A Messiah of the Last Days

by C. J. Driver

  “John Buckleson,” I answered.

  Williams nodded, we shook hands, and Alison took me to where she had left the car.

  *

  So I could retreat, and no one would follow.

  *

  In the dark days that came and went, there was no one but Alison. I suppose I must have been having a nervous breakdown; I stayed at home and saw no one but Alison, the girls, and the doctor who gave me pills to help me sleep and pills to keep me quiet. I didn’t get into chambers for nearly a month; when it became clear that John was never going to be able to go back into a dock again to let the State finish its business with him, Matthew Wynstanley took my place in court and saw my little part in it through. Lester got ten years, Shirley five; they were both very lucky at that. Austell went away somewhere, and no one heard any more about him; I suppose he survived—people like him do.

  Bowland was never brought to trial; Williams told me long afterwards that he was totally unfit to plead. He is in Broadmoor still, and will I expect be there for life, unless they drug or shock him into some kind of safe sanity. When the police went through John’s belongings in Brixton, they found a series of letters from Bowland to him—extraordinary letters, starting as friendly chatty gossip about the Free People and the state of the world, and then, almost in the space of a single sentence, veering off into the drifting and sloping incoherence of schizophrenia: “I saw Tella too last night; she was looking well and we had quite a chat about things. There was a man in one of the kitchen fires at the commune and he told me you were going to kill me after the lawyers get you out; it’s a rotten scene and as a representative of the people I regret to say I have no alternative but to kill you myself … Yours in comradeship, James Bowland.” They were all like that, or so Williams told Henderson. I rather suspect the Special Branch may have known that John was getting the letters when he was in Brixton, and hadn’t thought them important enough to do anything about. Who could have guessed anyway from the centreless jargon? Bowland seemed somewhow to be afraid that John would be acquitted and would then kill him; as John himself had told me, he had known about the cache of arms, and John himself had given him one of the pistols he got from Matthew Payne with the forged licence. I suppose it was the letters that made John smile so strangely at Bowland when he came into court; and I suppose Bowland had waited until then to see how I tried to defend John—perhaps it was my roughness with Austell that made him act, or perhaps he had some reason of his own to make him want to stop John going into the witness box.

  I never saw Bowland’s letters to John, but I have some idea of what they must have been like, because there was a time—two, three months after John’s … John’s ending—that he started to write to me too: ordinary enough letters they seemed at first, asking what had happened to various of the Free People, but then turning to a weird sloping writing that sprawled off the edge of the writing-paper in huge lop-sided words—and saying things which at first seemed to work perfectly ordinarily, and then turned strange, so that I was forced to look up from the page to the light of the window to make sure my senses were still working. It was the man in the fire again …

  Alison found out and then they stopped; either she intercepted them or wrote to whoever it is at Broadmoor who controls these things—I suppose she was worried they would continue the damage. Yet in some ways I welcomed them; and it wasn’t Bowland who had done the real damage anyway. He was just the man who pulled the trigger. The assassination was its own consequence; it was, after all, almost self-inflicted.

  The one person besides Bowland himself who could tell us the truth of that ‘almost’ is John; and he can’t. The chest injury wasn’t too bad; but the other bullets did what I suppose was an effective brain operation. One of the surgeons told Alison that because Bowland fired from below the bullets did not affect the motor functions of the brain, but simply the areas which control the power to think, speak, read, reason. John came out of his coma in two weeks; but he came out as a vegetable, or what people call a vegetable.

  When I told Alison after Henderson had phoned me with the definite news, she said only in all her simplicity, “Thank God, at least he’s not dead.”

