‘Very therapeutic,’ I sneered.
‘That’s what Dr Kincaid says. And there’s been a power cut. Or perhaps he’s turned off the electricity. He says darkness is good for the patients. It’s keeping them fairly quiet, anyway. And Dr Kincaid, well, I wouldn’t want to put a label on it, but he does seem to have gone a little mad. And he wants to see you. That’s why I came here. To get you.’
‘OK then,’ I said, still the cliché-ridden leading man. ‘If he’s ready for me, I’m more than ready for him. Let me out of this straitjacket, will you?’
‘I’d like to, I really would, but Dr Kincaid has said I shouldn’t, and this would be a really bad time to disobey him.’
There was something in that, but it left me feeling extremely vulnerable.
‘He’s waiting for you in the library,’ said Alicia. ‘I’ll take you there.’
She led me by the feeble light of the pencil torch. I couldn’t picture what would happen once I got to the library. I wondered what constituted ‘a little mad’ in the case of Kincaid. I couldn’t imagine what roles he and I were going to play, and perhaps that was just as well.
He was seated at the library table, an arc of stubby candles in front of him casting a streaky, restless light on to his smooth, glossy cheeks. He looked both glum and threatening. His body leaned forward, his head like the end of a battering ram. He looked at me fearfully, as though I might do something crazy, as though I was the mad, dangerous one, although how dangerous could I possibly be in a straitjacket?
‘How are you, Gregory?’ he asked in his best condescending, medical, bedside voice.
‘Top notch,’ I said. ‘Nothing I like better than a little straitjacket time.’
‘I had hoped you might see its value.’
‘Wrong once again, doctor.’
He gazed at me dolefully, as though I was an enigma to him, one of his rare but devastating failures.
‘Why did you do it?’ he asked.
He was speaking more in sorrow than in anger, though I sensed the anger might not be very far away.
‘Do what?’ I demanded.
There were so many things he might have been accusing me of, and I thought it best to be clear.
‘Why did you write Disorders? Did you think it was a joke?’
I was furious. ‘I’m not playing this game, you bastard,’ I said.
He looked genuinely surprised by my reaction, as though he might have been expecting regret or defiance, but this simple denial confused him.
‘You’re not pinning this on me,’ I said. ‘Oh yes, I realise that review’s very convenient for you—’
‘Convenient?’ he exploded. ‘Could you please try to explain to me, for the love of God, what is in any conceivable way convenient about all this?’
His anger was formidable but I could handle it.
‘It’s convenient because it makes me the fall guy,’ I said. ‘You’re still the great doctor, and I’m the one who deceived and betrayed you. But I’m not having it.’
He blinked at me with perplexed dignity. ‘You’re not really still trying to claim you didn’t write the book, are you?’ he said.
‘Fuck this. We don’t have to go through this charade,’ I said. ‘Credit me with some intelligence. I know you wrote it.’
We glared at each other in fierce mutual accusation, and as we stared and glowered we both caught something in the other’s eye; something that was very rare indeed around the Kincaid Clinic. We both saw that the other was not pretending. It was clear that we both really believed what we were saying, believed that the other was the culprit. And suddenly we both knew we were wrong. Kincaid realised I wasn’t the author of Disorders, and I realised he wasn’t either. We continued to stare at each other. We didn’t know what to say.
Alicia broke the silence and said, ‘It looks like another one of those linguistic-philosophical conundrums, doesn’t it? The two of you have convinced each other that you’re both telling the truth. That doesn’t necessarily mean you both are, but you both believe you both are. And if neither of you wrote Disorders, then you have to ask who did.’
It was a good question, but not one I felt remotely able to answer.
‘How about the patients?’ Alicia suggested. ‘Maybe Dr Bentley was wrong after all. Maybe they really did write it.’
Kincaid and I shook our heads. No, that didn’t seem like an option. We’d stopped believing in that possibility.
‘Then how about Byron?’ she asked eagerly. ‘He looks like a writer. Or how about Anders? He looks completely unlike a writer – maybe it’s a disguise. Or Sita? Who knows what she gets up to behind that quiet exterior?’
