Bedlam Burning

by Geoff Nicholson

  ‘We could taxi around out here until you’ve read it,’ Raymond said.

  ‘No. You wouldn’t have liked it if I’d stood over you while you wrote it, would you?’

  There was general consent that I’d said something reasonable and the patients started to withdraw, going off in a solemn, mournful procession. I should probably have gone back to bed, resumed my dreams of Alicia, but this boxful of writing had me hooked. I got dressed and got ready for work. I felt good. Here at last was something to do. This was what I was here for.

  I took the pages out of the box and separated them, arranged them into individual works, as it were. This was harder than it might sound. The pages weren’t numbered, and not all of them had very clear beginnings or ends; but using common sense, intuition, and noting the different typewriter faces, I did my best.

  Then I began to read. I didn’t just sit down at the first page and systematically read my way right through to the end, since I was far too eager to get an overview of the types and varieties of writing. I picked a page here, an opening paragraph there, a couple of random sentences elsewhere. I got a taste, a flavour, a sense of things to come. But then I did indeed go back to the beginning, not that there was a beginning per se, and studiously, thoroughly, conscientiously, read and then reread the complete works.

  Here was a version of God’s plenty; most of it having absolutely no relevance to the title The Moon and Sixpence, for which I was somewhat grateful; although oddly enough there was one piece that seemed to make a pretty good stab at retelling the story of Charles Strickland and his adventures in Tahiti. I say ‘seemed’ because my memories of the original weren’t very fresh, Somerset Maugham being almost as unfashionable then as he is now.

  The other pieces were more obviously ‘creative’. There was a childhood memoir about growing up in a softer, more bucolic age, a time with fewer cars, less crime and better weather. There was a strangely subdued erotic fantasy about a naive teenage girl who’s invited to an English country house, a place much like the Kincaid Clinic, where she meets a family of eccentrics who engage her in elaborate but really quite mild and harmless forms of sexual activity.

  There was a continuous stream of consciousness, a hundred or more pages: unparagraphed, underpunctuated, unmediated and strangely unrevealing meanderings about love, pain, despair, that sort of thing. Another piece recounted, at floaty length, the deeply spiritual joys of dancing naked.

  There was an account of a football match, written in painstaking, mind-numbing detail, recording every move, every pass, every tactic, every disputed decision, every mood swing demonstrated by the crowd. It took about as long to read the piece as it would to have watched the match, although perhaps that was the point. It had a certain lumbering, anal power, but it was remarkably little fun to read, although I knew I wasn’t there just for fun. More entertaining was a story set on a Boeing 747 where the pilot comes down with an attack of food poisoning and the plucky air steward has to land the plane on a tiny volcanic island and does so with dignity and aplomb.

  One of the most curious and, surprisingly, one of the most readable pieces consisted of a list, rather a long list, of ‘interesting facts’: the world’s most prolific playwright was Lope de Vega; in 1873 Mark Twain patented a self-pasting scrapbook; the Amazon river has one hundred tributaries; Morocco was the first country to recognise the United States; and so on. Another piece, one of the shorter ones for fairly obvious reasons, was an endless series of anagrams, about the ‘avarice’ of ‘caviare’ and the ‘long leases’ of ‘Los Angeles’, and ‘Alfred’ who ‘flared’. Parts of it were very clever, but it really made no sense at all. The anagrams didn’t add up to anything. They were just anagrams.

  Only two pieces struck me as genuinely disturbing, which I suppose is to admit that they were rather well written. One was a first-person account, a confession I suppose, from a woman who had got so angry with her baby that she’d picked it up by its feet and held it out of a fourth-floor window, and with her free hand tossed a coin to decide whether or not she was going to drop it. The coin came up heads, the baby fell to its death.

