The Possessions of Doctor Forrest Read online

  I will say, too, that I’m far happier now to be in West Wing with my fellow Depressives, Neurotics & Bipolars. I don’t mind the proximity to the Anorexics in Upper Court – they’re serious individuals, all of them, I can see that. But the drunks and cokeheads in East Wing – get them behind me, I don’t want to go near that particular circle of hell.

  Forgive me, though, if I say I’m still a bit troubled to be thought of as the inmate of a boutique asylum. How green would be my girlfriends’ eyes at the size of my en suite, my plasma TV, my palatial bed (even more so to know that that pop singer slept in it before me, struggling with her ‘exhaustion’, even before she’d begun her world tour). But on that first morning I stood before your doors here, tentative, suitcase in hand. I have to say Blakedene Hall just looked to me like some country-house holiday spot for weekending bankers. Even this time I still felt a measure of guilt stepping over the threshold into the foyer. One does expect a porter to take one’s bags, a concierge to pocket one’s car keys, a maître d’ to sketch out what the chef has planned for dinner.

  However, I am no inverse snob – that would ill become me. And I would say of the building that it exudes a huge reassurance. Anyone would call it handsome – that Palladian sandstone so grandly high and wide, pleasingly darkened by rain and ivy; the Doric porch and pilasters, the low arcaded wings, the delightful south-facing veranda where a girl can smoke her Gitanes in peace as she writes up her diary …

  I am a diarist by nature, you know that. Only I used to write so that I could hear my own voice, to cope with the terrible silence in the place where I lived. These days … I’m actually rather afraid of what I might be thinking. Do you really expect me to be truthful here on this page? True, when I first made a friend of pen and paper, aged 12, it seemed a needful and acceptable thing to fantasise, succumb to the occasional swoon – since my imagination was innocent, fundamentally chaste. I expect you guessed – that handsome, angular English teacher I penned up a storm about, the one who urged me to read Rimbaud and Baudelaire? He didn’t exist. Nor the stable-boy on the neighbouring estate, beautiful but inclined to the spiritual. Such were my daydreams, back then. Before Flint. Before everything got torn and ruined and turned to shit by that fuck-pig, that despicable scum, ravageur, monstre, corrupteur.

  * * *

  Steven – there are things I struggle to tell you – because you will not think well of me. Since last I was here? I made mistakes. I can’t help disappointing you, and I fear I will continue to do so. I disappoint myself.

  The girls who used to bully me at St Mary’s, those viciously bored little queen-bees – yet I can’t help thinking they had a point, you know. You told me they were just upper-class English snobs, looking down their long noses because my father made his fortune in cut-price phones and laptops. But maybe they sensed something more: that I was one of life’s open wounds, and it would be too much fun for them to pour salt on me. The knife looks for a wound, Steven, the wound for a knife – the old romance of la plaie et le couteau.

  Can you help me? Even now? And can I still keep my secrets? Without them, you must understand, there’s only so much of me that remains.

  8

  Dr Hartford’s Journal

  Some devil

  August 31st

  Thwarted at every turn is how I feel today. My report back to Team on Eloise Keaton’s clearly much worsened condition was greeted by … a strange, flat scepticism – much as yesterday’s management meeting seemed to hum with implicit disapproval of me. Even Margaret Yang tossed a few barbs on how I prioritise my time, to perceptible nods from Andrew Gillon. Then Grey called me at lunch, confirming our run on the Heath tomorrow morning, after so many recent cancellations – only to add it would be a chance for us ‘to work out what we’re going to do about Robert’. Exactly what does he imagine we can do in the circumstances? Pack torches and spades, form a two-man search party? Trawl the Thames, stake out the airports? I understand his fears, his dismay, I share them. But clearly the police are chasing up every lead.

  Of course, it all put me in a less than ideal state of preparedness for two taxing hours with David Tregaskis. I went out to fetch him from the art pavilion, found him sat apart as ever, commanding the space of a whole trestle table, going avidly about a sculpture in creamy water-based clay that he’d perched up on a metal pole. Staring stark-eyed at his work, tugging his long dark locks, his red tongue tapping at his teeth, he looked every inch the Byronic artist. His shirt was open to near the navel, asserting his all-over hairiness.

