Stranger Than Kindness

by Mark A Radcliffe

  Anna smiled. ‘You don’t look to me to be a risk to yourself or others. Beyond that, what you do or think is none of my business.’

  The young man nodded. ‘That’s very… liberal of you.’

  ‘Is it annoying, talking to people like me?’ she asked.

  The young man looked at her seriously. ‘It can be frustrating. In principle you are a force for good, aren’t you? You are part of the small minority of people who are interested enough in whatever madness is, and whatever distress it causes, to try to help. But as soon as you sign up you become part of an industry that… well… that doesn’t always help very much.’

  ‘Yeah, I can see that,’ Anna nodded. ‘That’s why people like me stop doing it, I think.’

  They sat quietly together, drinking their hot drinks and people-watching. Anna noticed that it was the closest she had felt to relaxed in days. The young man may be mad, but he had a presence that appeared contagious.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask,’ she said. ‘How did you treat yourself?’

  ‘You’ll consider me mad,’ he said. ‘I can see your point. What with the trousers and stuff.’ He laughed. ‘I choose to live like this. I see it as part of my job, if you like.’ He shrugged. ‘But OK. When I was in hospital…’ He turned and pointed westward. ‘A big old hospital over that way, you’ve probably worked in one like it. Or that one even?’ She shook her head. ‘When I was in there I was struggling. The voices were bad, getting hateful, and the drugs weren’t helping. They mostly just slowed me down. Muffled the voices, which made me strain to hear them. I couldn’t think clearly so I couldn’t solve my own problems. When your problems begin to belong to other people, that’s when you know you are lost. Anyway, I met a bloke while I was in there. Not that much older than me. I don’t think he was an inpatient. I met him in the grounds. I thought at first he came to sell drugs to the patients, but he wasn’t like that. He said that he could make the voices go away without drugs, any drugs. I was numb with prescribed drugs. I said ‘you going to use fairy dust?’ and he said sort of. ‘What you got to lose?’ he said. We went to a park and he started to collect the dew. Really. He just gathered lots of dew from the grass. He made me hold the jars he collected it in. When he had enough he took me back to a bedsit near the hospital. I thought it was going to be a sex thing, but he poured the dew into a small white saucepan and boiled it on a two-ring gas stove. When it was boiled he put a teaspoon of tea in a pot, poured the water in and left it. ‘Drink it,’ he said. I just looked at him. He said ‘What’s the worst thing that can happen? You drink some tea without milk. What’s the best thing that can happen?’ I drank it. Went back to my bed in the hospital. When I woke up the voices had gone. I still felt rubbish, because of the drugs, but the voices had gone. True story.’

  Anna didn’t look at him. ‘And what are you doing with your life now?’

  ‘I do what the other man did for me. He told me that someone had helped him, a long time ago, and that with relief came responsibility. I have helped lots of people, maybe more than you. Drugs are not the answer, or at least not the only answer.’

  ‘Believe it or not, I know that,’ she said without thinking.

  ‘Of course you do,’ he said, getting up and putting the wrapper from the cheese and Marmite sandwich neatly into his empty cup. ‘Question is, what are you going to do about that? Thank you for the sandwich. Take care, Hannah.’

  12. After Dark

  Nina Sykes was no more likely to age than she was to vote. Physical change, like the ordinary affairs of men, was beneath her. She looked as polished and contained now as she had nine years before when Black Portier had first met her. He had put on another seven pounds and wore an even more expensive suit to compensate for that fact. Regardless, he knew it was best not to flirt.

  ‘Mr Portier. What exactly is going on?’

  ‘Well Ms Sykes, as you know the research findings are not what we might have hoped for.’

  ‘Not what one expects to get for what became £3.64 million, Mr Portier, certainly. My boss says to assure your people that we have kept the receipt.’ Black wasn’t sure what that meant and that may have shown in his face. ‘Tax Mr Portier, all in all your government—’

  ‘It’s not actually my government, Ms Sykes, I am not politically aligned.’

  ‘Nobody in government is, Mr Portier. I feel I should say that if our money is going to be wasted in this manner we can foresee the need to shift all of our research funding abroad. I understand that the other pharmaceutical companies are watching with interest.’

  Black Portier took a deep breath. He knew that she was trying to intimidate him but if he didn’t look in her eye it was harder for her to do that.

  ‘Ms Sykes…’ Black did the half-mouthed smile he would have been doing if he had been trying to flirt with the clearly frigid and seemingly autistic lawyer. ‘My speciality is in the management of information. Let me assure you everything is completely under control.’

  Nina Sykes stared at him for what felt like a long time. ‘Mr Portier, are you flirting with me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. I am not sure it will be forgotten, Mr Portier, that you and your government—’

  ‘It’s not my gover—’

  ‘You came to us for money, Mr Portier, and we generously—’

  ‘You funded some research that you believed would show the world what you wanted it to see. Namely, that the mad benefited from your drugs more than anything else. I, or rather we, sought to facilitate that and in so doing also demonstrated ourselves to be open minded and enquiring, interested in other emerging treatments.’