  “But, love …” I started; I was going to say, “But he’s as good as dead.” But he wasn’t; he was as good as alive. He still breathed, moved, saw, touched, tasted, felt; there was no anguish in him, no puzzlement, no … Alison was right; at least he was not dead. The ghost of the old John Buckleson cries in my ear, “Oh, you sentimentalist, Tom, you sentimentalist.” But he said it would be despair and it is not. If all my story were of the dream and descent from the dream, of nemesis after great hubris, of hero and victim, I might be content with despair, with the thin shadows of the people I have known, with my loathing of the society which I serve; but that won’t do any more, because there is something else in the wreckage of the past: terror and excitement, perhaps—terror at myself, excitement at what is to come; terror too of what is coming, and excitement in the magnificence of John Buckleson’s failure. No, it’s not despair …

  Or let me put that another way, both more rhetorical and more ambiguous: if John Buckleson is a Messiah of the Last Days, I am his prophet, and so what if what I prophesy has already happened? What is history but a prophecy of the past?

  *

  The Free People kept their commune going for about three months in a desultory way; O’Brien even organised a demonstration or two, and a couple of hundred of them turned out. But without John to make them forget how motley a crew they were, with their mixture of socialism, anarchism, left-wing communism, communalism and old-fashioned radicalism, they soon dispersed to other organisations and places where they felt more at home. Some stopped being students and either lost or changed their politics. Some grew into academics who could safely keep their views and yet live comfortably, advising the occasional trade union on how to avoid registration or writing scathing articles in New Focus. Some went off to rural communes. Some stayed where they were, anarchists of the mystically irrational variety, and began to work for groups which made them feel less ‘alienated’. Others became teachers, a few even went into advertising where they could still wear their hair long and not wear ties. Some are, I suppose, living lives very much like my own: secure, sensible, loving. I don’t see them; they grow more like their fathers every day. I didn’t know all of them, so I can’t tell; but a couple did become real villains lifting safes and doing over drunks. Not long ago I defended someone and recognised one of the co-defendents as a former member of the Free People; he asked his barrister to talk to me on his behalf, but there was nothing I could do for him then—he was sent down for three years and was lucky at that, since he had, like my own client, been ‘demanding with menaces’.

  I still go back to Brenton once a year, to put some flowers on my parents’ graves, to have supper with my sister, to drink a pint or two at the Labour Club. There was a time when I thought half-heartedly that I might go back there to live, perhaps in one of the terraced houses in the suburbs we used to live in—to give up the Bar and turn to soliciting, or even to give up the law and become … well, a businessman, a clerk, an insurance agent, perhaps even a foreman in a building firm. But there’s no room left for romantic gestures; flowers on a grave and an embarrassed welcome in the Club will have to do. You can’t forgive your private history any more than public history can forgive you. And can you see Alison in Brenton? In a terraced house in industrial Brenton? No, it’s a permanent exile; the owl charts my home.

  I have never met Mrs. Henderson again, but I did meet Mr. Henderson. He came back from Brazil when John was shot, but before I was better went off to Canada on some other job. Then one afternoon when I was in chambers, he phoned; he was back on leave, he said, and would like to see me. I tried to put him off—I was very busy I said, and had to catch a train home. But he insisted, and in the end I promised him five minutes. That was all he needed anyway, he said.

  It turned out that all he wanted was
to thank me—to thank me. He was, like his son, a small man, but otherwise there seemed to be no physical resemblance between this grey-haired, grey-faced little executive accountant and his darkly vivid son.

  “My wife—whom I gather you’ve met—regards you as John’s saviour.”

  “I was his barrister, that’s all,” I shrugged.

  “My wife finds religious connotations even in the most professional associations …”

  I was not going to be drawn into the unhappiness of that marriage. “My association with John was not entirely professional,” I said.

  “With John? Oh, of course, you mean Richard. I keep forgetting the changed name. No, I realise it wasn’t entirely professional; which is why I wanted to thank you. I am sorry it has been so long.”

  “I don’t seem to have done very much.”

  “No.” There was no dressing-up of that ‘no’. I hadn’t done much so why pretend I had? Suddenly I saw this man was really John’s father; the directness was so typical.

  “Have you been to see him?”

  “No, I haven’t; my wife has, and she says there is no point, since he recognises no one. Is that so?”

