The Itinerant Lodger

by David Nobbs

  “We’ll cure you, and then they’ll fix you up with a nice job.”

  Baker’s shaking grew more violent.

  “That’s right. Have a good cry. Get it off your chest.”

  Baker’s shoulders began to heave as the shaking took a grip on him. Dr Grainger summoned an attendant, who led him back to his room, shaking and gasping as the agony swept him away.

  Chapter 27

  “SO WE STILL DON’T KNOW WHY HE THINKS HE’S BEING persecuted?”

  “No, sir.”

  “It’s paranoia all right, though.”

  “Yes.”

  “Three dung coloured stripes. That puzzles me. Why stripes?”

  “No mention of it in Prude, sir?” asked Dr Grainger, referring colloquially to that well-thumbed volume, The Social Meaning Of Colour—Babylon to Stevenage by Virginia and Edgar Prude.

  “No. It’s disappointing. I was sure we were on the right track. The light blue seemed so obvious. The old school tie next, I thought, and back in the womb by Wednesday.”

  “The tie angle didn’t produce anything, then?”

  “No. We drew a blank. I had Harper check up. He even rang Gorringes. No school, not even in the colonies, has an old school tie with three dung coloured stripes. Never mind, Grainger. You’ve done your best.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “The fact remains that he feels he’s being got at. It was obvious from the start. He felt we were getting at him. He felt we were prying.”

  “He has a strong sense of his own inadequacy.”

  “Yes. What do you make of this panacea thing?”

  “He wants to be cured. He can’t admit it to himself in personal terms—who can admit anything to themselves, in personal terms, without medical help?—so he persuades himself that it’s the world that needs curing. A typical transferred reaction process.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “I know I’m right, sir.”

  “Well, the time has come to hand him over to Belling. See what he can do.”

  So Baker was sent to Wagon Twelve, where, along with all the other paranoiacs, he would be under the care of Dr Belling, a fearless Australian who had not lost his nerve even after being badly mauled by a patient in Goole the previous year. Dr Belling would cure him, if anyone could. It would have to be a rush job—only a month remained before they struck asylum and moved to Halifax—but he could do it if anyone could.

  So Baker joined the three other paranoiacs under Dr Belling’s care. None of them were serious cases—these were dealt with by the Goldplank or City Mental. They were three harmless, pleasant people whose lives would have been quite happy were they not being got at by, respectively, the Greek Government, the Methodists and the Old Bovinghonians Small Bore Rifle Club.

  Dr Belling took the paranoiacs into the big tent each morning, and in the middle of the tent, in the treatment ring itself, he gave them certain objects—hoops, composition rubber balls to balance on their noses, tiny bicycles with square wheels, funny masks, all kinds of little objects that would help them to recapture their childhood and track down the source of their illnesses. Drugs, of course, also helped.

  While he was exercised in that huge ring with its smell of wind and sawdust, and while he was interviewed in Dr Belling’s room, with its faded photographs of grim little groups of long ago, each with its sad title, “Paranoiacs, 1957” or “Manic Depressives, 1949–1950”, Baker was finding it extremely hard to accept that he was being persecuted. It was strange, admittedly, that everyone should be being got at except him, but surely he would have noticed if anything like that had been going on? And, anyway, who would do such a thing? The Greek Government? Surely not? The Methodists? What reason could they possibly have? And it couldn’t be, it couldn’t possibly be, the Old Bovinghonians Small Bore Rifle Club. No, he wasn’t being persecuted. Life was bad enough without that.

  But the idea stuck, as ideas will, especially when one has time on one’s hands as Baker did during the long, lonely nights. He recalled those words of Dr Grainger, which had seemed so senseless at the time. “They can’t get you here. No-one can get you here.” Could it be that they were trying to make him believe that somebody was persecuting him, in order to avert suspicion from themselves? Was it they, his doctors, who were persecuting him? Ever since they had come into his life he had been questioned, imprisoned, harried. He began to read it in their faces. He realised suddenly how odd it was that he had been brought here so abruptly by Mr Lomax, and for no good reason. It was all a plot. They were persecuting him for some reason that he didn’t understand, and they were trying to calm his suspicions and explain away his feelings of persecution by persuading him that he was a paranoiac. He, a paranoiac! Not in a month of Sundays. He, Baker, who had trusted so many people so implicitly all his life, and had so often been disappointed.