  ‘It’s not a treatment, it’s a spa.’

  Black nodded and exhaled through his teeth. ‘A particularly expensive spa, Ms Sykes. You need to understand that we have as much to lose as you do, if not more. If it emerged that CCT, which incidentally costs an awful lot of bloody money, was the best way to treat people and we didn’t fund it there would be all sorts of difficult questions. Leave it with me Ms Sykes: you’ll be laughing about this whole affair by the end of the week.’ Not, Black thought, that she had the look of a woman who ever laughed at anything.

  Black Portier had come a long way from being part of the team that advertised microwave chips for almost the very first time. His strength—an ability to appear so shallow people assumed he must be a bit deep—had remained constant, although he had refined it over the years. However, what had changed was the value attached to such a talent. As a young man in the early Eighties he had the advantage of earning a decent wage and not being afraid to stay up late and spend it. The resulting attention lent him a confidence that his clumsy sixteen-year-old self would have considered psychotic. Later, when the real psychosis came, he found out something very important: that at his core, when faced with something flesh-eating and destructive, he scared very easily. This lesson had consequences. Black found that he was quick to save himself, to do anything to be OK and safe, and he knew he would do this regardless of the consequences for anyone else. If the devil had offered him a pact whereby the voices would go if he threw kittens into the river, he would have bought a van to collect kittens in. Madness may change you, but Black Portier knew that before it did that it showed you who you were.

  This led quite naturally to Black finding that as he grew older—and of course he knew he was not alone in this—he found himself largely impervious to the lives of others. If you see someone else about to do harm to another person you will, Black believed, respond emotionally in one of two ways. You will either shout out to stop them or you will sit quietly and watch, relieved it is not you, believing subliminally that the universe only has so many stings to dish out and if someone else is getting them you won’t. He had, since 1989, been a watcher rather than a shouter.

  He kept his brief flirtation with the mental health services a secret for ten years. He felt he was very lucky t
o keep his job when he effectively went missing for a week without explanation. He was together enough not to phone the office from the psychiatric ward and self preserving enough to later call his boss and plead forgiveness, telling of the surprise death of his father and his midnight drive to Scotland to stop his mother from overdosing on paracetamol. The fact that both his parents were alive and well, and probably only living in Scotland because their eldest son lived in London and he annoyed them in ways parents don’t like to be reminded of, simply meant that Black had to remember, should family discussions come up, that his father was dead and his mum a bit fragile. After a while he sort of came to believe it himself and once forgot to write ‘dad’ on a Christmas card he sent home.

  By the late Nineties Black had risen to be a creative director. He was, however, in his late thirties and advertising was for the younger man, so when government got in touch with his company, anxious to use the minds of men who could sell anything from alcopops to Peter Mandelson in order to change the way the nation thought about madness, a tearful confession not only won his company a contract but it also got him a job co-ordinating between government and agency on the development of the campaign to reduce stigma. And got him laid by one of the campaigners.

  It was now that his defining quality, ‘so shallow he must be deep,’ came into its own. Disclosure without either personal reflection or political context was a quality celebrated on countless reality television programmes and—provided it wasn’t too shrill—it was an effective means of career advancement in the heady early days of New Labour. The fact that he had once brushed the shoulder of madness and had, from that single thirty-six hour experience, written a hundred stories about himself, lent Black Portier a character that was otherwise hard to see. He was obedient and untroubled by the weight of principle but that didn’t mark him out from many others, and of course his history alone wasn’t enough to propel him upward. He was good at what he did, persuading people to do things that they might not have otherwise considered, and that was the definition of success in 1999. The fact that he had the ability to extend that skill to controlling not just information but also the very agenda by which information was judged and valued lent him a sense of his own power that reminded one or two older civil servants, who occasionally met him, of one Benito Mussolini.

  However such showiness passed over time. Black was now a 54 year old portly spin doctor or ‘fixer’ as he preferred to see himself, aware, indeed pleased, that in the eyes of those around him he looked like a man whose time had passed. Twenty years ago, the eyes of those around him would have been the most important eyes in his world. Nowadays he had come to realize that power, authority and effectiveness lay some way beyond the judgement of his peers. Black had, in essence, grown up.

  At the turn of the millennium Black had been charged with a small spot of housekeeping. A Junior Health Minister had accidentally slept with the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest. No big deal, except for a couple of strange coincidences. The first was that the Junior Minister in question was a leading figure in a Pan-European immunization programme that, once agreed, would ensure all children in the European Union would, if they wanted to be allowed to go to school, be compelled to have a combined vaccination jab. Meanwhile it turned out that the winner of the Eurovision song contest—a flamboyant man with chubby cheeks and a very poor singing voice—was the son of the president of a drug company that made an awful lot of money from the sale of single, non-combined vaccines. A company that had thrown millions at trying to prove their jabs were more effective than the combined vaccine and had failed, and was now throwing the plump popster at a junior minister to the same sort of effect. Black had been charged with ensuring that the story and, more importantly, the accompanying video did not get out until after the agreement had been signed. He had not known of the underpinning intrigue until he was met at Paris airport by a representative of the drug company that made the combined vaccine, who told him everything in the excitable manner of the school snitch.

