Bedlam Burning

by Geoff Nicholson

  ‘So where exactly would this writer-in-residence job be?’ I asked.

  ‘At the Kincaid Clinic.’

  ‘That’s some sort of hospital?’

  ‘An asylum,’ she said. ‘A nut house. A loony bin. A funny farm. A booby hatch. Don’t look so surprised.’

  I thought I had some justification for being surprised. I had no idea that asylums employed writers-in-residence, and it sounded like a very tough job.

  ‘Wait till you meet Dr Kincaid,’ Alicia said. ‘Then everything will become clearer.’

  I doubted that, and I wasn’t sure this was an area in which I actually craved clarity. I was still enjoying the confusion. The taxi arrived in due course outside an imposing, dignified Victorian building on the outskirts of Brighton. It looked substantial yet severe, rather small for a hospital, more like a converted vicarage or village schoolhouse, and only passingly like my idea of an asylum. The front elevation was complex, all gables and bays, dormer windows and intricately carved bargeboards. It was Gothic, but not horror-movie Gothic. In fact, it looked quite benign and it took a while for me to notice that the retaining wall was a good deal higher than most garden walls, and that the tall cast-iron gates had some heavy-duty electronic hardware keeping them locked. Alicia produced a high-tech little device that she waved in the direction of the gates and they opened automatically. I found this rather impressive and futuristic.

  We walked into the grounds and headed for the main entrance of the clinic. I was aware that an asylum at night with locked gates and high walls was the stuff of dark fantasy and bad dreams, yet I felt unthreatened. And when I first stepped inside the vestibule, to the front desk, where a hatchet-faced night nurse looked at us blankly, I was hit by a severe whiteness, a combination of white-painted surfaces and pitiless fluorescent strip light. It was the sort of illumination that drives away shadows and phantoms. And when Alicia took me in to meet her boss, I saw that his office too was wilfully, clinically, bare and bright.

  Dr Eric Kincaid was sitting behind a stark metal desk. He was a middle-aged black man. That surprised me, but only a little. It would have surprised me even more if the head of the clinic had been a woman. It would have surprised me almost as much if he’d spoken with a heavy regional accent. He didn’t. His voice was thick and deep and grave. If there was a hint of Caribbean lightness to it, he kept it well under control. This was the voice of authority, of the Establishment.

  There was a solidity about him, a scale. He carried a lot of weight but he carried it easily, and everything about him seemed padded and rounded. His wrists and neck were thick with fat and muscle. The collar and cuffs of his shirt gripped too tightly, and he pulled at them from time to time, to get some temporary relief from their constriction. His bald head was a polished, dimpled dome, his belly was a globe of flesh that pushed out his white doctor’s coat, and his fingers were short, spatulate, competent looking. He exuded calm, dignity, competence, maybe even wisdom: or was I just buying into some familiar myth about the power and charisma of doctors? Did he look like a genius? Well, what did geniuses look like? Like mad scientists, like crazy professors, like Einstein? By these standards he looked all too prosaic.

  ‘Mr Collins,’ he said, ‘I’m very pleased to meet you at last. Alicia’s told me all about you.’

  Alicia caught my eye and nodded winningly, encouraging me to go with the flow, to accept what Kincaid was saying, implying that everything would be cleared up later. Had she really told him about Gregory Collins? How would she have had anything to tell?

  ‘Nice to meet you too,’ I said.

  ‘I won’t lie to you,’ Kincaid said, ‘I haven’t read your book from beginning to end, but I’ve skimmed it thoroughly and I’m confident we can work together.’

  I couldn’t imagine where he got such confidence from, and I was sure it was misplaced.

  ‘It’s apparent from your writing that you have a firm and subtle grasp on the convolutions of the troubled human mind. Have you spent much time with the mentally ill?’

  ‘Well, I spent three years at Cambridge,’ I said.

  He considered this remark to make sure I was joking and then he laughed, a laugh that started deep in his belly, then rose swiftly to become a fluting, high-pitched thing. And then Alicia felt she could laugh too. The professional courtesies had been observed.

