Bedlam Burning (17 page)

Left alone in the lecture room, I found myself on my knees, collecting the manuscript pages together, smoothing them out, trying to make a neat pile of them, and when I'd done that I took them up to the library where I set them on one of the empty shelves. At least the place now contained some reading matter.

I stood in the library and experienced a whole cocktail of emotions. Did many people drink cocktails at that time in the seventies? Perhaps not. Perhaps that was a craze that came later, and in any case this was a cocktail that was likely to disagree with even the strongest stomach. I wanted to cry, to run away, to run to Alicia's arms, to smash something. I felt useless, a complete failure; and the fact that Kincaid didn't want to get rid of me only made me feel worse. I was grateful for his indulgence but I was ashamed to need it. Surely if you were no damned good at something you should admit it and move on to something else. Besides, I wasn't even sure I could last through another week. Then two rather strange, encouraging things happened.

The first was a visit from Raymond. I heard the rattle of his trolley in the corridor outside the library. Raymond's face appeared at the door, looking cheerful and perhaps as though it might be wearing a little make-up. I let that pass. He wheeled himself and the trolley into the library, and he was followed by Carla, the young black girl. She dawdled across the room and pressed herself against the window, leaning her forehead on the glass and looking out at nothing in particular.

Raymond made no acknowledgement of her presence, but said, ‘You don't have to believe everything Alicia Crowe tells you.'

My first reaction was to take this as an insult against Alicia, and I wanted to come to her defence. Nobody was going to accuse my Alicia of being a liar, but Raymond added mildly, disarmingly,
‘There's absolutely no reason not to drink the coffee. It's not going to poison you. Really. I never poisoned anybody. All right, so I put a little prussic acid in the water supply on the aircraft. But I knew I'd get found out before anybody drank it. And I wanted to get found out. I had to convince everybody I was mad, didn't I?'

‘Did you?'

‘Yes. I know that's what lots of them say around here. But in my case it happens to be true. I needed to get away. I'd made some powerful enemies up there as I jetted back and forth across the skyways. They were out to get me. I knew that if I could get locked up here I'd be safe. It's worked very well so far.'

‘Apparently.'

‘But I wouldn't poison you. What would be the point? What would it achieve?'

‘Well,' I said, ‘it might reinforce the impression that you're actually mad.'

This amused him. ‘Very good,' he said. ‘I can see you're going to enjoy your time here.'

There was no answer to that. The coffee certainly looked and smelled appealing enough, and my instincts somehow told me I could trust Raymond, at least to the extent of believing that he didn't want to poison me.

‘Tell you what,' he said. ‘Why don't we get Carla here to be your official food taster? I love Carla. I wouldn't hurt her for the world.'

Before I could consider the offer, Carla had sprung into life, hopped and skipped across the library and was drinking a cup of hot black coffee. She attacked it like a wine taster, running it round her mouth before swigging it down. Then she froze, did a double take, grabbed her stomach with both hands. Her face buckled in agony, she fell to her knees, and I realised she was playing at being poisoned, doing a comic turn that involved gurning and squawking and writhing around in an embarrassingly poor mime of someone in their death throes. She ended the performance twitching in a foetal position on the floor, but by then I had stopped watching, and was drinking my own cup of coffee, convinced it wasn't toxic.

‘Oh, you're quite the frequent flier, aren't you?' Raymond said.

I found myself feeling oddly well-disposed towards both him and the idiotic Carla, who had now picked herself up and was doing extravagant calisthenics in front of a run of empty shelving. I am
always amazed at the way the smallest things can be responsible for making the most major changes in people's emotions, but as Raymond wheeled his trolley out of the library, giving a little curtsey as he went, the prospect of another week at the Kincaid Clinic seemed, for some reason, not nearly so daunting.

Then the second thing happened: the telephone rang. I looked around the library in surprise. I hadn't even been aware there was a phone in there, and I was amazed to find an old Bakelite model shrilling out from under a chair in the corner. Even so, I just ignored it at first. I didn't think it could possibly be for me, and it would surely stop before too long. But it continued to ring and at last I felt obliged to pick it up. A voice I recognised as the nurse's said, ‘Phone call.' And I said, ‘For me?' And she said, ‘Obviously for you. You're Gregory Collins, aren't you?' There was a fizz of static on the line before I was connected. In that second I thought perhaps it was Kincaid, having changed his mind about giving me the sack. But it was Gregory Collins,
the
Gregory Collins.

