Bedlam Burning (9 page)

‘You don't have to make a decision now,' Alicia said between kisses, but in some sense I already had.

Then she said it was getting late and she ought to be going, and curiously enough I had no sense of disappointment. I felt sophisticated and worldly and grown-up, and I didn't try to change her mind or make her stay. That would have been juvenile and unsophisticated. I was beyond all that.

‘Where do you live?' I asked.

‘I have a flat in town but I spend most of my nights here on call. I'm on call now. I have to go in case I'm needed.'

I was impressed by her dedication. And so she went, and I was left in the hut, and I spent the night alone on the sofabed. I slept unaccountably well and when I woke early next morning, I was pleased, though startled, to find Alicia standing over me, and she immediately led me to the front gate, as though sneaking me out of her parents' house, and a taxi was waiting there to take me to the station. Alicia kissed me again, a lot less passionately than she had the previous night, but I had no complaints; it was early and the taxi driver was watching, and as I got into the car I felt a terrible sense of separation and melancholy. The Kincaid Clinic was already starting to feel ominously like home.

‘I'll call you,' I said to Alicia.

‘I know you will,' she replied.

I was only an hour late for work, which I didn't think was too bad considering what I'd been up to the night before, but I knew my boss Julian would think differently, and I knew I didn't have any excuse he'd accept, the truth obviously being the least acceptable of all. On the train back to London I rehearsed stories involving domestic crises, intense but non-life-threatening medical emergencies, failures of the public transport system, even contemplated inventing a wild night of debauchery resulting in a terrible hangover, but I never got as far as delivering my excuses, since the moment I walked into the shop I saw Gregory Collins slumped forlornly at my desk, waiting for me. He was in a terrible state. He looked as though he'd been up all night and he'd obviously been crying.

I looked at Julian sitting at the adjacent desk, expecting him to provide an explanation, but he looked at me, expecting exactly the same. He wasn't happy with my late arrival, and he was even less happy about the unwanted presence of Gregory Collins, but above all else he was intensely embarrassed. A rare book showroom was no place for this kind of emotional display. He waved his hands vigorously at me, at Gregory and at the door. He didn't care what I did, so long as I took this problem out of the shop. Gregory looked up, and the sight of me was all too much for him. His chin turned to soft rubber and he let out a spongy wet moan.

‘Let's, er, let's go and get a cup of coffee,' I said.

‘Tea,' said Gregory. ‘I don't drink coffee.'

We found ourselves in a cramped, crowded, greasy spoon, at a tiny, unsteady circular table that Gregory threatened to knock over with his every clumsy movement. We ordered tea for him, coffee for me and a couple of bacon sandwiches. Gregory was starting to look a little more composed. He blew his nose on a big blue handkerchief. It
seemed too banal to ask what was the matter, why he was so upset, so I waited for him to do the talking.

‘I thought you were quite good last night,' he said, somewhat to my surprise. I'd imagined we'd be talking about heavier matters. ‘I thought your reading wasn't bad at all. Not the way I'd have read it, obviously, but not too bad.'

He had a way of turning a compliment into a complaint, and I was about to say that if he wasn't happy with my performance he should have done the reading himself, but I didn't. I decided to be kind.

‘Thanks, Gregory,' I said.

‘Disappointing turn out,' he said, ‘but I blame that old bird who owned the shop. Couldn't organise a fart in a baked-bean factory.'

‘She meant well,' I said, not at all sure why I was defending her.

‘It'll be different next time,' Gregory asserted.

‘You think there'll be a next time?'

‘Who knows? Who knows?' he said enigmatically.

A waitress delivered our bacon sandwiches. Gregory bit ferociously into the white bread and swallowed hard. A bolus of scarcely chewed sandwich lodged in his throat and prevented him from speaking, but at last he got it down and said, ‘It's no good, Mike. I can't lie to you. I shagged your girlfriend last night.'

He said it loudly enough that two workmen sitting at the next table looked up from their newspapers and sniggered.

‘Nicola?' I said.

‘Well of course Nicola.'

‘Really?' I said, awed by the wild improbability of what he'd told me. ‘Really?'

