Alison looked at him quizzically. ‘I have no idea. I don’t think so, why?’
‘I just think selling coffee in here would help.’ Adam looked over at Grimy Nige and Jim who were engrossed in Autobiography and Biography.
‘What do you think, fellers?’
‘Sounds like a great idea, Mr Sands,’ said Grimy Nige.
‘More things to look at. And we have a record player,’ said Jim.
‘Only got four records, though,’ said Grimy Nige. ‘And we don’t like any of them.’
‘I’ll think about it. In the meantime, if it doesn’t get his hopes up, why don’t you bring him in later and we can look at the basement together and at least say hello?’
Alison tried to control her smile. ‘End of the day OK? Towards four-thirty or five?’
‘That’s fine.’
‘Thank you, Adam,’ she said, looking at him evenly. ‘I mean just for thinking about it, thank you.’
Later, after the veritable rush that was selling eleven books to four different people and an internet order for academic books from a student at Alison’s university that came in at over £60, Anna, Grace, Tom and Laura came in. Anna was carrying two cups of coffee.
‘I took a wild guess,’ she said.
‘You’ll have got it wrong,’ he smiled. ‘But thank you for the thought.’
‘Large soya latte?’
Adam looked surprised. ‘How did you guess that?’
‘You’re not as unpredictable as you think,’ she smiled ‘And I noticed there was only soya milk in your fridge last night.’
They stood in an uncomfortable silence for a few moments. Grace was looking around the shop and smiling. ‘I imagined you would run a record shop,’ she said.
‘Funny you should say that…’
Silence again.
‘I suspect you’ve come to say goodbye,’ Adam said, looking at Anna and then at Tom.
Anna pursed her lips. ‘Sort of.’
‘We’ve come to tell you that we’re getting married,’ said Tom.
Adam smiled and hugged Laura. ‘Congratulations. When did he propose?’
‘This morning.’ Laura was blushing. Another uncomfortable silence. ‘Will you come to the wedding?’
‘I’d love to. Will you be doing the music yourself?’ he tried to joke.
‘You should get Mr Sands to play guitar for your wedding,’ said Grimy Nige. ‘He’s the best guitarist you’ll ever hear.’
Tom smiled. ‘I’m not bad myself,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ said Jim. ‘But you’d be nowhere near as good as him.’
‘My agents,’ said Adam. Tom was looking at him intently, desperate to ask something but not quite sure what. ‘Anyway, are you heading home?’
‘Yes,’ said Anna and Grace.
‘We thought we might stick around for a few days,’ said Laura. ‘Have a wander round the coastline. Maybe take you out for a drink?’
Anna looked surprised, Adam noticed and asked her: ‘And what are you going to do when you get home?’
‘I have a meeting to go to, remember? I’m heading north.’
Adam sipped his coffee. Too hot. He blew into the hole in the plastic cup and looked at Anna. He could probably count the amount of times he had been in the company of this woman on the fingers of both hands and still be able to pick up a book. It was always fleeting, never planned and they had managed to design a relationship based on never having to waste time getting to know each other. He blew on the coffee again, looked at Grimy Nige and Jim and nodded. ‘I’d like to come with you. Not been north for a while.’ He stared at her as evenly as he could and noticed, as she held his gaze, that she swallowed hard, nodded once and said: ‘Yeah, OK.’
16. The Turns We Took
David Cassells had done well for himself, although he was haunted by the perpetual sense that he could and indeed still might do better. He had tired of the face-to-face clinical work very early in his career. Frankly, most of the mad bored him rigid and he came to realize that the post-industrial dualism of psychiatry and psychology did not exist to seek out anything interesting or different. Its narrative, indeed its very purpose, was to explain how each personal presentation of insanity was essentially the same as the last one; that all phenomena could be explained, diagnosed and treated according to the existing model, language and tablets. Modern psychiatry was a celebration of its own brilliance and its often earnest, occasionally convoluted, whimsically interpretative and increasingly expensive discussions always resulted in a diagnosis and some medicine from a scientifically limited if economically expansive drug pool.
Of course, he had come across one or two interesting patients, mostly through his trainees because he himself had limited his own caseload to a bare minimum at the earliest opportunity. There had been the old dear without a body: she was interesting in the sense that she appeared to have so definitely chosen a delusion that would offer her solace. But you couldn’t talk to her, or at least not so she would ever talk back. And on the same ward a woman who thought she was a man, same thing really, a delusion that actually relieved her of her own sense of unhappiness, which must, to Cassells way of thinking, have been sexual but was unbreachable. This was what he had found frustrating. Interesting cases were rarely susceptible to the skills of psychology. He tended to get the over-articulate worried well banging on about the ‘fundamental disappointment of it all’ and they reminded him of his mother.
