Bedlam Burning (24 page)

He said, ‘All right, all right, I admit it. I see truffles, waterfalls, shaving brushes, human ears, stampeding buffalo, piles of dirty laundry, circuit boards, brown-paper packages tied up with string …'

Kincaid gathered up the cards and put them face-down on his desk. The session was over. Kincaid's face signalled disappointment yet also a stoic, if wounded, bravery.

‘How did I do, doc?' Max asked brightly. ‘How many did I get right? Have I won a goldfish?'

This was proof enough to me that Max was still taking the piss. If I'd been Kincaid I'd have been tempted to abuse my position and given Max a few unnecessarily painful injections and maybe a course of fierce laxatives, but Kincaid was a true professional. He said, ‘You can go away now, Max, while Mr Collins and I evaluate these results.'

Max put one foot in front of the other, heel to toe, swaying a little, and repeated the procedure as many times as were required to get himself out of the office.

‘Interesting, yes?' Kincaid said, once he'd gone.

‘I suppose so,' I said.

‘Max hasn't been entirely freed from the bondage of images, but compared with his condition a few months ago he's improved remarkably.'

I didn't want to argue with Kincaid, yet I couldn't stop myself saying, ‘But wasn't he just drunk?'

Kincaid looked at me condescendingly.

‘Max has many problems,' he said. ‘Alcohol is his rather pathetic way of coping.'

‘And what happens when he starts seeing pink elephants?' I asked.

Kincaid was no better at spotting my cheap jokes than he had been at spotting Max's piss-taking. ‘Then I'll know I've failed,' he said solemnly.

Soon after, I came across Max again, in a less medical setting. He was lying beside the path that led from the Communication Room to the dried-up fountain. His eyes were closed, mouth open, legs curled under him in a position that would have been excruciating for anyone who wasn't anaesthetised by drink. I couldn't just leave him there, so I shook him awake and said, ‘Would you like me to help you get back to your room?'

He flickered back to consciousness and nodded. My motives for helping him weren't entirely altruistic. I had quite a curiosity to see how the patients lived. This would be a way of seeing inside one of their rooms.

I got Max into the clinic and to his own front door. We both hesitated on the threshold and I wondered if perhaps the patients' rooms were forbidden territory, but nobody had told me so, and Max said at last, ‘Won't you step inside for a night cap?' It was four in the afternoon, but I said I would.

I had no picture of what Max's room would be like; and however hard I'd tried I'd never have imagined the reality. I stepped inside and it was for all the world like entering a tiny, perfect replica of a rustic English pub. There was a free-standing wooden bar in one corner. Behind it were bottles and glasses and optics, an ice bucket, a row of tankards, and in front was a single wrought-iron, marble-topped pub table with three chairs around it, and one of the chairs was occupied. Sita, the silent Indian woman, was sitting there, staring placidly into a glass of colourless liquid, her white muslin sari trailing to the ground, where it hung in an expanse of sawdust.

‘You've met Sita,' Max said by way of introduction. ‘Our resident enigma.'

‘Hello, Sita,' I said, though naturally she didn't reply.

‘Just because Sita doesn't say anything doesn't mean she's got nothing to say,' Max insisted.

‘Doesn't it?' I asked.

Max was surprised by my question, and he appeared to be giving the matter intense, if brief, consideration before he said, ‘Oh all right, maybe it does mean that.'

Sita sipped her drink. Although I got the feeling she'd been there a good long time, she didn't look remotely drunk, and when her eyes acknowledged my presence they were clear and lucid. I was surprised to find her there at all. If I'd been asked to speculate about who among the patients might be a secret drinker, or a boozing companion for Max, Sita wouldn't even have crossed my mind.

I looked around at the pub paraphernalia on the walls, nothing figurative, no hunting scenes or sporting prints, but there were lucky horseshoes, antique carpentry tools, some brewing equipment. I'd seen many less convincing attempts at creating an olde worlde pub atmosphere.

‘This is amazing,' I said.

‘You won't tell anybody about it, will you?' said Max. ‘This is just our little secret.'

