Bedlam Burning Read online

  ‘Where did you get these?’ I demanded ungratefully.

  ‘What’s the matter? Aren’t they good enough for you?’

  ‘They’re mine.’

  ‘Of course they’re yours. I’ve just given them to you.’

  ‘But they were always mine. Where did you get them?’

  ‘We have our sources.’

  ‘Where’s the rest of my stuff? My books? My photographs? Where are they?’

  ‘If you really want to know, I found these clothes.’

  ‘Found them?’

  ‘Yes. They were in the bushes. Some local boys apparently threw them over the wall.’

  ‘You were going to give me clothes that someone had thrown over the wall?’

  ‘So you don’t want them?’

  ‘Yes, I want them. And I want a lot more besides.’

  ‘Gregory, you’re behaving a little hysterically.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Trust me, Gregory, as a doctor, I can say most certainly that you are.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like labels.’

  That got to her.

  ‘I’m going to leave now,’ she said. ‘We can talk about this later. Or we can not.’

  And that was pretty much my life for the first week. I ate and slept. I wandered the grounds. I had ambiguous little encounters. I did ‘nothing’. The days weren’t so hard, but the evenings could be tough to get through. Drink and drugs would no doubt have helped, but I now had no access to them and, in truth, I had never had any great appetite either. Sometimes I was dismayed at just what a clean-living lad I was. I certainly wished I still had my books, or even a radio. They would undoubtedly have helped pass the time, as would a television, but there was no set in the clinic, no television room, and you’ll realise what an utterly different and alien age we were living in, if I tell you that didn’t seem remotely odd to me.

  Mostly I’d sit in my hut feeling inert, bored, lonely, feeling like I might have made a terrible, stupid mistake; and I’d listen to the night noises, to the creaking trees, the flurries of unidentifiable wildlife, the distant traffic. And I’d look up at the clinic, at all the lights that blazed constantly, and sometimes I’d watch Kincaid’s office window, and see the man himself, pondering, pacing restlessly, then suddenly getting a bolt of inspiration and darting to his desk and furiously jotting down notes.

  And one night, as I was thinking about Kincaid, and wondering what he’d done to give Alicia such a high opinion of him, he was suddenly there at the door of the hut. I hadn’t heard him approach, and I was aware how slack and vacant I must have appeared, what an idle, good-for-nothing employee, yet he looked at me kindly, and that threw me.

  ‘You won’t mind if I step inside your hut,’ Kincaid said.

  Why would I have minded? And how could I have stopped him if I had?

  ‘How’s it going?’ he asked. I thought about telling him the truth, but before I could open my mouth he said, ‘Don’t tell me. I’m sure I can guess. You’re feeling inert, bored, lonely. You think you might have made a terrible, stupid mistake.’

  I was impressed by his savvy.

  ‘Also,’ he said, ‘you’re not sure you’re up to the job. You’re not even sure you know what the job is. You feel lost. You feel becalmed, a little frightened. You don’t know what you’re doing here. You’re not even sure who you are at this very moment.’

  He was right, of course, and in other circumstances I might have been disturbed or infuriated by that. Generally, I didn’t want people to know so much about me, didn’t want to be so transparent and commonplace, but at that moment, feeling that somebody understood was quite reassuring. Then Kincaid said, ‘Don’t worry. This is all perfectly fine and normal,’ and I was aware of a certain relief at knowing I was experiencing things that were within acceptable bounds.

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. I find you sitting here all alone, doing nothing as it were, wishing you were doing something, not knowing what that something should be, and I understand your pain. But I tell you this: doing nothing is absolutely the best thing for you at this time. It isn’t easy to be a blank sheet of paper. Freeing yourself from fear, desire, thought, ambition, action; these are worthwhile and noble goals. If you succeed in the attempt you’ll be the most useful member I’ve ever had on my team.’

  I stared at him, blankly I’m sure, and I had nothing at all to say.

  ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘You’ve also seen the importance of freeing yourself from speech, from response. Well done.’

