Engleby

by Sebastian Faulks

  And in her shame was her humanity.

  I don’t think that’s a misogynistic remark.

  Thirteen

  I had a visit from Stellings today. Yes, you can have visits here. I told you: it’s a hospital.

  Like you, I’d imagined iron-barred cells with famous Panthers and Rippers served food by armed yet windy guards through hatches using lengthy tongs while the men inside went more and more insane down the years, beating their brains against the damp brick walls.

  In fact there are only a handful of people kept locked up and it’s mostly for their own safety. But all the famous guys – you can bump into them over the seed boxes in the garden stores, or doing some fiddly work with a bradawl in the carpentry shop.

  I met Stellings in the overheated day room where Johnnie Johnston and a couple of others were watching Neighbours on television.

  Stellings was dressed in what he imagines to be a non-homicidal-maniac-inciting outfit of blue jeans, stone windcheater and open-necked plaid shirt with a nasty little polo pony on the breast pocket.

  He’s very butch about being normal and makes a thing of saying hello to anyone he remembers from previous visits. ‘Hi, Frank!’ he calls with a wave to creepy Frank Usborne, who, I told Stellings, had killed three rent boys and kept bits of them in the freezer compartment of his fridge.

  This is completely untrue. I’ve no idea what crime Frank committed, but by far his worst offence inside is that he always gets to the Sudoku puzzle in the newspaper before anyone else and completes it before breakfast. If above the grid it gives the rating ‘Difficult’, Frank puts a little left-out sign and adds ‘Not Very’ in ballpoint next to it.

  This is really annoying.

  At the age of 52, Stellings has retired from Oswald Payne. He renounced his equity partnership to give some of the younger bloods a shot, but in fact he had little choice in the matter as fifty is considered the end of the line in his world.

  ‘Some of these young guys, they’re just animals, Mike. There’s a twenty-eight-year-old called Sean Busby I’m afraid I was responsible for hiring. Normally our partners work on a lockstep arrangement, but Busby wouldn’t stay unless he worked on an “eat what you kill” basis.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have done that in your day, Stellings?’

  ‘No. I was very much for lockstep, it’s more collegiate, it encourages people to pool their resources and work as a team. I’d hate to be on an eat-what-you-kill basis. That way, everyone’s just working for themselves.’ He puffed out his cheeks. ‘Though I suppose I wouldn’t have minded eating what Sean Busby killed.’

  ‘Or Frank Usborne.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Mike.’

  I don’t think Stellings likes coming to Longdale with its barbed-wire walls and silly regulations. ‘Toiletries. Patients can only receive these if they are in plastic bottles. NOT glass or aerosols. Items should be new and in the original wrapping. Any seals must not be broken.’ Christ knows what Clarissa and her smart friends with their personal trainers make of his visits. He can’t bring food or sweets in case he’s tampered with them; he can’t even bring cigarettes for fear that he’s replaced the tobacco with a bit of Glynn Powers’s finest.

  The only reason Stellings comes to see me is because entirely by chance, one evening almost thirty-five years ago, he found himself sitting next to me at dinner in a candlelit hall in our first week in college.

  Everything else – every single thing in the intervening thirty-five years – is down to politeness.

  I’ve been in here since March 1989, so that makes seventeen years. And I’m managing. I’ll come up for review again in 2008, apparently, and by then society or the Daily Mail may feel I’ve done enough, even though in theory I haven’t been punished at all, I’ve only been treated. It is a weird thing with us guys who are not ‘mentally ill’. There was a schizophrenic who in a moment of early mania cut off his mother’s head and baked it in a pie. His father killed himself from grief. The son did seven years in a Special Hospital, got better, and was released. People like me, on the other hand, are for ever defined by what we did; we can’t really get ‘better’ in that way. But don’t let’s go there again, or I’ll get as ‘vexed’ as Dr Turner.

