Bedlam Burning Page 21

  ‘Got any drugs on you?’ she asked.

  ‘No!’ I said.

  ‘I thought as much. You know, if I have one complaint about Dr K, it’s that he doesn’t give us enough drugs.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘And even when he appears to be giving us enough I sometimes think they’re mostly placebos. He gets all these free drugs given to him by the drug companies—’

  ‘Does he?’

  ‘Oh come on, don’t be naive, Greg. This whole place is funded by drug company money.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘How else do you think it survives? On love? On government subsidy?’

  I hadn’t thought about it. I hadn’t been much concerned with the clinic’s finances. And even if I’d wanted to know about the Kincaid Clinic’s workings I got the feeling I’d have had a hard time discovering much. If I couldn’t get access to the patients’ case histories, I was hardly likely to get financial information.

  ‘I never thought about it,’ I answered.

  ‘That’s because you’re an artist, I suppose,’ she said, and I wasn’t sure if she was being contemptuous or not. ‘All I’m saying is Kincaid gets given all these free drugs and he keeps them to himself, and I think it’s a rip off. That’s why I have to make a deals with the local boys.’

  ‘Deals?’

  ‘I dance for them and they supply me.’

  She opened her hand and revealed a stash of pills and tablets, like a handful of shiny, multicoloured insects.

  ‘They just gave you these?’

  ‘Right. Not bad for a little dance work. Dancing may be spiritual but it has its material side too.’

  ‘Why do you need drugs?’ I asked.

  It was a naive question even for me, even for then. This was a time when the whole world was starting to need drugs: to get high, to come down, to stay calm, to stay thin, to stay in control, to wake up, to doze off, to make friends, to make deals, to show you were made of the right stuff, to insulate, to meditate, to fornicate. And soon there would be all those people who didn’t need any reason at all.

  ‘I need more drugs to be more sane,’ Charity said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘God is drugs,’ she insisted.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I don’t care about your opinion. Timothy Leary says that modern psychology is based more on worrying about what the neighbours think than on anything else. Isn’t that a terrible condemnation?’

  ‘Seems like you get along fairly well with your neighbours,’ I said.

  ‘You’re so conventional, Gregory. Even your name sounds straight. Gregory Collins. It sounds like a name from the past. The future’s going to have a different name. Want to smoke some dope?’

  ‘Is that all right?" I asked.

  ‘It’s against the law of the land, if that’s what you mean, but it’s not going to kill you.’

  ‘I mean what if Dr Kincaid finds out?’

  ‘Fuck Kincaid,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve heard that some people do,’ I said, vaguely paraphrasing a line I remembered from the movie of Cabaret.

  She gave a laugh that already sounded stoned.

  ‘Maybe you’re not such a straight after all,’ she said.

  She dug in a plastic bag and produced a fat, ready rolled joint. She lit it, inhaled once herself and handed it to me. I hesitated, but only for a moment. If I was prepared to drink with Max, why shouldn’t I smoke dope with Charity? If I was the wild subversive guy I sometimes thought I was, surely I should ingest a few illegal substances. We sat down on the bed, keeping a safe distance between us, and I took a couple of deep drags. It tasted like mild, ineffective stuff.

  ‘Sometimes I think cosmic consciousness is the only gig worth playing,’ Charity said. ‘Spiritual growth is the only therapy worth thinking about.’

  Grudgingly I admitted that might be true. To the limited extent that I thought I knew what spiritual growth was I would probably have welcomed it, but I wasn’t actively seeking it out. It seemed to me the world was far too full of people who were looking for wisdom, truth, ultimate solutions, and I was amazed and depressed at how easily they found all these things.

  ‘We’re all looking for guidance,’ Charity said. ‘We all need like a guide, someone who’ll reawaken the divinity inside us.’

  ‘Someone like the Pope,’ I said.

  We both giggled at that one. Maybe the dope was better than I thought.

  ‘I mean a real holy man,’ Charity said. ‘A guru. Maybe a shaman.’

  ‘You think you’re going to find one around here?’

