Bedlam Burning

by Geoff Nicholson

  She looked at me serenely and said absolutely nothing.

  ‘She doesn’t speak,’ Raymond said by way of explanation.

  ‘Never?’ I asked.

  ‘Not so far, anyway.’

  There was obviously a whole bundle of problems lurking here, and this didn’t feel like the moment to go into them. I turned rapidly to the woman in the football kit. Today she was wearing a canary yellow shirt. Norwich City, I thought.

  ‘Then how about you, Maureen?’ I said. ‘Is this your account of the football match? If it is, you should be proud. It’s a very good piece of writing.’

  She was unmoved, so I turned, not without anxiety, towards Anders.

  ‘Is this yours?’ I asked, and I offered him the pages describing the violent rape and murder. He looked at me as though he might well do me some physical harm, but not now. For the moment his hands remained where they were, bunched into meaty but unmoving fists.

  ‘In fact,’ I continued to lie, becoming more transparently desperate, ‘there’s some wonderful writing here, things that any writer would be pleased to have written. I know I would. I’m surprised nobody wants to take credit for it.’

  They weren’t falling for any of this, and when I said, ‘So, would anybody like to read aloud what they wrote? Or something they didn’t write?’ I knew I was flogging an absolutely decaying horse. I embarked on a series of increasingly hopeless questions. Had they enjoyed doing the writing? Had any of them written before? Did anybody have a favourite author? All of these were equally useless. Nobody said a damned thing. I felt like some idiot student on teaching practice. I found myself at the centre of a ring of sullen, obstructive silence. I’d had enough.

  ‘Well, if there’s nothing more to be said, then there’s no point trying to say it,’ I muttered.

  I started to leave, and then gradually, slowly, the patients got up from their seats, moved into the centre of the circle and began to pick up pages of manuscript from the floor. At first I thought I must have made some sort of breakthrough, that they were taking what they’d written, but that happy delusion didn’t last long. They were clearly not taking their own work since they would grab a single sheet here, a couple of pages there, a handful elsewhere. And when they had what they considered enough they didn’t return to their seats. They stood ruminatively for a while, holding and shuffling the sheets of paper they’d salvaged, and then, with a shared purpose, they all simultaneously tossed them energetically, intently yet playfully, into the air.

  Once the pages were airborne they became much more desirable, much more fascinating to the patients. They tried to snatch them as they fell, diving to catch them before they hit the floor, then tossing them up again. Sometimes two people would make a grab for the same bit of paper, and then a little tug of war would ensue. Some patients clasped handfuls of paper to their bosoms, rubbed their faces with them. Others kicked pages around the floor as though they were dancing in piles of fallen leaves.

  All this was done wordlessly, but not exactly silently. It was accompanied by what seemed to me rather predictable madhouse noise: whooping, screaming, hysterical laughter and so forth. The patients were ignoring me completely by now, and I stood hopelessly at the centre of all this frantic paper-orientated mayhem and I felt utterly dispirited.

  And when, much as before, the porters came running in, adding to the chaos, and when Alicia came and viewed the scene with great weariness, and when Kincaid also eventually arrived and instantly put a stop to it all, I had a terrible feeling, not only that history was repeating itself, but that it might continue to repeat itself endlessly, indefinitely, that it would always be like this. I’d be constantly losing control, Kincaid would be constantly bailing me out, for ever and ever, or at least until such time as I couldn’t face it any more and walked out, or until Kincaid fired me. One or other of these options surely couldn’t be far away.

  Kincaid commanded the patients, ‘Go away again, and write something else. This time your project is to be entitled …’ He displayed a rare moment of indecision and said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. Mr Collins will give you a title.’

  I was speechless, my brain was dry. I was being asked to perform the tiniest creative act and the task was beyond me. After a long, though hardly pregnant, silence, and for reasons that I couldn’t fathom, I found myself saying, ‘Heart of Darkness’.

