Runaway (30 page)

When we were finally set up and ready, we launched into the set that we would normally perform for the first half of a dance gig. Just to get ourselves back in the groove. The acoustics in the Victoria Hall were good, and we were fresh and full of energy, just because we hadn’t played in a while.

In groups of twos and threes the residents of J. P. Walker’s experiment in the democracy of madness trooped into the hall and stood listening to us. There is something universal about the communicative power of music. It cuts through all barriers of language and culture, of sanity and lunacy. And we connected that first day with almost everyone at the hall. Someone began dancing, and very soon all of them were. Crazy, wild dancing that transcended the music. And it was exciting to watch. To know that you were doing this to people and that, whatever their mood or depression, whatever their physical or mental problems, they had left them at the door along with their inhibitions. Music made them, and us, free. And one.

JP himself stood watching with interest, a tiny smile playing about pale lips, and I caught the admiration in Rachel’s eyes. They were fixed on me and filled with an intensity that released something deeply primal inside me. And I remembered her telling me that she found nothing more arousing than talent.

We had just finished ‘Roll over Beethoven’, and were counting in to ‘She was Just Seventeen’, when the most bloodcurdling scream cut us off mid-count. The door into the hall burst open and a middle-aged woman stood there, stark naked and yelling at the top of her voice. Yells interspersed with lung-bursting sobs, then fresh screams.

She was a woman in her forties, breasts like empty sacks, her flesh carried on a small frame like a baby’s jumpsuit that was two sizes too big. Her body was smeared with some thick, dark substance, and it didn’t take long for the smell of it to tell us what it was. She was covered in her own shit.

‘Where’s my bottle?’ she screamed. ‘I want my bottle! Johnny says I’ve got to have my bottle.’

And she started running around the hall, scattering everyone in her path. No one wanted to go near her. The run turned into a skip, and she began singing some toneless, unrecognizable tune.

I glanced at JP but he made no attempt to intervene. He watched disinterestedly for a moment, then turned to disappear into the common room.

The smell was beginning to fill the hall, and Rachel took refuge on the stage beside us. But the woman stopped right below us, staring at us with wild eyes.

‘Why did you stop? Why did you fucking stop?’ Her voice was like tearing paper. ‘I want to dance. Play! Play!’

I glanced at Jeff and nodded. Anything to get her away from us. He struck his sticks together four times, and we launched into ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, wishing in fact that she wasn’t standing there at all. But she didn’t move away. She began writhing and twisting on the spot in the most grotesque and violently malodorous dance I have ever seen. It was all I could do to stop from throwing up.

Then suddenly one of the men who had been at the table during lunch came running out of the common room. A big man, completely bald, all his head hair concentrated in a mass of black beard, and matted curls covering his chest and neck. His arms were spread wide, holding out a large grey blanket which he wrapped around the dancing woman as he reached her, completely engulfing her. I could see in his face his repulsion at the smell. And yet still he held her – against all her kicking, thrashing, screaming protests – until gradually she began to lose impetus, surrendering finally to the hold of his arms, whimpering and sobbing.

A woman emerged from the common room with a baby’s bottle filled with milk and handed it to the bearded man, who immediately thrust the teat between the shit-smeared lips of the woman in his grasp. She began sucking on it with a passion, and allowed herself to be led away, distracted and consumed by the feeding process. The remaining residents moved aside, like a parting of the Red Sea, to let them past, then several went running around the hall opening all the windows.

A small, bald man walked up to the front of the stage and grinned at us, revealing two missing front teeth, one top, one bottom. ‘That’s Alice,’ he said. ‘The star of the show.’ He took a pull on his cigarette, then pushed the tip of it into the cavity in his lower teeth so that it stuck there and moved with his mouth when he spoke. ‘She’s about six months now.’

‘What show?’ I said, confused.

‘The Victoria Hall show. Johnny’s prize patient. Stripped back to the womb, and growing again to childhood.’ He closed his lips around the cigarette and sucked in smoke. ‘Gets all the fucking attention!’ He turned and stomped across the hall back to the common room.

Not for the first time, I had been unable to discern whether this was a doctor or a patient. A distinction, I was to learn, as fine as that between madness and sanity.

I turned to look at the others, and saw in their faces the trepidation that I felt. None of us was sure that this was a gig we really wanted.

_III

The hall was so big and dark that the few candles carried by shadowy figures barely made an impression. Joss sticks burned in unseen corners, filling the air with a sweet, pungent scent. I was aware of bodies all around us, forming a large, loose circle. Four of us moved slowly around its interior circumference. Me and Maurie and Luke and Dave. And Rachel. She had insisted on being a part of it.

She’d had a bad afternoon, slowly succumbing to the shakes and an insidious itching that had her scratching her arms and scalp. There was nothing I could do to comfort her, and in the end JP led her away mid-briefing, an arm around her shoulder, his voice soft and filled with reassurance. When he brought her back half an hour later, she had been calm, almost serene, and I was torn between jealousy and relief, wondering if he had given her medication, or whether it was the power of his personality that had triumphed over her craving.

Now she was back to normal, if any of this could have been described as normal.

Suddenly, a rectangle of yellow light fell from the door of the common room, cutting through the crowd and extending to the back of the hall. A man stumbled through it. A silhouette. And although we couldn’t see his face, we could feel his confusion.

