Authors: Sebastian Faulks
They stopped giving me drugs because everyone could see they did no good. Take drugs away from a patient and he may improve; at least he’ll stop experiencing the side effects. But take drugs away from a shrink and all she has left is chat.
Dr Vidushi Sen is a very poor chatter. She sits opposite me with her shiny black hair tightly drawn back and pinned, in her pretty cotton shift worn over trousers that taper and button at the ankle. She blinks over her shallow black-framed glasses, clipboard in hand, and waits for me to spout.
I don’t think Dr Sen subscribes to the Exley theory of ‘personality disorder’. There’s a nasty mix there of nature and nurture, of a ‘biological substrate’ and plain bad behaviour. All a bit murky for her, I think. Am I meant to be mad or bad? The Exley answer, which essentially says ‘a bit of both’ is not to Dr Sen’s taste. And since I don’t really fit into any category of mental illness in either the American or European handbooks, of which there have been several new editions since I’ve been in Longdale, all of which she’s studied dutifully, Dr Sen is left with the conclusion that I am bad.
She thinks I am a very nasty man indeed and should really be banged up in Strangeways or Winson Green with the robbers and the ‘sane’ killers and the nonces. She believes I’m far too lucid, too well controlled and too reasonable to be mad. She’d like to say too well educated, too, but, in a way so convoluted one can barely follow it, that would be incorrect, politically.
Dr Sen would never actually say that I am bad. She’s very hot on ‘blame’ and ‘guilt’: absence of need for, destructive effects of.
Another thing she’s very hot on is me being gay. She hasn’t said as much, because it’s not her way to suggest things; but she’s always leaving the pink door ajar, hoping that one day I’ll sidle through. I’m dreading that in desperation she’ll order up another ‘penile seismograph’ or whatever the thing’s called, but instead of looking at some forlorn toms with their legs apart, I’ll be staring at Master Meat the Butcher’s Boy.
She’s a keen student of my journal and reveals a good deal about herself by the passages she chooses for our delectation. Those concerning Margaret and my relationship with her are of particular interest.
‘You called her “candid, optimistic and polite”.’
‘So?’
She says nothing, merely raises a shaped eyebrow. I know what she means: that these are the terms in which you might describe your chartered accountant, not your lover. I don’t say so; I just give her rather boring justifications of each adjective in turn.
She echoes Exley’s comment on my restrained description of the first time Margaret and I had it off together; I point out that I wasn’t writing to titillate. She also draws attention to my repeated references to sodomy and fisting in Her Majesty’s prisons, presumably wishing to imply that my obvious distaste is – oh, toiling paradox! – a concealed desire. I hear her big feet coming from the next valley.
‘And this boy “Rough”, the one who became so good at squash because he had gay desires . . .’
‘What about him?’
Again the raised eyebrow. She is at the very least implying that his name, as in Trade, is another throttled longing on my part.
‘Dr Sen, as you probably know, there is a huge amount of homosexual activity in this hospital. Two men in my block are virtually married, with the blessing of the supervising psychiatrist. They share a room. They have a standing order for condoms and KY from the hospital shop. Their relationship is said to have helped them both to earthly joy and the prospect of an early release. What’s to hide? Being gay would only make things better for me.’
Dr Sen seldom pushes things. She’s young, maybe thirty-two, and it’s against her training to suggest. You must also remember that Longdale is a maximum-security institution. Although we have confidentiality for our tête-à-têtes, the door of the consulting room is unlockable and I sit nearer to it, so that if a rescue has to be made I am easy to get at. The wall behind me is half glass and gives onto the corridor where a male nurse patrols, never more than a few paces away. There can suddenly be an undertow of danger. I see her sense it. Sometimes I see fear in her wide dark eyes: the dilating black pupils almost cover the brown iris.
Her view – I know, because she is transparent, so much better at self-disclosure than I am – is that I am a furious misogynist whose hatred of women springs from a violently suppressed homosexuality.