  Evidently the sculpture was a bust, with a rudimentary neck and oval head, but there were intimations of bone structure, the bridge of a nose and full lips had been roughed out. David has talent, no question. How quickly he’s taught himself this craft! Little sticks, paperclips and sponges were strewn about, and in his hand he was turning a sharp-pointed divider-calliper that made me a tad uneasy. But Dora Holzman manages the pavilion, it’s her call. And I do consider David harmless, even to himself.

  He ‘greeted’ me first by a distracted nod, while he twisted and tugged at the fine silver bracelet he wears always on his wrist – a distressed but clearly precious loop of intricate little knots. Finally he turned those hard orbs of his onto me.

  ‘Yeah. It’s blank now but all will become clear. You want to start right, see, at the outset of any piece. You treat the structure respectfully, especially when you’re a novice – with kid gloves. But, at some point, you have to jump in. Do violence.’

  With that, still pensive, David turned back to his raw clay head, grasped it in both hands and, with his thumbs, inflicted a twin pair of gouges. Then he popped a rolled-up little eyeball of clay into one hole, and began to scratch a ‘retina’ with one of his unfurled paperclips. Sitting atop scattered papers on the trestle was a charcoal drawing in his skilful hand, some lovely long-haired female. I complimented his draughtsmanship, he merely shoved the sketch under some other pages.

  ‘How are the kids, Steven? Little Julian okay?’ (Too often of late I’ve noticed this unsettling ability of David’s, as if guided by queer frequencies, to seemingly intuit whatever’s wrong in my household.) ‘And how is Tessa? You know there are still a few things I’d really like to discuss with her, if that were possible …’

  I wish I’d never let on to David that Tessa is a medievalist. He’s hinted before as to which aspects of the period preoccupy him – namely the persecution of the Knights Templar by Philip of France on Friday the thirteenth, October 1307; plus the alleged usage of the blood of Christian children in the Passover meal. Intelligent though David undoubtedly is, I find his intellectual interests highly selective. And given his tendency to lead any topic down a rabbit-hole, gesturing wearily or testily if one fails to follow his impossible turns, I don’t think a ‘discussion’ between Tessa and him could satisfy either party.

  Margaret Yang, the first of us to treat him here, told me she knew his type: ‘the sort of guy who really believes he’s Jesus Christ, but the trouble is he’s got a very detailed and not completely implausible explanation for it’. When his parents brought him in his poor little mother wept to me, ‘Oh doctor, he always had a wild imagination, it’s only more recent he’s started to change …’ What he had ‘more recent’ was mental distortion from years of marijuana and amphetamine abuse. He was at art school when they diagnosed him depressed, prescribed him Seroxat, whereupon a whirlwind was unleashed: turmoil, his asserting that he’d ceased to feel ‘real’. That psychosis, at least, is past. His sense of unreality, though, persists. This is David’s fourth stay with us. I had believed he improved each time, if I didn’t quite understand why. Now I’m less sure. Still, we are committed to people once they’ve come, we see them through – I’ve waived certain charges in David’s case, not that he will ever thank me for it.

  Lately I believe he’s finally found something here that he truly responds to – not our cares, alas, rather an aspect of Blakedene’s history that appeals to his mystical bent. On
the shelves of the ground-floor library, amid a modest collection of titles devoted to local history, David seized on our copy of the privately printed memoir of William Harron, a rightly obscure old fraud of a ‘society medium’ (from Kirkcaldy, no less) who used to conduct séances here during the 1860s, at the invitation of the then lord of the manor, the disreputable third Marquess of Ravenscourt. Indeed, once David and I were seated in my office he spent fifteen minutes petitioning to be moved from his room, as he believes it to be the very site where Victorian visitors to Blakedene were haunted by the shade of Roisin Slaney, a servant girl reputedly impregnated then killed by the depraved Ravenscourt. Trying to keep us clear of that rabbit-hole, I assured David that in all my time here I’d received no reports of any spectral sightings.

  Whereupon things went downhill. I append the transcript, which is, by its oddness, self-explanatory. I should say it was preceded by a silence of maybe thirty seconds wherein David merely glowered at me.