Kincaid and I remained silent and unconvinced. I was actually finding Alicia’s behaviour a little embarrassing. I couldn’t see why she was so desperate to come up with a quick, easy answer.
‘Oh, all right,’ she said suddenly, resignedly, ‘I admit it. It was me.’
Kincaid and I said ‘What?’ simultaneously.
‘I wrote it all, well, dictated it to the patients in my office, in our therapy sessions, then had them type it up, just like you said. After all, “psychiatrist” is an anagram of “typist’s chair”.’
‘Did you really do this?’ I asked, not fully persuaded.
‘Why would you?’ said Kincaid.
‘For all the reasons everyone said. I wanted Kincaidian Therapy to look good, to be declared a success.’
‘I wanted it to succeed too,’ said Kincaid, ‘but why this way?’
‘Because you’re a great man and a genius, and Kincaidian Therapy is a great thing, and because this man here,’ she meant me, ‘wasn’t capable of inspiring the patients. And because I love you,’ she said.
Kincaid was as taken aback by this declaration of love as I was. I’d never thought Alicia was in love with me, but neither had it crossed my mind that she was in love with him. Fortunately, I didn’t have to ask the obvious question: why had she been sleeping with me, if that was the case? Alicia was already explaining away that apparent contradiction.
‘I only slept with Michael to make you jealous, Dr Kincaid. That’s why I made so much noise, why I was so verbal. So you’d hear me. So you’d pay attention. So you’d love me.’
This sounded plain crazy to me. Was it true? Or was she just manipulating Kincaid, trying to get control over him? She said he’d gone a little mad, yet he seemed more or less rational to me, if you discounted turning off the power and treating the patients like political prisoners; whereas the things Alicia was saying seemed far more insane.
‘Who’s Michael?’ Kincaid asked.
In the confusion I hadn’t even been aware that Alicia had used my real name.
‘Michael. Gregory. What’s in a name?’ said Alicia.
Kincaid looked distressed and bewildered, and I couldn’t blame him. Straitjacketed though I was, I felt the urge to help him out.
‘Gregory Collins isn’t my real name,’ I said quickly. ‘It’s a pseudonym. My real name’s Mike Smith. Not much of a name for an author. You can see why I changed it.’
Kincaid was satisfied, at least for a moment. As for Alicia, if she knew I wasn’t really Gregory Collins, then she’d been playing a much longer and more bizarre game than I’d realised.
‘But just a second,’ Kincaid said, shuffling his wits. ‘Michael Smith was the name of the man who wrote that blasted review. Did you write it? Did you do all this deliberately?’
‘No, no,’ I said. ‘This is not what I wanted at all.’
You could say that again. Kincaid seemed to be on the brink of defeat, and yet there was an undeniable strength about him as he said, ‘It’s time somebody told me what’s going on.’
Alicia and I glanced at each other like the conspirators we apparently were, and then I told Kincaid everything. He sat in stately suspended animation as I ran through all the ramifications that had resulted from not being who I said I was. It took some doing. It was hard enough to keep the story clear i
n my own head, and even harder to make it clear to someone else. Kincaid listened intently, and the more it sank in, the more he looked as though he wanted to kill me or Alicia or both of us.
When I’d eventually finished he turned to Alicia and said, ‘And you’ve known about this all along?’
‘Well, it depends what you mean by “all along”, but essentially yes,’ she said.
His head swayed, looking robotic, and his mouth moved slowly as though not quite in sync with his words. ‘Between you, you’ve destroyed me,’ he said.