  ‘I see we shall all be getting on famously,’ Kincaid said.

  I smiled as distantly, as formally, as inscrutably as I knew how. I suddenly wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible, but I wasn’t sure whether matters would be best speeded up by blandly agreeing with him or by saying nothing at all.

  ‘Do you have many commitments, Gregory?’

  I said, ‘No.’ What else could I have said?

  ‘So you could start on the first of the month?’

  ‘I suppose I could,’ I said.

  ‘Then let’s say you will. It’s good to have you aboard, Gregory.’

  Aboard? In what sense was I aboard? I’d been expecting, at best, to discuss the possibility of a job, but Kincaid talked as though he thought the deal was already done. He could only have got such an idea from Alicia, and I wondered why she’d wanted that. I was inclined to protest, but I knew it was all irrelevant anyway, and a pleading look from Alicia prevented me from saying anything at all. I didn’t want to cause trouble, didn’t want her to look bad in front of her boss. So, in as noncommittal a way as possible, certainly without actually saying the words, I let Kincaid think I was agreeing to start work as a writer-in-residence come the first of the month. That wasn’t far away but I hoped it was long enough for Alicia to find some means to get out of her self-inflicted humiliation. If she wanted to blame Gregory Collins and say he’d let her down, that would be just fine.

  ‘Very well then,’ said Kincaid, ‘I’ll let Alicia give you the tour of the facilities, and explain the precise terms and conditions, show you your accommodation. You’d be living-in, naturally. You know, you writers are a peculiar breed. Alicia suggested you might be rather resistant to accepting the post, that you might take some persuading, but as ever she was just being cautious. Good. I shall see you next month. You’ll be very happy here. Goodbye.’

  We exchanged a soft handshake, then I was dismissed and Alicia escorted me out. She had the decency to appear shamefaced.

  ‘You’re quite an operator, aren’t you?’ I said.

  ‘Would you say so?’

  ‘A bit of a con-artist, in fact.’

  ‘Is that so terrible of me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but it’s also quite funny.’

  This was clearly, obviously, transparently the moment when I ought to have come clean, when I ought to have said that I was a con-artist too, said I was a Gregory Collins impersonator. Then we’d have laughed about it, seen how ludicrous and impossible the situation was, seen that we were kindred souls, and fallen into each other’s arms for one night of improbable, never to be repeated sexual bliss. But I didn’t come clean. I remained dirty and deceitful, and for the best possible reason: I wasn’t given the chance to be clean.

  We had come out of Kincaid’s office and Alicia was beginning her tour, but we were scarcely halfway along the clinic’s central corridor, a long, low-ceilinged conduit with ten or so identical grey doors leading from it, when one of the doors swung open violently and a demented-looking naked woman emerged and ran towards us. Actually, this was the most naked-looking woman I had ever seen: skinny and bare, ribs and tendons showing through the pale skin, a shaved head, an utterly hairless body, and although her demeanour was certainly wild and threatening, there was nothing but vacancy in the eyes. She was staring at Alicia and me, and despite, in one way, looking as though she had a potent desire to do us harm, in another way I wasn’t sure she was really seeing us at all. I had the feeling that in her eyes we could have been any sort of grim hallucination.

  ‘Let’s stay very calm,’ Alicia said.

  I couldn’t tell whether she was tal
king to me or to the crazed patient or to herself, but it was a futile statement. None of us was remotely calm. Alicia talked quietly to the naked woman, calling her by name, Charity, repeating it often and sweetly, trying to placate her, but it was quite obvious to me, layman though I was, that it was doing no good whatsoever. Charity was not being placated. She was getting increasingly upset. She was jumping up and down and her arms were performing weird, uncontrolled semaphore.

  ‘Who’s this?’ Charity said, pointing at me. ‘Some new quack?’

  ‘This is Gregory,’ Alicia said. ‘He’s going to be working here from now on. You’ll be seeing more of him.’