  ‘Why not? The gates of Eden may be wherever you look for them.’ She stared at me a little too hard and said, ‘Couldn’t you be a guide?’

  I was stoned enough to think she might be serious.

  ‘No, not me,’ I said. ‘I’ve got nothing to teach anyone. Except for creative writing. And even then—’

  ‘But that’s just what I’d expect a really great spiritual teacher to say.’

  ‘I’m just a writer,’ I lied.

  ‘But writing’s a spiritual discipline, isn’t it?’

  ‘In a way—’

  ‘And God’s like this bestselling creative writer, isn’t he?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Charity said. ‘A lot of people want to say God’s dead but what if he’s like a writer who’s run out of plots, or he’s got writer’s block? Or what if maybe he’s not dead, but, you know, he’s just gone nuts?’

  The dope was working wonderfully, so well that not only could I follow what Charity was saying, but I also had a profound, if free-floating, sense of its significance, of the way in which it seemed to explain everything about writing and God and the workings of the Kincaid Clinic. Things in the room were looking sharper and brighter, the peacock feathers were shivering with a cold, metallic light.

  ‘Do you believe in free love?’ she asked me and I froze a little.

  ‘“Free love” is a term I’ve never been able to use except in inverted commas,’ I said.

  She looked at me sadly. ‘I don’t think you’re a bad guy, but you’re too armoured and too much in your own head. And that’s why you can’t believe in free love.’

  I wasn’t sure whether that was true or not, and although I recognised ‘armoured’ as a Reichian term I didn’t altogether know what it meant, and I wasn’t sure Charity did either. I replied, ‘All I’m saying is that I don’t think free love is so much a question of belief as of temperament.’

  ‘Now you’re just using words,’ she said, as though this was the final condemnation.

  ‘The rumour is there are already quite enough believers in free love here in the clinic.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ she demanded. ‘Charles Manning?’

  I didn’t deny it.

  ‘Poor old Charles. Yeah well, that’s the myth the straight world has about the insane, right? They’re crazy so they can have all the sex they want and it doesn’t matter, whereas the sane people are repressed and shut down and militarised and they only have it on Saturday nights if they’re lucky, and that’s supposed to be healthy. Free love is the sanest thing anybody’s ever come up with.’

  AIDS, of course, was not on anybody’s mind at this point, although the horrors of venereal disease and crabs and hepatitis still seemed well worth avoiding if at all possible, to say nothing of unwanted pregnancies.

  And then, belatedly but not unexpectedly, Charity started to explain herself. She said, ‘I don’t belong here, you know. I’m not crazy. It’s my family; that’s where the problems always come from. Always. They’re rich, they hate me, I’m an embarrassment to them. They call me an exhibitionistic nymphomaniac. But I’m just looking for attention and love, and I’m looking to take a few drugs and get in touch with the spiritual forces. They can’t deal with that. OK, so I have a religious vision once in a while, I like to dance sky-clad, I see the face of God in a puddle or a pa
tch of shadow or something, but what’s so bad about that? They think it’s dangerous. God and sex and drugs are too much for them. They want me out of the way, so they pay the bills for me to stay here. That’s cool with me, like it’s a health club or a finishing school. I like it here, but I don’t belong.’

  ‘Nobody seems to think they belong here,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah well, some of us are right about that and some aren’t. You can fuck me if you want, Gregory. It’d be really cosmic.’

  She let the shirt drop from her shoulders.

  ‘No thanks, Charity. I’m sure that would get me into all sorts of trouble,’ I said, and I woozily dragged myself up off the bed and started making slow, stoned progress towards the door, across a floor that seemed to be made of marshmallow.

  ‘Hey, Gregory, don’t be a drag. Don’t make your excuses and leave.’

  I didn’t flatter myself that Charity really wanted to have sex with me. Either she was just trying to embarrass me or she was just stoned or she was just a nymphomaniac. None of these cases required me to do anything. However, her professed belief in free love did sound like possible circumstantial evidence for Charles Manning’s assertion that the clinic was a hotbed of sexual activity, and although I still saw no real proof of this, I found it was on my mind a lot more than I wanted it to be. I made my excuses and left.