I said that was fine by me, but I found it hard to believe we were the only ones in on the secret. How could you possibly set up a replica pub in your hospital room without anyone knowing?

‘Where do you sleep?' I asked, noticing that there was no bed in the room, not in itself so very surprising since it would undoubtedly have spoiled the pub effect.

‘Where I fall,' Max said. Yes, well that explained the sawdust on the shoulders. Then he adopted the style of a genial pub landlord. ‘What's your poison, Gregory? Will you be having the usual?'

‘I don't really have a usual,' I said.

‘Well, I usually serve whisky,' he said, and he slopped whisky into a thick-bottomed glass for me. ‘This'll soon have you feeling frisky.'

I looked at the whisky bottle. The label had been largely scraped off, perhaps because of its pictorial elements, but enough of it remained to be identifiable. It was White Horse. ‘Is this your usual brand as well?' I asked.

Max shrugged. It was all the same to him and he poured himself a drink much larger than mine and launched into a convoluted story about some occasion when he was drunk in Leith. I wasn't really listening, since I was wondering if this bottle of whisky was the one that had been in my missing holdall. There was clearly no way of telling. White Horse wasn't exactly an uncommon brand, and even if we'd been dealing with some rare single malt the evidence that this bottle was mine would still only have been circumstantial. But I thought it was a bit of a coincidence. And I thought too that if my whisky had survived, then maybe some of the rest of my stuff might also have survived; in which case, where was it?

‘Where do you get the booze from, Max?' I asked.

‘I have my lines of supply,' he said mysteriously.

‘Go on,' I said.

He hesitated, but then decided I was an ally or at least not a squealer, and said, ‘Let's just say some of the natives around here aren't entirely unfriendly.'

I thought of the lads in the car and the ones who partied outside the boundary wall. I could see they might have an ambivalent attitude towards the inmates of the Kincaid Clinic. They might consider them contemptible nutters, they might spray graffiti on the outer wall, but they might also take a certain delight in supplying them with booze, and who knew what else?

Max and I joined Sita at the table and I sipped my whisky. It felt wicked, and certainly subversive, to be drinking in the afternoon in a mental hospital with two of the patients, though Max and Sita treated the occasion casually enough.

Max said, ‘I suppose you want me to tell you why I'm here.'

I said I did. I thought it would save time.

‘I'm remodelling my consciousness through alcohol. It's a kind of auto-psychosurgery if you like.'

‘Yes?'

‘I imbibe alcohol. I annihilate some brain tissue, create a few cellular modifications, remould some cortex, incinerate a few circuits and synapses, strew some litter on the mesocorticolimbic pathway. Sounds a little crazy perhaps, but I know what I'm doing.'

‘Does Kincaid know what you're doing?' I asked.

‘No,' said Max, ‘He thinks I'm depressed. He thinks I'm using booze as self-medication.'

‘And he thinks that's all right?

‘So long as I keep away from those nasty old images he's happy as a sand boy.'

Suddenly Max leapt to his feet and started viciously stamping the floor. At first I thought he was having a fit, but no, there was method here. A spider was scuttling through the sawdust, a real spider, not some alcohol-induced hallucination, I was pleased to see. Max stamped the spider to death and carried on stamping long after the creature was reduced to a black smear. It was manic and alarming but Sita sat through it unmoved. Perhaps she was used to it.

‘I feel better for that,' said Max. ‘I hate spiders. It's not a phobia or anything. I just hate them.'

‘How long have you been doing this consciousness-remodelling of yours, Max?' I asked.

‘Years,' he said. ‘And years.'

‘Is it working?'

‘I still need a lot more data,' he said and poured us both another drink. ‘Do you think I should write about it?'

‘If it's what you want to write about.'

‘What else do I have? Aren't you supposed to write about what you know? And what else do I know about?'

I was going to say I wasn't absolutely sure people should only write about what they know, since most people know so little, when I became aware that Sita was pointing at something on the floor. I looked and saw, with some amazement, that as a result of Max's stamping, the sawdust had been shuffled around, and by chance had formed itself into a human profile, one that looked quite passably like Kincaid. We all stared and sniggered childishly before Sita got up and very decorously brushed away the face with the hem of her sari.

