A Psychiatrist, Screams

by Simon Parke

  Peter avoided eye contact with Tamsin.

  ‘You are a good cock impersonator?’ asked Tamsin.

  ‘It is of no consequence.’

  ‘But it can be useful at parties to have an animal in us... a cock in us, or whatever.’

  Tamsin’s self-discipline appeared to be cracking... but appearance lied.

  ‘And how was prison?’ she asked.

  The green-suited crab almost betrayed surprise.

  ‘A three-year sentence for dealing in Class A drugs,’ said Tamsin, referring to notes in slightly theatrical fashion. ‘But not all bad, reduced to... let me see, eighteen months for good behaviour. So well done there.’

  ‘Repented of long ago.’

  ‘So that’s all right.’

  ‘In God’s eyes.’

  ‘We’ll have to take your word for that.’

  ‘No, we can take God’s Word for it,’ he said, tapping his bible and smiling.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Tamsin, putting down her notes. ‘We appear to have two Ezekiels, two Reverends, wouldn’t you say? So I’m wondering which Reverend was at the Feast of Fools, sinner or saint?’

  Forty Three

  ‘I was just here for the wipe-out!’ said Virgil Bannaford eagerly.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Here for a jolly good laugh, nothing more honourable than that, mea culpa.’

  ‘So the therapy?’

  ‘A complete gas!’

  ‘You didn’t take it seriously.’

  ‘Not into any of that nonsense!’

  ‘You’ve had bad experiences?’

  ‘One therapist, yonks ago, complete charlatan, told me to wear an elastic band around my wrist - and to ping it when I felt myself needing to control a situation.’

  Virgil laughed at the absurdity of it all.

  ‘You like to control things?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Apparently!’

  ‘And did it work, the elastic band?’

  ‘Hah! Of course it didn’t work, I’d broken the damn thing by lunch time, snapped it out of its stupid little existence.’

  Peter nodded.

  ‘Well, I’m sure your therapist had their reasons.’

  ‘Their mortgage, most like!’

  ‘And I do agree - we need to deal with the forces within rather than play games with them.’

  ‘Stupendously ridiculous.’

  ‘But we also note you’d broken the band by lunch time, which at least exposes your issues with control... even if it doesn’t heal them.’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘So you gave Barnabus a hard time?’ said Tamsin, picking up the story.

  ‘As that old rascal Freud once said, ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar!’

  Peter: ‘Fair point, though presumably in saying that, he was also saying that sometimes it isn’t.’

  Virgil would lean forward and then back: forward to attack, back to assess. Now he leant back.

  ‘You can look into things too much, if you ask me.’

  ‘Looking into things frightens you?’

  ‘Not in the least! It just bores me. Therapy’s little more than a dubious commitment to gazing in the navel direction! And what if you then discover - and here’s the thing - what if you then discover there’s nothing bloody there, that you’re empty, that you don’t exist?’

  ‘Is that what you fear?’

  ‘That wouldn’t be so clever! No, life’s too short.’ A slight pause.

  Tamsin: ‘So the Feast of Fools was just one big laugh?’

  ‘Gladiatorial combat with therapist, followed by Saturnalian orgy with clowns! What could be better?’

  Unless interrogators were careful, they could find themselves pressed back by the body-energy in this man. Peter peeled himself off the dark-panelled wall, and decided on fresh direction:

  ‘You clearly miss the Bullingdon Club, Virgil.’

  ‘Impressed with your research.’

  It was Bella he should be impressed with, the woman who’d found out more about Virgil than was apparent in any police records.

  ‘The Bullingdon Club?’ queries Tamsin, looking to both. Virgil gives Peter the floor with the words, ‘Ignorance before experience.’

  Peter explains: ‘The Bullingdon Club, 200 years old, is essentially a Dining Club at Oxford University for the sons of royalty, sons of nobility and these days, sons of mere money.’

  ‘Well, it’s a sort of equality, letting the nouveaus in!’

  ‘Club uniform smart: tail coats of dark navy blue, matching velvet collar, ivory silk lapels, mustard waistcoat and sky blue tie, which they wear to drink large quantities of champagne and to destroy whichever premises has the misfortune to be hosting them.’

  ‘We always paid for damage done.’

  ‘Membership is by election and may involve approaching a homeless man with a £50 note, only to burn it in front of him.’

  ‘I never did that - or at least I don’t remember doing that!’

  ‘New members are expected to consume the entire contents of a tin of Colman’s powdered mustard,’ continues Peter, ‘after which their room is trashed.’

  ‘There seems to be a lot of trashing in the Bullingdon Club,’ says Tamsin.

  ‘Oh my God, listen to yourselves!’ exclaims Virgil. ‘Are the country’s elite no longer allowed to behave badly, before assuming their dutiful place as leaders of nation and empire?’

  Tamsin wonders which empire he refers to, and asks how an Abbot from the desert knows quite so much about the Bullingdon Club?

  ‘Brother Torquil was a member in his wild youth, son of some Scottish lord. But he’s now responsible for novitiates at the monastery of St. James-the-Less, so he trashes less than he used to. But he’d tell stories of astounding destruction while we worked in the monastery garden.’