  He made a couple of important decisions during that job. Firstly, he decided not to report the complexities of the problem to his immediate superiors, opting instead to see if he could ‘sort it out.’ Secondly, he decided that in order to manage a situation like this one you had to decide on what was an acceptable and desirable outcome and aim for that, rather than simply try to do the impossible, which in this case was to save the agreement, which frankly wasn’t terribly important anyway, unless you were a child whose life would be at risk without the herd immunity of a widespread vaccination programme, which he wasn’t.

  The agreement was never signed but nobody minded. Indeed the fact that it was not signed was celebrated as a victory for independent sovereignty in the face of a pushy and demanding Europe. More importantly, the combined vaccine was sold to every single country in the union on separate contracts. The drug company making that vaccine was very pleased with this as it enabled them to negotiate independently with each country to provide the best deal possible. The other drug company was quite happy because, where they would have been wholly neglected by the compulsion to have the combined vaccine, now they could still market directly at the easily distracted parents who had heard that combined vaccines were close to satanic, of which there were many, and turn a nice little profit. Furthermore, as the never-to-be-heard-again Eurovision winner told Black over dinner some weeks later, the whole escapade had brought him and his father closer. And finally the Junior Minister, whose career continues to flourish and who still sends a private Christmas card to Black Portier, was grateful that You Tube hadn’t been invented yet.

  Black managed that outcome by making each party believe that he was working for them and that he was essentially a conduit for unseen powers far cleverer than himself. When his success seeped back to London it was noted. He had found himself managing several potential embarrassments since then, primarily involving the indiscretions or misjudgments of politicians, civil servants or family members of large corporations; he had developed an instinct for finding solutions to problems which, while not necessarily serving the people who were most anxious or felt most at risk, certainly protected whatever money was involved. Ostensibly, Black Portier appeared to be a middle ranking, slightly-out-of-date spin doctor, who liked fine wines and women who should know better. However, he was also the recipient of a generous bonus scheme each year that was the only acknowledgement in the world that he was both seen and appreciated. It was, in truth, the only acknowledgement he wanted.

  *

  Anna had gone back to her hotel room. She had sat on the bed propped up by pillows and stared at her feet. Nobody had called her Hannah in over thirty years. Yes, it probably just sounded like Hannah because she was tired and stressed and something about the boy had unnerved her. But then she had been called Anna for a very long time and couldn’t remember ever hearing it sound like that before. She should have asked, she should have said ‘What did you call me?’ But she was so surprised she just froze. She walked away, not far, maybe ten feet and when she realized that she had to ask and turned round he had gone. She had looked around but couldn’t see him; her instinctive reaction was not to start to search the immediate area systematically but instead to turn in on herself and wonder why she had not instantly reacted.

  Now, sitting on the bed, for the first time since she had seen Meena’s smouldering former flat she turned her attention away from her present crisis and instead to her sense of self. She had imagined, absurdly perhaps, that ‘Hannah’ had been buried so deep as to have become non-existent. She had separated herself from her youth with such ruthless efficiency in her twenties that she never imagined having to address that girl again. Yet she felt hollow, like a cored apple. Maybe, she reasoned, it was not the name but the boy who unbalanced her. She had worked with the so-called mad all of her adult life, she knew psychosis when she heard it and on the face of it his story about the dew was as mad as cheese, but it didn’t ‘feel
’ mad. If she thought about it logically, it ranked alongside inducing epileptic fits by electric shocks to the brain to cure psychosis because of the belief that epilepsy and schizophrenia could not inhabit the same brain. Or the magic water nonsense of homeopathy. And those things had been believed, defended, turned into reason and treatments, so why not this?

  Because he didn’t ‘feel’ mad? And because she had been taken, perhaps romantically, with the idea of a cure for madness being passed down the generations by a secret circle of kindly former patients? She didn’t believe it, but she liked it. But all that was before he called her Hannah, which had made her feel something different: threatened, uncertain, seen? No it was more than that; it had made her feel uncontained, like she was spilling out into the street, into the world. She wasn’t the carefully constructed Anna Newton: instead, she was the unformed impetuous Hannah. And maybe because of that she found herself thinking that it would be simple enough to test out the dew thing one day.

  It occurred to her for the first time that perhaps she had been on her own for too long. Perhaps she had instinctively realized that when she sat down with the young man. Perhaps the fact that she was drifting eastwards, towards where her son and Adam Sands might be, rather than westward, meant that her unconscious was pulling her toward people, people who might be able to tell if she was making any sense in the world. Although she couldn’t remember when she had started to wonder what the hell her so-called unconscious was telling her to do.

  She phoned Grace, who answered straight away. ‘Anna?’

  ‘Grace, am I going a bit mad?’

  ‘No. I almost wish you were, but no.’

  ‘How do you know? I’ve just met this young man—’

  Grace interrupted without apology. ‘Anna have you listened to the news at all today?’

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘They reported earlier that the police are looking for a Dr Paul Stern in connection with allegations concerning a sexual assault on an underage girl.’