I’d taken Alicia at her word and not done any specific research about madness and its treatment, but I hadn’t felt able to arrive without having read a book or two about creative writing. I’d trawled some bookshops and discovered quite a cache of books that claimed to teach you how to write, and in a few cases to teach you how to teach other people how to write. Some were quite practical and down to earth, some were just pretentious. Some contained simple suggestions and exercises, others took a more spiritual approach, angled towards personal growth. None of them was specifically designed for use in a mental institution, and I suppose I knew even then that I wouldn’t ultimately be able to rely on how-to-do-it manuals, but I’d bought a couple of them and they were in my holdall and I considered them a very worthwhile prop.
However, as I stood in the pouring rain outside the Kincaid Clinic, all this stuff about madness and methodology seemed rather academic. The problem of how to get in was far more pressing. I didn’t doubt that sooner or later someone would come in or go out through the gates, at which point I’d surely be able to gain access, and if it hadn’t been raining I might have been prepared to wait patiently. As it was, the rain was getting heavier and there was absolutely nowhere to shelter, so I looked closely at the gates and, although they were formidably high, they didn’t look utterly impregnable. There were a number of inviting iron curlicues that could be used as hand or foot holds if you were of a mind to make an ascent. I reckoned that if I did that and got to the other side I’d be able to go to the clinic’s main entrance, and find someone to open up the gates so I could bring in my belongings. It was a bit of a pain, and it obviously shouldn’t have been necessary, but in the circumstances it didn’t seem like such a bad or crazy scheme.
I began my climb, actually a lot trickier than it had looked, since the rain was making the iron framework slick and I kept losing my grip. Nevertheless, I managed to get to the top in reasonable order, but when I swung my leg over to begin the descent of the other side, I lost my footing, slipped, flailed, and found myself splayed on top of the gates, one leg and one arm on either side, half of me in the clinic, half in the outer world, trying desperately to keep my balance. I held on as best I could, and I may even have called out for help since help, of a sort, came running.
Two men I’d seen before trotted out of the clinic. They were the porters who’d taken away the naked Charity after our wrestling match. They looked businesslike yet sporty, like athletes going out for a pre-match warm up; but although I recognised them, they apparently didn’t recognise me.
When I saw them clambering up the gates towards me I was at first rather pleased. Help, I thought, was at hand. But their demeanour, their body language, and the way one of them shouted, ‘Come down from there, you mad bastard!’ made me realise they weren’t primarily motivated by kindness. They appeared to think I was an inmate trying to escape. They were trying to drag me down as roughly as they knew how. One of them grabbed my ankle and pulled on it heavily. I was flipped over the top of the gate and fell head-first towards the ground, my ankle acting as a sort of pivot, and only by instinctively huddling my arms around my head did I stop my skull making contact with the wet black asphalt of the drive. Instead I landed on my elbows and I lay there winded, unwilling to move, fearing I must have broken any number of bones. A second later the porters were hauling me to my feet, and dragging me inside the clinic. This, I suppose, was what I’d wanted, but again it was not precisely the way I’d have liked to make my entrance.
My belongings, of course, remained outside in the rain. As the porters dragged me through the doors, through the empty waiting area, where my flailing presence caused not the slightest interest to the nurse on duty, one of the porters said to the other, ‘They’re going to have to electrify that gate before long. Only way to keep the buggers in.’ I tried to speak up, tried to say I was attempting to get in, not out, but being shocked, wet and winded I dare say I wasn’t sounding very articulate. Certainly the porters treated me as though I was raving incoherently, and I found myself being pulled along the clinic’s central corridor, past the line of identical grey doors behind which the patients lived, until we came to a door the porters liked the look of. One of them held it open and the other pitched me inside, into warm, musty, absolute darkness. I heard the door slam and lock behind me.
