she had once or twice in the past become a little star struck, given the sheer celebrity status of some of her ‘priority’ clients, Johanna hadn’t really taken to John Nightly at all. She never would. The calmly beautiful mother of two hadn’t at all fallen under his spell.
But Ms Zorn did not object to coming to the Center two afternoons a week in order to sit down on a comfortable chair and help drain John of his record royalties. Johanna took up her pen to write today’s page of her daybook – what she liked to refer to as her ‘daily Nightly notes’.
‘That’s fine,’ she comforted, as she prepared to commit her thoughts. ‘Did you feel anger when you woke up this morning?’
‘don’t actually ’member.’
‘Feeling angry or waking up?’
‘yeh… don’t remember it.’
Johanna stared at the notebook, flustered at not being able to write down anything of substance. ‘Do you have any idea at all why you’re feeling so upset, or unsettled, today?’
Johanna relaxed her pen hand, folded both palms onto the open book and let them rest on the pages. John trained his sights on her again.
‘you know that if you split… separate… the word “therapist”, you get “the rapist”, don’t you?’
Joanna looked away. Johanna adjusted a hairpin.
The man relaxed back on his cushion, satisfied that his arrow had hit wood.
‘Can I say – and record, if you don’t mind – that you do appear to me to be in a state of… mild…’
‘you can record anything you like, darlin’.’ The patient rotated his eyes from side to side. ‘You have complete “artistic control”
– just like me!’
‘A little more… unsettled than usual, maybe?’ Johanna took up her pen. ‘Has something… happened? Taken place?’ The patient looked indignant.
‘How on earth can anything “happen” in here?’ He gnawed at his fingers. ‘What the hell could happen, anyway – if it did happen?’ raising his voice again. ‘Nothing happens in this place. That’s the whole idea, surely? And anyway… everyone tells me I’m actually a very happy person. I bring “sunshine” into their lives… apparently.’
‘I’m sure that has always been the case.’
John put on a mock-Southern voice, aping Johanna’s pronounced South Carolina drawl. ‘Long as I can ’member, darlin’,’ he said.
‘And who is… “everyone”, John?’
‘The usuals, my dear, mah darlin’.’ He spoke faster, ‘all my friends, mah ’ssociates, ah guess…’
John’s manner, his demeanour, his accent, vocabulary, his whole manifestation, had changed at least four or five times during the past fifteen minutes. Johanna found it unsettling… spooky.
‘That being the case… what exactly are your thoughts… your feelings towards your friends, John?’
‘my friends?’ He smiled, ‘I was thinking about them this morning – or was it yesterday? And… what I’m wondering…’ John looked through the swing door into the corridor, ‘the main thing… what I wonder – when I have time to wonder…’ He stared directly at her, ‘Where are they?’ The patient wasn’t playacting anymore. ‘Where the hell is everybody?’
Johanna let herself be distracted too, most unprofessionally, and found herself gazing out of the window on the opposite side of the room. In the far distance the permanent taken-for-granted idyllic backdrop. All was blue. The sound of long, rolling waves and spring tides beckoned. She looked forward to a swimming session with her five-year-old later that afternoon. Cocooned inside the 26-foot glass wall of John Nightly’s garden penthouse Johanna watched silently as a gas-jet blue coupé made its way up the shingle path. A slim, unusually well-dressed middle-aged woman got out as two porters rushed to help with her bags.
‘What would you like to do most in the world right now, John?’
‘that’s easy!’ He looked the consultant psychiatrist up and down. Starting from her blue, blue eyes and her bridged nose and her dark Spanish skin, before moving on to her curvaceous curves, her surfer’s waist and her long, fake-tanned legs – particularly the bit from the knee to the foot. That bit was a truly spectacular bit of leg, he thought, as he lay back on his daybed and raised his eyebrows to the moon. ‘What I would like to do, most in the world, right now is… to stay in this room right here with you… right where I am… obviously, Johanna…’
John’s laugh was hearty. It suggested confidence.
‘nice and safe and warm. That’s what I want most… in the world’, he continued. ‘It’s my life’s work, that… and well, it’s cold out there.’ John gave a little mock shiver. ‘Freezing. When I was last out, anyway.’
‘This morning, you mean?’
‘not this morning… no. A long… quite a long time. Few years now… when I was last out there… would have been when I was at… Regal…’
Johanna sat back. ‘And where is that exactly?’
John’s voice became hushed, as if he were about to reveal a lifelong secret.
‘in Denmark Street… Yeh. Always been there. Same place. That’s in…’
‘Denmark?’ Johanna conceded a cute half-smile as the boy returned the volume back to normal.
‘Not Denmark…’ John lifted his hand. ‘It’s not in Denmark – Denmark Street. It’s… well… London confusion! as they say! It’s never in the place it says.’ He sounded exasperated and suddenly exhausted.
Johanna gazed out into the sunshine. The oldster continued in more contemplative mood.
‘don’t matter where these places are. They’re in the background. Where everything is. Somewhere in the background out there… all the time.’
‘And your wife was from Denmark… Wasn’t she, John?’
‘Deferately not… no… she was… I don’t know… somewhere round… there. Lost track of her really. No idea where she’s at anymore.’
John twisted round and sat up. A quite delighted expression came upon his face.
‘there are just so many people, though. People around at the moment.’