  The final piece seemed genuinely psychotic. It was a description of a murder: the pursuit, capture, stabbing, mutilation and anatomically precise dismemberment of a young female victim, in the car-park of a pub called the Moon and Sixpence. I wasn’t quite stupid enough to assume this was describing events that had actually taken place, or even that the writer wanted to take place, but to have described these events at all suggested to me that the writer was potentially sick and dangerous, although at the same time I knew I might be over-reacting and over-dramatising.

  It took me far longer than it should have to realise that none of these pieces had the writer’s name on it. That seemed odd. You might have put it down to modesty or lack of ego, but I felt it implied something more than that. I wasn’t ready to start finding conspiracies, but presumably the patients must have got together and agreed to remain anonymous. I tried telling myself this was no bad thing, that it would allow me to come to the texts without prejudice. But who was I kidding? Even if I didn’t want to become involved in some banal guessing game, it would have been unnatural not to want to know who’d written what.

  Some assumptions were inevitable. You tend to think you can tell a man’s writing from a woman’s writing, an old person’s from a young person’s, the writing of the spectacularly insane from that of the more discreetly insane. But other, larger, assumptions offered themselves too. Surely Raymond had written the piece about the emergency plane landing. Surely Maureen, the woman in the football kit, had written the account of the football match. Surely Charity had written the piece about dancing naked. And if I’d had to guess who’d written the piece about the sexual violence in the pub car-park, I would certainly have gone for Anders.

  But the moment I thought these things I also thought that perhaps I was being too facile. Perhaps a man like Anders who oozed violence so effectively in person mightn’t have any need to write about it. Maybe this violent fantasy had been written by one of the quieter, more harmless-looking people – the quiet ones always, allegedly, being the worst – or perhaps it had been written by a woman trying to exorcise her worst fears. Similarly, in a less dramatic way, just because you dressed in football kit didn’t necessarily mean you wanted to write obsessive accounts of football matches. Maybe it meant the opposite. And again, if you spent a certain amount of your time dancing naked, perhaps you didn’t need to write about that either. If you can’t judge a book by looking at its cover, you probably can’t judge mental patients by their literary output. But what then could you do with that output?

  Well, you could spend a whole weekend poring and agonising over it. You could make notes and annotations. You could mark the bits you liked best. You could jot down suggestions for how things could be said more simply or more clearly. Without getting too pedantic about it you could correct a little spelling and grammar. And all of this I did.

  Naturally, most of the writing didn’t deserve or benefit from this length and depth of reading, but I thought I owed it to the patients to treat their efforts with the utmost respect. And besides, having been so idle and restless all week I was inclined to let the work take up as much time as possible.

  I concentrated long and hard, but there were one or two distractions. Raymond came by at intervals to ask if I needed pillows or blankets, and Cook, in his tin helmet, brought me bowls of soup and stew. From time to time I was aware of being watched. Patients would position themselves some distance from the hut so they could look at me through the windows, trying to see how I was reacting as I read their efforts.

  I did my best to show I was treating the job with the right degree of commitment and high seriousness, that I was reading thoroughly, intently and yet not too critically. But these weren’t easy concepts to communicate non-verbally, and sometimes it was actually quite hard to read at all while aware of being watched. I became very self-conscious and lost all se
nse of how I might normally behave or appear while reading. I became someone who was performing the act of reading.

  A far more important and welcome distraction was Alicia. I was not distracted by her actual presence, alas, not by the flesh and blood woman, that would have been too much to ask, but thoughts about her and the night we’d spent together were distracting enough. I kept reminding myself that she had come to my hut, that we’d had sex, that it had been great, if quirky, and maybe its quirkiness was part of its greatness. I had got what I wanted. Actually, I had got far more than I had hoped or bargained for, but perhaps good sex is always like that.

  And I found a lot of questions drifting into my head. I wondered if what Alicia and I had done ‘meant’ anything. Did it mean she liked me, that she’d come to my hut again? Would that be regularly? Once in a while? Every night, whether I wanted it or not? Did that mean that my life at the Kincaid Clinic was going to be a lot more tolerable and enjoyable from now on? Or was it going to be more difficult and problematic? Did Alicia want the same things from me that I wanted from her? And did I have the slightest idea of what I really wanted, anyway?

