Bedlam Burning (41 page)

‘Crazy?'

‘Yes. I think having group sex in front of the visiting trustees is crazy in anybody's book.'

‘Perhaps,' she said grudgingly.

‘Could you take this straitjacket off me?'

‘First tell me your theory.'

I was disappointed not to be instantly freed, but I was so eager to tell my story I was prepared to tolerate it.

‘The patients went crazy simply because they wanted to,' I said. ‘They wanted the trustees to see they were mad. Carla was listening at the door, remember? She heard them say that Kincaidian Therapy had worked and it was time for the patients to move on. They don't want to move on, so they have to prove they aren't sane. She reported back to the other patients and they knew they had to do something pretty spectacular.'

‘Possibly,' said Alicia.

‘But they were obviously in a double bind, the one I now see they've been in all along. If they appear completely sane then Kincaidian Therapy is declared a success and they're sent on their way. But if they appear completely mad then Kincaidian Therapy is declared a failure and they're sent somewhere else anyway. So the trick all along has been for them to show just enough progress to make Kincaid continue the treatment, but also to make sure they're never completely “cured”, whatever that means.'

‘They were playing us along all the time, you mean?' she asked.

‘Yes. Malingering if you like. But the so-called literary evening threw everything out of kilter. The trustees were right. The patients
did
behave like more or less sane people on that night, and that was their undoing. They looked too good. So obviously they had to behave like totally insane people today. Personally, I think they went about a million miles too far, but obviously it's a tricky thing to get right.'

‘Poor Dr Kincaid,' Alicia said.

‘Kincaid I'm coming to, but wait. Now, obviously Carla didn't hear Bentley read out the review of
Disorders
. She'd gone by then, so she couldn't have known that I was being accused of having written it all. She didn't know that part of the game was up, although I'm absolutely sure she knew I wasn't the author. And, for reasons I'll explain, she obviously knows who is – Kincaid.'

‘Dr Kincaid?' said Alicia in slightly extravagant wonderment.

‘Yes. Bentley may have been out to get me, but he knows what he's talking about. If he says there's textual evidence that
Disorders
was all written by one person, then I'm prepared to believe him. But it's not me. It's Kincaid. He's the single author who wrote the whole book. I don't know exactly how he made it work, but if I had to guess I'd say he probably did it in his therapy sessions, in his office when the blinds were drawn.'

‘How?' said Alicia.

‘I think he probably just dictated things to the patients. Maybe he was doing preparation when I saw him pacing in his office at night, and then when the patients came in to see him he let it all pour out, giving vent to his literary ambitions. The patients wrote it all down in their notebooks, then they went to the Communication Room and typed it up and gave it to me as their own.'

‘But would they do that?'

‘They would if Kincaid told them to. If they'd refused he'd have kicked them out of the clinic.'

‘But why would Dr Kincaid do it?'

‘For all the reasons that Dr Driscoll said. To make himself look good, to prove to the world that Kincaidian Therapy actually worked. And he might have got away with it if it hadn't been for Dr Bentley. And of course it was very handy for Kincaid that Bentley accused
me
of doing the dirty work. It let him off the hook. It made
him look like the innocent party. And it's even more convenient that he can now use me as a scapegoat.'

‘Well,' said Alicia. ‘It's very ingenious. You're very clever, aren't you?'

‘It's not just clever. It's true.'

Alicia looked at me a little less tenderly and admiringly than I'd have liked. I wanted her to acclaim me as the all-knowing hero, instead she looked troubled. But, then again, why wouldn't she? Even if she accepted what I said was true, it didn't solve anything. What was the next step? A break out? An insurrection? The lunatics taking over the asylum?

‘It's got a little bit crazy out there in the clinic,' Alicia said.

‘You don't say.'

‘All the patients are in their rooms, straitjackets on, bags over their heads.'

‘Very therapeutic,' I sneered.

‘That's what Dr Kincaid says. And there's been a power cut. Or perhaps he's turned off the electricity. He says darkness is good for the patients. It's keeping them fairly quiet, anyway. And Dr Kincaid, well, I wouldn't want to put a label on it, but he does seem to have gone a little mad. And he wants to see you. That's why I came here. To get you.'