‘It's me,' he said. ‘Bob Burns.'

Call me unimaginative and given to stereotyping, but the moment I heard his voice I pictured pinched northern terraces, pinched northern faces, miners walking home through grainy, high-contrast streets, the whites of their eyes staring out through blackened faces, their hands full of pickaxes and caged canaries. I wondered if Gregory might be calling to wish me well, to ask me how the job was going, but he was far too self-absorbed for that.

‘I'll not beat about the bush, Michael. I've had a letter that's a bit disturbing.'

I didn't imagine Gregory could be more disturbed than I was at that moment, but I asked, ‘Who from?'

‘Dr John bloody Bentley.'

‘Oh,' I said. It surprised me that Bentley would be writing to any of his old students, and it seemed especially unlikely he'd have written to Gregory Collins. But Gregory reminded me, ‘I sent him a proof of my book, remember?'

I did, but only vaguely, and it didn't seem reason enough to merit a phone call.

‘I was asking him for a quote for the jacket,' Gregory said. ‘But the bugger never replied, so I thought he probably didn't believe in that
sort of thing, and like you said at the time, it probably wouldn't have done me much good anyway, but now he's written to me.'

‘Has he given you a quote?'

‘I'll read you the entire letter,' Gregory said. ‘It's not long. “Dear Collins, Thank you for sending me the advance proof copy of
The Wax Man
, which I have now, a little belatedly, had a chance to read. I can assure you it will be warmly received at my next book-burning party. Sincerely, Dr John Bentley.” What do you think of that?'

In the way that you can find yourself laughing even when you have nothing to laugh about, I found myself chuckling at Bentley's letter.

‘It's no laughing matter,' Gregory said. ‘Don't you think it's shocking?'

‘I don't think it's very surprising if that's what you mean.'

‘But don't you think burning books is a bloody fascistic thing to do?'

‘Of course. But I also think the letter's probably an example of Bentley's famous Cambridge wit.'

‘How's that?'

‘I think it's a joke, Gregory.'

‘You don't think he's going to burn my book?'

‘Oh, I think he probably is.'

‘Then how is it a joke?'

Explaining jokes is a futile business at the best of times. In my current frame of mind I thought that explaining one to Gregory Collins was likely to drive me to despair. Not the longest of drives.

‘OK, it's not a joke,' I said.

‘So don't you think I should denounce him?' Gregory asked.

‘Denounce?'

‘Tell the university authorities. Or write a letter to the
Times Literary Supplement
or something.'

‘No, I don't think so. I don't see what that would achieve, especially given that you burned your own book at one of his parties.'

‘That's different altogether. A bloke's allowed to burn his own stuff, like Freud – he destroyed all his letters and notes 'cause he didn't want to make it too easy for the biographers, but that's a bit bloody different from when the Nazis burned his works.'

‘Yes, it's different,' I said, ‘and I can see why you mightn't like it, but I don't think you've any choice but to put up with it. If you get
into a fight with Bentley I can't see how you're going to emerge from it without looking silly.'

‘You think I look silly?'

‘No, in general, I don't think you look silly, and I think it would be best if you stayed that way.'

‘It's a rum business,' he said.

I wondered what he'd been expecting from me. Perhaps he thought that since I was the one who'd tried, totally unsuccessfully as it turned out, to embarrass Bentley at our book-burning party, I was going to be an ally in trying to attack him on some dubious moral grounds. The truth was I didn't care about Bentley any more, didn't care much at all about the people I'd known or the things I'd gone through at university. It all seemed a million years ago and a million miles away.

‘Why don't you do something subtler?' I suggested. ‘Like making him a character in your next book?'

‘There may never be a next book,' Gregory said, and he drifted into a moody silence. Then he asked, ‘What do you think Nicola would say?'

‘Something pretty snotty, I'd guess.'