  Disappointed, yes. Why had he been disappointed so often? Because they had all ganged up on him. All of them. He saw it all now. Ackroyd, Lomax, the Governor, all of them, all in the plot, all in league with the doctors, all softening him up ready for the moment when Dr Mildweed and his hatchet men could lock him up. All frightened men, frightened of what he might achieve, he and his panacea.

  How few there had been on his side! Mrs Pollard, Mr Burbage…Mrs Pollard, where had she been when he was sent to prison? Where was she now? Why was she always absent when he needed her most? Where was Mrs Pollard when the light went out?

  Surely not her? Not her. Not that kindly, loving…but then if she was a secret agent it would be her business to be kind and loving. Oh, it was clever. And to think that he’d never suspected a thing, never even noticed what a coincidence it was that it had been she who had answered the advertisement, of all the people who might have done so. How Dr Mildweed must have laughed as he’d told her what to say! He’d read of such things. People you trusted implicitly, and behind your back they sent coded messages to Moscow. Government officials were inveigled into making love with beautiful women who had tape-recorders wedged in both ears and a tiny camera lodged in their belly-button. Oh, Baker, how simple you’ve been.

  It couldn’t be true. The confidences they’d shared. The happy moments they had spent together. No, she hadn’t sent coded messages…the letters! Mr and Mrs Elliott, and Mr and Mrs Lucas. What a fool he had been. What rings he’d allowed them to run. But the letters were his idea. Or were they? And even if they were, hadn’t she planted the suggestion? That was enough. That was what these people did. They planted the suggestion.

  But not Mr Burbage. Not nice old Burbage, helping him like that. Helping? A fine help he’d been. He’d still served a year in prison, for all that help. The sudden substitution for Ackroyd, on the day before the trial! And, then, when he came out, Mr Burbage waiting there. It was all so clear now. And he’d thought it was friendship. He’d soaked up the drink, made pacifist statements to that military poet, and then what had happened? He couldn’t remember. Of course he couldn’t remember. Somewhere, in the Ukraine, a roll of microfilm lay waiting to remind him. Oh Baker, Baker, Baker, your life was a mirage. Your friendships didn’t exist. Those days by the kitchen range, lit by the flickering of a fire that had its birth in pre-history, they were a lie. That evening in the pub, allowing the warmth of friendship to spill over you, you were a laughing-stock. What have you ever shared? What has life offered to you, in all these years? Miss Daisy Wilkinson. That’s all. Miss Daisy Wilkinson was the one person who was true, and Miss Daisy Wilkinson you rejected, long ago.

  They came with drugs to kill him. He would not give them the satisfaction. He refused to eat the food that was provided, for fear that it was drugged. He knew what would happen if he ate it. First he’d feel drowsy, strangely drowsy, and then….

  Unfortunately all the food that arrived for Dr Belling’s patients was drugged, the chef being the only Greek Methodist ever to cross the portals of the Old Bovinghonians Small Bore Rifle Club, so that if one wanted to remain undrugged one died of hunger. To
starve was to play into their hands as surely as any other way, and quite soon Baker began to eat.

  He found himself growing drowsy, strangely drowsy. Semi-conscious, he allowed himself to be swathed from head to foot in wet drying-up cloth. It was nice. It was relaxing. He lay in his big pram, waiting for his nice new Australian mother, and when she came he told her all his troubles.

  In the semi-conscious days that followed his nice Australian mother learnt a lot about his patient. Clearly Baker believed himself to be unacceptable to society, and clearly this led him to see society—represented here by his doctors—as a hostile enemy ranged against himself. It was all so clear.