  I often sit on a bench in a part of the grounds known as the Verandah – in fact a sort of raised grass embankment that gives long views down over Rookley, towards Chatfield. I have thoughts there. I remember.

  Once I saw a mother in a supermarket in Paddington – an obese, poor woman with bare legs and a small child who was making a noise. She swore at him and slapped him in the face, which only made him howl more. It wasn’t her fault really; she was clearly exhausted, broke and stretched to snapping point. But I knew that when she got the child home she’d beat him more, and if there was a father (a bit unlikely) he too would hit him.

  And that child would slowly ascend towards full awareness in a world whose sky was violence and whose horizons were fear. And however resourceful he was, however patient and fortunate in the events of his life that followed, he was like a creature in a nest of imprisoning boxes who could never really break free. That was his world and any attempt to persuade him that it was merely a ‘subjective’ or ‘individual’ experience could never convince him.

  And all of us, I think, are like him. We may think as we grow older that we know more, but in truth no one has an overarching view, no one can see in the round. We are like cards in a pack, and the king of spades is a better thing to be than the two of diamonds; but none of us is a dealer or a player with free will and power to dispose; none of us can see or understand the value of the entire deck, let alone the rules of the game in which it’s employed. Even the best of us is no more than an inert piece of card with some markings.

  All of us – Julie and Jennifer and me and creepy Frank Usborne and even Dr Turner – are like that child because we are so severely limited by the operation of our consciousness – the faculty that Unamuno called a ‘curse’, that made us lower than the jackass or the crab.

  In much of my childhood and adolescence I never knew how unhappy I was. I accepted everything as being the norm because I knew no different. How could I? I had nothing with which to compare it, and all my impulses were towards normalisation on the ‘constancy principle’ (Freud surely did get that bit right). Only now can I see with a little more perspective how damaging that degree of misery was to me. Not because (and here the psychoanalysts are mistaken) I pressed into service the mysterious hypothetical mechanisms of ‘repression’ to put it to one side, away from the normal processes of mind, so that it festered and grew toxic until such time as it was ready to wreak havoc on my entire metabolism. No; but just because that much pure, continuing unhappiness is bad for you. It burns away your gentler impulses. It corrodes the soul.

  When I look at Gerry and Mark and I think of poor Jennifer and all the people that I’ve met and talked about in these pages, they seem to me all in their way like that little boy in the Tesco aisle. They seem part of a great biological accident: viz., that the defining human faculty – that of self-awareness – is a faulty one, at best partial and frustrating, at worst utterly misleading.

  It’s as though we discovered that hawks’ famous eyesight didn’t really work or that all hounds secretly have a duff sense of smell. The failure of any other faculty we could bear with patience, even with humour, but not the failure of the one that distinguished us from all previous species. That is beyond irony, beyond cruelty.

  What I fear most of all is that when I die, my consciousness won’t be extinguished but will survive to be reborn in a small boy in a striplit supermarket; and I will have to go home with that exhausted violent mother, and will go through this struggle of life all again, caught in an eternal loop of return.

  Scientists now believe that my sense of self is an illusion generated by the chemical activity of the brain; that there is no such thing as ‘mind’, that there is only matter, but that over the successful Homo sapiens years the i
dea of self has become a ‘necessary fiction’. We think that some small grey bits of brain, following a random inaccuracy in cell duplication many years ago, began in one individual and his offspring to generate an illusion of mind; and that, in history, the chance mutation that allowed them this chimera had side effects so helpful to the species that its possessors were naturally selected, to the extent that we are all now descended from them – mutants every one of us, whose key mutation is a fib.

  If that current thinking is right and consequently there is no self, then my consciousness is so biochemically similar to that of the small boy in the supermarket as to be functionally indistinguishable. Therefore ‘I’, since I am not an individual entity, cannot cease to be, but am doomed to exist for ever – until or unless some new freak mutation finds favour with the powers of natural selection, and human consciousness, like the bat’s blind eye, falls back into disuse, deselected, along with the other hopeful monsters – back into the welcoming void whence it came.