  Kincaid was well-pleased with my choice, but the patients didn’t react to it at all. They simply shuffled off leaving the crumpled and abandoned manuscripts behind them. Kincaid and I stood together for a moment.

  ‘I’m really sorry about this,’ I said.

  ‘I know you are,’ he said.

  ‘If you want me to resign I will.’

  ‘Why would I want that?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t you?’ I asked.

  He narrowed his eyes a little, to appear shrewd and powerful, as though he was looking into my inner self.

  ‘Because I have faith in you,’ he said. ‘Perhaps more faith than you have in yourself. I know you, Gregory. I know you’re no quitter. You’ll give me another week. After that you can do what you like, but I know you and I know you’ll give me another week.’

  ‘Oh, OK,’ I said weakly, but I wasn’t really sure I meant it.

  12

  Left alone in the lecture room, I found myself on my knees, collecting the manuscript pages together, smoothing them out, trying to make a neat pile of them, and when I’d done that I took them up to the library where I set them on one of the empty shelves. At least the place now contained some reading matter.

  I stood in the library and experienced a whole cocktail of emotions. Did many people drink cocktails at that time in the seventies? Perhaps not. Perhaps that was a craze that came later, and in any case this was a cocktail that was likely to disagree with even the strongest stomach. I wanted to cry, to run away, to run to Alicia’s arms, to smash something. I felt useless, a complete failure; and the fact that Kincaid didn’t want to get rid of me only made me feel worse. I was grateful for his indulgence but I was ashamed to need it. Surely if you were no damned good at something you should admit it and move on to something else. Besides, I wasn’t even sure I could last through another week. Then two rather strange, encouraging things happened.

  The first was a visit from Raymond. I heard the rattle of his trolley in the corridor outside the library. Raymond’s face appeared at the door, looking cheerful and perhaps as though it might be wearing a little make-up. I let that pass. He wheeled himself and the trolley into the library, and he was followed by Carla, the young black girl. She dawdled across the room and pressed herself against the window, leaning her forehead on the glass and looking out at nothing in particular.

  Raymond made no acknowledgement of her presence, but said, ‘You don’t have to believe everything Alicia Crowe tells you.’

  My first reaction was to take this as an insult against Alicia, and I wanted to come to her defence. Nobody was going to accuse my Alicia of being a liar, but Raymond added mildly, disarmingly, ‘There’s absolutely no reason not to drink the coffee. It’s not going to poison you. Really. I never poisoned anybody. All right, so I put a little prussic acid in the water supply on the aircraft. But I knew I’d get found out before anybody drank it. And I wanted to get found out. I had to convince everybody I was mad, didn’t I?’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes. I know that’s what lots of them say around here. But in my case it happens to be true. I needed to get away. I’d made some powerful enemies up there as I jetted back and forth across the skyways. They were out to get me. I knew that if I could get locked up here I’d be safe. It’s worked very well so far.’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘But I wouldn’t poison you. What would be the point? What would it achieve?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it might reinforce the impression that you’re actually mad.’

  This amused him. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘I can see you’re going to enjoy your time here.
’

  There was no answer to that. The coffee certainly looked and smelled appealing enough, and my instincts somehow told me I could trust Raymond, at least to the extent of believing that he didn’t want to poison me.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we get Carla here to be your official food taster? I love Carla. I wouldn’t hurt her for the world.’

  Before I could consider the offer, Carla had sprung into life, hopped and skipped across the library and was drinking a cup of hot black coffee. She attacked it like a wine taster, running it round her mouth before swigging it down. Then she froze, did a double take, grabbed her stomach with both hands. Her face buckled in agony, she fell to her knees, and I realised she was playing at being poisoned, doing a comic turn that involved gurning and squawking and writhing around in an embarrassingly poor mime of someone in their death throes. She ended the performance twitching in a foetal position on the floor, but by then I had stopped watching, and was drinking my own cup of coffee, convinced it wasn’t toxic.

  ‘Oh, you’re quite the frequent flier, aren’t you?’ Raymond said.

