The House of Sleep (10 page)

‘It was hidden behind the wardrobe.’

‘And what was Mr Worth doing moving the wardrobe?’

Dr Dudden ignored this question. He said: ‘I realize you won’t want to hear it, doctor, but this exactly proves my point. This is precisely why we have to be careful what… sort of person we allow in here. This is the sort of thing that happens when you open your doors to riff-raff.’

‘Are you by any chance referring,’ said Dr Madison, ‘to the NHS patients?’

‘I don’t think I need to spell it out,’ said Dr Dudden. ‘That woman in your group, for instance. The Brixton woman. I don’t mean to be snobbish, but… what can you expect from someone like that? No class, no character…’

‘This is not Maria Granger’s room.’

‘I don’t mean her specifically: it’s the general principle.’ He peered closer at the stain on the wall, and wrinkled his nose. ‘What kind of person,’ he said, ‘what kind of
scum
would smear the walls of a room with their own excrement?’

‘A disturbed person, presumably. The sort of person we’re supposed to be here to help.’ She gave the stain a cursory glance, then stepped back. ‘Anyway, I think it’s probably blood.’

‘I’m going to find Mr Worth,’ he said. ‘On no account must he mention this in his article.
Somehow
we’ve got to keep him quiet.’

‘I’m sure Mr Worth doesn’t have the slightest intention –’

‘Have a word with the cleaning staff: immediately. Get them to wipe it off.’

When he had gone, Dr Madison remained for a few minutes in Day Room Nine, staring at the words on the wall, and at the stain: and whether it was rage at her colleague’s insensitivity, or compassion for whatever wretched creature had felt some inarticulate need to desecrate the room in this way, her eyes were soon cloudy with tears, and she found herself rubbing at the wall with her sleeve in a spasm of sudden, violent irritation: a kind of frenzy.

∗

A few weeks ago,
Terry wrote,
I found myself overhearing one of those recurrent dinner-party conversations about who is the ‘greatest’film director at work today. The two participants were both critics: one of them, a member of the old school, argued for the veteran Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, while the other, who seemed to think of himself as some sort of Young Turk, carried the inevitable banner for Quentin Tarantino.

It was like… well, what was it like? It was like watching two teams of blind men trying to play football on a derelict pitch, when no one had had the decency to tell them that the goalposts had been taken down years ago.

It was the Taranteeny I felt really sorry for. At least his opponent’s position had some sort of antiquated coherence. But as for the Turk (perhaps, remembering the Young Fogeys, we should coin a neologism for this specimen: the Old Turk), he didn’t seem to realize the sheer crappiness of his argument – which was that by ‘revitalizing’ B-movie cliches, Tarantino was actually achieving some sort of (and yes, he really did use this word) ‘originality’. I think, God help him, he may even have mentioned postmodernism at some particularly desperate moment.

Reader, I couldn’t find it in me to put either of these saddies out of their misery. Silent sympathy seemed to be the only appropriate response to the spectacle of two exhausted Don Quixotes still chasing after the spectre of originality in modern cinema. My one piece of advice to them, if they should happen to be reading, would be that they check out Joe Kingsley’s
Chalk and Cheese 4
(PG) as soon as possible, and learn what they can from it.

Terry performed a quick word-count on his computer, and found that he had already used up almost a third of his review space. Not that it really mattered: he always enjoyed laying out his theoretical wares in this way. Still, it was probably a good thing that he had brought himself round to the film at last.

Kingsley, it goes without saying, is the master of cliche. He makes Tarantino look like a bungling amateur in this area, because he has never fallen for the neo-humanist fiction that old conventions can be given a new twist. And the
Chalk and Cheese
series is cliche itself – mismatched cops assigned to the same case – stripped down to its purest and most satisfying essentials. Number 3, directed by ex-pat Englishman Kevin Wilmut, made the fundamental mistake of trying to freshen things up with a romantic undercurrent and a political subplot: the dead hand of Wilmut’s literary, BBC background was all over it. Clearly, though, someone at Fox has come to his senses and put Kingsley back at the helm of the series which kick-started his career and which he has since made brilliantly, paradoxically, his own.

