Bedlam Burning

by Geoff Nicholson

  Of course, opinions weren’t uniform, and the book didn’t receive universal unadulterated praise. At least two reviewers raised doubts about the morality of the enterprise. They saw a problem in parading the outpourings of the insane, but even they concluded that on balance the inherent worth of the writing prevented the book from being merely a freak show. None of the reviewers doubted that the book was at the very least a fascinating literary curiosity; but one or two suggested it was more, that it was a significant piece of writing, a sprawling, collaborative, avant-garde masterpiece.

  One reviewer began by apparently agreeing with me, saying that being mad doesn’t make you interesting, and it certainly doesn’t make your writing interesting, but he went on to say that Disorders was a good book precisely because the patients were interesting, and so was their writing, and that Gregory Collins had done a great job of inspiring, editing, even ‘healing’ the patients. I thought all these reviewers were out of their minds. Why couldn’t they see what a pig’s ear Gregory had made of everything?

  When the reviews arrived in the post, I would convene a meeting of the patients and read out the day’s arrivals. I felt like the village storyteller or town crier. The patients gathered round and hung on every word, responding passionately to each note of praise, to each hint of reservation or criticism. When I’d finished reading there’d be much discussion, much textual analysis, many attempts by the patients to read between the lines, to draw out hidden or veiled or subconscious meanings. I guess they were behaving just like authors.

  Kincaid would sometimes sit in at these sessions and he was as beguiled as anybody. He regarded every approving word as a vindication of himself and his methods. He never acknowledged that I had been even remotely instrumental in the creation of the book and I found this infuriating, but I knew that I’d have looked pathetic if I’d started trying to assert my own importance. When, in the vaguest way, I hinted at this to Alicia, she had no idea what I was talking about. ‘But your name’s on the front of the book, isn’t it?’ she said.

  When we were in bed together I was still required to say a great deal. The publication of the book and its observable success had made me even more desirable to Alicia. Now, when we had sex, I was still required to play the madman, but the game had changed, so that I had to be a literary madman; madness and artistic endeavour being so closely linked, she assured me. I would pretend to be a successful author (quite a challenge to my acting skills), but one on the brink of insanity. Alicia would be an adoring fan, hoping she could pull me back from the abyss by having sex with me. ‘Tell me about all the hundreds of literary groupies you’ve fucked with that big dirty prick of yours.’ It was hard work, keeping up the level of invention and filth that Alicia required, but I did my best, and since she never complained I assumed I must be doing something right. Did I think this was normal and healthy? No, of course I didn’t, but if a woman can’t be allowed to indulge her sick fantasies in a writer’s hut, where else is she going to do it? On paper?

  The book continued to get coverage, and not only on the book pages. It became apparent that we had what some might call a highly exploitable book on our hands, but given Kincaid’s strictures it wasn’t easy to see just how we were going to exploit it. That was when Nicola became increasingly involved. She said there were any number of newspapers eager to send interviewers and photographers to meet the multiple authors of Disorders. All she needed was a date and a time. Kincaid was having none of it. Possibly, he said, he might be prepared to allow one very carefully vetted journalist into the clinic to conduct a short interview under his own watchful eye, but a photographer was out of the question.

  Nicola grudgingly reported this back to the papers who misinterpreted it as a desire to preserve the patients’ anonymity, in which case they were prepared to be obliging. They were willing to photograph the patients in silhouette, or from some angle that left them unrecognisable. But Kincaid said that wasn’t the point at all, and once editors were faced with the prospect of an unillustrated article they cooled off considerably. I thought this wasn’t absolutely logical of Kincaid. His therapy was about keeping patients away from images, not away from cameras, but I suppose it was fair enough to think that once they’d been photographed they’d want to see the results, and that could threaten all sorts of mayhem.

