The Wanderer (7 page)

On the second evening, Rachel came to my door, called out, ‘Where are you? Everyone’s worried! Are you there?’

I stayed quiet and still. After a while, she gave up, went away.

On the morning of the third day, I went into the hall, found a local rag jutting from my letterbox, the tape I’d stuck over the slot torn free. I dug out some matches, set fire to the newspaper, went into my room, cowered beneath the bedclothes.

Later, I learnt that the paint on the front door, which dated to the building’s conversion into flats, nearly twenty years before, was not fire-retardant. It went up straight away. Burning smuts spread the blaze, fluttered through the air, lighted on my coatrack and the old sofa I kept in the hallway. Fumes swiftly overcame me.

A neighbour called the emergency services. They responded quickly, the fire was put out, and I was carried out, still out, by the paramedics. When I came round in the ambulance, I babbled,
struggled, and they had to sedate me. At hospital, my raving continued, and, following treatment for smoke inhalation, I was transferred to a mental health unit. Rachel, my parents, and some friends came to see me. So I gathered afterwards, I knew no one. I fixed visitors with a glare, grabbed their hands, spoke to them in a low, desperate tone, claiming the brutal murders in the capital were my doing, that devils had possessed me, made me kill. This was reported to the police, and Amanda Hayworth came to speak with my doctors. She told them what I’d found in the Soho alleyway, explained I wasn’t held under any suspicion. When, after some weeks, I was still deranged, the psychiatrists treating me recommended that my parents give permission for me to be committed a time. They reluctantly agreed.

For six months, I was confined to a sanatorium on the Kent coast, the Fairchild Institute: a foursquare Georgian country residence, atop the cliffs, staring blankly out to sea, a place of light-grey stone blocks, ivied gable ends, a gently pitched roof, myriad chimney stacks. My room on the third floor, in the former servants’ quarters, was cramped, but otherwise comfortable, well-appointed; it contained a double bed, a wardrobe and writing desk, and had a small en-suite bathroom with a shower, toilet, and wash basin. From the window I could see the edge of the bluff and, beyond, the Channel. On days when the sun was out and light glittered on the water, the sea looked thin-beaten gold agitated by faerie hands.

The routine of the sanatorium was unvarying; I soon lost track of the days. We inmates were awoken at seven in the morning. After we’d washed and dressed, some with the nurses’ aid, we were herded downstairs to the refectory, fed breakfast, sometimes cereal, sometimes porridge, often burnt and virtually inedible, occasionally eggs, bacon, and toast, given our medications. Mornings were taken up with compulsory therapeutic activities. On days when the weather was inclement, these took
place indoors, we were set to perhaps bread-making or sewing (our handling of the needles carefully supervised); and when it was fine we were taken outside to play croquet or badminton (our handling of the mallets and rackets, likewise). After a light lunch of soup or sandwiches, we were allowed to occupy ourselves till the evening meal, to read in our rooms or wander the Institute’s grounds. As these were on the landward side, to the rear of the main building, where the terrain sloped sharply away, they’d been landscaped, three terraces cut into them. Immediately behind the house was a paved area with a row of benches it was possible to sit and enjoy the prospect of undulating fields of wheat beyond the outer wall from; then, below that, was a kitchen garden, with beds of herbs and aromatic flowering plants; and, on the lowest level, a large, immaculate lawn, surrounded by shrubbery, with, at the far end, a shade-dappled copse, with a murmuring rill running through. But, lest you think this idyllic, surrounding the grounds was a high wall topped with coils of razor-wire – I was put in mind of the thorny thickets growing round the cursed castle in ‘Briar Rose’. Dinner was always served early, at six, and usually consisted of chunks of grey meat and vegetables cooked in simmering water for hours till reduced to an insipid slop. Afterwards we were free to either play board games or watch television, till nine, when we were sent up to bed.

Within three weeks, or so, I was mostly sane once more. But, sure what I’d undergone hadn’t been delusion, the cause, rather than effect, of my frenzy, and, therefore, grateful for the sanctuary the lonely and secure spot afforded me, I feigned continued aberration. After all, the grey food and the wall aside, it was a pleasant enough place.

