Engleby (28 page)

I found myself angry, and this is something to which I should perhaps also confess at this point. Anger. I’ve found, at moments in my life, that this emotion can cut free from the thing that provoked it and become an independent force.

Just as grief, as I explained, seems to have a life of its own, away from the loss or the memory that caused it, there can come a moment in anger when, even if the source of irritation were removed, it would be too late.

This is perhaps important, so maybe I should try to explain.

Are you familiar with catastrophe theory? Think of a graph with two axes, the relationship between whose quantities is charted by a steady diagonal. On the vertical: Engleby’s temperament; on the horizontal: the annoying thing; on the diagonal line you draw with your ruler and pencil: degree of anger. All goes steadily until a certain point: a camel-straw – or catastrophe. At this moment the relationship between the two axes stops being constant because a new element comes into being: rage.

To represent the relationship between the formerly two, but now three, quantities you need to make a three-dimensional graph, because rage, while related to Engleby’s temperament and annoying factors, is in fact a separate entity.

What’s frightening about this third dimension is that at some stage (and here we depart from the classic catastrophe theory model), the rage becomes not only separate, but independent and self-sufficient. Catastrophe indeed.

As I was circling in my car, I worked out that, just as the North Pole is always north, the town centre is always at a tangent from the ring roads and that it therefore didn’t matter which unsigned approach to it I took.

I was right – well, obviously – and ten minutes later parked the mildly overheating Morris 1100 in a new multi-storey car park and walked up the main shopping street. I was still angry, borderline enraged. What about? The factory work, the ring road, all that, yes, but other stuff as well. Stuff I couldn’t put a name to even if I wanted. Deep; and unidentifiable, because I couldn’t see it or name it. Fishy monsters at the mile-deep bottom of a loch, left over from some older evolution. Childhood or something; the dawn of awareness; the scramble to adapt – to mould what I was and what I felt into something the world could accept.

In the shops, which were virtually the same as the ones in Reading, I drifted round. I thought of buying a present for my mother or for Julie, but I didn’t have much idea what they liked in the way of clothes, or of sizes. Size ten, for instance. Is that large or small? It sounded vast, but the dress didn’t look that big.

Then I saw a record shop, on Church Street, and that looked a likely place to pass some time. For Jules I bought
Honky Château
by Elton John because I thought it might bridge the gap between the music I liked and the sort of crap she listened to.

The youth behind the counter (about my age, I suppose) said why didn’t I get
Pictures from an Exhibition
.

‘Because I want this,’ I said, holding up the beige gatefold sleeve of
Honky Château
, ‘and because I’m not paid till Friday so I can’t afford two records.’

‘Have you heard of
Pictures from an Exhibition
?’

‘Of course. Everyone’s heard of Mussorgsky.’

‘Eh?’

‘The composer. The man who wrote it.’

‘No. I mean Emerson, Lake and Palmer,’ said the youth, with a whinny of superiority. ‘Have you heard of them?’

‘Heard of them?’ I could feel the catastrophe looming. ‘I saw Keith Emerson and the Nice play the whole of
Ars Longa, Vita Brevis
at the Lyceum in’69. I got
In the Court of the Crimson King
by King Crimson with Greg Lake on bass and vocals from Virgin by post before it even hit the shops. I played “Twenty-First Century Schizoid Man” and “Epitaph, including ‘March for No Reason’ and ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow’” so often I wore out the stylus. I hitchhiked to Birmingham to see Atomic Rooster live, and, yes, they did have Carl Palmer on drums.
Heard
of them? I pretty much put them together. I first heard—’

‘Keep your hair on, mate. Do you want a bag?’

No, I want to take you out back and beat your fucking head on the floor.

‘Thank you,’ I said, and took the bag out onto the street.

I had some blue pills in my pocket and I took two. I knew the symptoms, but I’d never had them this bad before.

Then I went to an off-licence and bought a half bottle of vodka. I drank it pretty much straight off, using the paper bag as cover.

The town centre was all coming down or going up. Earth movers and diggers and jackhammers were replacing parts of Hampshire with slabs of reinforced concrete, plate glass and shop names lettered in pink and turquoise corporate swirl. Their moving, digging and drilling was ploughing up the past and furrowing my brain.

I went into a large clothes shop. It might have been Debenhams or British Home Stores or Marks & Spencer, they all look the same to me. They all sell eight million
nighties
.

I walked slowly between the counters, and picked up many of the clothes in my hands. I felt nylon, wool, silk and cotton. I felt a lot of terylene and dacron. I let it run through my fingers because I wanted to reassure myself that it existed.

These molecules (polymers, I think) ran, slick and synthetic against the pores – the ever-so-organic, mammal pores of my skin, my
dermis
. The jackhammer in my temples, the enlarged molecules in my hand. It was like that time in Izmir when the centripetal force of Engleby had failed and I began to fly apart, into my atomic pieces.

I held on tight. Men’s lambswool sweater. Woman’s brushed nylon peignoir. Child’s school socks (wool and polyester mix).

All reality about me now appeared to be in tatters, taken down and reduced to the civil war of its particles.

I held on very, very tight indeed.

Because in addition to that feeling, that disintegration, there was rage. I wanted to break something.

I could no longer move. I clung rigid to the edge of the counter. I could see my knuckles white. My finger was bleeding where my thumb nail had gouged it.

‘Are you all right, sir?’

‘No. Get me a doctor.’

I forget what happened, except that when a man came, I wept.

They brought a chair. This man put his arm round my shoulders. That’s why I cried. That small kindness.