  And then he went again. The visiting genius disappeared into the night and I was left unsure whether he’d been dispensing wisdom or absolute bullshit.

  9

  The layman (and there weren’t many men more lay than I was when I first arrived at the Kincaid Clinic) could be forgiven for not knowing the difference between coprophilia, coprolalia and coprophemia; so let me clarify.

  Coprophilia is literally the love of faeces; and I’ve got nothing much to say about it other than it’s disgusting and twisted and I don’t want anything to do with it. But the other two are far more interesting and relevant.

  Coprolalia is literally ‘faecal speech’, a condition, a bit like Tourette’s Syndrome, where the patient can’t help but let rip with a string of obscenities, regardless of where he or she is: in the supermarket, in the church confessional, at the Brahms recital. Some textbooks will tell you the patient actually plays with words the way a coprophiliac plays with faeces; which again isn’t very attractive and not at all sexy. Coprophemia, however, in the right circumstances, can be both.

  Coprophemia involves the use of obscene language as part of sexual arousal. At its most extreme it’s a destructive perversion, where the dirty language becomes more important than the sex itself, but in a milder form it’s a harmless enough little kink, a sexual extra. But as I say, I wasn’t remotely aware of these distinctions and definitions when I first arrived at the Kincaid Clinic, and if anyone had told me they were distinctions that were going to have any importance for me, I probably wouldn’t have believed it.

  Anyway, it was Friday night. My first week of employment, if not strictly of work (since I’d done sod all), was over, not that its being over made any appreciable difference to the atmosphere or the activities of the clinic. I’d had my talk with Kincaid and I’d gone to bed, not because I was tired, but because I could think of nothing better to do.

  I lay there, willing myself to go to sleep, but unable to as my mind milled the same old stuff – what was I doing there? should I confess? and so on – and naturally enough I got to thinking about Alicia. I wasn’t exactly having sexual fantasies; that would have been too easy, too unambiguous. I still feared I’d made a fool of myself over this woman. For whatever reason, she had wanted me to take the job at the clinic and she’d used her charm, for want of a better word, to get me there. Charm, don’t you hate it? But once I’d arrived, the charm had stopped. That may or may not have made her a bad person but it certainly made me a complete idiot. I felt hurt and a bit used, and yet I still wanted us to get on. And what else did I want? Sex? Love? A relationship? The meeting of two soul mates? Well, why not? I wouldn’t have turned down any of those things, although I knew it was presumptuous to demand them, perhaps even to hope for them. I’d have settled for company, warmth, someone to talk to. So, for one reason and another, Alicia was much on my mind, and then suddenly she was there.

  Perhaps I’d gone briefly to sleep after all, because I didn’t hear my door opening or closing, but I was suddenly awake and in pitch darkness, and I heard Alicia’s voice say, ‘Is there room for another one in there?’ Then she giggled. She was no longer using the steely, combative, medical tone I’d become familiar with in the last few days. It was the old Alicia, the one I thought I knew.

  I fumbled to turn on the bedside lamp and Alicia said, ‘I prefer it with the light off,’ which in other circumstances might have been a small disappointment, but I was so gla
d to have her there at all, so surprised and pleased, that I couldn’t possibly object. She sat down on the bed and I reached out a hand to touch her. My fingers made contact with her rib cage. It was bare. Her body was warm and smooth and I could feel a regular rhythm rising and falling under the skin. My hand moved down her flank, to her hip and her leg, and I discovered she was completely naked.

  ‘So, are you going to fuck me?’ she asked.

  This was by some way the most surprising thing she’d ever said to me.

  ‘Well, yes. Sure,’ I replied.

  I heard her exhale. It was a gentle, approving sound.

  ‘And will you be kissing my breasts and making my nipples stand on end, and then are you going to eat my pussy, and will you press your mouth and nose against it, and will you lick my clitoris until I’m all drenched and dripping, and then are you going to take your big fat cock, and shove it in me, first in my mouth and then in my cunt, filling me up? And are you going to ram it home, ram it in and out, until I shriek and scream and claw your back and then are you going to pump your hot, creamy cum right into me?’