  Then the papers said, OK, we won’t photograph the patients, we’ll just photograph the editor and the doctor: Collins and Kincaid. I sensed that Kincaid was tempted by this prospect. He wanted attention and recognition, yet he resisted. If the patients weren’t to be photographed then neither were we. This seemed even less logical, though for my part I was obviously relieved. Having my picture in the national papers was the one sure way of blowing my cover. I complimented Kincaid on his integrity.

  There was talk of sending a radio crew to the clinic to make a documentary, and that sounded harmless enough, but Kincaid didn’t want that either. As with visits from the patients’ relatives, there would be too many uncontrollable factors; all those old problems with flowery shirts and patterned ties and someone might even have a visible tattoo.

  Nicola eventually went ballistic. She called the clinic and did her nut with Kincaid, demanding to know what he was playing at, why he was being so obstructive, whether he was serious about this book or not. Didn’t he want the book to sell, to be read, to reach as big a public as possible? I believe she may even have accused him of dilettantism.

  I admired the way Kincaid stood up to her, but in the end, and even though I had my own reasons for not wanting to be part of a publicity circus, even though I didn’t think the book was nearly as great as everybody else did, I still felt Kincaid was being needlessly obstructive. Alicia joined in too. Here, she said, was a great opportunity for Kincaid to prove wrong all those pygmies (that was the word she used) who’d said he was a trifler, who’d dismissed his work as trendy and shallow. I wondered who’d said this, where and when.

  It was hard to tell which of these pressures Kincaid finally bowed to, but in the end he agreed that something ought to be done.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘I know what we’ll do. We’ll have a literary evening.’

  26

  Kincaid’s notion of what constituted a literary evening, like his notions of just about everything else, were pretty much his own. Since the patients couldn’t go out into the world, then the world, or at least a small bit of it, would come to the Kincaid Clinic. He regarded this as quite a concession.

  An invited audience of twenty or so carefully chosen individuals was to be allowed into the clinic for a single occasion. This group would contain literary journalists, members of the psychiatric profession, some academics and a few of the clinic’s trustees. It was to be a low-key affair. The visitors would be given a tour of the facilities, they’d hear a brief lecture by Kincaid, then the patients would give a short reading from Disorders.

  My role in all this was unspecified, and if Kincaid had had his way it would probably have been non-existent. He certainly didn’t want me to address the invited group and tell them what I’d done with the patients; he didn’t want me to be around at all. He even suggested I might like to take the evening off and go into town.

  My reactions were understandably ambivalent. There was every reason for me to keep out of harm’s way, to avoid showing myself, and yet I was angry to be left out, elbowed out, of the proceedings. I felt I had to fight my corner. I had to find a discreet but vital role for myself. I decided I would take charge of the patients’ reading.

  I told Kincaid that I wanted ‘to be there for the patients’, to organise their part of the event, help them decide what they should read, to guide them, to rehearse them; then on the night itself to keep their spirits up, reassure them, give them their cues and keep them calm and coherent through what might prove to be a difficult occasion. Kincaid grudgingly conceded that it was a job that needed doing. Alicia, by contrast, found it touchingly modest. She was really liking me a lot at this time. />
  And yet the more I thought about it, the more I reckoned that the role I was designing for myself was by no means a trivial or menial one. The patients would indeed need some help, and I was willing to give it to them. The prospect of the reading filled them with excitement and anxiety, and I thought there was a new disingenuousness about their reaction. They seemed not to be play-acting. They had some trepidation but they really wanted to do it. This public appearance promised to be as validating for them as it was for Kincaid and his therapy.

  As Carla said to me, in one of her more lucid moments, although with how many layers of irony I couldn’t quite be sure, ‘If we’re good enough to read to an audience then we can’t be complete nutters, can we?’ I decided to take this at its face value.

  The question of who would read what was apparently going to be a tricky one. In the past I’d been the one to pick out pieces of text and assign which patient should read them aloud. I knew this wouldn’t be good enough now. The patients had started to care. They only wanted to read the ‘best bits’ as they put it, the parts they thought had special literary merit, the parts that suited their voices and personalities. If anyone had asked me I’d have said that thanks to Gregory some of the very best bits weren’t in the book at all, but I continued to keep that to myself. There was a moment when I thought this process of selection might finally tell me who had written what, not that I cared very much about that any longer, but it didn’t do that at all.