‘There are quite a lot of… staff this week, if that’s what you mean. And it appears there are a lot of visitors as well.’ Johanna looked back along the wide corridor. John yawned.
‘Is there anyone in particular you’d like to see maybe…? Coming up, in the… in the coming future?’
‘the “coming future”? Hilarious, darlin’. When is that future coming, exactly? Is it when you “come”?’ He chuckled, without embarrassment, at his own, awful response, ’cos, well… suddenly I’ve got a future – if it is.’
The patient laughed again at his own terribleness. ‘Didn’t think I had, Johanna. I thought you’d got that one expedited in the old filing cabinet somewhere.’ He grinned, ‘was under that impression, anyway.’ John became suddenly animated. ‘Like it! Love it! So let’s do it! Let’s go with it… as my old Master, my guru – used to say, ’cos now, suddenly, I’ve – we’ve, rather – me and you, I mean – we’ve… got a future… together maybe!’ He rattled his throat. ‘Together at last! Like Sinatra and Sammy Davis. Ella and Louis… Ravi and Yehudi! And that – is progress! Wouldn’t you say?’
The man really was getting so much better. A whole lot better. The improvement in his general mental state now visible in his physical self. There was colour in John Nightly’s face; in his cheeks and lips, on the tip of his recently broken nose. For the first time in so many years there was colour. John’s white London pasty-face had vanished. Replaced by a soft San Fran tan, no doubt from the long afternoon lawn meditations, the outdoor waterings, the corridor tending. A scarlet hue, almost a halo, about the head. Like that of an old Cornish labourer with too many miles against the wind. The blood rushing in to guard and protect him. Blood colour. The colour of life itself. Ruddy colour. Blue colour. Together they make blood. Somehow, some way… John Nightly was bloody well coming back to life. John Nightly, like other famous comebacks: James Bond 007, he’s always back! ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ Francis Albert, the …unfathomable Evel Knievel – even bloody Vladimir Horowitz – along with almost every artist of any consequence who came before, started small, made it big, bowed out and then was ‘back’. Weren’t they?
When the unlikely Ms Zorn had started with John, an unbelievable five and a half winters past, the most she could get out of him had been the odd ‘yeh’ or ‘no’ with the occasional ‘so what’s the point, then?’ After that inauspicious beginning, John Nightly fell into a ‘meek and mild’ phase, lasting approximately another two winters. A period of strict non-commitment. No opinions, no preferences, no requirements. As if he were turning into a kind of lone being, a lone star, apart from the world and its choices. More isolated and remote than before. Ascetic and self-contained throughout this era, as long as John Nightly got the ‘bare ne-ces-si-ties’, as he happily musicalised them, he appeared to be content. The patient, after that prolonged spell, was at least stable. Following that, John entered his freefall period. Paragliding, you might say, between good recall and bad. A typical ‘reclamation’ phase, which Johanna had not found easy, wherein John really did have to relive certain situations, particularly ‘wrongdoings’ – some personal, some professional – in order to progress to the next and hopefully final stage of recovery.
But now… now we were talking. In sentences. Mocking the CP, irritated by her, angry with the institution, with the world, with the act of living itself. Showing much more confidence now. To actually be someone again. Today the patient was insufferable, rude – horribly unpleasant. Good… she thought; very, very good.
‘Who would you like to see in the next… Perhaps tomorrow, for instance?’
�
��tomorrow I’d like to see Iona.’
‘That’s what I meant.’ Johanna was relieved to have the patient back on track. ‘And if Iona is… not available?’
‘my mother, of course… but you’d have to be extremely clever to sort that one out… dig all that up again.’
John took a blanket and pulled it up to his neck.
‘even before I went daft in the head. I’m not… very good with people. Not good at all,’ he concluded, ‘you said so yourself.’
‘Did I?’
‘saw you talking to Hank about it.’
Dick Marvin – Dr Marvin – the chief consultant psychiatrist in charge of John Nightly’s annexe, had always been referred to by the patient as ‘Hank’. Even to his face John would say ‘Now look, Hank, the thing is…’ when complaining about a consultation being rescheduled, or ‘What exactly are you gonna do about it, Hank?’ if one of John’s cannas had been tended by another patient, and while chuckling to himself as everyone around appeared puzzled.
John was tickled pink when he discovered that the chief consultant, the guy who actually ran the joint, had the same surname as the famed guitarist.
Johanna was flummoxed. She had had a conversation with her boss, but there was no way John could have possibly overheard what had been said. She remained silent, and tracked back, trying to recall exactly where she and Dr Marvin had been positioned while discussing the patient’s complete inability to relate to anyone from the ‘new days’. They’d actually been standing on the other side of the glass. No more than a few inches away from where they were right now. But that glass was at least an inch thick. There was no way the boy could’ve overheard anything.
‘read your lips!’
The CP squinted.
‘You read my lips?’ Johanna lost her cool. ‘I guess you’re well-versed in that activity, aren’t you?’
‘I am, yeh! Well “well-versed”!’ he smiled. ‘When you’ve watched as many film edits as I have. The thing with it is… in terms of… actually “seeing people”,’ he proceeded, ‘it’s okay for me to… “imagine” I’m going to see someone. I’m fine at that stage, but when that… possi-bi-li-ty…’ He coughed and spluttered, ‘actually looks like it might turn into re-a-li-ty… ’