  Naturally, I try not to think about that too much.

  There are things to do here that keep your mind off it. I used to go to ‘group therapy’, which was of limited use since many of the group were mad. Some of them were at least coherent and wanted to talk about their crimes; they wondered what had made them rape small children or set fire to their own houses. A lot of them sat staring straight ahead, stunned by drugs or anomie.

  Few of them had the smallest interest in the remainder of the group, though I remember the otherwise silent Benny Frost perking up one day when it transpired that one of the others had cancer. Benny sat forward and took a close interest. Was this person going to die? What were his chances? Benny is very frightened of death, so frightened that he killed three men, very slowly, hoping to learn something self-protective from their experience of dying.

  For a while, I used to go to church. There is a fine Victorian chapel, rather like the one in Jennifer’s old college where Anne made her impassioned address from the pulpit. I liked the stories from the Bible, but the music was unendurable, particularly Frank Usborne on the tambourine. After some bell, book and candle ritual, the chapel briefly went interfaith to accommodate the Muslims, of whom we have a growing number. Now they have their own miniature mosque, a former punishment room outside which you sometimes see a row of laceless shoes. Inside, it’s done up like the carpet shop at Harrods.

  There is no synagogue because Jews don’t do murder. What about Cain? you’re thinking. But he wasn’t a Jew because the Jews didn’t start till Abraham, and if the Garden of Eden was where we think it was, Cain, like his parents, was probably from Mesopotamia, which was on the site of modern Iraq. And on the sixth day, God created . . . an Iraqi. Of course, the children of Abraham did then do a lot of killing on their own account, but the modern British Jew doesn’t. When Jennifer Turner first told me this, it made my head spin for days. Nature-nurture, culture, religion, genes, schizo, psycho . . . In the end, I gave up; my thoughts seemed no more conclusive than those provoked by the ‘modern’ painting in Stellings’s drawing room all those years ago.

  For years I also did a course in ‘social skills’. Much of this focussed on how to approach the opposite sex, and for this purpose we were allowed to mix with women patients. There was a good deal of ‘role play’, much of it taped on video for our later delight. Somewhere in the archive is a film of me pretending to be queuing outside a cinema and ‘striking up a conversation’ with Lizzie ‘the Hatchet’ Rockwell that culminates in me asking her if she would like to join me for a drink later. In the rushes I saw, it doesn’t, to be honest, look as though my heart is really in it.

  And then of course there was teaching. There are paid instructors in any number of crafts and trades, from tinsmith to bookbinder, but some men also wanted to do school work. When I arrived, this was under the supervision of a patient with a degree from Oxford in Classics, though he always referred to it as ‘Greats’. Under prompting from Dr Turner, I eventually volunteered to help. I was paid for my work, and it secured my ownership of the envied parole card that gives me freedom to roam. I had a class of half a dozen for GCSE Maths and Physics, three for History and English, while one year I taught Geography A level by keeping one step ahead in the book. I didn’t give it much of a socialist slant, as my old moral tutor Dr Townsend might have done, but my candidate secured a B-grade in the exam and I believe it helped him get released back into the world. Such are the consolations we teachers cling to.

  I stuck at the pedagoguery for several years, though not as long as Mug Benson, who, the Chatfield Year Book – yes, the bastards tracked me down again, or perhaps they just bicycle a copy up the slope – informs me is still grinding out irregular verbs in the valley. Our exam results kept on improving. Johnnie Johnston, who to my certain knowledge, couldn’t count from one to five without ten minutes’ hard digital labour, applied to do Maths GCSE one year. It was uphill work for him, me and the rest of the class, but he was adamant that the transmitter signals from Redruth were giving him the all-clear. In August, he brought me a piece of paper that reported he had scored an A-star. The thrill rather went out of it for me after that.