  I found myself feeling oddly well-disposed towards both him and the idiotic Carla, who had now picked herself up and was doing extravagant calisthenics in front of a run of empty shelving. I am always amazed at the way the smallest things can be responsible for making the most major changes in people’s emotions, but as Raymond wheeled his trolley out of the library, giving a little curtsey as he went, the prospect of another week at the Kincaid Clinic seemed, for some reason, not nearly so daunting.

  Then the second thing happened: the telephone rang. I looked around the library in surprise. I hadn’t even been aware there was a phone in there, and I was amazed to find an old Bakelite model shrilling out from under a chair in the corner. Even so, I just ignored it at first. I didn’t think it could possibly be for me, and it would surely stop before too long. But it continued to ring and at last I felt obliged to pick it up. A voice I recognised as the nurse’s said, ‘Phone call.’ And I said, ‘For me?’ And she said, ‘Obviously for you. You’re Gregory Collins, aren’t you?’ There was a fizz of static on the line before I was connected. In that second I thought perhaps it was Kincaid, having changed his mind about giving me the sack. But it was Gregory Collins, the Gregory Collins.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘Bob Burns.’

  Call me unimaginative and given to stereotyping, but the moment I heard his voice I pictured pinched northern terraces, pinched northern faces, miners walking home through grainy, high-contrast streets, the whites of their eyes staring out through blackened faces, their hands full of pickaxes and caged canaries. I wondered if Gregory might be calling to wish me well, to ask me how the job was going, but he was far too self-absorbed for that.

  ‘I’ll not beat about the bush, Michael. I’ve had a letter that’s a bit disturbing.’

  I didn’t imagine Gregory could be more disturbed than I was at that moment, but I asked, ‘Who from?’

  ‘Dr John bloody Bentley.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. It surprised me that Bentley would be writing to any of his old students, and it seemed especially unlikely he’d have written to Gregory Collins. But Gregory reminded me, ‘I sent him a proof of my book, remember?’

  I did, but only vaguely, and it didn’t seem reason enough to merit a phone call.

  ‘I was asking him for a quote for the jacket,’ Gregory said. ‘But the bugger never replied, so I thought he probably didn’t believe in that sort of thing, and like you said at the time, it probably wouldn’t have done me much good anyway, but now he’s written to me.’

  ‘Has he given you a quote?’

  ‘I’ll read you the entire letter,’ Gregory said. ‘It’s not long. “Dear Collins, Thank you for sending me the advance proof copy of The Wax Man, which I have now, a little belatedly, had a chance to read. I can assure you it will be warmly received at my next book-burning party. Sincerely, Dr John Bentley.” What do you think of that?’

  In the way that you can find yourself laughing even when you have nothing to laugh about, I found myself chuckling at Bentley’s letter.

  ‘It’s no laughing matter,’ Gregory said. ‘Don’t you think it’s shocking?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s very surprising if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘But don’t you think burning books is a bloody fascistic thing to do?’

  ‘Of course. But I also think the letter’s probably an example of Bentley’s famous Cambridge wit.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘I think it’s a joke, Gregory.’

  ‘You don’t think he’s going to burn my book?’

  ‘Oh, I think he probably is.’

  ‘Then how is it a joke?’

  Explaining jokes is a futile business at the best of times. In my current frame of mind I thought that explaining one to Gregory Collins was likely to drive me to despair. Not the longest of drives.

  ‘OK, it’s not a joke,’ I said.

  ‘So don’t you think I should denounce him?’ Gregory asked.

  ‘Denounce?’

  ‘Tell the university authorities. Or write a letter to the Times Literary Supplement or something.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t see what that would achieve, especially given that you burned your own book at one of his parties.’

  ‘That’s different altogether. A bloke’s allowed to burn his own stuff, like Freud – he destroyed all his letters and notes ’cause he didn’t want to make it too easy for the biographers, but that’s a bit bloody different from when the Nazis burned his works.’

