Bedlam Burning (42 page)

Kincaid and I were left alone in the library. I feared for what he might do to me, but he was a better man than I had any right to expect. He did nothing, said nothing, just stared at me long and hard, and then he left me there, walked out of the library, locking the door behind him.

I thought of trying to kick open the door, but I didn't see how that was going to do me any good. Not having the bag over my head was a real improvement but the straitjacket was causing stabbing pains all over my torso. I'd once seen an escape artist get out of one of these things in about half a minute and I'd been unimpressed at the time. Now I wished I'd watched more closely.

I don't know how long it was before Gregory arrived, and I wasn't
sure how he'd got there. Apparently he'd found a way of escaping from his padded cell, and a way of arming himself with a flaming torch – a length of tree branch with a paraffin-soaked rag tied round its end. Then, avoiding the porters and Kincaid, he had shinned up the front of the clinic to the window of the library, and now he was forcing his way in.

‘It's like a bloody madhouse out there,' he said as he climbed into the room. A wayward, flapping light and the reek of paraffin filled the library. ‘This is a right place you've brought me to.'

There was no point arguing that he had come entirely of his own free will and that I'd much rather not have had him there at all. I said, ‘Unstrap this thing, will you, Gregory?' I hardly thought I was asking too much. Why had he come to the library if not to free me? But he was no keener to undo the straitjacket than Alicia had been. He was now strolling round the room, looking at the books on the shelves, inspecting them by the light of his flaming torch. I had the urge to explain everything to him, but there was so much information I would have needed to impart that I was relieved at his distracted condition, although that in itself created other problems.

‘You know, this is a very dodgy collection of books,' he said. ‘I noticed that when I was here before but I had other things on my mind then.'

‘Yes, well, beggars can't be choosers,' I said.

‘Can't they?'

‘No, Gregory, they can't. Now let me out of this thing, will you?'

He said, ‘I see
Disorders
got an interesting review. By someone with your name. Now there's a turn up for the books.'

‘You wrote it, didn't you?' I said. That was another thing I'd worked out.

Gregory tilted his head modestly. ‘Oh yes. I most certainly did.'

‘It was a very perceptive review as it turns out. You were right. There was only one author.'

‘Of course,' he said. ‘It was me.
I
wrote
Disorders
.'

‘Oh please, Gregory.'

I was reminded of that scene at the end of
Spartacus
where the Romans say they'll let everybody go if Spartacus stands up and lets himself be crucified and, one after another, hundreds of people get up and every one of them says, ‘Take me. I'm Spartacus.' ‘No, I'm Spartacus.' ‘No, I am.' So they crucify the whole lot of them.

‘Gregory,' I said, ‘could you be a real pal and unstrap me and then we can have a good long talk about this?'

‘I know it sounds a bit barmy,' he said, making no move to help me, ‘but it's not all that complicated really. It's like inspiration. I sit up there in Yorkshire and I transmit these brain waves, these inspirational vibrations, and they go through the ether and they arrive in the minds of the patients here at the Kincaid Clinic and they write it all down, and it's like a group project, like divine dictation, and it comes out a bit garbled in the transmission, a bit scrambled, and that's why I needed to come along and edit it and make it my own again. And obviously that's why my name's on the front of the book—'

Gregory had lost it. Either the trauma of the abandoned wedding or the shock of being in the padded cell had pushed him over some vertiginous edge. This was not what I needed. I didn't know what the consequences were either for him or for me. On the other hand, how sane did he have to be to do a simple thing like get me out of the straitjacket?

‘Can we talk about this later?' I asked.

‘Later may be too late,' he said, and he perused the bookshelves again.

‘When Ernest Hemingway was young he worked for Ford Madox Ford at
transatlantic review
, and Ford told him that a bloke should always write a letter thinking what posterity will make of it. This pissed Hemingway off so much that he went home and burned every letter in his flat, especially the ones from Ford Madox Ford.'