‘No,’ said Alicia passionately. ‘No. I love you. I need you. I dream of us together, driving away from here together, at speed, into the night, a black man in a black car, the headlights pointing the way through the impenetrable night, and then suddenly you turn off the lights and you put your foot to the floor, the engine roars and the car accelerates and we continue careering into the unknown dark. The blackness enfolds us. It’s all right. I trust you. You know the road by heart, every twist and turn, you don’t need visual data, you touch the wheel deftly, confidently, and you carry us away into the night, into this darkness and oblivion, into—’
Kincaid slapped her, the way people slap hysterical women in films. The problem here was that Alicia wasn’t actually hysterical at all, but the moment Kincaid hit her she began to scream, loudly and deliriously. Kincaid didn’t know what to do, and neither did I. I think we were both relieved when the porters arrived. They just happened to have another straitjacket and black nylon bag with them, and they strapped Alicia in, despite her fighting and screaming, and then carried her away into the night.
Kincaid and I were left alone in the library. I feared for what he might do to me, but he was a better man than I had any right to expect. He did nothing, said nothing, just stared at me long and hard, and then he left me there, walked out of the library, locking the door behind him.
I thought of trying to kick open the door, but I didn’t see how that was going to do me any good. Not having the bag over my head was a real improvement but the straitjacket was causing stabbing pains all over my torso. I’d once seen an escape artist get out of one of these things in about half a minute and I’d been unimpressed at the time. Now I wished I’d watched more closely.
I don’t know how long it was before Gregory arrived, and I wasn’t sure how he’d got there. Apparently he’d found a way of escaping from his padded cell, and a way of arming himself with a flaming torch – a length of tree branch with a paraffin-soaked rag tied round its end. Then, avoiding the porters and Kincaid, he had shinned up the front of the clinic to the window of the library, and now he was forcing his way in.
‘It’s like a bloody madhouse out there,’ he said as he climbed into the room. A wayward, flapping light and the reek of paraffin filled the library. ‘This is a right place you’ve brought me to.’
There was no point arguing that he had come entirely of his own free will and that I’d much rather not have had him there at all. I said, ‘Unstrap this thing, will you, Gregory?’ I hardly thought I was asking too much. Why had he come to the library if not to free me? But he was no keener to undo the straitjacket than Alicia had been. He was now strolling round the room, looking at the books on the shelves, inspecting them by the light of his flaming torch. I had the urge to explain everything to him, but there was so much information I would have needed to impart that I was relieved at his distracted condition, although that in itself created other problems.
‘You know, this is a very dodgy collection of books,’ he said. ‘I noticed that when I was here before but I had other things on my mind then.’
‘Yes, well, beggars can’t be choosers,’ I said.
‘Can’t they?’
‘No, Gregory, they can’t. Now let me out of this thing, will you?’
He said, ‘I see Disorders got an interesting review. By someone with your name. Now there’s a turn up for the books.’
‘You wrote it, didn’t you?’ I said. That was another thing I’d worked out.
Gregory tilted his head modestly. ‘Oh yes. I most certainly did.’
‘It was a very perceptive review as it turns out. You were right. There was only one author.’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘It was me. I wrote Disorders.’
‘Oh please, Gregory.’
I was reminded of that scene at the end of Spartacus where the Romans say they’ll let everybody go if Spartacus stands up and lets himself be crucified and, one after another, hundreds of people get up and every one of them says, ‘Take me. I’m Spartacus.’ ‘No, I’m Spartacus.’ ‘No, I am.’ So they crucify the whole lot of them.
‘Gregory,’ I said, ‘could you be a real pal and unstrap me and then we can have a good long talk about this?’
‘I know it sounds a bit barmy,’ he said, making no move to help me, ‘but it’s not all that complicated really. It’s like inspiration. I sit up there in Yorkshire and I transmit these brain waves, these inspirational vibrations, and they go through the ether and they arrive in the minds of the patients here at the Kincaid Clinic and they write it all down, and it’s like a group project, like divine dictation, and it comes out a bit garbled in the transmission, a bit scrambled, and that’s why I needed to come along and edit it and make it my own again. And obviously that’s why my name’s on the front of the book—’
Gregory had lost it. Either the trauma of the abandoned wedding or the shock of being in the padded cell had pushed him over some vertiginous edge. This was not what I needed. I didn’t know what the consequences were either for him or for me. On the other hand, how sane did he have to be to do a simple thing like get me out of the straitjacket?