  DT: I’m disturbed, Steven, I’m disappointed by your, your— flat, your dull, your may I say boring, may I say resentful tone of voice?

  SH: I’m sorry, ‘resentful’ because—?

  DT: Because you’re so mired in your all-too-human thoughts. Human thoughts have changed a million times since this world began. They’ll change a million more before it ends.

  SH: David, shall we … speak of something else, some other—?

  DT: No, don’t make me talk about— banal things, not now when we just got near the essence. Just because you resist it. Have you even thought for one minute about the walls around you? These spirit-ridden walls?

  SH: Well— I’m a sceptic in this area, David, as are a great many people. I have given it thought, believe me. I do accept there’s a vital part of our lives that is ‘spiritual’, for want of a word with fewer connotations. But I’ve never been convinced that the spirits of the dead return to us in order to … bang on a parlour table. Or upturn a vase of flowers …

  DT: You’re talking about Harron? Yes, I agree. The gods don’t do magic shows. Harron’s methods weren’t refined, nor were his peers’. But in their day, for their time, they were pathfinders, Steven. True scientists, with true theory of death. We owe them better than this modern-day, pseudo-sophisticate contempt.

  SH: David, as you know, science proposes a method, standards of evidence—

  DT: Of course it does. If spiritualism can’t refute any scientific enquiry then it’s not true spiritualism. My spiritualism is founded on knowledge, not faith. On spiritual power, Steven. The whole problem is that spiritualism’s never been properly applied, properly tested – because of the sceptics, the faint-hearts, dimwits who hear the word ‘spirit’ and imagine only evil. Roisin Slaney wasn’t evil. Never harmed one of the dozens, dozens of people who saw her here—

  SH: But you fear she might harm you? Since you want to change your room?

  […]

  DT: No. My concern would be that Master Ravenscourt might choose to come after her again. ‘The satanic Marquess …’ He was absolutely sure he’d be reborn, you know. Such were his— energies. The spirits want human form, they seek the medium of flesh. To get things done.

  […]

  SH: Listen, David, I take seriously your interest, I do—

  DT: I’ve been seeing the spirits since I was four years old, Steven. Hearing them. I never asked for that, didn’t want it—

  SH: I understand that, I know—

  DT: But, listen, in itself that means nothing. Every one of us has the faculty, it’s only that so few trust in it. All I am is one who’s open. The spirits are in the air, Steven, they can come in a dream, they can jump out of a mirror. They’re common that way. What are we, any of us, but spirits enveloped by flesh …?

  I had thought David was improving … and now this. Might his ‘spiritualism’ be just an ‘encapsulated delusion’ – like his fellow inmate Marcia Fallow, perfectly lucid but for her belief she has been married, at one time or another, to a man from each and every country she can name (Dutch men the most affable, Syrians quite despicable, et cetera)?

  No, reviewing those baroque exchanges I realise now just how much David reminds me of the Spartan types I used to argue with fruitlessly at draughty socialist meetings, forever thinking they’d ‘refuted’ me by citing some neglected footnote to a footnote note in Marx. That’s David – he’s like the last communist. The problematic friend I can’t bear to dump. But I am his friend. No one but me is going to make the effort with him. At the same time, I must acknowledge, he’s assumed the place in my life once occupied by Tom Dole. This cannot be good, not for either of us.

  Margaret Yang has long argued that David’s only ‘topping up’, playing the system, manipulating my attention. Possibly. But the pain in his life is real, even if only an aggravated version of a form we’re all familiar with: a frustration with the limits of his own person. The problem is what do I do about that? Call in a shaman?

  * * *

  ‘Get back in your fucking cage, you mad cunt.’

  This, the sensitive response of the bloke I saw being asked for spare change by the barking beggar outside the mini-market first thing this morning. (I could have spared myself the spectacle, but such was my need for twenty cigarettes.) The bloke wasn’t aware he was having an argument until he was stuck in it – the beggar jabbing a finger first at the bloke’s face then at his own skull, his charge being that certain thoughts were broadcasting from out the top of his head, and this bloke had been trying to eavesdrop. So vehement were the beggar’s curses that the bloke’s rejoinder was, I suppose, inevitable, even defensible.