  ‘With a large dollop of nostalgia no doubt!’ says Virgil. ‘And has this got anything to do with the case in hand, because if not, I’m off.’

  ‘We don’t know if it’s got anything to do with the case,’ says Peter.

  ‘How could we know?’

  ‘Sounds like a load of socialist envy to me, the old green-eyed monster stalking my past.’

  ‘Not necessarily. At the beginning of a case, no one knows what contains significance. As with a jigsaw, we can only sit down and get the pieces out of the box. What will fit where, is still something of a mystery. This may not fit anywhere at all. But you have to look at all the pieces first.’

  ‘You sound like my nanny. Beastly woman.’

  ‘My experience is that every piece fits somewhere, even if it’s only background.’

  ‘She wasn’t all bad, Nanny Stokes, stale breath of course, but one mustn’t speak ill of the dull.’

  He looks for a laugh which doesn’t come so he tries to build bridges:

  ‘And of course I’m a great supporter of the police.’

  ‘How reassuring for us all,’ says Tamsin.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘And you’ve nothing else to add, Mr Bannaford?’

  ‘Nothing. My pockets are clean!’

  ‘So you were just here at Henry House for the laugh?’

  Forty Four

  Like a lizard in the sun, Martin Channing sat still, relaxed and alert. And he knew how to open with an attention-grabbing line, as he reflected on the Feast of Fools:

  ‘Well, I thought it was an unmitigated success,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Like an evening of commedia dell’arte, with the Harlequin, Columbina, Pierrot, et al! Marvellous!’

  ‘An unmitigated success apart from the murder,’ said Peter.

  ‘A plodding and pious response, Abbot - you�
�ve wandered into bland.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And not a camera in sight.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Cameras bring bland as sure as night follows day. Put an authority figure on TV, and it draws from them considered words, official words, judiciously chosen - and authentic as spray-on tan, words designed only to beguile or anaesthetise the public.’

  ‘Quite a speech.’

  ‘But am I wrong?’

  ‘I was simply pointing out the fact of murder.’

  ‘And so what?’

  ‘Well, it’s not without importance,’

  ‘But does the world have to stop?’

  ‘The world pauses perhaps.’

  ‘Then there would have been some very long pauses in Medieval England, Abbot!’

  Tamsin attempts to re-focus: ‘We’re trying to find out what happened here last night.’

  ‘Creation is red in tooth and claw,’ says Channing, ignoring her,

  ‘always has been, we just forget.’

  ‘At least now we investigate the claw’s damage,’ says Peter.

  ‘Do you like Dorset, Abbot?’ Where was this going?

  ‘I don’t know it well.’

  ‘You’d love it, everyone loves it, Portland Bill and all that, everyone loves Dorset.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

  ‘But presumably you read the piece in the Silt last week?’

  ‘I may have missed it.’

  ‘They’ve found fifty-one decapitated skeletons there, an execution dating from the early eleventh century.’

  ‘I’m sure the Dorset police are on the case.’

  ‘You see, we should never pretend we’re a civilised species, Abbot, that’s what I’m saying. We all contain the appalling.’

  ‘The Silt contains it every week,’ says Tamsin, keen to get back to the Feast of Fools.

  ‘As do you, Detective Inspector, and even the holy and habited Abbot!’

  Peter says he isn’t sure anyone is pretending to be civilised, but the lizard sweeps smoothly on:

  ‘The executed of Dorset suffered multiple wounds, inflicted by a sharp-bladed weapon to head, jaw and upper spine. All a little unnecessary - the violence, I mean - but then humans will be humans, delighting in savagery, and all of it watched and applauded by a very large crowd. The massacre was entertainment!’

  He paused before finishing.

  ‘So really, we should be thankful it was only Barnabus on Friday night, with an audience of just one.’

  ‘Certainly not fewer than one,’ said Tamsin, ‘though maybe more, who knows? Perhaps you know, Mr Channing.’

  Martin, conspiratorially: ‘Mind you, the executed of Dorset were only Vikings, trespassers in the area, so we shouldn’t be too sad. Not Swedish are you?’

  ‘Do I look Swedish?’ asked the black-haired, olive-skinned Tamsin.

  ‘Freedom of movement around the European Union was allowed in those days - but only if you had a large number of sword-wielding friends.’

  Tamsin feels it’s time to move on from Dorset... and the Vikings.

  ‘So why were you here in Henry Hall?’

  ‘Professional interest. A local event on Halloween night... could make a decent story. And I wasn’t wrong, was I?’

  ‘Do you usually send yourself?’

  ‘Flaky features editor pulled out.’

  Peter and Tamsin sift the words for truth.

  ‘And the evening itself?’

  ‘As I say, a rather charming success from beginning to end... well, almost the end. All very bizarre, of course, the clothes, the voice pills, the stage shoes - but really, wasn’t bizarre the point? And I was so looking forward to my second session with Barnabus. Plenty of material to reflect on!’

  ‘Perhaps Frances will stand in for Barnabus?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  He wasn’t keen.

  ‘And the Lord of Misrule?’ asks Tamsin. Give us some help, thinks Peter.