  These weren’t merely rhetorical questions, but I knew there was no point in trying to answer them. For the time being I would have to live with an amount of uncertainty, and that didn’t seem so terrible. The mere possibility of a future that involved more Alicia, more sex with her, more intimacy with her, was enough to sustain me, at least for now.

  By the end of the weekend I had completed my first seven days at the Kincaid Clinic. It had been a tough week in all sorts of ways, but I’d got through it, and by Sunday evening, satisfied that I’d dealt properly with the first batch of patients’ writing, I felt I wasn’t in such bad shape. The future looked possible.

  And then Kincaid came to see me again, and even that didn’t seem too bad. Whereas on his previous visit my desk had been completely bare, it was now stacked with a thousand or so pages of typescript. I looked like I was doing something.

  ‘How quickly life can change,’ Kincaid said, as he stepped into the hut. ‘You’re pleased it’s such an impressive trawl.’

  ‘Well, there’s certainly plenty of it,’ I said. ‘Want to read some?’

  He appeared to be debating with himself whether this would be a useful strategy, but I already suspected what the outcome was going to be.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think that would be entirely appropriate. I might be invading your territory. I’m keen to know what the patients are up to but …’ more studied rumination, then, ‘I think it would be better if you simply wrote me a report.’

  ‘Yes, I could do that,’ I said, ‘if you think you can trust me to analyse it properly. I’m no psychologist.’

  ‘I trust you totally,’ Kincaid said, and he was about to retreat, but I didn’t let him get away that easily. ‘There is something I’d like your professional opinion on,’ I said, and he couldn’t resist that. ‘None of these pieces has the writer’s name on it.’

  ‘Did you tell them to put their names on?’

  ‘I didn’t tell them anything. You did.’

  Another man might have thought I was accusing him of something or other, forgetfulness at the very least, but not Kincaid. He said, ‘You know, this is interesting. I think what we might be seeing here is a manifestation of the patients’ group mind.’

  I didn’t know what that was, and I suppose it would have been easy enough to ask him what he meant, but I couldn’t be bothered. I didn’t want to give him another opportunity to show off.

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ I said. ‘Though I can understand why they wouldn’t want to put their names on some of it.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Somebody is writing some very sick stuff, violent murderous fantasy, dangerous stuff.’

  ‘Dangerous?’

  ‘Well, needless to say, I’m not so naive as to think he, or I suppose possibly she, has actually done or is going to do what he, or she, describes, but if that’s what’s going through his, or her, mind then—’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then I think we should keep an eye on him or her.’

  ‘Yes, Gregory, we do keep an eye on our patients – that’s why they’re here.’

  I felt nicely humiliated.

  Kincaid said, ‘I don’t think you need worry, Gregory. After all, they’re only words on paper. Sticks and stones, they’re not.’

  ‘Well yes,’ I said, ‘but—’

  ‘But me no buts, Gregory. Perhaps the person writing these violent fantasies is doing so simply in order to worry you, to manipulate you, to make you have this very conversation with me.’

  ‘I can see that,’ I said.

  ‘In which case we surely have a duty not to be manipulated, not to worry, not to have this conversation.’

  I wasn’t sure about that. I couldn’t help thinking that if the writer of the piece committed some horrible sex crime, in or out of the clinic, now or later, it wouldn’t be much defence, neither legal nor moral, to say, ‘Oh, we didn’t worry because we thought it wasn’t sticks or stones.’

  ‘Up to a point,’ I said, but Kincaid had already lost interest in me and our conversation.

  He rumbled throatily. ‘So you’ll let me have the report on my desk at nine o’clock tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘Then you’ll see the patients and deliver your judgement of their work. Don’t feel you have to be too gentle with them.’