By the time an ambulance man came, the blue pills must have been flushed through me by the vodka. I drank a glass of water, which must in turn have released the loitering alcohol. I remember nothing more until I awoke in a cubicle.

I was lying on a bed in my clothes beneath a cellular blanket. I felt relaxed, though nagged at, worried by something. I felt I’d given vent to things I should have kept locked up. I’d let the cat out of the bottle, the genie out of the bag . . . I slept again. Some man asked me questions, offered me rest and I accepted.

Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender. It was dark, and two or three people were with me, speaking softly, with consideration.

I was obviously somewhere else now, but I didn’t remember the journey. My disintegrating particles had become a wave. I had reappeared without apparently having travelled the intervening distance. Human beings, as atomic matter, must conform to the laws of quantum mechanics – even their thoughts, which are but electrical functions of brain. Perhaps I had thus solved the mysteries of human behaviour and motivation. God, how should I know?

I was offered hot milk and two white tablets. No injections, nothing sinister. Then a comfortable bed.

I awoke and it was day. I was in a dorm. There were five other beds in it, but no one in them. My clothes were folded over a chair at the foot of ‘my’ bed.

The first thing you do in such a situation is try to get normal. Do your teeth, have a cup of tea, find out where you are. I dressed and stuck my head into the corridor and saw a woman in ordinary clothes, not obviously a nurse.

‘Excuse me, could you tell me where I am?’

‘You’re Michael, aren’t you? We let you sleep in a bit. How do you feel?’

‘Fine.’ It was true. I’d slept deeply. I had no hangover. Good clean spirit, vodka, and I had an eighteen-year-old’s resilience. ‘But where am I?’

‘You’re in a hospital. You came in here last night. My name’s Alison by the way.’

‘Which hospital?’

‘It’s called Park Prewett. It’s a psychiatric hospital. You were transferred from—’

‘I want to get out of here.’

It appeared that I had finally followed Stalky Read’s much-offered advice, albeit unconsciously: I’d taken if not the first bus, then some kind of ambulance to ‘the Prewett’.

‘Why don’t you come and have some breakfast?’

I followed Alison reluctantly along a corridor, then down some stone stairs.

‘I ought just to warn you,’ she said, ‘that we’ve got some visitors at the moment. One of the long-stay wards is having its kitchen renovated and their patients come to us for meals. Don’t be alarmed. They’re all nice people, just that some of them have got their funny ways.’

She led me into a stench of hospital food. I found my throat close tight. It was like the opposite of appetite; it made me feel that far from eating I could never eat again.

Maybe it wasn’t just the smell, maybe it was the sight as well.

At two refectory tables were about fifty people, men and women of all ages but mostly much older than me. A man with a big shaved skull was banging a metal dish on the table and moaning. Women with funny, screwed-up faces were grabbing and gobbling.

Alison must have seen my expression. ‘Come and sit down here. I’ll find you a place. Come and sit next to Sandra here. Sandra, this is Michael.’

‘Pleased to meet you.’

Bits of food were being thrown around. Some people ate with their hands. There was little speech – and no one actually conversed with anyone else – but there was a lot of noise. Shouting out; moaning, wailing. The whole thing seemed barely under control.

I pushed my food away and tried to raise the cup of tea in front of me, but my hand shook. I got some into my mouth but couldn’t swallow it. It felt as though some mechanism was preventing me from letting anything from this crazed world enter me, over the membranes of mouth and throat. My body alarm was on, the doors were jammed. I let the tea dribble back into the cup.

I got up from the table and walked out of the bedlam, down the corridor. A nurse in uniform asked where I was going, not unkindly. I said I wanted to go outside and get some air.

‘The doors are closed for the time being, until after breakfast is cleared and the C-block patients have gone back. Then of course you can go for a little walk. Which doctor are you under?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t live here. I just want to go home.’ The
smell
.

I suddenly thought of the 1100 in the town centre car park. It was going to cost me a packet.

The nurse took me to an office, a glassed-in place, where a man assigned me an appointment for the following day.

‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘I want to go home. I want to discharge myself.’

The registrar, if that was what he was, found my admission note.

‘You were sent from the general hospital,’ he said. ‘A Dr Andrew Brown was on duty there. You’re now under the care of Dr Leftrook, but she’s not in today. You can see her tomorrow, and she can make an assessment.’

‘There must be other doctors. I need to get out today. I’ve got a job. I need to get back to it or I’ll lose it.’

After a lot of dim questions, he conceded that the Prewett had more than one shrink and I was given an appointment to see a Dr Greenhough that afternoon. The registrar wanted to know who my normal GP was, and fortunately I could give him the name of Dr Ray, on whose list I’d been at the grammar school. Since I hadn’t consulted him for at least three years he’d give me a clean slate. (I wouldn’t have wanted him to get the opinion of old Vaughan in King’s Parade.)

Later, I saw an open door and went out into the grounds. My block was clearly low risk, which was reassuring. I walked about, being careful to steer clear of any mutterers in overcoats. The main building was gabled brick with creeper; there was a bell tower and a colonnade whose cloister was held up on steel pins rather than on plastered columns. In other respects, it was the twin of Chatfield, down to the distant games pavilion and the gravy smell. Hello, Batley, hello, Francis. I knew we’d meet again.

As I walked about I could taste the fear in my mouth. I thought of the old men’s poorhouse that I used to see at twilight as a child. All these places were versions of the same thing. One could never finally escape, one was destined always to return.

Through a hole in the fabric of time, through a gate in the wall, through the moment in the arbour where the rain beat.

I sat on a bench in the garden and bit back tears.