  I nodded. I go to see him too.

  “My wife blames me for what happened. Perhaps if I had been able to come back from Brazil when he was arrested …”

  “I don’t think it would have made any difference; and I wouldn’t think anyone could blame you.”

  “Nor do I, I suppose. I just wish we could have been friendlier since he grew up.”

  “Every parent of grown-up children thinks that,” I said ex cathedra.

  “Do they? I’m not really capable of judging; I’ve been away so much since he was a child.” He looked at his watch. “Well, Mr. Grace, I know you are a busy man; I have taken enough of your time.” He stood up and found his hat and coat. “Thank you for seeing me, and thank you for what you did.”

  14

  The man who guards the gatehouse is beginning to know me now; he salutes me, and I salute him back. Perhaps because he is used to a legal voice, he answers my questions promptly enough. A retired policeman, he is; from the West Country (as if I couldn’t hear that), come to live with a married daughter in Beckenham. She’s married to a policeman too, I’ll be pleased to hear; a sergeant already he is, and on the up-and-up. He doesn’t need to know my name; he did ask me once—begging my pardon—and I replied, “Oh, it doesn’t matter; you wouldn’t have heard of me,” because if he got home and repeated my name, up-and-coming Sergeant Son-in-Law might have known or passed it on.

  Salute exchanged, he asks me whom I wish to see, though he knows perfectly well by now: it is his job to keep people in, not out.

  “John Buckleson,” I say. “In the chronic ward.”

  “All right, sir. You know the way, don’t you? Straight through to the big house, then …”

  “Yes, I know,” I interrupt, then drive on.

  *

  The place they keep John in is on the far side of the hospital, beyond the out-patients’ wards, the playing-fields, the geriatric wards, the disturbed children’s school, the ‘big house’—the old Manor House from which the hospital gets its name, Red-stone Manor State Mental Hospital—then a right turn and on to the prefabricated wards which house the long-term patients: the dangerously aggressive, the deteriorated schizophrenics, the irreparably brain-damaged, the catatonics. The staff call it ‘the vegetable garden’.

  I knock at the Sister’s office, put my head round the door, and she tells me to go right ahead. I know my way. When I get to his ward, the big male nurse, Charlie, comes to shake hands; when John was first sent here, I had heard so many stories about chronic mental wards I decided I would choose the biggest and nastiest-looking male nurse and pay him to protect John. So Charlie gets his £5 every quarter, and I am a little happier that John is not being tormented by playful nurses. I shake hands with Charlie warmly, slide the envelope out of my pocket into his, and Charlie leads me to where John is sitting, saying as he does so, “He’s been very happy, Mr. Grace, I can assure you; and he’s no trouble at all, no trouble at all I assure you—just very quiet and peaceful-like, sitting there …” And then I stand before John, and I stop hearing what anyone says to me.

  They have let his hair grow long again, I suppose to try to hide the worst of the scars. He’s fatter now than he used to be, yet the old essential line remains, and the old harsh colouring, and when I stand in front of him I can still imagine him as he used to be. He doesn’t recognise me; he doesn’t seem to recognise anyone any more. Still, I keep up a ritual; I reach down, take his right hand in mine, and pretend he is greeting me. He does not draw back or respond; and when I release his hand it falls back. He looks at me, incuriously. Then Charlie goes behind him, helps him to stand and brings him a warm coat to wear; I fold John’s arm into mine, and we walk to the door. Charlie lurches in front of us, opens the door, and sees us down the steps. Once we are on the level John steps out confidently enough; but he doesn’t turn his head to look at the garden or at me, nor does he turn to look back at Charlie and the ward.

  So, for half-an-hour or so, I walk him around the grounds of the hospital; occasionally I stop to change sides, so that his arm in mine should not get uncomfortable, but we walk not slowly as you have to do with someone who has been ill, but briskly. For all the scars on and in his head, there is nothing wrong with John’s body; it is only the instructions to the body that have gone wrong. I suppose we walk nearly two miles in those thirty minutes, past the ‘big house’, around the playing-fields, close to the gatehouse and so back to the vegetable garden again. We don’t talk; John does not talk any more and if he understands other people’s talking, he shows no sign.