‘Would you mind if I gave her a bell and asked her professional opinion? I haven't seen her since, you know, that night.'

I knew I had no say in the matter, no right to object or even have an opinion, and yet some dim, dormant part of me minded a lot. I didn't want Nicola and Gregory cosying up, discussing matters of literature and conscience behind my back. But naturally I had to say, ‘What you and Nicola get up to is your own business.'

‘Good,' Gregory said. ‘I thought you wouldn't mind, but a bloke's got to be careful. I wouldn't want good mates like us to fall out over a bird. Right you are then, I'll keep you informed.'

I could tell he was about to hang up, and suddenly I was furious with him. He was such a self-centred bastard, so completely without interest in anyone other than himself. Even if he didn't care about me or my job or my well-being, wouldn't simple curiosity have compelled him to ask how things were going at the clinic? I didn't intend to open my heart to him, but I decided that while I'd got him, I'd make use of him.

‘I need some advice,' I said.

‘From me?' I was glad he showed the appropriate amount of surprise. ‘If it's about writing—'

‘It's about teaching.'

‘Great. That's what I do best.'

‘So tell me, how do you do it? How do you stand up in front of a class of ten people—?'

‘Only ten?' he said. ‘If I had a class with only ten in it I'd think I'd died and gone to heaven.'

‘Yes, but these are adults and they're mad,' I said.

He wouldn't concede that this made any difference.

‘Anyway,' I continued, ‘how do you get them to respond? How do you get them to speak? How do you keep control? How do you make them respect you?'

‘I don't know,' said Gregory flatly. ‘You just do.'

It was a more useless answer than I could possibly have imagined. ‘And what do you do if your first class turns into a cross between a paper chase and a rugby scrum?' I asked.

‘In my school they'd get a bloody long detention.'

‘Mightn't work in my position.'

‘And I assume you don't have corporal punishment?'

Nobody had actually told me we didn't, but I was making the same assumption. ‘Right,' I said.

‘Mmm, mmm,' I could hear him brooding, trying to come up with something. It was a painful procedure for him. When I'd just about given up hope of him saying anything at all, he finally replied, ‘Well, some people say you should be yourself when you're teaching, but I think that's asking for trouble. If you try to be yourself they'll have you. I think you need to be someone else. Anyone else.'

‘But I am being someone else!' I whined. ‘I'm being you.'

‘Are you though?' he said heavily. ‘Are you really?'

I thought I understood what he meant. I was pretending to be Gregory Collins, but in name only. When I'd stood in front of the patients I'd been all too depressingly, and all too vulnerably, like the real Michael Smith. I hadn't had an act; and that had been the problem.

‘OK, yes,' I said, ‘I can see that.'

‘And I'll tell you something else,' said Gregory. ‘If a useless chuff like me can succeed as a teacher then someone like you has a duty not to fail.'

‘You know, Gregory,' I said, ‘I think you might be right.'

I said I'd give the Kincaid Clinic another week, and this time I meant it.

In one way I could see that this second week was likely to be more of the same; more enervation, more feeling like a spare part, but it differed in this respect: throughout the first week it had been possible to have some optimism, to hold on to the quaint belief that there might be something to look forward to. Now I knew what was coming. I knew the patients were entirely likely to deliver more of the same old rubbish, and I didn't have a clue how I was going to deal with it. All right, I could follow Gregory's advice and adopt a persona, but I wasn't sure exactly where that would get me, or for that matter where it would get the patients.

They were now rather more in evidence than they had been the previous week, both in the clinic and around the grounds. I saw them wandering through the corridors, sitting by the dried-up fountain, on the couches in the reception area; and every time I saw them, they were carrying writing pads, apparently locked in agonies of creativity, and then I'd see them scurrying into or out of the Communication Room, a name that now seemed to be submerged beneath multiple layers of irony. When the patients noticed me, some of them still often looked at me with resentment or hostility, or sometimes in a way that seemed simply crazy, but once in a while I sensed them regarding me with what felt more like sympathy, maybe even pity, as if I was the sad, hopeless case and they were the concerned, perhaps condescending, visitors, as if they were just passing through and I was there for keeps.