Bedlam Burning (33 page)

The letter from Nicola made the patients very happy. What's more, it made them behave relatively sanely, and that worried me a little, because it seemed that doing the writing hadn't had that effect at all. It was only the prospect of seeing it in print that appeared to have done them any good, and that didn't seem right. The relationship between cause and effect felt out of kilter. Perhaps this was publication therapy rather than writing therapy. Perhaps that was all you needed to do to cure people of their madness – just offer to publish what they wrote. But this, of course, assumed they'd been mad in the first place. To the extent that I still didn't know whether the patients' madness was phoney, I equally didn't know whether their newfound (comparative) sanity was phoney either.

Gregory was not troubled by these things. I received lots of correspondence from him. I knew he was the sort of person who wouldn't undertake this project lightly, but even so I was surprised by his intensity. He sent me letters, memos, pages of notes, detailing the progress of his editing. He saw myriad possibilities, he spotted great literary themes and parallels in the work; one letter of his invoked Jung, Pindar and both John Fords. Although I was pleased that he was keeping me informed, I had the feeling these communications weren't really for my benefit, but rather for the benefit of future scholars who might want to know precisely how he'd gone about his
task; a feeling that was confirmed when he informed me he was keeping carbon copies.

At the end of every bit of communication, Gregory wrote in large energetic letters, SEND ME MORE, and the patients were only too happy to oblige. Every day a new pile of writing would appear; and every couple of days I'd bundle it up and send it off to Gregory. I never dispatched it without first having read it, but I no longer gave it the sort of attention I once had. There seemed no reason to. This writing was no longer mine. It belonged to Gregory and to the world at large; at least some of it did, the parts that Gregory would edit and approve and include in the anthology. The patients knew this as well as I did, and now they treated me as little more than a messenger through whom they could gain access to Bob Burns.

If anything the writing became even more manic. In person the patients may have behaved with a new restraint, but on paper they raved more extravagantly than ever. There was hideous sex and violence, idiotic confessions, paranoia, mystical druggy outpourings, castration anxiety, crazed word play, retellings of
Gawain and the Green Knight
and
Black Beauty
– the whole shebang. They were playing to a new audience, and Gregory just lapped it up. Each new batch of writing raised him to higher levels of excitement, and sometimes that worried me too.

I suppose it was because when you got right down to it I wasn't sure I shared his lofty estimation of the writing. I wasn't sure it was really as good or as fascinating as he was claiming. I liked it well enough, felt attached to it, but that was for personal reasons, and I thought that Gregory's claims for it were at best excessive and over-optimistic, at worst pretentious, ridiculous and just plain wrong.

Was this sour grapes? Was I angry because Gregory could detect literary quality where I'd only detected insanity? Did it piss me off that he was a better ‘literary critic' than I was? I suppose the simple answer had to be yes. I could partly console myself by saying that I'd been too close to things, that it was easier for an outsider to come in and see them more clearly; but that didn't mean I wasn't pissed off. But neither did it mean that I wanted the book to fail. I didn't. I wanted it to be good. I wanted Gregory to be right, even though I didn't think he was.

I couldn't express my doubts to anyone; certainly not to Gregory or Kincaid, and not even to Alicia. Things had been going very well
between her and me. She still wouldn't admit we were having a relationship or anything like that, but her nocturnal visits had become more frequent and she was hardly ever angry with me these days. We continued to have highly verbal sex in which I was increasingly called upon to play the part of a sex-crazed lunatic. Was that a bit sick? No doubt it was, but what was I supposed to do? Say to Alicia, ‘I'm sorry, but I can only have normal, healthy, conventional sex with you.'? If I'd survived her initial fury I'd never have survived her demands that I define normal, healthy and conventional.

There was only one occasion when Alicia really disturbed me. It was night. I'd been up in the library looking for a book to read. By this time I'd pretty much exhausted the resources of the Ruth Harris selection, so it took me a while to find anything. I finally settled on a biography of General Gordon. When I got back to my hut all the lights were out, and that seemed odd because I was sure I'd left them on. I thought maybe a fuse had blown. But then I saw the door was wide open and I'd definitely closed it. Someone had obviously entered the hut and turned off the light, and I naturally wondered why, and whether they were still there in the dark. Something told me they were. I stood at the open door and listened.