  When we get back to the ward, Charlie helps me to take John’s coat off and to return him to his chair; there’s no point in staying with John then, so I spend a few minutes wandering around the rest of the ward. There is usually something going on; most of the patients are well enough to do some rudimentary work around a big table in the middle of the day-room. The last couple of times they have been putting marbles into bags; each patient has a cardboard carton of marbles next to him, and a pile of little polythene bags, and into each bag goes five marbles. The bags are then passed on to another patient, who puts in one larger marble and passes the bag to another patient, who staples the top together and puts the completed bag into a large carton next to him. Presiding over the whole is a bored youngish girl, an occupational therapist; the patients seem to do the work willingly enough, though sometimes one will wander away from the table for a few minutes on his own devices—it must be desperately boring work, even to those damaged people. I have talked to the girl a couple of times now; last time I plucked up the courage to question the value of the whole exercise.

  “Doesn’t it make them bored, this job,” I whispered.

  She does not bother to whisper. “There’s nothing else for them to do but what I find: it’s hard finding anything. They can’t do complicated things like making baskets. They don’t read, and they can’t really talk to each other, or if they do it’s nonsense.”

  “Always nonsense?”

  “It seems like that to me.”

  “Whose marbles are they?”

  “From a toy factory place in Beckenham.”

  “Does the factory pay the patients?”

  “They have to be paid. It’s the law.”

  “Cheap?”

  “Oh, yes, of course; but I think only about half the bags end up having five marbles in them. Unless I watch him,” and she gestured to a square-faced man whose chin was covered perpetually in a sheen of saliva, “he puts anything up to twenty marbles in. And he tries to put only one in,” she gestured to another misshapen and disfigured patient.

  “What happened to him?” I asked.

  “Car accident, I think. He goes beserk sometimes; we have to watch him.” Her voice was without inflection; boredom flattened every syllable.

  “You mu
st get bored,” I said.

  She did not answer. “It’s a pity your friend can’t do anything. He just sits there all day long. He doesn’t ever try to say anything to you, does he?”

  “No,” I answered. “He doesn’t talk and he can’t count out five marbles and put them into a bag.”

  “He was clever, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “I used to admire him a lot when I was younger. We all did.”

  She is twenty-five at the most, I suppose; she used to admire him and she asks if he was clever. And I am thirty-eight.

  Yet sometimes when he looks at me, I see the man I knew there—as a man blind a long time might see a light for a moment and then be blind again, or as someone looking at a clear surface of water might see a sudden darkness of passing wind—and I feel almost as if John was still there, hidden away inside himself, hiding there deliberately, avoiding me, but just for one moment allowing me to think he might still be there.

  He isn’t; and I know he isn’t. I saw the X-ray slides—Bob Henderson showed them to me to make me realise there was no hope of recovery, ever—and I know how much of his brain was destroyed, both by the bullets and by the surgery to repair what could be repaired. Is it John Buckleson after all whom I visit? The semblance of him? I suppose I would not go to visit him at all if I did not think that something at least went on.

  He won’t live very long; “that’s the one consolation,” Henderson told me once. Who wants consoling? Because even if John Buckleson who led the Free People is dead, as dead as the Free People themselves, there is still a body known as John Buckleson which eats and sleeps and walks around the grounds of a State mental hospital, led mainly by a bribed male nurse called Charlie and visited, once every few months, by a friend who used to defend him against the fury of the British bureaucrats. I am the only person who visits him. After all, there is no reasonable point in anyone’s going to him; he recognises no one, and even if his father came to see him, or a policeman, or Bowland himself on a brief sortie from Broadmoor, he would walk as happily, led by the arm, through the gardens.