‘OK then,' I said, still the cliché-ridden leading man. ‘If he's ready for me, I'm more than ready for him. Let me out of this straitjacket, will you?'

‘I'd like to, I really would, but Dr Kincaid has said I shouldn't, and this would be a really bad time to disobey him.'

There was something in that, but it left me feeling extremely vulnerable.

‘He's waiting for you in the library,' said Alicia. ‘I'll take you there.'

She led me by the feeble light of the pencil torch. I couldn't picture what would happen once I got to the library. I wondered what constituted ‘a little mad' in the case of Kincaid. I couldn't imagine what roles he and I were going to play, and perhaps that was just as well.

He was seated at the library table, an arc of stubby candles in front of him casting a streaky, restless light on to his smooth, glossy cheeks. He looked both glum and threatening. His body leaned forward, his
head like the end of a battering ram. He looked at me fearfully, as though I might do something crazy, as though I was the mad, dangerous one, although how dangerous could I possibly be in a straitjacket?

‘How are you, Gregory?' he asked in his best condescending, medical, bedside voice.

‘Top notch,' I said. ‘Nothing I like better than a little straitjacket time.'

‘I had hoped you might see its value.'

‘Wrong once again, doctor.'

He gazed at me dolefully, as though I was an enigma to him, one of his rare but devastating failures.

‘Why did you do it?' he asked.

He was speaking more in sorrow than in anger, though I sensed the anger might not be very far away.

‘Do what?' I demanded.

There were so many things he might have been accusing me of, and I thought it best to be clear.

‘Why did you write
Disorders
? Did you think it was a joke?'

I was furious. ‘I'm not playing this game, you bastard,' I said.

He looked genuinely surprised by my reaction, as though he might have been expecting regret or defiance, but this simple denial confused him.

‘You're not pinning this on me,' I said. ‘Oh yes, I realise that review's very convenient for you—'

‘Convenient?' he exploded. ‘Could you please try to explain to me, for the love of God, what is in any conceivable way convenient about all this?'

His anger was formidable but I could handle it.

‘It's convenient because it makes me the fall guy,' I said. ‘You're still the great doctor, and I'm the one who deceived and betrayed you. But I'm not having it.'

He blinked at me with perplexed dignity. ‘You're not really still trying to claim you didn't write the book, are you?' he said.

‘Fuck this. We don't have to go through this charade,' I said. ‘Credit me with some intelligence. I know
you
wrote it.'

We glared at each other in fierce mutual accusation, and as we stared and glowered we both caught something in the other's eye; something that was very rare indeed around the Kincaid Clinic. We
both saw that the other was not pretending. It was clear that we both really believed what we were saying, believed that the other was the culprit. And suddenly we both knew we were wrong. Kincaid realised I wasn't the author of
Disorders
, and I realised he wasn't either. We continued to stare at each other. We didn't know what to say.

Alicia broke the silence and said, ‘It looks like another one of those linguistic-philosophical conundrums, doesn't it? The two of you have convinced each other that you're both telling the truth. That doesn't necessarily mean you both are, but you both
believe
you both are. And if neither of you wrote
Disorders
, then you have to ask who did.'

It was a good question, but not one I felt remotely able to answer.

‘How about the patients?' Alicia suggested. ‘Maybe Dr Bentley was wrong after all. Maybe they really did write it.'

Kincaid and I shook our heads. No, that didn't seem like an option. We'd stopped believing in that possibility.

‘Then how about Byron?' she asked eagerly. ‘He looks like a writer. Or how about Anders? He looks completely
unlike
a writer – maybe it's a disguise. Or Sita? Who knows what she gets up to behind that quiet exterior?'

Kincaid and I remained silent and unconvinced. I was actually finding Alicia's behaviour a little embarrassing. I couldn't see why she was so desperate to come up with a quick, easy answer.

‘Oh, all right,' she said suddenly, resignedly, ‘I admit it. It was me.'