  The beggar, still shouting after the bloke’s retreating back, shoved a hand down the front of his filthy strides, the hand then becoming visibly agitated. I am quite certain that, had I asked him, he would have told me his hand was ‘possessed’. This is the sort of man I should be treating, except he can’t afford me. He needs a friend, this man. He was a boy once, and all his cares were as nothing. What happened to him?

  Of course, we used to think ‘behaviours’ such as his were the work of witches and demons. Indeed, I’ve met Somalian immigrants to this country who remain of that view: still comfortable with the notion that the devil – the Deceiver, the Father of Lies – intervenes in our affairs. They come to our cities, take on dirt jobs, pay a fortune in rent and council tax for some hovel where the neighbours hate them. Their wives leave them for some witch-doctor, and they seek succour from some other witch-doctor, who tells them the author of their misfortune is …? ‘The devil, probably.’

  Do I have a better idea? My profession long ago dispensed with Satan, of course, but initially advanced no further than to the notion that madness thrived in the sufferer’s blood, and could be drawn out by a sensible application of leeches. What are the fruits of wisdom that centuries of enquiry now bestow upon me? ‘Get some drugs into this man! Dampen down those symptoms!’

  I saw another beggar this morning, fifty yards down the street from the ranter, slumped under the cashpoint where I stopped to top up. A girl, sexlessly shaven-headed, wearing a vest and khaki shorts and boots, as if she’d just staggered out of a desert. She looked floppy, inert, no sign of will or initiative, not even of any strong feeling, unlike our ranter friend. I suspect she wouldn’t eat much, even if food she had – likewise vis-à-vis her personal hygiene. She’s not right, anyone can see. But is she really ill? If so, how so? Type Two Schizophrenia? But if you can’t see it under a microscope, is it really illness? Mightn’t it be those devils?

  Back when I was dissecting the brains of schizophrenics at the Maudsley – what did I hope to find there amid the spongy tissue? Some glaring abnormalities in structure and function? Or the finest, most minute strangeness, the stuff of a life’s work? In any event, I was disappointed. Yes, I have felt some upsurge of hope lately when we’ve scanned the brains of patients by magnetic resonance. If one keeps an eye on the bold fields indicative of metabolic rate and blood-flow – there you can
perceive a definite visible correlate of the patient’s mental turmoil. That’s when it feels meaningful. But MRI costs. The drugs are cheaper, faster – ‘more effective in the short term’.

  No, in the main I have to go by the evidence of mine own eyes. And what I can actually see is distress: people so immensely pained that everything about them is just inappropriate – every thought, every action. Something has ripped the soul out of them, they live in a thought-world of permanent black.

  But then what about those black thoughts that seem to oppress all of us, at times, out here in the community of the sane? Mightn’t those thoughts just be a necessary part of the human experience, to a greater or lesser extent? I’ve treated people for the seeming crime of ceasing to wash and care properly for themselves. These mornings of late I stare into the mirror at a pale unshaven shambles of a man, waiting for my double to say ‘What does that make you …?’

  * * *

  A curious coda to the day. I went walking over to West Wing, thinking I might slip Eloise’s workbook back under her door, but all was dark and silent and I thought better – was on the point of retreating to make up my bed on the Chesterfield – until I saw a slash of light onto the corridor outside David’s room. I wandered down, peeked in, saw him in the swivel chair at his desk, avidly at work on that clay bust. Dora must have let him take materials to his room. I must have words with Dora …

  He had fashioned some delicate small pieces – nose, lips, ears – and adhered them to the mass of the head. Now he was sculpting some surrounding coils into a mass of hair, taking care to suggest flowing locks. To me it rather had the look of Frankenstein fashioning a bride for himself. For a while I stood there peering over his shoulder. I still feel a sort of childish wonder in seeing how a likeness can be brought to life, how by mimetic art we meet faces we never saw before, yet suddenly seem to know better than our friends. This woman being moulded by David – she had an inchoate loveliness, an Attic refinement, albeit something Medusa-like to those coils. In truth I did feel she resembled some face I’d seen before, but far too vaguely to place.