Bedlam Burning (45 page)

Nevertheless, something about it was surprisingly accurate. Gregory had managed to create a convincing atmosphere of enervation and perplexity that rang absolutely true. His ruminations about what madness is and what madness does were very much the ones I'd had myself. I had to conclude that the book was pretty good. It certainly seemed much better than
The Wax Man
, although naturally enough I hadn't read that book in a very long time. Unlike Nicola, I'd have hesitated to say whether or not it was publishable. What I was absolutely certain of, was that I didn't want it to be published.

I didn't get a lot of sleep that night, but by the morning I knew what I was going to do. I didn't turn up for breakfast at Nicola's hotel. By the time she'd have realised I wasn't coming I was already on the train to Cambridge, seeking out Dr John Bentley, a man I thought could help me.

I called him on my mobile from the train. He was surprised to hear from me, even more surprised than I'd been when I saw Nicola, but given our history he wasn't going to say no to me, now was he? We talked only briefly on the phone but I thought I'd conveyed that something significant was afoot.

I arrived at the college. I'd been there occasionally over the years, and my feelings were always much the same; a simultaneous familiarity yet strangeness, a nostalgia, a sense of loss, a dislocation. The college had been there since the sixteenth century. I'd been there for three years. I was nothing to the college, yet for those three years it had been more than enough for me.

I walked through the main courtyard to Bentley's rooms. He'd lived in the same place all these twenty-odd years, the place where we'd gone for our book-burning party, and when he opened the door to me, he looked remarkably unchanged; certainly he appeared no older than when he'd taught me. I felt as though I had aged and deteriorated while he'd remained in a state of delicately shabby preservation.

He invited me in. His rooms were smaller than I remembered them. Perhaps they'd filled up over the years with the accumulation of books and papers, the clotting together of knowledge and scholarship. I noticed he owned a very sleek laptop. Bentley was quite chummy, as though I was one of his favourite, roguish students dropping in for one of my regular visits. In fact, we'd spoken just once over the years, shortly after I got out of the hospital. I'd called him on the phone and asked him who the author of that ‘Michael Smith' review was: him or Gregory Collins or somebody quite else? Gregory, of course, had claimed authorship, but at a time when his grasp on truth and reality had been decidedly patchy.

Bentley had categorically denied that he was the author, although he admitted he wished he had been. The review had provided him with an elegant solution, a way of ending my tenure as Gregory Collins, of exposing me to all concerned, without making himself look petty or vindictive. He thought the review was a very good joke. He had repeated that he liked jokes. I trusted him enough to believe he wasn't the author. I could see no reason for him to lie. So I accepted that Gregory had written the review. I could live with that.

As I walked into his rooms, Bentley's eyes lingered just a little too long on my scarred cheek, but I didn't blame him for that. It made him seem human. He brewed tea and we sat in wing chairs on either side of the cold fireplace. There was an arrangement of pine cones and teasel heads in the grate that suggested there hadn't been a fire there in a long time.

I began by asking him if he'd really burned the copy of
The Wax Man
Gregory had sent him, as he'd promised in his letter, and he said no. He hadn't thought the book quite good enough for that. He also insisted that his book-burning days were far behind him. The parties had only seemed worthwhile so long as there were undergraduates who understood the perverse principle of the thing. For all that the world now claimed to be thoroughly post-modern and ironic, people just didn't ‘get' the idea of book-burning parties any more. He thought it probably had something to do with Salman Rushdie.

I told Bentley about my current dilemma, what to do with Gregory's legacy,
Untitled 176
. I opened my bag, pulled out the bound manuscript and set it down on a low table between us. Bentley looked at it without interest. He was finding this a good deal less intriguing than I'd expected. We talked briefly about Kafka and Brod,
and about one or two other famous literary incendiarists (Bentley's term): Isabel Burton, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Moore – the burner of Lord Byron's journals. We agreed that these precedents didn't necessarily have a great deal to teach us.

‘You could read it if you'd like,' I said.

‘I think not,' said Bentley, as though I'd suggested a bracing dip in the North Sea on Christmas Day.

That was fine by me. The manuscript sat between us looking flat and dead.

‘And I suspect you've already decided what you want to do,' he said.

‘I know what I
want
to do, but I'm not sure I should do it.'

‘What stops you? Fear of being condemned by posterity?'

‘In a way.'

‘And you need some sort of dispensation from me, from the world of academe? I didn't think our opinions meant so much to anybody any more.'

‘You'd be surprised,' I said.

‘Or did you just want me to strike the first match?'

‘Possibly,' I said. ‘But I think the real reason I'm here is because I want all this stuff to have some shape, some outcome.'

‘You want things to come full circle? Isn't that a little humdrum?'

‘I need a sense of an ending.'

‘Closure? Isn't that what people call it these days?'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘Ultimately, I'm not quite sure what you want from me, Michael. Do you want me to help you burn the manuscript or beg you not to?'

‘Either would probably be all right,' I said.

Bentley did his pondering act and finally said, ‘I think you're entirely on your own here, Michael, but for what it's worth, if you really want my opinion, I think that burning Gregory's manuscript might be a little bit glib, a tad too neat. Don't you think so?'

‘I'm sure you're right,' I said.

He invited me to have lunch in the college, but I declined. We said polite goodbyes and I left his rooms and walked out through the college into the streets of Cambridge. They were full of clean, harmless-looking students who made me feel very old. Had I ever been so innocent, so pristine?

I wandered down to the river and stood on King's Bridge. It was
busy with people coming and going and I feared there might be something a bit melodramatic about standing there and throwing Gregory's manuscript into the water, but nobody paid the slightest attention to what I was doing. Then I wondered if the manuscript might float, sit on the top of the water and some punting undergraduate might salvage it and return it to me, but no, I was worrying unnecessarily. I let go of the manuscript and it fell softly from my hand, hit the surface of the water and disappeared unspectacularly into the thick shallows of the river. It didn't have the drama or the finality, and I certainly didn't experience the sadistic thrill, that combustion would have provided, but perhaps that was no bad thing. It was good enough. The deed was done.

I walked back to the railway station, a long and not especially interesting route, but it gave me time enough to think, to make some resolutions and decisions. I knew what I was going to do when I got home, something I'd been resisting and yet moving towards for a very long time. I would start writing. I already had my title.

A NOVEL

In
Bedlam Burning
Geoff Nicholson takes deadly satiric aim at the ivy covered walls of academia and the rubber rooms of insane asylums. When the debut novel of Gregory Collins is accepted by a publisher, he seems set on a course for literary stardom. There's just one problem: he doesn't quite have the looks to match his talent, and his publisher wants a photo to put on the book jacket. He asks his handsome (but dim) college classmate, Mike Smith, to take his place.

Consequently it is Smith rather than Collins who receives the offer to be writer-in-residence at an asylum where therapy is centered on the soothing powers of literature. It's not long before the boundaries between inmate and observer are blurred in this literary cuckoo's nest, and the comedy of errors verges on tragedy.

Geoff Nicholson
is the author of thirteen novels, including
Hunters and Gatherers, Footsucker, Bleeding London, The Food Chain
,
Still Life with Volkswagens
,
Everything and More, Flesh Guitar
, and
Female Ruins
(all available from Overlook).