  It was the first time I’d been asked a question in quite those terms, but that was because I’d never had sex with a coprophemic before, not that I even knew the word at the time.

  ‘Well, when you put it like that …’ I said.

  I suppose I had always known that pornography was largely a way of telling, rather than a way of being or doing. It’s not what you do, it’s the way you describe it (although I suppose some activities, coprophilia for instance, would be obscene however poetically you described them). But in general the sexual act is much the same whether it’s being described poetically or euphemistically or lubriciously. There was nothing remotely poetic or euphemistic about Alicia’s vocabulary. I could tell she was excited by these dirty words, by her own use of them, and I was excited too, though I think I was as excited by her excitement as I was by the words themselves.

  I pulled her into bed and began to kiss and stroke her, and she said, ‘Tell me what you’re going to do to me,’ and that threw me a little. For one thing, I wasn’t quite sure that sex was necessarily a thing that one person ‘did’ to another. I preferred to think it was a thing two people did together, call me a pathetic old liberal if you will.

  For another, I felt suddenly rather innocent. No doubt Cambridge had a lot to answer for. In those days the university contained seven men for every woman, and that created problems for everybody. Yes, I’d managed to find girls who’d wanted, or at least hadn’t refused, to go to bed with me, but none of it had ever been very richly erotic. Mostly what we’d done was put our heads down and hoped for the best and, even after university, much the same had applied with Nicola. It had all been normal and healthy, and very straightforward, and really rather tame. Nobody had ever asked me to talk about what I did or I was going to do; and certain girls had only been prepared to have sex with me on condition that we didn’t talk about it at all, before, during or after. I wanted to give Alicia what she wanted but I felt extremely reticent. I wasn’t entirely lost for words, and I wouldn’t say that I was shy exactly, but I felt I somehow lacked the vocabulary.

  ‘I’m going to give you a good screwing,’ I said ineptly.

  ‘And how exactly are you going to do that?’

  ‘I’ll put my penis in your vagina and then—’

  ‘No,’ she said, a little irritated but not angry, at least not yet. ‘You’re not going to screw me with your penis. You’re going to fuck me. You’re going to put your smelly old cock in my steaming hot cunt.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, and I endeavoured to do my dirty linguistic best. I used the terms, the words and phrases and pornographic constructions that Alicia favoured and demanded, but I feared I mightn’t be doing it convincingly. At times I felt like I was improvising bad dialogue in some hideous theatre workshop. Fortunately Alicia had enough dialogue, or I suppose in the event monologue, of her own.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Oh, that’s fucking good. Shove it in. Let me feel your dirty, hairy balls slapping against me. Oh, you filthy, dirty fucker.’

  And so on, for quite a long time at very high volume. She let out the occasional grunt and shriek, but mostly she remained highly verbal, highly articulate.

  Partly it was encouragement. She was egging me on to new acts, new heights or depths, and in a way it was similar to giving me a set of instructions, telling me what to do, telling me what she needed done. I had no objection to that. It’s nice when women tell you what they want. And partly it was a commentary, describing, in the lewdest terms possible, what we were doing, and although, therefore, the commentary and the acts were inseparable, the pleasure she was taking in the words seemed somehow independent of the acts themselves. I was glad she was having such a profound reaction to what we were doing, and yet I couldn’t help feeling there was something rather unspontaneous about her responses. I felt she wasn’t so much improvising as quoting, and that her words came from some pornographic book of love that she had memorised from beginning to end.

  I didn’t disapprove of this exactly. Sex, I knew even then, was largely a matter of repetition. We know what we like, that’s why we keep doing it, and although we all think we enjoy novelty, a completely novel sexual experience seems unlikely after a point. If you haven’t done certain things by a certain time in your life the chances are you probably don’t want to. Certainly coprophemic sex with Alicia was quite a novelty for me, but I kept getting the uneasy feeling that Alicia’s reactions, her performance, if you prefer, didn’t have all that much to do with me.