I could hear movement, the heavy sigh of the mattress on my sofabed, a regular, sexual rhythm; and I heard a voice, a familiar one, Alicia's, and she was saying things (or at least variations on things) I had heard her say before: coprophemic utterances, dirty talk, obscenities, words of profane sexual encouragement. ‘That's right, that's right you filthy fucking lunatic, lick my cunt, suck it, devour it, stretch it, stick your tongue in, your fingers, stick your whole hand …' And much more in a similar vein. And who, I wondered, was being sexually encouraged? I ran through an entire cast list of possibilities: all the patients, both male and female. Which one would she have chosen? Or maybe she wasn't with just one; maybe there were three or four of them in there, both sexes, all persuasions, all enjoying the pleasures of Alicia's filthy mouth. Maybe she was at the centre of one of Charles Manning's orgies.

Now wait a minute, hold on, I thought. This was getting out of hand. Alicia was supposed to be the one with the over-active imagination, not me. But in any event, whatever the cast, she'd seen fit to bring them back to my bed. Why had she done that? Was that
meant as the final insult, the ultimate slap in my face, and was that some extra turn on for her?

I tried to think of what to do or say. I couldn't come up with anything rational. I didn't feel entirely in control of myself. On automatic pilot, angry yet vulnerable, scared yet reckless, I stormed into the hut, switched on the overhead light, ready for the disgusting pornographic spectacle in my bed. But I was disappointed, or rather I was extremely pleased, since it seemed the light had chased away all the filthy images, all the sexual demons. Alicia was quite alone in my bed, between the sheets, apparently naked but completely covered, and she was masturbating and she was addressing her filth to the empty air above her. Her eyes, freed from their hornrims, squinted in the light. She was surprised to see me but not embarrassed. ‘Turn the light off. Get in here and fuck me, you madman.' I did as I was told.

Afterwards she explained that she'd crept into my bed in order to surprise me, but as she waited there alone and naked, she'd started thinking about me, picturing what I'd do to her when I arrived, and that had got her aroused, so she'd had to start masturbating and verbalising. And as she'd said those dirty words she'd been imagining me as the lunatic in bed with her. I decided to believe this and be flattered by it.

However, when the next batch of writing arrived it contained, if not precisely a transcript, then a very fair reconstruction of the coprophemic monologue Alicia had delivered to the empty hut that night. My first reaction was to be furious. Someone had obviously been eavesdropping, stealing Alicia's words. A part of me wanted to convene an emergency meeting of the patients and like some old-fashioned headmaster demand to know who was responsible and keep everybody there until the culprit confessed. But, inevitably, I didn't. I didn't even tell Alicia about it. I knew I wouldn't be able to discover the scribe, and any attempt to do so would have made me look ridiculous. I did, however, take some small revenge. This was the one bit of writing I didn't pass on to Gregory.

When I had the next meeting with the patients I found myself looking at each of them in turn, wondering which of them had written down Alicia's words, but it was an old and frustrating game and I soon abandoned it. These meetings had now become a bit perfunctory, if not entirely superfluous, yet I didn't feel we could not have them. I'd have been left with absolutely nothing to do. We no
longer discussed individual pieces of writing but addressed more general topics.

‘Is it OK just to write down your dreams?' Raymond asked.

I assured him there was a rich tradition of dream literature, though I also warned him that dreams were always a lot more interesting for the dreamer than for the poor sod who had to read them.

‘The world is like a dream,' said Cook.

‘But aren't dreams really images?' Raymond insisted.

‘In a way,' I said.

‘So aren't dreams really bad for us? Kincaidian Therapy is trying to keep us away from images but our subconscious minds keep supplying new ones.'