  ‘Not me, sadly, I would have been a great deal more wicked!’

  ‘Some might say that as editor of the Silt, you’re the Lord of Misrule already.’

  ‘I take that as a huge compliment.’ That figured.

  ‘And so no idea who it was, the Lord of Misrule?’

  ‘No idea at all, but they had a certain panache, I’ll give them that. Rather distinctive stylised movements throughout, negating all individuality, a cross between mime and ballet.’

  Martin Channing can’t resist a little demonstration, a strangely compelling sequence of moves.

  ‘Are you sure it wasn’t you?’

  ‘I’ll tell you who it reminded me of,’ says Martin.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Picasso’s ‘Seated Harlequin’.

  Tamsin looks blank as Martin explains:

  ‘Who some say was his alter-ego, the sad man with a painted smile, traumatised by the suicide of his friend Casagemas.’

  Pause.

  ‘We’ll bear the art history in mind,’ said Tamsin.

  Forty Five

  ‘So yours was a different vision of therapy, Frances?’

  ‘A rather more practical one, perhaps.’ Frances had alert and lively eyes.

  ‘Barnabus wasn’t practical?’

  ‘I believe in quick results from therapeutic intervention.’

  ‘And Barnabus didn’t?’ Frances sighed.

  ‘Barnabus said healing took time, and the trouble is, time’s something nobody has... or not something they can be bothered with, at least.’

  ‘The murderer will have time - when this is all over,’ said Tamsin. A pause, broken by Peter:

  ‘And perhaps that’s the reason why they’re ill.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘People unwilling to offer time to the healing process. They seek the quick fix and the easy mend.’

  ‘Distraction junkies, unable to focus on the important?’

  ‘Not unknown,’ said Peter, but Frances is unconvinced:

  ‘Rake up the client’s past,’ she said, ‘and you’re lost in a swamp with no exit. It’s like the eternal onion, layer after layer removed, but never reaching the heart of the matter.’

  Peter says: ‘You prefer something more cognitive?’

  ‘Hijack the mind, get the old box of tricks working for you - of course! Why are you depressed? I don’t want to know - and neither do you frankly. But let’s at least get some positive thought going. Six sessions max, wham bam, thank you, Sam.’

  ‘Think yourself fit?’

  ‘Good slogan. We could use that at Mind Gains.’

  ‘Feels a little like papering over the cracks,’ said the Abbot.

  ‘And papering over the cracks is fine.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘What’s your problem with papering over the cracks?’

  ‘The cracks, I suppose.’

  ‘Cracks are okay! People can happily live in a house for years with the cracks papered over. It looks nice, which is what most people want. And as long as the holes don’t get any bigger, nothing unmanageable at least, what’s the issue? Nothing wrong with a bit of papering over - if it saves rebuilding the entire wall!’

  ‘That’s a take on therapy I can understand,’ said Tamsin. Peter: ‘But Barnabus liked to rebuild the wall?’

  ‘There was a pseudo-spirituality in his work, which I always felt was misguided.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Why encourage people in their delusions? I wish to promote realism, not psychological infantilism.’

  ‘So religion, however described, is opposed to the goals of mental health?’

  ‘No question. I say to people: where
is there any evidence God exists? Prove to me that any supernatural being cares a hoot for you, or ever will? Freud believed religion was rooted in a child’s sense of helplessness in a dangerous world.’

  ‘And you agree?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So the human is less a soul and more a machine?’

  ‘Clearly! So yes, attend to the hurt, identify the harmful consequences of the hurt, identify strategies for coping, discuss the benefits of moving on, the benefits of releasing past grievances, establish ways this process might be supported - it’s not rocket science and it sure as hell isn’t spiritual. It’s just the re-orientation of our psychology. The “whys” don’t matter - the only thing that matters is: “what now?”.’

  ‘So your creed is something like: “Don’t stir the water - just build a bridge over it”?’

  ‘That’s what I used to say to Barnabus.’

  ‘But he didn’t agree?’

  ‘He could be very stubborn.’

  ‘And so could Bella,’ says Tamsin.

  ‘Bella?’

  ‘She pulled out of the Feast of Fools after an argument with you. What was that about?’

  Frances breathes deeply and speaks slowly:

  ‘She wanted to be the Lord of Misrule. She’d organised the event and felt she was owed that.’

  ‘But you didn’t?’

  ‘I didn’t what?’

  ‘You didn’t feel she was owed that?’

  ‘It was a ridiculous idea.’

  ‘Explain ridiculous.’

  ‘Simple. At the heart of the event, the pivot of unpredictability on which it sat, was the random nature of that appointment.’

  ‘And so that was that.’

  ‘I run Mind Gains, not Bella.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are we done?’

  ‘And now, of course, there’s no Barnabus to share that leadership,’ says Tamsin. ‘Will you miss him?’

  ‘It was terrible what was done to him, unforgiveable, although in some ways - and don’t take this the wrong way - he was like a sick dog put out of its misery.’

  Forty Six

  ‘It’s a bit like the four gospels,’ said Abbot Peter. ‘Same story, different versions... only this time, without any names.’