  I wasn’t a complete robot. I was doing more than just obeying orders. I was my own man, and yet when a woman is telling you to suck her breasts, lick her clitoris, stick your tongue up her anus, it would take a very contrary man to insist on doing something different. And indeed, Alicia’s commands (or demands) were so encyclopaedic, there was very little I could have done that she hadn’t already covered.

  And after I’d ‘filled her up with my giant load of hot, filthy, steaming cum’, to use Alicia’s phrase, we lay together in a welcome silence. When your partner has exhausted the possibilities of every sexual obscenity, it’s hard to know what to say next. And the truth was I didn’t need to say anything. I was perfectly happy lying there in the dark, with my arm around Alicia, not saying or doing anything. And I wondered if this was what Kincaid meant about freeing yourself from speech and response. I even remembered what he’d said about my time in the padded cell, how darkness and silence could be reassuring and supportive. Of course my experience of the padded cell would have been rather different if Alicia had been in there with me, and lying with Alicia now wasn’t ‘doing nothing’ in the sense that I’d been doing nothing in the writer’s hut for most of the past week. Nevertheless, it occurred to me that Kincaid might possibly know what he was talking about. Then I realised how vile it was to be lying in bed with Alicia while thinking about Kincaid. I tried to clear him out of my mind.

  Then Alicia spoke. She said, ‘This never happened, right? I was never here. We never had sex. Nobody must know: not Kincaid, not the staff, not the patients, not anybody. If anyone suspects, I’ll deny it with my dying breath. If you ever tell anyone, I’ll call you a liar, say you’re making it up, weaving some sick little fantasy about me. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘Good,’ she said, and she softened, she curled into me and was again her warm, affectionate, maybe even loving, self. I wondered how long this could possibly go on.

  10

  I don’t know if Alicia and I literally slept together that night. I know that I fell asleep while she was in my bed, and I know that when I woke up she’d gone, so perhaps she never slept there at all. I also know that while I slept I dreamed of being in bed with her, and by the morning everything about the whole episode had taken on an utterly dreamlike quality.

  I was brought abruptly into consciousness by a knocking at the door of the hut. I sat up, saw that A
licia wasn’t beside me and in a way I was glad. Even though I didn’t feel quite as intensely about secrecy as she apparently did, I didn’t much want to be found in bed with her by any of the people likely to be knocking at my hut.

  I got up and opened the door a couple of inches to see Raymond peering in at me. ‘Would you like any duty free, sir? Only joking.’

  I stared at him fuzzily. This time he had no trolley, he wasn’t offering coffee, and as I opened the door an inch wider I saw he wasn’t alone. Accompanying him were the other nine inmates of the Kincaid Clinic. They stood in a silent, straggling line outside the hut. Some looked at me hopefully, some beseechingly, some with unconcealed excitement, some couldn’t look at me at all. Anders, of course, looked at me as though he wanted to beat me up. But all of them seemed to be attaching an unnatural importance to being in my presence. That was when I looked at my watch. It was six in the morning.

  ‘What on earth do you want from me at six o’clock on a Saturday morning?’

  For a time nobody spoke, but after a painfully prolonged silence Raymond was nudged forward and took on the role of spokesman. ‘We’ve brought you a little something to read,’ he said.

  A cardboard box was handed along the line, as though it were a fireman’s bucket, and was deposited on the threshold of the hut. The top was open and I could see it was full of paper, or rather typescript. The patients were delivering the week’s work, ten versions of The Moon and Sixpence. I was impressed, indeed amazed and daunted by their immense productivity. There had to be a thousand pages or more in there, at least a hundred pages per patient. That wasn’t just prolific, that was manic; well, what a surprise. Reading it all was going to be a big job, even if it was one I’d been looking forward to.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Thanks very much. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’