‘But, Gregory—'

‘And when Goebbels lit a bonfire in Berlin in nineteen thirty-three to commemorate the new spirit of the German Reich, he used up twenty thousand books. Not bad, eh?'

He fixed his attention on some scruffy old volumes on a bottom shelf of the library.

‘It's not exactly the Alexandrian Library in here, is it?' he said. ‘And you know what happened to that. Well, actually, nobody's all that sure. Caesar definitely burned down some library or other during the Alexandrian wars, but it probably wasn't
the
Alexandrian Library. Because if Caesar had really done so much damage there wouldn't have been much left to destroy come the really big burning of ad 642 when the Caliph Omar ordered the destruction of the library on the grounds that if the manuscripts in it agreed with the
Koran they were superfluous, and if they disagreed with it they should be destroyed anyway.

‘And frankly that's how I feel about my own books, Michael. The works of Gregory Collins are pretty much the only ones anybody should ever need. The rest can go to blazes.'

‘Gregory, all I'm asking is that you undo this straitjacket.'

‘I couldn't possibly do that,' he said. ‘That would be against doctors' orders. In fact, I think you're in need of a little more therapy.'

He reached into his pocket and produced another of the black nylon bags, which he rather deftly, with one hand, slipped over my head, and then he torched the library, the Kincaid Clinic and me.

Welcome to the present. I'm writing this in the here and now, and inevitably you're reading it in the here and now. Of course. There's no other way. That's the strange and unique bargain that a book makes with us. When you pick up
Bleak House
you're there with Dickens, when you pick up
Mein Kampf
you're with Adolf Hitler – in the same shared here and now. I think this is totally different from what happens with a painting or a piece of music or a play or a movie; and if books have any capacity to endure, to face up to what I suppose we might as well call the ‘electronic media', then I suspect it's largely because of this, that they allow a profound connection across huge swathes of time and space between two individuals. You'll find some French lads who'll give you an argument, who'll say it's really all about presence and absence; but hell, you can't spend your life worrying about what the French think.

It has felt very strange to be writing about the person I was all those years ago. Needless to say, I'm no longer precisely him. Thank God, I've changed, matured, wised up a bit; and yet as I describe the things I thought and did back then I don't feel I'm describing an entirely different person, don't feel that I've had to actually invent or reconstruct a character. A part of me is still that gauche twenty-three-year-old, just as a part of me is still the child on his first day at school, the ten-year-old discovering the joy of books, the hopeless adolescent trying to work out what love and sex were all about.

The twenty-five years or so since those days at the Kincaid Clinic have been, on balance, good to me. There are some lines in the
Four Quartets
about how as you get older the pattern becomes stranger, but I'm not so sure. In lots of ways the years seem all too simple, like a ride down a ski slope: continuous, sometimes exhilarating, occasionally scary, but in the end not so very convoluted, not ultimately
unpredictable. I realise I've been quite lucky in this.

I've been married and divorced. There were no children, nothing really worth fighting about, and yet the split was bitter and damaging. But who would have expected anything else? Both my parents have died, I've put on weight, lost some hair, had a couple of bad bouts with a stomach ulcer; but today I'm living with a good woman and we say we love each other, and we believe it, which seems to be as much as anybody can ask. I think you would have to say that, all things considered, I'm happy, that I've had my full ration of happiness. There are plenty of stories that could be mined out of those years, but I don't want to tell them here and now. They seem simultaneously too personal and too commonplace.

If by some sorcery I was now able to go back, knowing nothing of the intervening years, and meet the person I was then, I think I'd look at him and say, my God, what the hell is ever going to become of him? He has no prospects. He has no ambitions. He has no way of making a living. He completely screwed up his future when he took that job at the Kincaid Clinic. What's he going to do with his life? And yet I suppose I'd be reasonably confident that somehow or other he'd survive. He mightn't win any glittering prizes, but he surely wouldn't end up entirely destitute and lost. Perhaps I could have looked at him as if at a character in a soap opera and thought, ‘Oh yes, it'll be interesting to see how this plot develops.' But I wouldn't have held any hopes that it was going to be one of the great dramatic storylines.