Four hundred and eighteen words. What next, he wondered. Summarize the plot? (But of course there was no plot.) Discuss the performances? (But the actors in this film didn’t perform, they went through motions.) Mention the dialogue? (But the dialogue was exactly the same as in the earlier films.) In truth, the film itself had barely skimmed the surface of Terry’s consciousness. As soon as it had arrived in the morning post, he had taken the Jiffy bag up to the Observation Room attached to Bedroom Three, where Lorna had shown him how to get the video working. The tape supposedly lasted for ninety-seven minutes, but it had not taken him that long to watch it. He sat in total absorption through the opening credits, enjoyed the first scene (a protracted gunfight which
brought several of the other patients crowding into the room to find out what all the noise was about), then fast-forwarded through the first expository scene and any other subsequent dialogue scenes which lasted for more than thirty seconds; congratulating himself, into the bargain, on watching the film in just the way that its makers – with their eyes fixed firmly on the video market – would have intended.

It would be stretching a point,
Terry now wrote, shifting his chair back into the shade of the building (for the sun, reflected by the glittering ocean, was starting to blank out the screen of his PowerBook),
to claim that
Chalk and Cheese 4
is flawless. Kingsley’s detractors – whose uncomprehending criticisms mean, I trust, less than nothing to him – like to claim that his films resemble ninety-minute pop videos. This is in fact a sublime compliment to which he hasn’t (yet) quite earned the right. There’s the occasional falling-off, here, a sporadic tendency to flag: timing some of the shots at random, I was surprised to find that many of them were more than six seconds long. But fifteen minutes after finishing the movie, this critic isn’t complaining: I’m still high on its irreverence, its joyous contempt for the audience, its contagious hatred for political or any other kinds of correctness, its hooligan energy. An energy which, incidentally (to go back to our dinner-party duellists) is the only kind available to the filmmaker nowadays. This is the crazed, manic energy of the bull at the end of the fight, fatally wounded but ploughing ahead, driven only by pain and anger and the mindless will to go on living. This is the condition – terminal but frantic, ‘gasping but somehow still alive’ – of the American cinema in these dying days of the twentieth century. And Kingsley is its master.

A shadow crossed the computer screen, causing Terry to look up. Dr Dudden, having emerged silently on to the terrace, was waiting to address him.

‘A brief word, Mr Worth. The briefest of words. Far be it from me to interrupt your labours.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Terry, squinting into the sunlight.

‘Dare I hope – dare
we
hope, dare all of us hope – that this is an early draft – the first tentative steps towards your article?’

‘My article?’

‘About the work that we do here.’

‘Oh.’ Terry hadn’t given this a moment’s thought. He wasn’t even sure, at this point, that the Clinic was interesting enough to merit a piece for the Features page. ‘No, I’m still thinking about that one.’

‘Ah. Still in the planning stage.’ Dr Dudden forced a smile, which mingled practised insincerity with a desperate need to ingratiate. ‘When you do come to write it – and far be it from
me,
of course, to dictate, or even to attempt
any
sort of influence or… input, in any way – but when you do come to write it, I do hope that the small… irregularity in your day room won’t mitigate, or in any way –’

‘Irregularity?’ said Terry.

‘I’m referring, of course, to the unfortunate – erm –
graffito
to which you so kindly, so thoughtfully –’

‘Oh, that.’ Terry smiled blandly. ‘Well, you know, I can only record what I see: take things as they come, so to speak…’

‘Hmm.’ Dr Dudden’s answering smile was weak, uncertain. ‘I can take it that we understand each other, then.’ When this was neither confirmed nor denied by Terry, he turned, wavered, paused, turned back again, hesitated and finally managed to say: ‘We have some good news, by the way.’

‘Oh?’

‘A small breakthrough last night, according to your EEC.’

‘In what way?’

‘You entered Stage One sleep. For twelve minutes: at about three o’clock in the morning.’

‘And this is the first time it’s happened?’