  For instance, Anders was keen to read the obsessive passage about the woman shaving her body, a very early piece that had somehow made it through the editing process. Carla said she wanted to recite some amazing true facts. Raymond wanted to read an account of a football match. Byron claimed not to care what he read, just so long as he was the last to perform. A good few of them wanted to read passages about sex and violence. They reckoned these were the most dramatic and compelling, the ones most likely to create audience response. That was undeniable. No doubt the spectacle of various asylum inmates reading out accounts of sex murders would have a certain power, but I didn’t think it was going to be much of an advertisement for the benefits of Kincaidian Therapy or for the book.

  I tried to be gentle with them, to guide them into creating a short, varied, sane programme, but perhaps I was hoping for too much, and perhaps I was overestimating my powers of persuasion. But we did arrive at a selection, a running order, that seemed, to me at least, to show the patients and their writing in a sympathetic and not entirely unrepresentative way. It was eccentric and obsessive, occasionally repetitive, occasionally impenetrable, not without sex and violence, not always entirely healthy, but not repellent either, not laughable, not simply insane.

  I knew that in all this we were doing a further act of editing, selecting only from Gregory’s selection. We were creating a kind of sub-anthology, making something new. And that felt good. I was finally showing some creativity. We did a couple of read-throughs and they went pretty well, though I was aware that things could change when a live audience was brought into the equation.

  I wondered if Nicola would be a member of that audience. It was surely common enough for publishers to attend events like these. And it occurred to me that Gregory might also find a way to be there, just as he’d been at the reading in Ruth Harris’s bookshop. Both prospects filled me with horror. However, a little while before the event, I received news that neither of them would be there, for the unimpeachable and entirely staggering reason that they would be getting married that day. To each other. I was dumbfounded.

  We were at a time in history when all sorts of people claimed not to ‘believe’ in marriage, although this lack of belief often lasted no more than a couple of years after they’d left college. People relented because they wanted to make their mothers happy, because they wanted to have children, because they saw certain tax advantages. Some people thought of this change in belief as a cop out, as buying into some dusty, hypocritical old values, though I was never one of these. I found it hard to believe there was any great ideology at stake here, but I was still surprised when anybody I knew announced they were getting married. However, Nicola and Gregory’s announcement was a surprise of a different order.

  The news came in a rather apologetic letter from Gregory, informing me of the wedding and telling me I wasn’t invited. If he’d had his way, he said, I’d not only have been present, I’d have been his best man. The prospect sent my head reeling. Just what kind of fool was Gregory Collins? Fortunately Nicola had had the ordinary good sense to veto the idea. Inviting the bride’s ex-boyfriend to a wedding might just about be permissible in certain circumstances, but having him as best man was just plain stupid. When said ex-boyfriend and potential best man is currently working in an asylum pretending to be the groom – well, no need to catalogue the objections.

  The absurdity of Gregory’s desire to have me there distracted me a little from the less spectacular, though no less real, absurdity of the wedding itself. I found it all but impossible to believe that Nicola would marry Gregory. Sleeping with him, going out with him, that was bizarre enough, but marrying him, that was just incomprehensible.

  What people ‘see’ in their partners is always inscrutable, but again, Nicola and Gregory’s case created a new level of inscrutability. In one way, it was easy to see why Gregory might want to marry Nicola. She was much the best he was ever going to get, and in my opinion she was far better than he deserved. But that only made more urgent the question of why Nicola wanted to marry Gregory. It’s not unknown for beautiful women to marry unattractive men – Jackie K and Aristotle O spring to mind – but these things are generally explained by money or power or the urge for a father figure. These didn’t seem to apply in Nicola and Gregory’s case.