  Under the influence of his treatment Baker grew more and more sleepy, too sleepy to recall, in after years, what that treatment had been. He had been swept back, barely glancing at his childhood and adolescence, straight to the larval stage, back into the world’s womb, where he was content to lie on his back and kick a little from time to time, in an effort to stretch his legs. He was living now in the misty, half twilight world of pre-history, enveloped in lethargy. He felt an immense desire for peace. He felt as if he had crossed a mountain range and had arrived at a place where it would be possible for him to lie undisturbed for ever under the warm sun, sheltered from the wind by a big stone, and to stretch his great legs to unbelievable lengths on the soft, springy grass. There he would be able to rest, as if Rip Van Winkle had remained awake to enjoy those hundred years of sleep.

  But he was not allowed to rest undisturbed. Drugs were forced down him. People asked him questions and wrote down his answers in their books. Paint brushes and table tennis bats were thrust into his hands and he had to sleepwalk through a series of absurd exercises.

  Then, after the drugs had been changed, little trickles began. The notes were taken with increasing eagerness. The energy grew stronger. Cooper grabbed a table tennis bat and was swiftly beaten 21–3, 21–2, 21–2. By that time he was exhausted, but later, as the hours passed, the energy took over again. Eventually, after a few days, his energy settled down to a nice, steady level and he was able to be taken off drugs altogether. He spent his time entering into all the rehabilitative exercises of the place—painting daffodils, playing table tennis, playing scrabble. A man of middle age, with little or no eye for colour, he had a poor sense of timing and lacked the clear head to see possibilities quickly, and his scrabble, table tennis and daffodils suffered as a result. But this merely meant that there was room to improve—and improve he would, of that he was determined.

  The days were slipping past. Soon it would be time for the Mobile Mental Home to move on to Halifax. Each day a few more people were discharged, and the place was developing that air of forlorn festivity which comes when a routine is running to a stop. Some of them felt better, some worse. Soon they would all be seeing their loved ones again.

  But Cooper had no loved ones to see, and no home to which he could return. If he had a past, it had been wiped out. He knew the rules of scrabble and table tennis, and that was as far as his qualifications went. His competitive urge had been aroused at last, and it was through satisfying it that he would find true peace, but no man can satisfy his competitive urge with table tennis and scrabble alone. He needs more—much more. Cooper was determined to find it.

  The day of his release dawned cold and snowy. He was half frightened and half stimulated by the challenge that he would face, and after finding himself unable to eat his breakfast he was taken to see Dr Mildweed. He joined a rapidly moving queue and after about twenty minutes found himself once more in the great man’s caravan.

  Dr Mildweed congratulated him on his recovery and presented him with a bill for £300. He asked for time to pay and Dr Mildweed made him sign an order promising to pay at the rate of £2 per week. “Perhaps that’ll teach you to go sane in future,” he said.

  In the corridor, just as he was about to step out of the door, Cooper met Dr Grainger, who had come to say good-bye.

  “Just off?” Dr Grainger asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you any plans?”

  “I’m going to get myself a job and find somewhere to live first.”

  “Good. Good. Well, the Ex-Lunatics Appointments Board exists to help people like you. Do you know where they are?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You’ll find them very helpful. They’re a great boon,” said Dr Grainger, handing him a printed card with their address.

  “Thank you.”

  “Well, I’m very glad to see you’re so well. I wish you all the best of luck.”

  “Thank you.”

  Dr Grainger shook hands with surprising vigour. “And mind now,” he said. “No relapses.”

  Cooper was somewhat surprised. He didn’t recall ever having met the man before. But the advice was sound. No relapses. No, there would be no relapses. All that was over. He stepped out of the caravan, walked across to the gates of the Home, walked through Roundwood Park, white under its mantle of snow, and stepped out into the street.

  He stood there, unable to decide which way to turn. He was cured. It was difficult to know what to do next.

  Chapter 28

  “YOU’RE AT THE AWKWARD AGE,” SAID THE DIRECTOR of the Ex-Lunatics Appointments Board. “Too old for the professions and too young for the school crossing patrols.”

  “I just want something steady and settled, sir.”

