Bedlam Burning (39 page)

I looked hard at Gregory and I didn't believe a word of it. Finding one person prepared to have sex with Gregory Collins seemed preposterous enough. Finding two, who both happened to be bridesmaids, who would do it with him the night before the wedding, stretched plausibility too far for me. I assumed he was making it up. So if this alleged scene of debauchery hadn't really been played out, then Nicola obviously couldn't have caught him at it. So either she'd had other perfectly good, perfectly understandable reasons for not turning up at the church and Gregory was using this story as an excuse; or just possibly he hadn't been stood up at all. Perhaps he was the one who'd chickened out and run away. That made sense to me too; that he had finally realised the impossibility, the inadvisability, the sheer insanity of getting married to Nicola. That seemed infinitely more likely than this other nonsense. Still, I didn't challenge him. Why bother? He'd got his story and as far as I was concerned he was welcome to stick to it.

‘You know Gogol?' Gregory asked.

‘The author?' I said. ‘
Dead Souls
,
The Overcoat
,
The Government Inspector
.'

‘Very good, Michael. He wrote
The Diary of a Madman
too.'

‘Right,' I said.

‘Well, when he was young he had a poem privately printed, called
Hans Kuchelgarten
. It got two stinking reviews, so he took back all the unsold copies and burned them. Only three copies had actually been sold so it was more or less the whole bloody edition. Anyway, he got over it and years later he had a big hit with
Dead Souls
. Right off he started writing the sequel, but it didn't go very well. It took him the best part of ten years and he still thought it was rubbish.
Meanwhile, he got sick with all these psychosomatic illnesses, and they gradually turned into real illnesses, and eventually he realised he was going to die and his great sequel wasn't any bloody good, so ten days before he snuffed it, he burned the bugger in an open fireplace. What do you think of that?'

‘What do you want me to think?'

‘I'd like you to think I'm part of a great tradition.'

‘Anything you say, Gregory.'

‘I want in,' he said passionately.

‘What?'

‘I want to stay here. I want to become an inmate. I want some of that Kincaidian Therapy. I want to write.'

Oh my God. This was far, far too much. There were so many reasons why I didn't want Gregory there, and I still couldn't face telling him all of them, so I simply said, ‘That would be a real mistake.'

‘No, no, it wouldn't,' said Gregory. ‘You see, what's going on is that I'm being persecuted. Somebody somewhere is writing a book about me, not just about my past but about my present and my future as well, and I've got no choice but to do what's written in the book, to live out this life story, written by somebody else. Can you imagine what that's like? So obviously what I need to do is stay here, keep my head down, pretend to be somebody else until I work out where this book's being written and then I track down the author, make him hand over the book, and then I burn it. Right?'

His eyes opened very wide and he gave a smile that showed all his teeth, and he seemed to be giving a reasonably convincing portrayal of a crazy person. And I just thought, Fuck it. What did I care? What did it matter? We were so near to the end, what possible difference could it make?

‘Whatever you say, Gregory.'

‘Best call me Bob from now on.'

I took him to see Kincaid and Alicia, and they regarded his arrival with much more nonchalance than I did. Kincaid was still in high spirits from the success of the literary evening and was feeling omnipotent. Another difficult case, no problem. Gregory was still Bob Burns as far as they were concerned, so I tried to explain things by saying that Bob had been working too hard editing some illustrated books, and Kincaid just loved that. And Gregory rambled
on about his wedding and threesomes with bridesmaids and books being written about him, and both Kincaid and Alicia agreed that the clinic was the best possible place for him.

‘But where are we going to put you, Bob?' Kincaid said. ‘The clinic has ten rooms and ten patients. The library and the Communication Room are obviously out of the question, and we have a writer very much in residence in the writer's hut, so I wonder where you'd be most at home. I know. I think we'll give you a couple of days in the padded cell.'