  ‘Yes, it’s different,’ I said, ‘and I can see why you mightn’t like it, but I don’t think you’ve any choice but to put up with it. If you get into a fight with Bentley I can’t see how you’re going to emerge from it without looking silly.’

  ‘You think I look silly?’

  ‘No, in general, I don’t think you look silly, and I think it would be best if you stayed that way.’

  ‘It’s a rum business,’ he said.

  I wondered what he’d been expecting from me. Perhaps he thought that since I was the one who’d tried, totally unsuccessfully as it turned out, to embarrass Bentley at our book-burning party, I was going to be an ally in trying to attack him on some dubious moral grounds. The truth was I didn’t care about Bentley any more, didn’t care much at all about the people I’d known or the things I’d gone through at university. It all seemed a million years ago and a million miles away.

  ‘Why don’t you do something subtler?’ I suggested. ‘Like making him a character in your next book?’

  ‘There may never be a next book,’ Gregory said, and he drifted into a moody silence. Then he asked, ‘What do you think Nicola would say?’

  ‘Something pretty snotty, I’d guess.’

  ‘Would you mind if I gave her a bell and asked her professional opinion? I haven’t seen her since, you know, that night.’

  I knew I had no say in the matter, no right to object or even have an opinion, and yet some dim, dormant part of me minded a lot. I didn’t want Nicola and Gregory cosying up, discussing matters of literature and conscience behind my back. But naturally I had to say, ‘What you and Nicola get up to is your own business.’

  ‘Good,’ Gregory said. ‘I thought you wouldn’t mind, but a bloke’s got to be careful. I wouldn’t want good mates like us to fall out over a bird. Right you are then, I’ll keep you informed.’

  I could tell he was about to hang up, and suddenly I was furious with him. He was such a self-centred bastard, so completely without interest in anyone other than himself. Even if he didn’t care about me or my job or my well-being, wouldn’t simple curiosity have compelled him to ask how things were going at the clinic? I didn’t intend to open my heart to him, but I decided that while I’d got him, I’d make use of him.

  ‘I need some advice,’ I said.

  ‘From me?’ I was glad he showed the appropriate amount of surprise. ‘
If it’s about writing—’

  ‘It’s about teaching.’

  ‘Great. That’s what I do best.’

  ‘So tell me, how do you do it? How do you stand up in front of a class of ten people—?’

  ‘Only ten?’ he said. ‘If I had a class with only ten in it I’d think I’d died and gone to heaven.’

  ‘Yes, but these are adults and they’re mad,’ I said.

  He wouldn’t concede that this made any difference.

  ‘Anyway,’ I continued, ‘how do you get them to respond? How do you get them to speak? How do you keep control? How do you make them respect you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Gregory flatly. ‘You just do.’

  It was a more useless answer than I could possibly have imagined. ‘And what do you do if your first class turns into a cross between a paper chase and a rugby scrum?’ I asked.

  ‘In my school they’d get a bloody long detention.’

  ‘Mightn’t work in my position.’

  ‘And I assume you don’t have corporal punishment?’

  Nobody had actually told me we didn’t, but I was making the same assumption. ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘Mmm, mmm,’ I could hear him brooding, trying to come up with something. It was a painful procedure for him. When I’d just about given up hope of him saying anything at all, he finally replied, ‘Well, some people say you should be yourself when you’re teaching, but I think that’s asking for trouble. If you try to be yourself they’ll have you. I think you need to be someone else. Anyone else.’

  ‘But I am being someone else!’ I whined. ‘I’m being you.’

  ‘Are you though?’ he said heavily. ‘Are you really?’

  I thought I understood what he meant. I was pretending to be Gregory Collins, but in name only. When I’d stood in front of the patients I’d been all too depressingly, and all too vulnerably, like the real Michael Smith. I hadn’t had an act; and that had been the problem.

  ‘OK, yes,’ I said, ‘I can see that.’

  ‘And I’ll tell you something else,’ said Gregory. ‘If a useless chuff like me can succeed as a teacher then someone like you has a duty not to fail.’