  It seemed the wrong time to contradict her, to say I wasn’t going to be working there. Solidarity with Alicia was all-important. It also seemed like quite the wrong time to say the other thing that had instantly come into my mind, that whatever Charity needed, whatever her mental problems were, a writer-in-residence appeared unlikely to be able to solve them; but I kept quiet about that too. Charity looked at me with uninterested hostility then, swiftly and athletically, made a lunge at Alicia.

  What happened next was brief, confused and wholly instinctive on my part. As Charity went for Alicia, I went for Charity; and, as luck would have it, I was quicker than she was. I grabbed her in a smothering sort of rugby tackle. We landed on the cold hard floor of the corridor, though I suppose it was colder and harder for the naked Charity than it was for me, and we wrestled there for what seemed like an indecently long time. My hands were filled with body parts that I had no right to be touching, but I still held on, and even though Charity was fierce and slippery, I was big enough and strong enough to hold her down until I heard the footsteps of two male hospital porters pounding along the corridor. They prised Charity out of my grasp, lifted her up off the ground, and carried her back into her room as though she were an awkward piece of folding furniture, a deckchair or an ironing board. The grey door closed behind them with a weighted gentleness. I expected to hear screams and the noises of a struggle, but no sound came.

  ‘You needn’t have worried,’ said Alicia. ‘She was only dancing.’

  ‘Was she?’

  ‘Yes. It’s a religious thing with her. It can get a little Dionysian sometimes but it’s never actually harmful.’

  Obviously Alicia knew a great deal more about Charity’s condition than I did, but I wasn’t sure she was right. Charity’s ‘dance’ had looked pretty dangerous to me, and not conspicuously religious.

  ‘You should see her with her clothes on. She’s just a hippie at heart.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, apart from the hair.’

  I was shaken up. Wrestling with a mad, naked woman, even a mad, naked hippie, was not one of the things I’d been expecting on my night in Brighton. The event had been shocking, but so brief and so quickly over that I could almost believe I’d imagined it. I noticed my hands were trembling.

  ‘You need to sit down,’ Alicia said. ‘Let me show you where you’d live if you were our writer-in-residence.’

  I was glad she used the word ‘if’ rather than ‘when’, but a part of me didn’t really want to see the accommodation. I knew it would make me envious. Whatever it was like, however humble, it would still be infinitely better than my own horrible room in London. What was the point in torturing myself? Yet I couldn’t bring myself to refuse. We started to walk.

  ‘What exactly’s wrong with the patients here?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re in an asylum, that’s mostly what’s wrong with them,’ Alicia replied smartly.

  ‘But are they like schizophrenic, or manic depressive or …?’

  Actually, that was about as far as I could go with naming varieties of madness.

  ‘What’s in a name, Gregory?’ Alicia said. ‘Words like schizophrenia or manic depression or paranoia, they’re just labels, just narrow, reductive terms for things we don’t really understand. By naming them we like to pretend we have power over them – like Adam in the Garden of Eden. What we now call schizophrenia we would not so long ago have called dementia praecox. Before that you might have called it being possessed by demons. Perhaps at some time in the future we’ll be calling it Kincaid Syndrome, or who knows, Gregory Collins’ disease.’

  I wondered how it would feel to have a condition named after you. Was that a thing anyone would want? And were they named after the doctor or the patient, the poor bugger who suffered from it or the clever bastard who ‘discovered’ it? Who were these people? Who was Tourette? Who was Down? What was the name of Pavlov’s dog?

  ‘Put it this way, Gregory,’ Alicia continued, ‘if you were a patient and you arrived here in distress, would you like it if I said, “Ah yes, I know what this is! What we have here is a case of Sydenham’s chorea, or Marchiafava-Bignami disease, or Steele-Richardson-Olszewski syndrome.” Or would you rather we just helped you get better?’

  ‘Would it have to be an either/or situation?’ I said.

  ‘You have so much to learn, Gregory. But it’ll be a pleasure to teach you.’