It was our cue to surround him, the wider circle closing around us as we did so. We were close enough in the dark now to touch and smell him, and I pushed him as instructed into Luke’s arms. Luke immediately spun him round, passing him on to Maurie, Dave, Rachel and then me. Round and round our tight little circle. His body relaxing into trust, growing heavier as it did, his momentum preventing him from falling. Faster and faster, as we ourselves moved round the bodies that encircled us. Until a crack like a gunshot was our signal to stand back.

Both inner and outer circles moved out from the centre, like rings of water from a pebble tossed in a pond. And the man dropped to the floor, crouching on his knees. The bearers of the candles moved in to create a circle of light around him, and he got unsteadily to his feet, dizzy and confused after all his spinning.

Another figure stepped into the circle, a sweep of white robe swirling around him as he turned to reveal himself in the flickering light. A young man, face powdered white, his lipsticked mouth a slash of red. He wore a felt hat with a toy parrot affixed to the top of it. Although I knew it was Jeff, I would never have recognized him. He cut a dramatic, half-comic, half-scary figure.

I could see the light of fear in the eyes of the man in the centre of the circle as Jeff drew a pistol from beneath his robes and pointed it straight at his head. The man raised his hands, as if somehow he believed they could stop the bullets.

‘No!’ he shouted. ‘No! No!’

But Jeff held his arm straight and steady, a slow smile spreading itself across his face. He was enjoying this. Then, very slowly, he began to lower the gun, still at the end of a ramrod-straight arm, until the barrel of it was pointing directly at the man’s crotch.

He was very nearly hysterical now. Screaming at Jeff. Urging him not to shoot. Hands grasping his crotch as he bent himself almost double.

Then,
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Jeff fired three times, and the man’s scream ripped through the darkness like a knife through flesh. He collapsed, whimpering, to the floor, clutching his private parts, rolling back and forth, moaning and weeping.

Almost immediately, several figures detached themselves from the crowd and stepped forward to lift him to his feet, hurrying him away through the yellow glow of the common room as the lights in the hall itself snapped on to leave us blinking in their sudden glare, pale startled faces all around, like floating Chinese lanterns.

JP stood by the door, a solitary figure whose lone clap resounded around the rafters. ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ he shouted. Then, ‘Time to eat.’

As at lunch, we ate very little. But there was wine on the table, a seemingly unending supply of it, and we drank to lose ourselves. It had been the strangest of days.

The coloured candles in their pools of melted wax burned all around the common room, sending the shadows of the diners dancing across the walls. A pile of albums played on a Dansette record player on the sideboard, and the sounds of the Beatles and the Beach Boys, the Kinks and the King thickened the smoke-filled air. The man at the centre of the evening’s little drama seemed perfectly recovered from the shots to his crotch, and he ate and drank hungrily. Jeff had washed and changed, but a residue of lipstick left his mouth unnaturally red, and he looked strangely feminine.

Rachel and I flanked JP, but it was Rachel who had the courage to ask what I had only wondered.

She was blunt and to the point. ‘What was all that about tonight?’

JP’s smile, it seemed, always reached his eyes, and he appeared genuinely amused. He kept his voice low, beneath the hubbub around the table, and said, ‘Richard suffers from what I can only describe as castration anxiety. Several months of psychotherapy have made very little progress. So tonight was an experiment of last resort. A kind of shock therapy to make him confront the illusory nature of his anxiety. Not to put too fine a point on it, Jeff blew his balls off. Or so he thought, or feared. Now he’ll have to deal with the fact that his testicles are still intact, and that his fears are groundless.’ He nodded acknowledgement to the possibility of failure. ‘Only time will tell if it has worked or not.’ He looked at each of us in turn. ‘That’s what the Victoria Hall experiment is all about. Taking an unconventional, non-pharmaceutical approach to problems that conventionally would be treated with drugs.’

His eyes sparkled, and I felt his excitement.

When the food was finished more wine was opened, joints were rolled and passed around the table. The residual excitement of the earlier drama was gradually dispelled, and the mood became more mellow. I noticed for the first time that there was no sign of Alice, or the big, bald, bearded man who had pulled her away.

‘Tell us a story, Johnny,’ one of the women implored. ‘Tell us a story.’

‘I’ve told enough stories to last a lifetime,’ JP said. ‘Someone else’s turn.’

An expectant silence settled itself around the table, and for a time it seemed as if no one was going to step up to the mark.

Then a dapper man in a white shirt and slacks pushed round tortoiseshell glasses back up the bridge of his nose and leaned into the table. ‘I’ll tell you a story.’

He had a lazy, North American drawl, and the streaks of steely silver through Brillo-pad hair made me think that he could be in his forties or fifties, which seemed very old to me then.

He pulled on one side of his short, wiry moustache. ‘This was when Johnnie and I were on that speaking tour of the States last year.’

All eyes turned towards him, and he seemed momentarily discomfited by the spotlight. But he quickly regained his composure.

‘Everyone knows what a hard time they gave us. The Institute of American Psychiatrists weren’t just sceptical. They were abusive. They were rude. They took every opportunity to criticize us in the press, to debunk our research and our papers. They sent hecklers to all our speaking engagements. It was like trying to bring enlightenment to the Dark Ages. After all, these people still believed in electric shock therapy and lobotomies. They were like witch doctors.’

His passion was clear, and I glanced at JP to see how he was reacting. But he was giving little away, lounging back in his chair, one bare foot up on the table, and a tiny enigmatic smile playing about his lips as he pulled on his joint.

‘Anyway, we were somewhere in the Midwest. Ohio or someplace, I don’t really remember. And they laid this ambush for us. A kind of challenge they knew that Johnny would have to accept but could never win.