And then there was the patients' writing. I was prepared for this to get better under our ‘new deal'. I thought that maybe the previous awfulness had come about because they felt too constrained or pressured. True, they didn't seem to have paid very much attention to the two titles Kincaid and I had given them, but there might still have been some sense of being told what to do, and perhaps that had inhibited them. Maybe they had things they really wanted to say that could only be said in their own ways and in their own time.

But I was also prepared for the writing to become worse. I was ready for the patients' outpourings to be even more mad and maddening, to be even fuller of irrelevance and banality. By the mid-seventies the notion of ‘letting it all hang out' hadn't been utterly discredited but it had already started to sound as much a recipe for disaster as for liberation.

In either case, whether the writing was better or worse, I was also expecting, and certainly hoping for, a drop in output. There had been something frantic about the production in those first two weeks, and I thought that was probably because the patients were trying too hard. Perhaps they'd been determined to impress me, or more likely, writing was a novelty for them and they'd thrown themselves into it with the energy that can accompany any new fad. Now that some of the novelty had worn off they'd surely settle down and write less.

Wrong. It wouldn't be true to say that nothing changed at all, that the writing went on exactly as before; for one thing, I didn't get the Saturday-morning knock followed by the bulk delivery. Instead the writing came to me piecemeal. I'd find a couple of dozen sheets of typescript left outside my hut, or I'd go into the library and find a densely typed sheaf of paper waiting for me. Nobody ever gave me their work directly, never put it straight into my hand, and I had to
accept this since no doubt it was done to preserve their precious anonymity. But apart from the method of delivery it was pretty much business as before.

The writing was all basically, intrinsically, amazingly, more of the same. It seemed to be neither better nor worse, neither freer nor more inhibited, neither more nor less psychologically revealing. It was just the same. So there were more spiritual ramblings, more confessions, more sex and violence, more amazing facts. There was another account of a football match – Bolton Wanderers 0, Notts Forest 0 – a real nail-biter apparently; another fairly accurate retelling of a well-known work of literature:
Macbeth
, in this case. There was stuff that looked like experimental prose. There was a tale of bitter, unrequited, ungrammatical love. There was a piece about the glory and wonder of trees; there was a day in the life of a candle. There were also more anagrams – one of which revealed that ‘Kincaid' was an anagram of ‘acid ink', and if I'd been on acid that might have seemed wonderfully significant, but I wasn't, so it didn't.

By any reasonable standards it was all absolutely dreadful; not uniformly dreadful, I suppose – some bits must have been better than others – but after I'd read a certain amount of this stuff my notions of good and bad, of better and worse, became extremely fogged. It felt as though I was dealing with the worst kind of slush pile (not that I had any personal experience of slush piles), and as such my first inclination was to reject it all.

And yet, perhaps because I couldn't reject it, because rejecting it would have been as inappropriate as it would have been meaningless, I found myself slowly coming, not to like it exactly but at least to tolerate it. And as more and more writing arrived every day, I came to appreciate that there was something irreducible about it. It was what it was, and that gave it a certain stature and dignity.

So I started to accept it, to welcome it en masse. I started looking forward to each new delivery, each new instalment. It wasn't like looking forward to the next episode of a serial, or following the adventures of a set of characters and wanting to know what happens next; it was more like looking forward to the morning newspaper. By definition you never know precisely what's going to be in the paper, but at the same time you have certain realistic expectations which are, by and large, fulfilled. The patients' writing ceased to surprise me, yet became an essential part of my routine, of my daily life.

Then I began to develop a curious fondness for it, although I could see that fondness was in some ways irrelevant too. Regardless of how I felt about the writing, regardless of its qualities, I still had an obligation to deal with it, to talk to the patients about it, to do something with them and for them. In a perfect world I might have preferred to sit them down individually and have one-to-one tutorials with them. I saw myself playing the part of the groovy young academic: hip, approachable, willing to talk about rock lyrics; that sort of thing. But, inevitably, this wasn't possible. Since nobody would own up to having written any particular piece of work, group discussions were the only option.