Why did I find that so satisfying? Why didn't I try to protect Gregory a little? Was it just
Schadenfreude
? Sadism? Did I want Gregory to suffer the way I had? Well yes, all the above, plus the fact that it would at least keep him out of harm's way for a while. And to be fair, he went happily enough, accepted it as part of the therapy, nodded gullibly as Kincaid spouted some guff about the welcoming, enveloping darkness. I said I'd see him soon. The porters took him away and I was left alone with Kincaid and Alicia.

‘Our little literary evening is bearing fruit already,' Kincaid said proudly. ‘Tomorrow afternoon two of the trustees are coming back to the clinic for a top-level meeting. I have high hopes. An academic called Dr John Bentley will be joining us too. I don't expect you'll want to be there.'

Before I could say anything, Alicia interrupted. She was on my side now. ‘Please, Dr Kincaid, I think Gregory has every right in the world to be there. In fact, I insist on it.'

Kincaid obviously didn't enjoy tangling with Alicia any more than I did. He made a little moue of acquiescence, and I said, ‘Great. I wouldn't miss it for the world.'

There were six of us at the meeting in Kincaid's office. I sat on ‘our' side of the table along with Kincaid and Alicia, while on ‘their' side were the trustees, two silvery-haired, grey-suited doctors, one male – a Dr Gutteridge, one female – a Dr Driscoll. They looked like people you could trust: substantial, decent, tough-minded without being cruel, the kind of people you'd be happy to have operate on you. They explained, though quite for whose benefit I wasn't sure, that they combined a truckload of medical, administrative and financial expertise. They were there to judge us, or rather they had already done so and were now about to deliver that judgement. They had both apparently been present at Kincaid's literary evening, though they looked completely unfamiliar to me.

The last member of the sextet, the final judge, and the hanging judge as far as I was concerned, was, inevitably, Dr John Bentley. He'd walked into the office at the beginning of the meeting and looked me firmly, though quite inscrutably in the eye. His gaze had revealed nothing of his intentions. But then, as he sat down, he gave me a slight but unmistakable wink. It was a tricky gesture to interpret. It seemed unlikely that you'd wink at someone just moments before you destroyed them, but then again if you wanted to lull them into a false sense of security to make the destruction that much more painful, you might do precisely that.

My attention was understandably scattered, and the silver and grey woman had been speaking for some time before I cottoned on to what she was talking about.

‘That's why, on balance, we're very pleased with what you've accomplished here,' she said. She was addressing Kincaid, but I could feel the tide of approval rolling in to include Alicia and me. ‘I'm sure
your techniques won't be without their critics. Whose are? Yet it seems to us those techniques are clearly working.'

Kincaid nodded, but he wasn't simply agreeing with her, wasn't accepting a compliment. He was just acknowledging her acceptance of what had been obvious to him all along: that he was right, that his methods worked, that he was a genius.

‘We very much want you to carry on the good work,' Dr Driscoll said. ‘We want to be facilitators for you. And we want you to be able to make the so far rather limited evidence even more compelling.'

I stole a glance at Bentley. He was placid. No wink this time, nothing. I wondered what he was up to. If ‘we' were indeed to carry on the good work then logic suggested he couldn't be about to expose me. He certainly couldn't have told the other two about me yet, and he was surely leaving it late. It was all very well to humiliate me at the last possible moment, but if he didn't say something soon, he was in danger of making himself and his colleagues look pretty damn silly as well.

Dr Driscoll continued, ‘Your current patients have obviously benefited enormously from Kincaidian Therapy, so much so that we feel they're ready to move on, to go back into the outside world, or at the very least to move on to a less regimented form of care.'

‘Mmm,' said Kincaid.

This sounded very alarming to me. Sane or not, malingerers or not, whether Kincaidian Therapy worked or not, whether we'd erected a bulkhead or not, I still couldn't imagine how the patients would fare if suddenly returned to the outside world.

‘And then,' Dr Driscoll continued, ‘we'd like to bring an entirely new group of patients to the clinic and have you apply your methods to them.'

‘Yes,' said Kincaid. ‘I see. I see.'