Later in his career he met the three hundred and fiftieth person to tell him they were psychic, only to find that she was. She predicted a plane crash, the weather, several football results and the fact that Cassells was not to be trusted. He envisaged a government-sponsored laboratory where he and a team he personally selected would work with Edna Bristle to discover how they might harness her power for good, or better still, profit. As a child he had been a fan of the X-Men comics and Edna was the bridge between his professional world and his youthful fantasies, or at least she was before they crammed her full of haloperidol to the extent that she could barely predict which of her legs was going to move in front of the other first when she set off on the long walk to the toilet.
He had done a bit of television work. Most psychologists had, and he had found he rather liked it. However, he knew he would only ever get the call if they were looking for gravitas and they rarely were, and when they did there were plenty of other lively middle-aged men wrapped in earnestness and Boden to provide it. He was a plump man confused by clothes. He had grown a straggly beard, hoping it would make him look interesting but it simply made people think he liked folk music. No, most television work required pretty female psychologists with long hair and strong jaws to look profound and answer questions like ‘But why do people behave like this?’ with: ‘It often goes back to their childhood, Lorraine. Although sometimes it doesn’t.’
He had published widely and written about how ‘taking the mickey out of mad people is actually a good way of integrating them back into mainstream society’ and ‘the mad are the last brutalized and stigmatized social group on Channel 4 comedy programmes’ for The Daily Mail and The Guardian respectively, and managed to survive the potential embarrassment of those two articles coming out in the same week.
In short he had cast his net wide, motored by a restlessness and a genuine and deeply-held sense that he should have his own institute by now, and never quite caught what he wanted.
Despite his quiet sense of disappointment, he was not an unsuccessful man. A visiting professor at a former polytechnic in the Midlands, the author or co-author of seven books, four of which marked him out as a leading figure in the unfashionable but crucial field of therapeutic alliance. It was all very nice, he would argue recurrently over anything up to 650 pages, for people to draw warmth and comfort from the pact between therapist and patient, ‘but the true alliance exists away from the point
of contact: it rests instead between the medical practitioner and the psychological expert.’ He was covered in eggs and flour at a large mental health conference for having written the line: ‘Patients are not the experts. If you crash your car you seek the expertise of a mechanic, not someone else who is good at crashing cars.’ He claimed he had been quoted out of context and later that he may have been drunk or suffering from a mental health problem himself, which confused people enough to leave him alone.
Cassells had been married four times and divorced three. His second wife had died in a diving accident in the Seychelles. He wrote a paper about the Psychology of Love and Loss that was published eight months later. He read an extract from it at the reception of his third wedding. Each of his wives had been a trainee of his; three of them had divorced him and married people they were sleeping with while still married to him. Cassells, being a trained psychologist, could easily detect a pattern. He was attracted to, indeed sought to rescue, unhappy women who could never be satisfied psychologically or sexually, although they all seemed quite happy now.
He was also still a consultant clinical psychologist but he had another consultant clinical psychologist who did most of his clinical work for him. And of course he was head of CREAK. ‘What exactly is that, dear?’ his mother had asked him.
‘Think of it as an MBE waiting room,’ he had replied.
‘While you are in there waiting, might you miss the knighthood?’ she had said, tapping the side of his face and leaving a faint smell of lavender.
As for CREAK, at its inception it promised much. Set up in the late 1990s, it was nearly as ambitious as he was. An independent, government-backed research hub designed to forge partnerships with private industry and fund, support and disseminate cutting-edge research across the health and social care world. It gave government the formal means—and Cassells thought this constituted political genius—to determine the research agenda, to choose what questions needed to be asked and who got to ask them. To decide what to release loudly and what to ignore. And actually to take credit for what emerged. Cassells was not in charge when it started. He was brought on board by his old Professor, a very clever eccentric who always wore shorts and drank his own urine. The Professor believed that psychology, thanks to the remarkable work of neuro-psychologists, was on the cusp of being heralded as the truth finder of the modern age. He had no doubts about his science, nor of the expertise around him, but he was an academic, not a strategist, and he felt that while Cassells was intellectually mediocre his relentless hunger would serve CREAK in terms of profile and politics. He was half right. Cassells brought strategy and hunger and—thanks to a series of well positioned press releases, in-depth interviews in the Sunday magazines and a well timed piece of research into the relationship between poor nutrition and misery—sold the nation the illusion that CREAK was the personification of New Labour progressiveness and the idea that Cassells was in charge. His Professor slipped from leader to non-executive president to retired academic inside nine months and Cassells prepared to rule the world.
By 2004 he had come to believe that the small successes that he and CREAK had accumulated were as good as it was going to get. Evidence that supported the licensing of 64 new drugs, a wonderful piece of Breakfast TV-friendly research suggesting that liquorice tea increases the success rate of smoking cessation by 76% and, timed for the new year, the discovery that the older you were when you stopped believing in Father Christmas the more likely you were to believe that Princess Diana was still alive and working in a care home in Bury.