  I also think that the very beautiful often distrust their own beauty and seek out its opposite. But I didn’t think Nicola was quite beautiful enough to need a man who was quite so unbeautiful as Gregory. So what were the other options? That Gregory was great in bed? No, that didn’t bear thinking about and even in those days I knew that marriage has very little to do with what goes on between the sheets. Maybe Nicola was pregnant, but that was no reason to get married either. It would just be making a bad job worse; Nicola wasn’t that silly. So maybe she was doing it to piss off her parents. That seemed a bit extreme. To piss me off? No, I didn’t flatter myself that much.

  So what other explanation offered itself? The only one I could think of was that it had to be about Gregory’s writing. Maybe Nicola was smitten with his creativity, his literary pretensions. Maybe she thought he was a genius. Maybe. Just maybe.

  I found myself thinking about their forthcoming wedding far more than I wanted to, and I wondered why. Was I jealous? Well possibly, although not, I’d insist, because I wanted Nicola for myself, but rather because I wanted someone to want me the way Nicola apparently wanted Gregory. I suppose I was envious of people who had a relationship that wasn’t merely sexual and that didn’t only happen on certain nights and largely consist of weirdish sex, as mine did with Alicia. I didn’t want to get married to Alicia or to anyone else, but I was still sufficiently bound up in society’s mores that I’d have liked to have someone who wanted to marry me. Naturally, I didn’t say any of this to Alicia.

  I certainly had plenty of other things to keep me occupied, but on the day of the reading I kept thinking about Gregory and Nicola, wondered if they were married yet, wondered if Gregory was making his speech, wondered who he’d found to be his best man. And when the twenty or so invitees arrived at the clinic for the literary evening, in a special bus that had picked them up at Brighton station, I kept thinking of them as wedding guests. An absurd notion; they didn’t look remotely like well-wishers, and neither did they much look like people out for a literary evening. They looked more like sober, uncomfortable tourists who had signed up for a mystery tour with a disreputable travel firm and were now regretting it. They were a serious, strangely homogenous bunch; a lot of suits, a lot of d
istinguished silver hair, and as they got off the bus it was surprisingly hard to tell who was who, which were the psychiatrists, which the academics, which the journalists, which the trustees.

  Kincaid and Alicia were waiting for them, ready to shake hands and exchange pleasantries. The porters were there too, like a guard of honour, as were Byron, Maureen and Sita, judged to be the most presentable and least volatile of the patients. I kept my distance. I was watching from the library, peering out of the window, a little nervous and still a little resentful at being excluded. But then someone I knew got off the bus, someone who made my exclusion seem not only tolerable, but a stroke of infinite good fortune. It was Dr John Bentley, my old Director of Studies, the man who’d hosted the book-burning party at which I’d first met Gregory Collins.

  I leapt back from the window. There was no way he could have seen me at that distance but I still felt the need to hide. My heart was doing a drum solo, my palms were wet, my ears felt unaccountably hot. I stood there trembling lightly, trying to think through the implications of Bentley’s presence.

  In one way it probably wasn’t so surprising. Bentley was a scholar, he read books, he kept an eye on what was happening in literature. He mightn’t be the first person you’d invite to such an event, yet he was by no means the last. But surely there could be nothing accidental about his presence. He must have recognised the name Gregory Collins both as someone who’d burned a manuscript at his party, and also as the writer of The Wax Man. He’d been in correspondence with the author, for God’s sake, and if he was as good as his word he’d even burned his book. That in itself would have made his presence problematic enough, even if I hadn’t been involved in this ludicrous deception.

  I didn’t know if Bentley had ever seen a finished copy of The Wax Man, complete with dust jacket and author photograph of me. I thought it was reasonably unlikely. Gregory would have sent him a plain, unjacketed advance proof copy of the book. Therefore he was presumably expecting to meet the real Gregory Collins at this event. The moment he laid eyes on me he’d know everything. What would he do then? He would surely do what anyone else would in the circumstances, be they literary critics or journalists, scientists or trustees, or anything else. He would stand up and say this man is an impostor, this whole thing is a sham. The sky would come tumbling down around all our ears.