This alarmed me even more. I wasn't sure I could face starting again, getting to know a whole new group of lunatics, learning their quirks, making peace with them, getting them to write, et cetera, et cetera. And yet even as I had these worries I realised they were of the sort that only arose if I was going to remain at the clinic, an assumption I couldn't possibly sustain. What the hell was Bentley up to?

There was suddenly a terrible crash and the door of Kincaid's office flew open, as Carla fell into the room and on to the floor. As in the
cheapest, weariest kind of farce, she had been listening at the door, and it had come open. I wondered if she'd done it deliberately. She scrambled to her feet, playing the hapless but endearing comic heroine. Nobody was endeared, least of all Kincaid.

‘Get out, you idiotic girl,' he said, and Carla slunk away like a whipped, knock-kneed spaniel.

Kincaid offered his apologies for the interruption and they were accepted easily enough. A single bit of buffoonery from one stupid eavesdropper was hardly going to be enough to invalidate what had gone before. Kincaid consulted his diary, discussed dates and institutions and budgets with the two doctors, and then suddenly the meeting seemed to be drawing to a close. There was talk of keeping in touch and scheduling a second meeting when practical details could be finalised, and then the two trustees were shuffling away papers, closing up their briefcases, about to shake hands and depart.

I still couldn't quite believe it. Was I really going to get away with it? Had Bentley come all this way simply to sit and say nothing? No, of course he hadn't. Very quietly he said, ‘There is one small matter I think I'm duty bound to bring up. Though I'm sure it's nothing.'

Did he really consider my fate such a small matter? Did he really think I was nothing? And how was he going to do this? How excruciating was he going to make it? I watched in fascinated terror as he took a pristine white envelope out of his jacket pocket and from it unfolded a couple of photocopied sheets.

‘I have here a copy of a review of
Disorders
. It's about to be published in a respectable, if small circulation, Cambridge journal. I think it just possibly merits some of our attention.'

I was baffled. A simple denunciation, a simple statement of the facts, of my lies and general deceit, was surely all that was required. Why was Bentley getting so fancy about it?

‘I only have the one copy so perhaps it would be best if I read it out,' he said.

The others weren't any more comprehending than I was, but nobody was going to stop him. Bentley began to read in his best, most persuasive and patrician lecturing voice.

‘“Certain readers professed to having problems with Gregory Collins' first book,
The Wax Man
. It was clear that here was a book with moments of irony, moments of high seriousness, moments of low comedy; the difficulty was determining which were intended to
be which. To put it another way, although readers frequently found the book hilarious, they were generally unsure whether they were laughing with the book or at it and, perhaps more problematically, whether the book was laughing at them. A few readers found this indeterminacy delicious, but most did not. They had a simpler desire to understand the author's intentions, to know, as it were, what was going on.

‘“With
Disorders
, the latest book to appear with Mr Collins' name on its cover (the need for this formulation will become clear), such uncertainties are most definitely not banished, but the book is such a highly wrought, relentlessly, ferociously sustained piece of irony and literary mayhem, that these uncertainties not only remain delicious, they also become the book's
raison d'être.

‘“Mr Collins sets up a meticulously preposterous fictional framework. The text purports to be the results of work done with a set of inmates at an experimental and dubious-sounding mental hospital called the Kincaid Clinic. We are given an introduction by the eponymous Dr Eric Kincaid, the supposed head of the clinic, which is a wonderfully savage and deadpan parody of psychiatric banality. Collins then invents a persona for himself as writer-in-residence at this establishment. In a gloriously ill-written preface he tells us it has been his job to encourage the patients' creativity; a job he has performed not wisely but too well. We are to understand that the rest of the book is a mere sampling, the tip of a vast, lumbering iceberg of the patients' manic literary efforts. These samples are splendidly, brilliantly awful.

‘“The book contains all that is good and bad, compelling and objectionable, satisfying and infuriating, intriguing and laughable, about modern experimental writing; sometimes it is obscene, sometimes it is trite and empty. Passages evoke echoes of almost everyone in the modern canon, from Burroughs to Artaud, from Bataille to Robbe-Grillet, from Huysmans to Freud, by way of Kafka, de Sade, Beckett et al.