The truth is I became a writer of sorts; not exactly the stuff of soap opera. When the Kincaid days were over, and after I'd eventually put myself back together, I returned to London and started to do some freelance journalism, nothing very exciting, nothing very cutting-edge, but eventually, by a minor fluke, I got a job working for an inflight magazine. I did everything: interviews, travel writing, book reviewing. I wouldn't say these were areas where my looks didn't matter – I suspect no such world exists. But let's say this was a job where I didn't have to show my face to the public. I wrote articles, I had a byline, that was all. I was just a name.

This went on steadily and unspectacularly until, when I was in my mid-thirties, one of those odd little arbitrary, life-changing things happened. I got the chance to interview a rather grand old English travel writer, one of those who rarely gave interviews, and he was
only prepared to see me because I'd given his book such a ridiculously fulsome review in the magazine. I was granted an audience. According to his publisher it was quite an honour for me.

I'd always used a crappy little pocket tape recorder when I'd done interviews, but this time a friend at a local radio station offered to lend me a professional machine. It would provide a broadcast-quality tape they might be able to use on air. It was OK by me, but I wasn't sure the grand old man would want to be recorded, yet oddly enough he agreed to it. It must have been my charm. Or something. It seemed like the most insignificant event at the time. I was still thinking of myself as a print journalist, not as a radio interviewer, and perhaps because I didn't care about it too much I was very relaxed and the interview went well. It was friendly and funny and revealing, and when it was broadcast it was regarded as quite a coup; and that was the start of my career in radio.

I'd never given any thought to my voice. It was just a voice as far as I was concerned. But now people were telling me it had an engaging warmth to it, that it established an easy intimacy with the listener. It made individual members of the audience feel I was talking to them directly. This apparently is what good radio voices do. It's not entirely unlike reading a book, I suppose.

My life got surprisingly easy from then on. I turned out to be a natural. I did a few more interviews as part of other people's radio programmes but then very quickly I got my own show on local radio. Most of it was pretty banal, reading traffic reports and birthday requests; but once in a while I got to interview a novelist or biographer or playwright. I was damn good at it, and I got a bit of a reputation for being smart without being stuck up, a guy who seemed to have read everything but who wore his learning lightly, and who could fight his intellectual corner if he needed to.

I moved on to a late-night show on a small London station, and now I have an evening show on a much bigger London station. We do some round-table discussions, some film and exhibition reviews, even a few phone-ins, but books and author interviews are what I do best and what I'm known for. When big-time authors have a book they want to plug on radio, they plug it with me. People tell me I'm a cult. People tell me it's a crying shame I can't do TV. I say that's OK, I do voice-overs instead; they help to top up the really pretty humble wage I get from the radio.

The title of my programme is
I'm Afraid I Haven't Read Your Book
– a double bluff. It mocks all those crappy radio interviewers who say those words to their authors; and the real joke is that I always
have
read the book. I've read everything. I'm famous for it. If you get the joke you get the show.

I come across as this benign, well-informed, intelligent, warm-voiced host who makes the authors feel relaxed enough to let their guard down; and if they're smart, modest, reasonable, then all well and good. But if they start being precious or pretentious or glib, then I fillet them, gut them and hang them out to dry. There are worse jobs.

Some of my critics, and yes I'm a big enough name to have critics, say I hate books, which is clearly nonsense. Others say I hate authors, but that's not exactly true either. The people I hate and the people I enjoy eviscerating on the show are those who adopt the
pose
of authors, who behave the way they think great authors behave.

‘Tonight we have with us David Bergstrom, author of
A Light Rain in the Appalachians
. Hello, David.'