Kincaid and I said ‘What?' simultaneously.

‘I wrote it all, well, dictated it to the patients in my office, in our therapy sessions, then had them type it up, just like you said. After all, “psychiatrist” is an anagram of “typist's chair”.'

‘Did you really do this?' I asked, not fully persuaded.

‘Why would you?' said Kincaid.

‘For all the reasons everyone said. I wanted Kincaidian Therapy to look good, to be declared a success.'

‘I wanted it to succeed too,' said Kincaid, ‘but why this way?'

‘Because you're a great man and a genius, and Kincaidian Therapy is a great thing, and because this man here,' she meant me, ‘wasn't capable of inspiring the patients. And because I love you,' she said.

Kincaid was as taken aback by this declaration of love as I was. I'd never thought Alicia was in love with me, but neither had it crossed
my mind that she was in love with him. Fortunately, I didn't have to ask the obvious question: why had she been sleeping with me, if that was the case? Alicia was already explaining away that apparent contradiction.

‘I only slept with Michael to make you jealous, Dr Kincaid. That's why I made so much noise, why I was so verbal. So you'd hear me. So you'd pay attention. So you'd love me.'

This sounded plain crazy to me. Was it true? Or was she just manipulating Kincaid, trying to get control over him? She said he'd gone a little mad, yet he seemed more or less rational to me, if you discounted turning off the power and treating the patients like political prisoners; whereas the things Alicia was saying seemed far more insane.

‘Who's Michael?' Kincaid asked.

In the confusion I hadn't even been aware that Alicia had used my real name.

‘Michael. Gregory. What's in a name?' said Alicia.

Kincaid looked distressed and bewildered, and I couldn't blame him. Straitjacketed though I was, I felt the urge to help him out.

‘Gregory Collins isn't my real name,' I said quickly. ‘It's a pseudonym. My real name's Mike Smith. Not much of a name for an author. You can see why I changed it.'

Kincaid was satisfied, at least for a moment. As for Alicia, if she knew I wasn't really Gregory Collins, then she'd been playing a much longer and more bizarre game than I'd realised.

‘But just a second,' Kincaid said, shuffling his wits. ‘Michael Smith was the name of the man who wrote that blasted review. Did you write it? Did you do all this deliberately?'

‘No, no,' I said. ‘This is not what I wanted at all.'

You could say that again. Kincaid seemed to be on the brink of defeat, and yet there was an undeniable strength about him as he said, ‘It's time somebody told me what's going on.'

Alicia and I glanced at each other like the conspirators we apparently were, and then I told Kincaid everything. He sat in stately suspended animation as I ran through all the ramifications that had resulted from not being who I said I was. It took some doing. It was hard enough to keep the story clear in my own head, and even harder to make it clear to someone else. Kincaid listened intently, and the
more it sank in, the more he looked as though he wanted to kill me or Alicia or both of us.

When I'd eventually finished he turned to Alicia and said, ‘And you've known about this all along?'

‘Well, it depends what you mean by “all along”, but essentially yes,' she said.

His head swayed, looking robotic, and his mouth moved slowly as though not quite in sync with his words. ‘Between you, you've destroyed me,' he said.

‘No,' said Alicia passionately. ‘No. I love you. I need you. I dream of us together, driving away from here together, at speed, into the night, a black man in a black car, the headlights pointing the way through the impenetrable night, and then suddenly you turn off the lights and you put your foot to the floor, the engine roars and the car accelerates and we continue careering into the unknown dark. The blackness enfolds us. It's all right. I trust you. You know the road by heart, every twist and turn, you don't need visual data, you touch the wheel deftly, confidently, and you carry us away into the night, into this darkness and oblivion, into—'

Kincaid slapped her, the way people slap hysterical women in films. The problem here was that Alicia wasn't actually hysterical at all, but the moment Kincaid hit her she began to scream, loudly and deliriously. Kincaid didn't know what to do, and neither did I. I think we were both relieved when the porters arrived. They just happened to have another straitjacket and black nylon bag with them, and they strapped Alicia in, despite her fighting and screaming, and then carried her away into the night.