Thinking it possible one or more of the other inmates had, like me, been deranged by an uncanny experience, I began turning the subject of conversation to the bizarre during the evening games of scrabble, chess, or draughts. I learnt the bulk of my
fellows were mundane neurotics, obsessives, depressives, but that there were a few with stranger afflictions: a man so appalled by, what he called, ‘the sinister half-life of plants,’ he’d broken into his local garden centre one night and torched the place; an ex-soldier who, convinced his testicles had been possessed by an ancient demon in the Iraqi desert, masturbated compulsively to rid himself of ‘cursed seed’; a woman who felt she was harried by an evil horde of miniature squirrels; and an old man, a former ventriloquist, who said his dummy had come to life one night on stage and turned against him, that he’d been forced to dismember it to save himself. These tales, in particular the latter, intrigued me at first, but, over time, I realized they were mere delusions.

I, though, had, I was sure, been afforded a glimpse of some cankerous truth about the world. My certainty of this led me to regard those who came to visit me as fools. I was incensed by their complaisant prattle. Most of my friends were repulsed by my disdainful, nasty manner and didn’t return after their first few visits. Rachel suffered my anger and derision for some months, coming to see me often, no matter how badly I treated her. In the end, though, she also found it too much. I can still recall our final conversation, a painful and poignant memory.

We were sitting, side by side, on the Institute lawn. It was a clear day, the wind coming off the sea a little chilly, but the sun’s rays warm, a caress. I was staring off into the distance; Rachel was looking at me with concern, stroking my arm.

I pushed her away, roughly.

‘I didn’t ask you to come here again,’ I said, not even turning to look at her. ‘Why won’t you leave me alone?’

‘Why are you being so cruel?’ she replied, gnawing on her fingernails. ‘I’m trying to help you.’

‘I’m trying to help you,’ I mimicked. ‘Stop biting your nails. It’s pathetic.’

She began crying, silently. Her indrawn breaths seemed to rack her.

(I can’t be sure, even with so much hindsight, why I drove her away; my motives are murky to me. I know I still felt a great deal for her then. But I’d grown wary and bitter.)

Her sobs ceased, she seemed to calm.

‘Don’t you want me there for you when you’re well again?’

I turned to her. She wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of her right hand, gave me a piercing look, grinned, a cold grin that haunts me still. I shrugged.

‘Well,’ she said.

And that was the last word to pass between us. She stood, walked away, left me sitting there on the lawn. I saw her only once more, a year or so later, walking down Tottenham Court Road. She was laughing, hand in hand with a man a few years older, who looked to dote on her. I ducked into a shop and watched them go by through the window.

I scarcely treated my family any better than I did Rachel, but they stuck by me.

During my time at the Institute, I strove to remain distant from the other inmates – I couldn’t be sure who I could trust. But even the most leery may blunder into the toils of friendship, and so it was with me; there was one whose company I fell into often: Colin Elton, middle-aged, a former lecturer in Medieval History at a red-brick university. He’d suffered a breakdown when research he’d been engaged in for many years was copied and published by a trusted colleague. Few believed Colin’s claim, he was thought resentful, his reputation was ruined, the thesis was forever linked with the plagiarist’s name. It had to do with the way the Black Death spread its contagion; it was abstruse, and I couldn’t quite grasp it.

Colin’s was a fascinating mind, and we had many long conversations ranging over divers subjects. The Middle Ages were, of course, his particular area of interest, but he could discourse on everything from architecture to the Eleatic paradoxes. In truth, our chats were less dialogues, more lectures:
for the most part, I was attentive merely, just from time to time prompting him with queries (then I knew little; now, now I wish I knew less). Colin was generally quite well, but so afraid of his ideas being thieved, he was mute with most people. I don’t know why he chose to trust me.

One evening, about six months after my committal and confinement to the asylum, I was playing my, by then habitual, evening game with Colin – mostly we played chess, but that evening it was draughts – when he interrupted a disquisition on the court of Louis XIV to look about him nervously.

‘You can’t ever be sure someone isn’t listening in,’ he said, leaning close, lowering his voice, tapping the side of his nose with the forefinger of his right hand. ‘They’ve got people everywhere. It’s not safe, even here. Any of these lunatics could be one of them.’