I didn't have an answer to that one, and was glad when Byron stepped in. ‘Raymond has a point,' he said, ‘but in this case I'm not sure there's a very clear distinction between the conscious and the subconscious mind. For instance, I find myself looking forward to our book being published. I imagine what it will be like to hold a copy, I try to envisage how it will look. I'm creating images for myself that I don't think are so very different from dreams.'

‘And what about when you're tripping?' Charity said. ‘And the trees turn into snakes, or people's faces turn into Frankenstein masks?'

‘And what about when I imagine something coming up out of the toilet and biting off my penis?' said Charles Manning.

‘And what about the idea that language derives from pictograms?' Byron offered. ‘If that's the case then it's hard to see that words are any different from pictures at all. Isn't it?'

‘I really don't know,' I said. ‘You'll have to ask Dr Kincaid.'

That shut them up.

In order to keep them down to earth I suggested they try to come up with a title for the anthology. This led to further intense activity, though I hesitate to say ‘creativity' since a lot of the things they suggested were either terrible or just plain stupid.
War and Peace
, for example,
Bonkers Outside Brighton
,
Much Madness is Divinest Sense
(borrowed from Emily Dickinson, I believe),
Draining the Ego
(a reference to Freud),
All Our Own Work
(maybe some irony there, maybe not),
I Spit in the Face of My Mother
,
Tales from the New Bedlam
,
Kincaid and After
,
Make Mine Mandrax
,
Mind Readings
,
The Footballers
,
Narm Saga
(which I could see was an anagram of
‘anagrams'). There were plenty more where they came from and I duly passed them on to Gregory, in the reasonable certainty that he wouldn't be using any of them. In one of his letters Gregory told me that after much brainstorming and many sleepless nights he'd decided on
Disorders
, a title that, perhaps surprisingly, we all felt we could live with.

For my part, I now had to come up with a foreword, something that purported to explain what I'd been up to all this time. I had to do some writing. I kept it exceptionally brief. My role, I said, had simply been to give the patients the freedom to write whatever they wanted, and the results were here for all to see. This seemed uncontroversial and in every sense undeniable. I would leave the grandiose waffle to Kincaid. He appeared to work long and hard on his introduction but when it came it was only a very slightly reworked version of the lecture he'd tried to make me deliver to the patients on my first day, the one I'd burned. Perhaps he thought it was unimprovable. Gregory declared himself happy with both our contributions, though they clearly didn't excite him in the way the patients' writing did.

We were sent roughs of the jacket design. Over the years I've talked to a lot of authors and I've learned they seldom really like their book covers. Given the large number of hands involved in
Disorders
, it was even less likely that we'd all be happy. Some of us were inevitably less unhappy than others. I'd suggested using a Jackson Pollock painting, maybe the one from the card Alicia had used to welcome me on my first day,
Number 32
, but it was reckoned that the Pollock estate would be far too difficult and expensive to deal with, so some lad in the publisher's art department had knocked up a drip painting and that's what they were using. I thought it was all right, if a little nondescript; the lad in the art department was no Jackson Pollock. Kincaid got a mite fretful that if you stared at the design and squinted you could make out what looked like faces in the bottom left-hand corner, but first Alicia and I, and then all the patients assured him this wasn't the case and he relaxed a lot.

The existence of a title and a jacket design spurred the patients to even greater heights of productivity, but I knew this couldn't go on for ever. Sooner or later a line would have to be drawn, and Gregory or Nicola or somebody in the publishing company would have to say, enough is enough, for better or worse it's finished, it has to go to the typesetters and printers. And sure enough such a day did come.
Gregory informed me, in a long self-regarding letter, that his mighty labours were at an end. He had worked night and day, editing and shaping, cutting and pasting, arranging and rearranging, ordering and, yes, disordering. His eyes hurt, his brain hurt, his fingers were bleeding from paper cuts, but finally the noble and heroic task had been accomplished. He now intended to take himself to bed for a couple of weeks to recover. I wondered how this was going to affect his teaching. Across the bottom of the letter was written, SEND ME NO MORE. That was the
real
end of an era.