  “I know. I know. And if I could give it to you I would. If only you were younger there’d be a great demand for a Cambridge and Winchester Ex-Lunatic. You haven’t filled in what previous work you’ve done, by the way.”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “You’ve forgotten?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “It’s not your fault. It’s the treatment. They’ve made you forget things. They’ve taken you back to your childhood. It’s so selfish. I mean it may help them to know all about your tricycle accidents but one just can’t expect it to interest the modern employer. He’s too busy. Don’t you know anyone who could tell us what experience you have?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I can’t remember.”

  “Usually there’s a close liaison with the next of kin, and we find out through them, surreptitiously. In your case no kin at all have put in an appearance. You’ve had no visitors. Frankly, Cooper, it’s a difficult situation. I realise that there’s a perfectly good medical reason for it, but it’s bound to count against you. You go for an interview, they ask you whether you have previous experience of that kind of work, and you tell them you don’t remember. It creates a bad impression. You see you may have the most tremendous qualificatious.”

  “I don’t feel qualified, sir.”

  “Well, you see, you wouldn’t. You may have developed some fantastic specialised skill, of enormous commercial value, but how are we to find out, short of trying you at everything in turn? I mean if you’d been the Postmaster General I’d be none the wiser. It’s not easy. Of course I can find you something but it won’t be much. Or you could try the personal columns of the papers. There are always a few odd things where they might not enquire about your past. Odd’s the operative word. ‘Literary gent requires aide and confidante.’ That kind of thing.”

  “I really want something quite ordinary, sir.”

  “Yes, I know. You’re cured, and it’s quite natural that you should. And also you’ll have to build up your self-confidence. You want to start finding out your aptitudes. So perhaps it’s as well to start with something humble.” He began to hunt through his filing system and a ray of nervousness broke through the fog of Cooper’s middle life. “Well,” said the Director at length, looking up from his files and staring straight at Cooper, “There’s only one thing I can suggest. It came in today. Commissionaire at the Royal Hotel. You’re a bit on the young side—they like them sixty-five—but I fancy they might take to the idea of a graduate commissionaire. They’re angling for their fourth star. I can’t pretend it’s ideal, Cooper, but it’s money,
and there is a canopy. You could wait and see for a bit, but I can’t promise anything much better.”

  So Cooper became a Commissionaire at the Royal Hotel. He found lodgings near to his work, and attempted to settle down to his new life. He found it very difficult. It was hard to suffer the effects of a complete cure at his age. Here he was, a middle aged family man, a respectable citizen, and suddenly he was flung out into the world without an asset to his name. No family. No career. No qualification. No hobbies. He hadn’t even any luggage. What use was a man without luggage? Somewhere there must be luggage, somewhere in the forgotten past of his there must be great trunks of the stuff, acquired in the course of twenty years of adult life. But where was it?

  No luggage, so he had to buy things. Pyjamas, toothpaste, essentials of one kind and another, things he could ill afford. For he wasn’t salaried, he was pittanced. He would have had trouble enough, trying to make ends meet, even without the two pounds he paid to Dr Mildweed, even without these essentials he had to buy. He wasn’t a drinking man, so far as he knew, but he’d have liked to have a local, somewhere to pass the time of day with a few cronies. But how could he possibly enter a pub, a man with no means? And even if one day he began to have means, what would be the use unless he developed a past to go with them? How could he go into a pub, with no opinions? “What do you think of capital punishment?” “I forget.” He’d be a laughing-stock.

  Those long hours in his lodgings, when he wasn’t at work, how dreary they were. He was too old to start having new interests, and he couldn’t recall the old ones. So he sat there, living on bread and tins of soup, and searching desperately into his past.

  The last thing he could remember was the arrivals platform at Liverpool Street Station. He got out of the train, and set off at slightly above normal pace, for he was eager to leave his youth behind and pass out into the world, where he would be able to…to what? What, what, what? He remembered only the eagerness with which he had set out, with a degree in his pocket and hope in his heart. And after that, nothing. Fog rolled in off Bethnal Green, an engine hooted, and he awoke in Dr Mildweed’s Mobile Mental Home. It was no use. Try as he did, he could remember nothing in between. A youth, as clear as if it was yesterday. An early middle age, as vivid as if it would stretch to the end of time. And nothing in between.