I was in a padded cell, a new experience, and if I’d ever considered it before I would probably have thought padded cells belonged in the realm of movies and comic books rather than of contemporary psychiatric practice. I tried to stand up, and fell against a thickly quilted wall. In the darkness I could see nothing at all, but I suppose there wasn’t much to see. For a very short while I was almost glad to be in the room. At least it was dry. At least I was inside the clinic. At least I wasn’t being manhandled by two porters. But this feeling of comparative well-being didn’t last long, and I soon started to feel a more natural anger and indignation. At this point there wasn’t a great deal of fear, since surely it couldn’t be too long before the porters, or someone, would work out that the clinic had one inmate too many. And then I imagined everyone would be full of regret, the porters would get a bollocking from Dr Kincaid, and from Alicia too, possibly. And then I’d be released, apologised to, treated like a lord, in an attempt to make it up to me, and I’d be graciously accepting and forgiving, trying to see the funny side of it. But this expectation soon passed as well.
I stood, then sat, then slouched, then prostrated myself in that padded room for a great many hours. I had lost all track of time before I finally heard a noise outside and the harsh overhead lights were switched on. The room took shape around me: smaller, uglier, more commonplace than I had imagined. There was the scraping of a key in the lock, then the door opened and Dr Kincaid strode into the room.
‘Mr Collins,’ he said gravely, ‘welcome to the Kincaid Clinic.’
No apologies, no offers to make it up to me. I was furious.
‘How are you?’ Kincaid asked.
Words very nearly failed me but I came up with, ‘How the fuck do you think I am?’
‘I expect you’re feeling a tad anxious, a mite distressed.’
‘Very good, doctor,’ I said. ‘Let me out of here, will you?’
‘Soon,’ he said, ‘but first let’s analyse these feelings.’
‘Oh, come off it.’
‘Bear with me, Mr Collins,’ he said, and I couldn’t stop him. ‘When you first entered this room I’m sure you were angry because you weren’t being treated with the respect you thought was your due. But anger is the most volatile of emotions, hard to sustain for any length of time. After that you were fearful of the darkness, the isolation, the unfamiliarity. Some typical fears of the dark may have atavistically gushed forth. But as time passed, these imagined horrors failed to materialise. You were reassured. You became calm. The darkness enveloped you like a friendly cloak, supporting and protecting you. The darkness became a source of strength. You accepted its power. You started to feel tranquil. You felt liberated by the absence of light, of visual clutter. Soon you felt wonderfully at home.’
‘Oh did I? Did I really?’ I snarled.
‘Yes. If you look into yourself I think you’ll find that you did, and then you’ll understand the wisdom that’s at the heart of the therapy we deliver at the Kincaid Clinic.’
‘Are you saying this was deliberate? This was a bit of therapy you laid on for me?’
He didn’t quite have the gall to pretend this was the case.
‘No, not exactly,’ he admitted. ‘The porters did indeed commit an error, an understandable error in my opinion, but, be that as it may, I want you to see how errors can be turned to psychological advantage.’
‘Yours or mine, doctor?’ I said.
I thought of launching myself at him and landing a punch on his big, self-satisfied face. It would have felt good. But I didn’t. However bad your first day in the new job is you don’t stick one on the boss unless you’re really looking for trouble
. Instead I said, ‘Let me out. Now.’
He sighed deeply, as if his bold experiment had collapsed, its failure due to my lack of insight and sensitivity, as though I had failed him. And yet he knew there was nothing more to be done. He accepted that I’d had enough of the padded cell. He opened the door. ‘You may go to your hut now,’ he said. I was dismissed. My audience with the great man was over.
I decided I’d better go and see what had happened to my luggage. I went through the clinic, through the waiting area, past the front desk where the nurse ignored me again. I walked out of the main entrance, along the driveway to the gates, locked as before, and I looked into the road where I’d left my bags before climbing the fence. Nothing was there. Hardly surprising. Maybe the lads in the car had come by again and nicked them. Something told me I might never see my stuff again. That was a depressing prospect in one way since, apart from a few things I still kept in my old bedroom at my parents’ house, it was pretty much all I had in the world. On the other hand, it wasn’t as though I’d actually lost very much. All my worldly goods amounted to precious little.