Government funding had been drastically reduced. Where initially CREAK could wait for research funding agencies to come to them for money and blessing, now CREAK went to them for money and maybe a name check. Cassells inevitably found this demeaning. It wasn’t so much that he was overseeing the fading of what was almost a flagship of progressive partnership—and that was going to look bad on anyone’s CV—it was more the fact that people had stopped asking him questions. Cassells believed the world was divided into two sorts of people: those who ask questions and those who answer them. He answered them, even if he had to make up the answer off the top of his head.
And so he had changed CREAK, subtly, from being a hub of research enquiry to a filter for research findings. It wasn’t knowledge that needed wrangling, it was information that needed controlling. Everyone knew that, it was the cornerstone of modern politics and it would become, thanks to him, the fount of social scientific knowledge.
When he made this proposal to central office, they behaved almost as if they liked him. He led with the savings he could make. A much reduced research budget, a slashed staff budget, cheaper—albeit significantly nicer—offices in the North of England and the unspoken promise that his version of science would not simply align itself to the political needs of government but also to the economic needs of private industry.
‘Haven’t we always done that anyway?’ asked a veteran and impossible-to-impress Civil Servant.
‘Not this efficiently,’ Cassells answered without looking at him. And in using the ‘efficiency’ word he was given their blessing.
It had been something of a rebirth. The new CREAK lacked the breadth and grandeur of the original. It didn’t get to choose what truths to construct, it no longer had the power to play kingmaker or oversee the nation’s research agenda, which Cassells felt offered him the chance to straddle scientific enquiry the way he once saw his third wife straddle one of his PhD students. But Cassells knew that you had to sway with the wind. These were more austere times but they would pass and, when they did, the service he now provided would serve as illustration of his potential for greater things.
In the meantime, Cassells actually enjoyed his work more now than he ever had. The consequences of his power may have been less impressive but the mechanics of it were in fact so much more exciting. CREAK didn’t bring much of substance to the table any more and, off the record, the large funding organizations considered it little more than a press office. However it was still attached to government, still had the power to generate attention, to ensure licensing for endlessly profitable drugs and to sustain a share price with a well chosen pat on the back. CREAK offered something and Cassells was very skilled in ensuring it got something back. It oversaw research contracts for example, when and how findings would be released and most importantly it vetted research teams, helped select research staff and retained the power of recommendation for future projects.
It is said that all people gravitate to a place in the world where their particular strengths can sustain them. Cassells was living proof of that. He was a gloriously unconscionable manipulator, well practiced, highly skilled. He was also a fantastic record keeper. He had the CV and accompanying psychological profile—with any useful stories or frailties that may or may not be real, attached—of everyone he had ever worked with, known someone who had worked with or even heard of. He longed for control, not simply because of his naked ambition but because it excited him. He also hoped that ultimately, if he could get enough of it, it might shut his mother up.
The pleasure he derived from making people make choices that they would otherwise have not considered was visceral. It was also intellectually affirming. He was in essence applying the science of psychology in an undiluted and specific way to the world around him. He didn’t always plan the outcome, psychology was an inexact science after all, but he certainly built the ballpark the outcome would land in. He didn’t plan his predecessor’s retirement but he certainly designed a CREAK where retirement sat beside sudden death, petulant resignation or wholesale personal reinvention as the only options available. Under the circumstances, and given his vague sense of loyalty to all the old man had taught him years before, he was pleased retirement was the result. Even if Cassells was not invited to the Professor’s leaving dinner.
Cassells, of course, did not have anything to do with the fire at Meena Ahmeds flat, nor did he slu
r Paul Stern. To be close enough to organize that level of detail, or sordid enough to design it, would be demeaning: indeed, it would make him little more than a mechanic. But he knew what and who were involved in the project from the start and he felt eternally in control.
*
It was like someone in heaven had gathered together their birthdays with Christmas and come up with the perfect present. Grimy Nige and Jim had a list of rules that Adam had written in capital letters and pinned to the counter.
1. Do not give things away for free.
2. Sell books when people want to buy them, even if they are books you like.
3. Show Alison and her brother the basement and explain I will be back late tomorrow. 4. Phone me whenever you are unsure about something.
‘We promise we won’t let you down Mr Sands.’ Grimy Nige was almost tearful with earnestness.
‘I know you won’t, fellers. I trust you.’
‘And if it goes well, Mr Sands?’
‘Who knows, Jim?’
‘Who is Alison?’ Anna asked when they were on the road.
‘A woman who wants to rent my basement.’
‘Kinky sex?’
‘Don’t know, haven’t slept with her.’
‘I meant the basement.’
‘It’s a bit dusty down there, but thanks for the offer.’
Anna laughed, turning her laugh into an exaggerated sigh. ‘Oh, those were the days. I think. I’m not sure, I can’t remember. You?’
Adam paused. ‘I can barely remember to buy tea bags.’
They drove on in silence, joining the old dual carriageway that passed through Herne Bay and Whistable, finally turning into the motorway.
‘So,’ said Adam finally. ‘How has your life been?’
‘Been good thanks. Yours?’
‘Not bad. Thanks.’ There was a pause before Adam added: ‘Mostly I just sell books.’
Stranger Than Kindness Page 27