She also thinks I am a racist, and this is delicate because even though she’s as English as I am, with a similar regional accent, her family is originally from southern India. (Her first name, Vidushi, incidentally, means ‘Learned’ in Hindi, which tells you about her pushy parents in Maidenhead. I looked it up in
hinduism.about.com
on the Internet on the heavily firewalled computer in the day room.)
When she asked me about a passage I wrote many years ago on immigration, I repeated that I merely felt pity for the West Indians who were given a false prospectus and found Britain cold and inhospitable, and sorry that for the many people from the Asian subcontintent who traded in their beautiful country for the grey rain of Catford and Lewisham.
She didn’t look convinced. She also brought up my description of Shireen Nazawi as ‘EFL-speaking’.
I conceded that it was ungallant – but true: English wasn’t Shireen’s first language, and she struggled with it, as, consequently, did the readers of her articles.
Dr Sen didn’t push too hard here, I must admit, because although racism was an important part of her view of Engleby as Utter Shit, it wasn’t central to her assessment of why I killed Jennifer Arkland.
For misogyny, she relied on my description of the wine bar in Knightsbridge, suggesting I implied that all women were basically prostitutes, and on my ‘fascination’ for the street tarts in Paddington.
Obviously, I had no difficulty batting those two away.
More difficult was a sort of experimental undergrad riff that went: ‘Anne, Molly and Jennifer are, like all women, weirdly obsessed by appearances – looks, colours, fashion, surfaces; they have no interest in ideas or deeper truths, only “style” and status and the rapacious purchase of goods to underline them. Their cordiality conceals a sense of bitter rivalry that they’ll carry to their death, without ever acknowledging it. They’re really machines for surviving in the competition for resources. Carrying the species in their wombs, they have to be.’
She didn’t remember the exact words, but I was able to fill her in.
I then explained, as in a Dr Gerald Stanley supervision, that context is all. This wasn’t necessarily ‘my’ view; it was
a
view that had been offered as a corrective to a romanticised depiction of the girl students’ lives that had preceded it. It was a squirt of lemon in the eye to defuse the charge of ‘sentimentality’.
Dr Sen did have one powerful argument for misogyny in my case, and we both knew what it was. To her credit, it was six months or more before, under provocation from me, she brought it up.
As I recall, I was irritated by her refusal ever to pass judgement on me for what I’d done. She never seemed able to express even so much as a mild disapproval.
‘You’re like Bill Clinton,’ I said, knowing the comparison would appal her. ‘He took the intern as his girlfriend, then denied it. He screwed her and he lied and lied and lied. But in the end when he coughed up he couldn’t say that he’d done wrong, he’d only say what he’d done was “inappropriate”.’
‘I don’t believe the idea of blame is helpful,’ said Dr Sen, as always.
‘With no blame there’s no shame. A human society can’t exist without shame. Shame is like handedness or walking upright. It’s a central human attribute. In fact, it’s the first human quality ever recorded.’
‘Where?’
‘Genesis, Chapter Three. The covering of nakedness. The acquisition of shame was the first consequence of consciousness, of the speciating moment. Take shame from me and you are calling me pre-human.’
Dr Sen coughed and rearranged her notes. ‘I was merely thinking it might be worthwhile for you to think again about your attitude to women.’
‘Why again? I’ve thought about it so many times. You seem to think that everything can be explained by it. You see significance even in the fact that I once stole a girl’s bike when I was at school. It wasn’t an insult to worldwide womanhood. It was because I needed transport for the gin and whisky I was stealing, so I could make money. It was about cash, not women. If there’d been a boy’s bike to hand, I’d have stolen that instead.’
She stopped looking down at her notes and met my exasperated gaze, quite calmly.
‘But you stole a woman’s bike again, in Cambridge, didn’t you?’
‘What have bicycles got to do with misogyny?’
‘That’s your word, not mine. I’ve never said you are misogynistic. But if anyone wanted to find evidence for that in your character, they needn’t look far, need they? After all, by your own admission, you violently killed a young woman.’