  And he was gone. I was left with the prospect of a report to be written and a class to be faced; two things to be daunted by, yet surprisingly I was undaunted. If Kincaid wanted a report by nine o’clock then he’d have one. It would be short, well-written and with a certain good humour and common sense about it; quite unlike the pages I’d spent the weekend reading. And as for seeing the patients and delivering a judgement, well, I preferred to think it would be more of a group discussion. I wouldn’t be standing in judgement on them, wouldn’t be giving them marks out of ten. It would be a getting acquainted session. I’d ask a few questions, get them to talk about what they’d written. I’d ask them to do some reading aloud. The time would soon pass. It would be like being back at Cambridge. Sort of. I thought I could cope with that.

  11

  On the stroke of nine next morning I was knocking on Kincaid’s office door and I had in my hand a neatly typed one-page report on the patients’ outpourings. Kincaid summoned me in and I stood by his desk as he read the report, which told him what I’ve told you, that the writing was variously manic, depressive, obsessive, naive, self-referential, obscure, compelling in one sense, repellent in another. I couldn’t help saying that I wondered if a title like The Moon and Sixpence hadn’t had a stifling effect on the patients’ creativity (although given that few of them seemed actually to have referred to the title, this probably wasn’t a very telling criticism). And I ended by saying I thought it was far too early to report anything at all with any certainty. Kincaid’s attention as he surveyed the report was intense yet cursory, as if he might be employing skills he’d learned on a speed-reading course.

  ‘It’s quite well-written,’ he said as he finished. ‘And there are one or two telling phrases, but frankly, given your considerable literary gifts, I suppose I’d expected more in the way of critical appraisal and value judgements.’

  ‘You mean whether or not I liked any of it?’

  ‘I mean whether or not it was any good.’

  ‘Good in what sense?’

  ‘In the sense of publishable.’

  ‘Publishable?’

  I was taken aback. Did he really think there was some literary genius locked away behind one of the clinic’s grey doors? Did he think they were likely to come up with something really good the first time out? And did he really think a writer was the best person to know what was and wasn’t publishable? Most writers, I suspected, had only the vaguest idea. Perhaps what he really needed was a publisher-in-residence, someone like Nicola.

  I could only say, �
��I think it’s still early days yet.’

  ‘I know it’s early days,’ Kincaid agreed, ‘but if a man can’t envisage a future, then he may have no future at all.’

  I wasn’t sure if this was true or not, but I was soon back in the lecture room with the patients. It was just them and me this time. No porters were in evidence, Alicia was not poised at the back of the room, and to some extent this felt like a welcome vote of confidence. I could be trusted not to burn the place down.

  I’d abandoned the lectern and arranged eleven chairs into a circle. It evoked memories of group therapy sessions I’d seen depicted in films, and perhaps also of King Arthur’s round table, a way of saying there were no favourites here, and possibly no leader. The patients sat uneasily, fidgeting, preening, slumping, in accordance with their differing conditions.

  I’d separated what I took to be the individual pieces of writing, and arranged them on the floor in the centre of the circle. ‘I’d like you to begin by retrieving your own work,’ I said. It was a fairly lame and obvious ploy, but I thought it was worth a try. It didn’t work in the slightest. Nobody moved. All ten sat there in inert silence. I was annoyed. I’d done my bit, spent the weekend wading through this verbal swamp of their making, and now they were refusing to play the game.

  I remained in my chair and said nothing, thinking this was indeed just a game, a bluff to see who could sit it out longest, and I thought I ought to be able to play the game every bit as well as they could. I was wrong. They had the strength of numbers, madness and perhaps practice on their side. When I couldn’t take it any longer, I said, ‘How about you, Charity? Surely this must be yours.’

  I picked up the nude dancing piece and offered it to Charity.

  ‘Must it?’ she said, and she twitched her top lip at me. How dare I make such a cheap, easy assumption? Her hands stayed in her lap and she refused to take the sheets of paper I was holding out to her.

  ‘How about you?’ I said, addressing Sita, the Indian woman. ‘Which one of these is yours?’