This was an era when many people professed to being unmaterialistic, if not downright anti-materialistic, but I think my profession was more sincere than most. I was prepared to be philosophical about the loss. There were my clothes, for instance. Now, nobody would willingly lose all their clothes but mine were the sort that anybody could lose without too many regrets. People are inclined to think that in the seventies everyone went around in silver jumpsuits, platform boots and glitter jackets, looking as though they were auditioning for Roxy Music, but I can’t say I ever met anyone who dressed like that. Yes, I did own a few of what now seem like archetypal seventies duds: purple loon pants and skinny rib sweaters, and I had a Che Guevara T-shirt, but that was sort of a joke anyway; and, in any case, I didn’t wear these things because they were super-fashionable or because I was trying to look ‘seventies’, I wore them because they were normal and ordinary. I wore them because they were what everybody else wore. And if they were gone they were easily replaceable.
I would have said the same for most of the other things in the bags. There were some books, a few Penguin classics, and the books on how to teach creative writing. I’d be sorry to see them go, but they too were replaceable.
I was sorrier to lose a bottle of White Horse whisky given to me by my father as a sort of ‘good luck in your new job’ present; and there was a little plastic bag containing enough grass to make three or four joints. These might have been welcome in the long evenings ahead, but what the hell, it was only whisky, it was only dope. These weren’t things to get upset about.
My camera had gone too. I wasn’t absolutely sure why I’d brought it. I did believe in documenting my life, taking pictures of friends and family, and yet I didn’t think I was really going to go round the clinic taking pictures of the inmates. But that made me think of the only truly irreplaceable things I’d brought with me: my collection of photographs, a box full of snapshots showing parties and holidays, weddings, birthdays, me on my first bike, that sort of stuff. It was from this collection that Gregory had extracted the photograph of me for use on his book jacket. There were also half a dozen nude pictures of Nicola, which it had taken me a very long time indeed to get her to agree to pose for. If all these were gone I’d be really sorry; but again, what good would being sorry do?
I went back inside the clinic and at last the nurse looked up at me.
‘Problem?’ she said.
‘My bags were left outside the gate. Now they’re gone.’
‘Why on earth did you leave your bags outside the gate?’ she said. ‘Obviously they were going to get stolen, weren’t they?’
This was undoubtedly true, yet I couldn’t tell whether I was being taunted or humoured, whether the nurse thought I was some pretentious big shot from the big smoke who deserved to be rooked by the humble locals, or whether she thought I myself was some sort of sad bumpkin whose naivety was more to be pitied than blamed. I didn’t feel inclined to justify myself by describing my misadventures with the porters and the padded cell, which presumably she already knew about.
Calmly I said, ‘If by any chance my stuff turns up, you’ll let me know, won’t you?’
‘Obviously,’ she said.
I could tell she wasn’t going to be a very warm or forthcoming source of information but she was all I had, so I asked her a couple of things that were on my mind.
‘Is Dr Crowe on duty tonight?’
The nurse looked at me as though I was a moron.
‘If I had that sort of information, and it’s a very big if, then obviously I couldn’t give it out to just anyone. Could I?’
‘Couldn’t you?’
She shook her head regally.
I said, ‘And how can I get something to eat around here?’
I thought it was a question that left no room for mockery or condescension, but she looked at me again with the kind of sympathy usually reserved for the offensively feeble-minded, and replied, ‘This isn’t a hotel, you know.’
‘I know,’ I replied. Then as sarcastically as I could, I added, ‘It’s a clinic for the insane. I can see that’s a reason for there to be no room service, but I don’t see that it’s a reason for there to be no food.’
‘There’s no need to raise your voice.’
I hadn’t raised my voice at all. I’d been sarcastic in an intense, quiet sort of way, but I wasn’t going to start arguing about the volume of my voice.