  I don’t do much these days, but I find listening to music helps distract me. I’m allowed a radio and CD player in my room and I’ve been hearing one or two of the old records I used to like at university. What I’m looking for is songs that buy into the human illusion in a really simple way, but have just a touch of comfort in them. Old Dylan, for instance:

  It ain’t no use a-turnin’ on your light, babe,

  The light I never knowed;

  It ain’t no use turnin’ on your light, babe,

  I’m on the dark side of the road.

  He just tells the girl she wasted his ‘precious time’, but it doesn’t really matter, so, ‘Don’t think twice, it’s all right.’ That’s a good attitude, there’s something noble about it and outside its time; I guess that’s what’s good about folk music: when it’s good it can have an eternal ring.

  ‘Girl From the North Country’ makes me think of Jennifer, sitting in the firelit circle in Ireland.

  If you go when snowflakes storm,

  When rivers freeze and summer ends,

  Please see she has a coat so warm

  To keep her from the howling winds.

  It’s the simplicity of the old folk tune he adapted overnight from ‘scarborough Fair’ that makes it almost intolerably poignant to listen to. That, and the use of ‘storm’ as an intransitive verb.

  We’re not allowed to download anything from the Internet, so I have to get Stellings to send me CDs (‘Only original recordings in the original packings will be accepted’). You’re only meant to use the computer for ten minutes, under supervision, and because it’s a PC with a Bill Gates programme it spends most of that time freezing and crashing. Stellings sent me a copy of Grand Hotel by Procol Harum. I lay awake all night with that song going round my head: ‘I’m thinking of renting a villa in France;/A French girl has offered to give me a chance./Or maybe I’ll take an excursion to Spain,/Buy a revolver and blow out my brain.’

  Not that I go along with people who try to make out the musicians of my generation were Great Artists. I read in the paper the other day that some professor at a university – Redcar, or Stoke, I think – has written a book arguing that Dylan is not only the Columbia recording artist who touched millions, but that he is the greatest poet since Yeats. Or possibly Keats.

  But then again maybe the prof has special insight; perhaps he knows something I never knowed.

  I had a consultation with little Dr Vidushi Sen this morning. I was feeling rather reflective and – though I tried to curb the feeling in myself – quite fond of her. She’s so young! She’s also a product of modern (i.e. post-trahison des clercs) British schooling, so has almost no general knowledge, and no familiarity with: grammar, foreign languages, myth, art and history – ancient or modern. Poor child, she has a job on her hands.

  The consulting
area is being redecorated, so we were in a small room in the old wing, which still has the Victorian shutters and bars from when it was a padded cell. Now it has piles of papers and folders and unread reports with daunting titles and two NHS ‘comfortable’ chairs, madmen for the use of, and a filing cabinet on which is a circular metal tray with unwashed coffee cups and an old carton of milk. A male nurse hovered outside.

  I began the causerie, as is expected.

  ‘If you were God, why would you absent yourself from earth?’

  No answer.

  ‘I mean, what is the point in divine terms of being not here? What purpose does that serve?’

  Still no answer.

  ‘Traditionally,’ I went on, ‘it’s explained as a “test of faith”. But if God was evident, then you wouldn’t need faith, would you? So it’s a circular argument. It looks like it’s also an ex post facto one, doesn’t it?’

  ‘What do you think?’ said Dr Sen.

  ‘I don’t think that a wise God would conclude that the advantages of being absent outweigh those of being present.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The consequence of being absent is that you place a heavy premium on blind “faith”. You leave belief open to human credulity. You make religion open to perversion by politics and fanaticism.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Better to turn up, I would have thought.’

  Silence.

  ‘I mean, if Woody Allen knew that ninety per cent of success comes from showing up, you’d think the Almighty could have figured it out too.’

  Longer silence. By looking fierce yet staying silent, I tried to make her speak.

  ‘Do you have religious belief?’ she said eventually.

  ‘Does it sound like it? I see the people nodding their heads at the Wailing Wall and I think God needs us more than we need him. It’s all about absence, isn’t it?’