  We had left the clinic and were walking through the grounds. The writer’s accommodation was apparently outside the main building. I could now see there was quite a bit of land attached to the clinic. There were some neglected flower borders, and then a much larger, overgrown area that ran all the way to the boundary wall. There were structures too: some outbuildings, a cracked and scruffy tennis court, and a dried-up fountain with a chipped cement statue of a mermaid at its centre.

  We went just a little further and there, in front of a giant rhododendron bush, was the neatest, quaintest, most appealing little cabin I’d ever seen; the same style as the main building, but its qualities had been distilled and concentrated. It was a structure anyone could have fallen in love with.

  ‘This would be yours,’ Alicia said. ‘It’s always been referred to as the writer’s hut. All it needs is a writer.’

  Alicia unlocked the door and we stepped inside. The interior smelled musty, like mildewed fruit. The old rattan and wicker furniture was careworn, there was some peeling yellow wallpaper and the overhead electric light provided only a feeble glow, but the place undoubtedly had charm. There was a desk with a typewriter on it, a chair, a frayed carpet, a pot-bellied stove. There was just one room with a sofabed: no bedroom, no kitchen, no bathroom. Alicia explained that I’d have to shower in the main building, just like everybody else, but that sounded like no great hardship. I’d lived with a similar arrangement at college. It wasn’t luxurious by any standards, except mine, but to me it was a palace. I sat down on the sofabed, looked around me, and of course I felt tempted.

  At that time I had never read Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. If I had, I would have known he described living in a hut as ‘the taproot of inhabiting’, and perhaps it would have helped me understand why I was so drawn to the place. As it was, I simply started to feel I could all too easily be happy here. This was a nice place in a nice town, and the fact it was located in the grounds of a lunatic asylum seemed like only the slightest drawback. Having Alicia close by, and especially if she was going to be as good to me in the future as she was being at that moment, would be an enormous attraction too. She was sitting close to me on the sofabed and she was gently massaging the back of my neck. She said it would help get rid of my tension. I was prepared for it to take some time.

  ‘So Charity isn’t dangerous?’ I said.

  ‘No. None of the patients here is actually dangerous, although some of them can be a little frightening.’

  ‘They aren’t sex killers or axe murderers?’

  ‘These people are people,’ Alicia said, suddenly earnest now. ‘That’s the important thing to remember. In the old days it was said that asylums were like museums of madness. We like to think the Kincaid Clinic is more like an art gallery or an opera house.’

  ‘And what do you do for them?’

  ‘We do what we can. We use a variety of techniques, some traditional, some experimental; a ser
ies of treatments that add up to what we’re proud to call Kincaidian Therapy. It would all become clear if you worked here.’

  ‘And what would I do?’

  ‘You would help the patients to use language as a bulkhead against madness.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘You’d get them to write, that’s all.’

  It sounded dangerously simple.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Alicia said. ‘You’re worried about the responsibility. That’s good. But don’t worry. We’re not asking you to be a doctor. We’re not asking you to deliver a cure; not that we believe in cures, in the ordinary sense. Your job wouldn’t be so hard. You’d have enough time to continue with your own writing. We don’t want to own you body and soul. I’m sorry I took a few liberties. Sorry I told Dr Kincaid you’d already agreed to take the job. But I like to think of it as an act of creative imagination. If you believe strongly enough that something is true, then the very act of believing makes it true.’

  I didn’t wholly understand why she was so keen to believe that Gregory Collins was going to be their writer-in-residence. True, his book, with its combination of blankness and luridness, might be construed as having some vague relevance to madness, but that hardly seemed reason enough. A more suspicious man would have doubted Alicia’s motives, and a more arrogant man might have thought she’d taken one look at my photograph on the back of The Wax Man and decided she had to have me. Being neither sufficiently suspicious nor sufficiently arrogant, I just felt confused.

  However, as I sat on the sofabed with Alicia’s fingers running complex patterns around the nape of my neck, I wasn’t much inclined to question her motives. Perhaps I should have been questioning my own. I was starting to think that possibly, just possibly, I might be able to carry this deception a little bit further. I was foolish enough to start thinking I might be able to do a reasonable job of teaching creative writing to a group of lunatics. How hard could it be?