  20

  I realise parts of my account make it sound as though the whole clinic was a continual seething mass of sex, drugs and alcohol, but it didn’t feel that way to me at the time. I still spent a large part every day just reading, either the patients’ work or the limited treasures from the library. And when the patients came to talk to me they often had perfectly chaste concerns. Byron would talk quite rationally about literature, although he never read anything from the library. I suspect he thought the books there were beneath him. Raymond, now usually to be seen wearing white gloves and vermilion lipstick, might come and tell me about some of the more exotic tourist sights he’d seen on his stopovers. Cook might tell me that someone had been putting ideas in his head and that he now thought the world was like a colander or a book of matches or a pizza. Some of these encounters were tedious, but I didn’t complain. I liked to be available for the patients. I didn’t try to be all things to all people, but I did what I could.

  I was in my hut one day when I detected a burning vegetable sort of smell. Then wisps of smoke drifted by, then sheets, then choking clouds of bleached grey smoke filled the hut. I got up from my desk and stood in the doorway looking out across the garden and saw the smoke came from the far side of a rhododendron bush. I went to investigate, but I knew what I’d find. Nothing more sinister than Maureen burning some garden rubbish. She’d made a small unruly bonfire out of branches, weeds, grass cuttings, all of them suspiciously green and unwilling to burn. She and Raymond stood looking at the bonfire unhappily.

  ‘How’s it going?’ I asked.

  ‘Not so good,’ Maureen said, sounding both sad and puzzled.

  Raymond fanned some smoke away from his face with a gloved hand and muttered, ‘They say there’s no smoke without fire, but we’re not so sure.’

  He had a point. There was no gleam of flame visible anywhere in the heap of smouldering rubbish.

  ‘Everybody likes a good fire,’ said Maureen. ‘Everybody likes to see the flames dance.’

  ‘You know what we like best about fires?’ Raymond asked.

  I feared it might be something sexual, or something about air crashes or destruction or the cleansing power of flame, but I said, ‘Tell me.’

  ‘We like the faces,’ Maureen said. ‘We like it when the flames have died down and you’re left with the embers and you stare into them and you see things: faces and animals and footballers and things like that.’

  ‘And air crashes,’ said Raymond.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I suppose we all like that.’

  ‘But do we all see the same things,’ Maureen asked, ‘or do we just project what we have in our own minds, you know like the old ink blots?’

  Yes, I said, I knew all about the old ink blots. We stood peering into the heart of the smoking pile. There was still no sign of a flame and I think we all felt a disappointment.

  ‘You won’t tell Dr Kincaid that we see images in the fire, will you, Gregory?’

  I said that I wouldn’t, any more than I’d have told him about Max’s replica pub, or Charity’s dope-smoking. I was pleased the patients thought of me as an ally, that they confided in me rather than Kincaid, although I wasn’t sure what this was likely to do for their mental health.

  ‘I think it’s probably all right to see faces in the fire,’ I said. ‘I don’t see how you can help it. I don’t think it can be all that bad for you.’

  Maureen and Raymond smiled at me but I wasn’t sure what their smiles meant. At the time I liked to think it showed that they believed me and found my words reassuring but later I began to wonder if what they were really saying was, ‘How would you know? You’re only a writer.’

  They were wrong about that, of course, I wasn’t a writer, but I was trying to do my best. True, there were times when my best seemed miserably inadequate, times when the writing, which continued to arrive in the same dauntingly vast quantities, didn’t seem to be getting any better, and neither as far as I could see, did the patients. And yet, and yet … Sometimes it really did seem to me that the work was starting to add up to something, though I couldn’t have said what, not a work of art, not a body of writing, not a thing you could show to anyone and say, look at this, this is good, this has quality or value or meaning. What then? Well, sometimes I wondered if it really did amount to a gestalt, a group mind as Kincaid had suggested, or at the very least a picture of madness at this time in social and cultural history.