‘We caught the train up to London together and we got talking.'

‘Did you tell her who you were?'

‘I didn't have to. She'd already worked it out. She's clever. And anyway, one thing led to another and, you know, we went back to her place and did it. It wasn't much cop, and I didn't enjoy it very much, and I reckon she only did it to piss you off, but we did it.'

What was I supposed to do or say? I felt as though only stock responses were available to me, as though spontaneity and real feelings were quite impossible. I knew I was entitled to feel angry, betrayed, hurt, that I was entitled to storm out, to threaten him, hit him, dump the mug of tea into his lap, and in different circumstances I might have done any of these, but as it was, none of them seemed
remotely appropriate. Certainly none of them would have come from the heart.

So I said, ‘Why did you feel you had to tell me this?'

‘Because I believe in being straight with people. I may be a bastard but I'm an honest bastard.'

‘Do you want me to thank you? To compliment you on your honesty?'

‘I don't know what I want. I suppose I deserve a good pasting.'

‘Sorry to disappoint you,' I said.

‘It was only a one-off, Mike,' he wheedled. ‘It was only crude, bestial sex.'

I'd never successfully associated Nicola with crude, bestial sex, much as I'd tried. I said, ‘I need to get back to work.'

I started to get up from the table but Gregory gripped my hand and kept me there. The workmen next to us looked up again, with rising disgust this time, and I sat down quickly, shaking off Gregory's grip, causing the table to list dangerously.

‘I'd like to make it up to you,' Gregory said. ‘If there's anything I can do, any sort of favour.'

One thing he might have done was say he was sorry, but I'd already sensed that word was no part of his vocabulary. And what right did I have to think apologies were in order? My relationship with Nicola was apparently even deader than I'd thought. I wouldn't ever have claimed to know the innermost workings of Nicola's psyche but I remained thoroughly amazed that she'd slept with Gregory.

‘I mean it,' Gregory repeated. ‘I'll do anything.'

‘Well, I suppose there's one thing,' I said.

Later that afternoon I called Nicola and said I wasn't angry or upset or anything, but I never wanted to see her again, that I was going away for a while and that she shouldn't try to get in touch. She said she understood completely. And then I called Alicia Crowe.

‘Alicia,' I said. ‘I have a small confession to make.'

‘A confession?'

The moment I heard her voice I got a clear picture of her in my head. I saw her face, her hair, her eyes, the glasses, the big red greatcoat, although given that she was at work at the clinic she was hardly likely to be wearing the coat. And I tried to picture her office,
smaller than Kincaid's, no doubt, and surely less stark, a few pictures on the wall, a few photographs of near and dear ones on her desk, an interesting house plant or two, maybe a vase of flowers. Was this stupid of me or is it inevitable? Isn't this what everybody always does? When we call home, don't we draw a picture of home in our heads? When we hear a familiar voice on the telephone, don't we always conjure up the owner's familiar face? And when the voice isn't familiar don't we always dream up a face that contains visual equivalents of the qualities we think we detect in the voice?

‘I can't stop thinking about you,' I said, by way of confession.

‘What does that mean?'

‘I suppose it means the Kincaid Clinic has a writer-in-residence.'

‘Fine,' she said.

She sounded chillier and less enthusiastic than I'd have liked, but I told myself that was only because she was at work. I had no idea what her situation was there, what precisely her work consisted of, but it was easy to imagine that she wasn't free to whisper sweet nothings into the phone. So I tried to adopt a similarly businesslike tone. I asked her one or two workaday, practical questions about the job, like how much it paid (more than I'd imagined) and whether I needed to do any preparation, whether there was anything I should read or study before I came. But Alicia said she was confident I could breeze through on my native talent, and I was inclined to trust her judgement. She said she'd see me on the first of the month.