She’d gone too far, and she knew it. She blushed a little, which gave her cheek a most beautiful colour, of rose under gold.
And in her shame was her humanity.
I don’t think that’s a misogynistic remark.
Thirteen
I had a visit from Stellings today. Yes, you can have visits here. I told you: it’s a hospital.
Like you, I’d imagined iron-barred cells with famous Panthers and Rippers served food by armed yet windy guards through hatches using lengthy tongs while the men inside went more and more insane down the years, beating their brains against the damp brick walls.
In fact there are only a handful of people kept locked up and it’s mostly for their own safety. But all the famous guys – you can bump into them over the seed boxes in the garden stores, or doing some fiddly work with a bradawl in the carpentry shop.
I met Stellings in the overheated day room where Johnnie Johnston and a couple of others were watching
Neighbours
on television.
Stellings was dressed in what he imagines to be a non-homicidal-maniac-inciting outfit of blue jeans, stone windcheater and open-necked plaid shirt with a nasty little polo pony on the breast pocket.
He’s very butch about being normal and makes a thing of saying hello to anyone he remembers from previous visits. ‘Hi, Frank!’ he calls with a wave to creepy Frank Usborne, who, I told Stellings, had killed three rent boys and kept bits of them in the freezer compartment of his fridge.
This is completely untrue. I’ve no idea what crime Frank committed, but by far his worst offence inside is that he always gets to the Sudoku puzzle in the newspaper before anyone else and completes it before breakfast. If above the grid it gives the rating ‘Difficult’, Frank puts a little left-out sign and adds ‘Not Very’ in ballpoint next to it.
This is really annoying.
At the age of 52, Stellings has retired from Oswald Payne. He renounced his equity partnership to give some of the younger bloods a shot, but in fact he had little choice in the matter as fifty is considered the end of the line in his world.
‘Some of these young guys, they’re just animals, Mike. There’s a twenty-eight-year-old called Sean Busby I’m afraid I was responsible for hiring. Normally our partners work on a lockstep arrangement, but Busby wouldn’t stay unless he worked on an “eat what you kill” basis.’
‘Couldn’t you have done that in your day, Stellings?’
‘No. I was very much for lockstep, it’s more collegiate, it encourages people to pool their resources and work as a team. I’d hate to be on an eat-what-you-kill basis. That way, everyone’s just working for themselves.’ He puffed out his cheeks. ‘Though I suppose I wouldn’t have minded eating what Sean Busby killed.’
‘Or Frank Usborne.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Mike.’
I don’t think Stellings likes coming to Longdale with its barbed-wire walls and silly regulations. ‘Toiletries. Patients can only receive these if they are in plastic bottles. NOT glass or aerosols. Items should be new and in the original wrapping. Any seals must not be broken.’ Christ knows what Clarissa and her smart friends with their personal trainers make of his visits. He can’t bring food or sweets in case he’s tampered with them; he can’t even bring cigarettes for fear that he’s replaced the tobacco with a bit of Glynn Powers’s finest.
The only reason Stellings comes to see me is because entirely by chance, one evening almost thirty-five years ago, he found himself sitting next to me at dinner in a candlelit hall in our first week in college.
Everything else – every single thing in the intervening thirty-five years – is down to politeness.
I’ve been in here since March 1989, so that makes seventeen years. And I’m managing. I’ll come up for review again in 2008, apparently, and by then society or the
Daily Mail
may feel I’ve done enough, even though in theory I haven’t been punished at all, I’ve only been treated. It is a weird thing with us guys who are not ‘mentally ill’. There was a schizophrenic who in a moment of early mania cut off his mother’s head and baked it in a pie. His father killed himself from grief. The son did seven years in a Special Hospital, got better, and was released. People like me, on the other hand, are for ever defined by what we did; we can’t really get ‘better’ in that way. But don’t let’s go there again, or I’ll get as ‘vexed’ as Dr Turner.