  But this notion wouldn’t always hold either. There were other times when I felt I was wasting my time as well as everyone else’s, times when I thought, at best, I was just there helping the patients pass the time, keeping them out of harm’s way, distracting them. And all I was doing when I put their writings in the library was collecting waste paper.

  I was walking in the grounds when I heard a voice, unmistakably Anders’, though he sounded softer, more constrained, more intimate than usual and he was involved in describing something or other.

  ‘Yes,’ I heard him say, ‘there’s a Spanish galleon, and a double-decker bus, and a rhinoceros, and a map of Italy, or maybe just a boot, and there’s a rolled leg of pork, and waves on a beach, and a dressing table, and oh fuck, that does feel good.’

  You might have guessed it was someone casting their eyes over more Rorschach blots, but that seemed an unlikely activity to be taking place out of doors. It also sounded like Anders was enjoying it far too much. I was curious to see what he was up to, and although he wasn’t someone you wanted to disturb or intrude on, after listening to more of his monologue, ‘An armchair, a dolphin, a lightbulb, a pygmy, a lung, a trumpet, and oh Jesus …’ I decided to take a look. Fortunately I could hide behind another rhododendron bush and peer through its foliage.

  At first I could see only a part of Anders, the lower half, but that was in some ways enough. He was lying on his back and his trousers and underpants were down, leaving him naked from waist to ankle. I could see chunky, hirsute legs, scarred knees and also his penis, chunky certainly, though not hirsute or scarred, and it was being nonchalantly fondled by a fully clothed Sita.

  I experienced a number of contradictory, ambiguous emotions. The first one was surprise. I had never watched people having any sort of sex before, and it felt horribly intrusive. But at the same time I felt almost pleased, as though I’d discovered or proved something. It wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination an orgy, but it was definitely something.

  Anders continued to talk, slowly, in this meandering yet precise, free-associative way, and Sita stroked his penis in a complementary though not identical rhythm. ‘A pheasant, a meringue, a sledgehammer, an ear, a Christmas tre
e,’ he said, and then in quite a different tone added, ‘Christ, Sita, you’re doing a bloody good job down there.’

  I moved as surreptitiously as I could, to a position where I could see Anders’ face. I wanted to see what he was looking at. The back of his head was resting on the grass and his eyes were staring straight ahead of him, up into the sky, into space, at nothing. But then I saw the sky was full of clouds that a lively breeze was ruffling and remoulding. Anders was describing what he saw in them. ‘A castle, a pillow, a loaf of bread, an isthmus …’ I studied the clouds and I could see what he meant, sort of. Yes, there was definitely one formation in the sky that looked quite like a castle, a loaf of bread and so on. I probably wouldn’t have ‘seen’ these things if I hadn’t heard Anders naming them, but they were definitely, in some sense of the word, visible; in some sense of the phrase, there to be seen. What, if anything, they had to do with sex I had no idea.

  Anders continued to speak, though he now was talking more quickly and with less precision, ‘A helicopter, a petrol pump, and a, you know, a fish, an octopus, one of those … oh Christ, I’m coming …’ which he duly did, after which he slid into a deep silence. Sita let go of his penis and wiped her hand on the grass; not very flattering to a man, I’d have thought.

  I retreated. My tread was tentative, since I assumed the postorgasmic Anders would be rather more alert than the pre-orgasmic one, and I imagined he might have specially violent impulses towards peeping Toms. I was so busy trying to creep away that I didn’t see Charles Manning until I’d nearly walked into him. I was startled. He was not.

  ‘Sometimes it’s good to watch, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The human imagination is a deep, fecund source of erotic images, but sometimes it isn’t enough.’

  ‘What? I said again.

  ‘Personally,’ he continued, ‘I’d say I’ve lived a fairly full sensual life. It’s certainly provided the fodder for a goodly amount of self-abuse. And yet there’s nothing like a bit of fresh, real-life stimulus for recharging the erotic batteries. One’s own fantasies are necessarily limited. To catch a glimpse of someone else’s reality is jolly arousing, even if Anders isn’t precisely the man I would most like to have striding through my erotic reveries.’