‘Can we talk about this later?’ I asked.
‘Later may be too late,’ he said, and he perused the bookshelves again.
‘When Ernest Hemingway was young he worked for Ford Madox Ford at transatlantic review, and Ford told him that a bloke should always write a letter thinking what posterity will make of it. This pissed Hemingway off so much that he went home and burned every letter in his flat, especially the ones from Ford Madox Ford.’
‘But, Gregory—’
‘And when Goebbels lit a bonfire in Berlin in nineteen thirty-three to commemorate the new spirit of the German Reich, he used up twenty thousand books. Not bad, eh?’
He fixed his attention on some scruffy old volumes on a bottom shelf of the library.
‘It’s not exactly the Alexandrian Library in here, is it?’ he said. ‘And you know what happened to that. Well, actually, nobody’s all that sure. Caesar definitely burned down some library or other during the Alexandrian wars, but it probably wasn’t the Alexandrian Library. Because if Caesar had really done so much damage there wouldn’t have been much left to destroy come the really big burning of ad 642 when the Caliph Omar ordered the destruction of the library on the grounds that if the manuscripts in it agreed with the Koran they were superfluous, and if they disagreed with it they should be destroyed anyway.
‘And frankly that’s how I feel about my own books, Michael. The works of Gregory Collins are pretty much the only ones anybody should ever need. The rest can go to blazes.’
‘Gregory, all I’m asking is that you undo this straitjacket.’
‘I couldn’t possibly do that,’ he said. ‘That would be against doctors’ orders. In fact, I think you’re in need of a little more therapy.’
He reached into his pocket and produced another of the black nylon bags, which he rather deftly, with one hand, slipped over my head, and then he torched the library, the Kincaid Clinic and me.
Now
30
Welcome to the present. I’m writing this in the here and now, and inevitably you’re reading it in the here and now. Of course. There’s no other way. That’s the strange and unique bargain that a book makes with us. When you pick up Bleak House you’re there with Dickens, when you pick up Mein Kampf you’re with Adolf Hitler – in the same shared here and now. I think this is total
ly different from what happens with a painting or a piece of music or a play or a movie; and if books have any capacity to endure, to face up to what I suppose we might as well call the ‘electronic media’, then I suspect it’s largely because of this, that they allow a profound connection across huge swathes of time and space between two individuals. You’ll find some French lads who’ll give you an argument, who’ll say it’s really all about presence and absence; but hell, you can’t spend your life worrying about what the French think.
It has felt very strange to be writing about the person I was all those years ago. Needless to say, I’m no longer precisely him. Thank God, I’ve changed, matured, wised up a bit; and yet as I describe the things I thought and did back then I don’t feel I’m describing an entirely different person, don’t feel that I’ve had to actually invent or reconstruct a character. A part of me is still that gauche twenty-three-year-old, just as a part of me is still the child on his first day at school, the ten-year-old discovering the joy of books, the hopeless adolescent trying to work out what love and sex were all about.
The twenty-five years or so since those days at the Kincaid Clinic have been, on balance, good to me. There are some lines in the Four Quartets about how as you get older the pattern becomes stranger, but I’m not so sure. In lots of ways the years seem all too simple, like a ride down a ski slope: continuous, sometimes exhilarating, occasionally scary, but in the end not so very convoluted, not ultimately unpredictable. I realise I’ve been quite lucky in this.
I’ve been married and divorced. There were no children, nothing really worth fighting about, and yet the split was bitter and damaging. But who would have expected anything else? Both my parents have died, I’ve put on weight, lost some hair, had a couple of bad bouts with a stomach ulcer; but today I’m living with a good woman and we say we love each other, and we believe it, which seems to be as much as anybody can ask. I think you would have to say that, all things considered, I’m happy, that I’ve had my full ration of happiness. There are plenty of stories that could be mined out of those years, but I don’t want to tell them here and now. They seem simultaneously too personal and too commonplace.
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