‘How can you be sure I’m not?’ I asked, impish.

He scowled, cocked his head. Then picked up two counters from the board, one of each colour, pressed them into his eyesockets, squinted to hold them in place.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked, irritated.

He grinned.

‘Do you know why the dead in Ancient Greece were buried with coins in their mouths?’

‘No. Can we get back to the game?’

Colin took the pieces from his orbits, pocketed one, or seemed to, then put both hands behind his back. A moment later, he held out his fists to me.

‘Choose.’

‘Stop it,’ I said gently, shaking my head.

He opened his fingers. There was a counter cupped in each palm. He returned one to the board, flipped the other into the air with his thumb. It arced, tumbling slow. He caught it with his right hand, slapped it down on the back of his left, kept it covered.

‘Heads or tails?’

‘Colin,’ I groaned.

He grimaced, got up from the table, walked away, taking the piece with him. Reaching the door, he turned, held up the piece, called to me.

‘To pay Charon’s fare.’

‘What?’

‘The boatman. Ferried the dead over the River Styx.’

He was shouting now, his voice hoarse, breaking, his eyes wild.

‘Did you know, photography, at first, was used mainly for filth, as it is again now, I suppose, and memorializing the dear departed? Mothers holding their just-dead infants up for the camera as rigor set in. Dead wives propped up by rods hidden beneath their skirts. Think of that. And remember me like
this!’

‘Don’t be so morbid, Colin.’

He put the counter in his mouth, under his tongue, turned, and left. His outburst had distressed some inmates; an old woman who sat in a wicker chair by the window, puckered up her face, began to hoot like an owl, thrash about, and a young man clutched his head, howled, soiled himself. Nurses rushed over to restrain them, another hurried after Colin to ensure he’d not swallowed the draughts piece.

That night, he somehow crept past staff on duty, found a way over the wall, threw himself off the cliff. At least that’s what was assumed to have happened; there were smears of his blood on rocks at its foot, but his body was never found, perhaps swept out to sea by the undertow.

Pangs of remorse goaded me from listless stagnation; I felt my confinement, was seized by an urge to get out, even if it meant putting myself in danger. I called my parents, and the following day they came to see me. They saw me well and, that afternoon, signed the papers rescinding my committal.
I returned to London. In the asylum I’d been denied news of the outside world, deemed too troubling; it wasn’t till after my release, then, I learnt the chef whose body I’d discovered had been the last victim of the beatings, that no one had been convicted of the attacks, that there were no suspects or leads.

My parents had organized for the major repairs to my flat to be carried out, but there was still much to be done; I spent my first few weeks at home redecorating. Sooted walls needed stripping, a fresh coat of paint; curtains had to be washed and aired; scorched, mouldering carpets taken up, replaced, though in the hall and lounge, I found the boards in good condition, left them bare. The work done I revelled in the results: the place felt new, purged of dread associations.

My life returned to seeming normality. I found temporary work, it didn’t pay well, but enough to get by on; I was thrifty. After a few weeks, I felt settled enough to contact some old friends, sent text messages saying, simply, ‘I’m back. Get in touch.’ I went out drinking with them. They all said how well I looked, awkwardly skirted mention of my sickness. I did not, though, attempt to contact Rachel; there seemed no way I could make amends, and I thought seeing her might cut me to the bone.

And that’s the end of this tale; a return to an ordinary, if slightly hollow, existence. At least till the day, frantic to share my woes with any who might understand, I placed the classifieds.

Or almost the end. There’s an uncanny epilogue to relate. One evening, perhaps six weeks after I was released from the Fairchild Institute, while walking past Smithfields Market in a stupor, listening to music – I distinctly remember the song playing was Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘It’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine’ – a harrowing gospel-blues, I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. I turned, taking out my earphones. An old man stood there, smiling a thin-lipped smile.

‘Don’t remember me, eh?’ he said.

I shook my head.

‘Well. I was the one warned you about them wolves.’

Then I recognized him: the man who’d accosted me in the Saracen’s Head all those months ago. Thinking him a phantasm, I shook my head to clear my senses. But he was real.