Immediately after my conversation with Alicia I handed in my notice to Julian Somerville, although I didn't tell him why I was leaving or where I was going, and he didn't seem at all interested. He said he was sure it was for the best, that he'd already sensed that my heart wasn't in bookselling, and in the circumstances he wouldn't make me work the usual amount of notice. Concocting a story for my parents was harder. Obviously I couldn't tell them the truth, so I said I needed to get out of London to clear my head, and that I'd taken a temporary job as a hospital porter in Brighton. This was an era when a great many people seemed to take temporary jobs as hospital porters; I'm not sure why. My father had thought I was wasting my education badly enough by working in a bookshop, so God knows what he thought of hospital portering, but if my family had one virtue it was that we didn't tell each other what we really thought. It saved an amazing amount of trouble.

All that remained was to tell my landlord I was moving out of his horrible room, and I was set to become writer-in-residence at the Kincaid Clinic. I realised this was, by a very long way, the most reckless, stupid and exciting thing I'd ever undertaken in my life. I felt very proud of myself.

It would have been nice to think I looked the part on the day I arrived to take up my post at the Kincaid Clinic. Facially, physically, sartorially, I knew I looked just fine, but in a perfect world I'd have arrived in more style, perhaps in an open sportscar with my luggage packed in around me. As it was, I arrived in the rain by taxi, carrying most of my worldly goods in a holdall and a couple of tired carrierbags. And once the taxi had left – the driver seemed all too eager to get out of the area – I found myself alone outside the locked gates of the clinic, getting soaked, and quite unable to make anyone inside aware of my presence. There was no bell, no buzzer, no way at all that I could see to let anyone know I was there. I'd told Alicia when I was coming, and I admit I was disappointed that she hadn't offered to meet me at the station; even Ruth Harris had provided that service.

In the drenched grey light of a wet afternoon the Kincaid Clinic looked a lot more forbidding than it had when I'd seen it before. More neglected too. I saw there were graffiti on the outer wall. Someone had sprayed ‘Nutters this way' in sloppy yellow letters. It didn't look recent and surely it should have been cleaned off by now. As I was thinking this, a passing car slowed down across the road from me, and the passenger, a loutish young lad, wound down his window and shouted, ‘What's the matter, mate? Aren't you mad enough for 'em?' before the car drove off in a shriek of wet rubber. Well, yes, I suppose I did cut a fairly mockable figure, standing there in the rain, trying to get someone to let me into the asylum.

Did I know what I was letting myself in for? In the strictly literal sense, obviously not. I didn't know what went on in the Kincaid Clinic, or any other clinic for that matter, and I had only the vaguest idea of what was expected of me, of Gregory Collins. You might well
ask how I thought I could possibly get away with it, and I suppose the simple answer is, I never really thought I could, at least not for very long. I assumed I'd be found out sooner rather than later, that someone would put two and two together, or Nicola would expose me, or I'd simply let something slip, and then I'd have to leave the clinic in some shame and confusion. But that would be all right; I'd cope with that. I wouldn't regret it. However things turned out, this was still so much better than the life I was leaving behind. And, besides, there was, or at least I hoped there would be, Alicia.

Questions about madness and sanity were much on everybody's mind in those days. Like everybody else, I'd read some Freud and Jung. Needless to say, only the more colourful stuff, the juicy bits about dreams and phallic symbols and the Oedipus complex, about the collective unconscious and archetypes and synchronicity; and in my ignorance I thought I understood it all. Then I'd read bits of Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis for the sex and perversion; but that seemed acceptable because it looked as though
all
psychology was about sex and perversion. In the same spirit I'd also read parts of Wilhelm Reich, and consequently felt pretty clued up about the connections between sexual repression and political oppression. Call me an idiot.

I'd heard other names too, like Pavlov and Skinner and Adler and Rank, but names was pretty much all they were. I was a little more familiar with R. D. Laing and Timothy Leary, and like many other people I'd been at least partially seduced by the idea that madness might be a beautiful spiritual journey. To be mad, these guys seemed to be saying, was to be unable to fit in with the rest of the tribe, to be unable, or at least unwilling, to go along with the patterns of behaviour that your tribe thinks of as normal. Obviously that could make madness seem attractive, even noble, especially to people like me who had been too young to be real hippies or revolutionaries and had had to content ourselves by growing our hair and arguing with our fathers about the evils of pot. The madman could appear to be in touch with other ways of seeing or being, ways that the lumpen mass and the repressive old bourgeoisie didn't acknowledge or understand.