‘Obviously the kitchens are closed at this time of night,’ the nurse said. ‘And the food store is well and truly locked. I’d like to help you, but obviously I can’t.’
‘OK then, how do I get to the nearest pub or burger bar?’
She sneered at me. ‘To do that,’ she said, ‘you’d have to go outside the clinic. And to do that you’d have to climb over the fence. And I don’t think you want to do that, do you?’
‘Obviously not,’ I said.
I set off for the writer’s hut, for what was going to be my home for the foreseeable future. For a second I had a vague, unrealistic fantasy that my luggage might, by some act of magic, if not porterage, have found its way there, but you know how it is with fantasies. However, there had been one or two additions to the place since I’d last been there. There was a basket of fruit, a vase of red carnations, and a bottle of champagne. They were arranged, perhaps like a still life, on a little kidney-shaped coffee table in front of the sofabed, and there was an envelope with my name on it. I opened it up to find a postcard from Alicia – a Jackson Pollock painting, black knotted strands against a beigy-grey background. The title was Number 32, and on the back were the words, ‘Welcome, Alicia’. I found this somewhat cheering, perhaps more cheering than it merited, but I was clutching at every cheerful straw I could find.
I did what I’m sure any real writer would have done in the circumstances: I opened up the bottle of champagne and drank it all. On an empty stomach, I was drunk by the second glass. I ate a couple of pieces of fruit so as not to feel like a complete degenerate, but they didn’t do much to absorb the alcohol. By the time, not very much later, I’d finished the bottle, I was ready to fall into a heavy stupor. Which I did.
7
I spent the night asleep on the sofabed, fully dressed. I woke up feeling happier than I had any right to. The sleep had done me some good and I resolved that today would be better than yesterday; after all, how could it be worse? I would start again. I’d challenge Kincaid if I had to. I would take no crap from nurses or porters. I would get what I wanted. I would make sure I was given food and respect and perhaps my own key to the front gate and, most important of all, I would make contact with Alicia.
There was a knock on the door of the hut and it was gently opened by a slight, smiling young man who came in pushing a trolley. He was wearing a peculiar sort of uniform, a high-necked, short-sleeved tunic and loud patterned trousers. In other contexts he might have resembled a chef or a de
ntist, but in the circumstances, given his scrubbed, hygienic appearance, I assumed he was a male nurse.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m Raymond. How are you this morning?’
‘Not so bad,’ I said.
‘Sorry about the turbulence. I’m afraid the Kincaid Clinic hasn’t been treating you very well, has it?’
At last. This was all I’d been looking for; a bit of sympathy, a hint of apology.
‘You can say that again,’ I said.
‘Can I offer you tea, coffee, a boiled sweet?’
‘Coffee, thanks.’
He messed around with a pot and a milk jug and handed me a tiny plastic cup of dense, tepid coffee.
‘Care for a bag of salted peanuts with that?’
‘Why not?’ I said.
He handed them over, and then he presented me with one of those little airline bags containing the odds and sods you might need during a long flight: a comb, toothpaste, a towelette. It also contained a sleep mask and a pair of earphones, which seemed superfluous to requirements, but it was reassuring to be given anything at all.
‘It’s not much,’ he said, ‘but it’s the least we can do. On behalf of all of us I’d like to welcome you on board and if there’s anything I can do to make your flight more enjoyable, don’t hesitate to ask.’
I thought he was overdoing the in-flight metaphor a bit, but when I put the coffee to my lips it certainly tasted as bad as anything served by an airline.
Then I heard a woman’s voice say, ‘I wouldn’t drink too much of that coffee if I were you,’ and I turned to see Alicia, dressed in her doctorly whites, hornrims in place, clipboard tucked under her arm. She was standing behind Raymond and had placed a firm, restraining hand on his shoulder. He drooped and looked suitably cowed.
‘It probably isn’t poisoned,’ Alicia said, ‘but you can’t be too careful. Raymond’s improving all the time, but he does have relapses.’
Bedlam Burning Page 8