‘While you’ve been under my observation, yes. As I say: a small breakthrough. Naturally, I can’t take any credit for it. I’ve done nothing to treat you, as yet.’ He waited (in vain) for Terry to manifest some enthusiasm, then added: ‘Anyway, I assumed you’d want to know about it.’

When Dr Dudden had disappeared back inside the house, Terry read through the last few lines of his review and suddenly wanted nothing more than to finish the thing off as quickly as possible. For some reason, this talk of a breakthrough disturbed him, and he found it hard to concentrate, hard to regain the level of engagement which had powered him through that final paragraph. In a fit of impatience and boredom, he decided to do something lazy – to end with an obvious cliche, and assume that readers would take it as a self-referential joke in keeping with the argument of the review as a whole.

I can’t recommend this film highly enough,
he wrote.
It’s a laugh, it’s a riot, it’s a refreshing blast of stale air. In short: fun for all the family.

Next, he inserted a page break and typed out his invoice.

TO: Writing review of
Chalk and Cheese 4
654 words @ £1 per word = £654.00
Plus VAT @ 17.5% = £114.45
Total = £768.45.

Halfway through making this calculation, Terry was distracted by the noise of a window opening high up in the house. He turned, craned his neck and found that the window in question was one he recognized. It belonged, in fact, to a room which he was intending to explore again, as soon as the opportunity presented itself: the room he had once lived in, up on the third floor, a long, low garret which (he now remembered) gave access directly on to the roof. Someone had pushed the window open, but he couldn’t see who it was. Then, a moment later, something flew – or was thrown – out of the window itself. At first Terry thought it was a seagull, then a racing pigeon: a blur and a flutter of white against the sky’s perfect, midday blue. But if it was a bird, it had forgotten how to fly, for after riding the currents of air for a few seconds it began swooping down to earth in slow, decreasing spirals. As it came closer, Terry recognized it as a large paper dart,
which now hovered briefly above his head, took a sudden turn and shot out towards the sea, then described a perfect curve of 180 degrees, came straight towards him at chest level, then dipped, lost momentum, and finally, using his computer keyboard as a landing strip, came to graceful rest on his lap.

Terry heard the window being pushed shut again. He stood up with the dart in his hand, shielded his eyes and looked to see if any figure could be made out behind the distant, reflecting glass. But it was too late.

Then he smoothed open the paper and read the scrawled message:
ASK HIM ABOUT STEPHEN WEBB
.

5

Robert’s long, nocturnal conversation with Sarah had a profound effect. Treasuring the memory of her kindness as she had listened to him, the soft burr of her voice as she had offered her own confidences, he quickly sank into a romantic coma from which there seemed to be no awakening. He loitered in the kitchen, waiting for her to appear; lurked in the corridor outside her bedroom; haunted the television room in the evenings; went for superfluous walks along the cliff path at the hour when he guessed her lectures would be over, rehearsing phrases of surprised greeting. He bought presents for her and threw them away almost at once, finding them unsuitable, inadequate; he combed his hair hourly and shaved twice a day (including his legs, although this was not for her benefit). But for most of the day he merely sat in his room, while his work lay neglected, and stared sightlessly at the walls, his mind acting as a private cinema screen upon which ever more tantalizing scenes would be projected: scenes in which he would be stroking her hair, reaching out for the first tentative clasp of her hand, brushing his lips against the immaculate curve of her ear, kissing the fine down on her neck. For days he sat in his room and dreamed like this. For days he convinced himself that the next time they met, their love for each other would reveal itself abruptly, spontaneously, in some sweet and irresistible outpouring.

There was one problem, however. Sarah seemed to have disappeared. Nobody in the house could remember seeing her lately, and her bed, according to Mrs Sharp, the caretaker’s wife, had not been slept in all week.

When more than eight days had passed in this manner, Robert found that he could stand it no longer: he would have to leave the house and look for her on campus. An hour and a half’s exhausted trawling of the Library, the Arts Centre and the Union building yielded nothing, however, and finally he took a bus into town and made for the only other place where a student might conceivably be found on a wet Saturday morning: the Café Valladon. Here he discovered no customers at all apart from his old friend Terry, sitting in the corner with a chaotic spread of essay notes laid out on the table in front of him.