Free Bedlam Burning by Geoff Nicholson Page B

point in torturing myself? Yet I couldn’t bring myself to refuse. We started to walk.
    â€˜What exactly’s wrong with the patients here?’ I asked.
    â€˜They’re in an asylum, that’s mostly what’s wrong with them,’ Alicia replied smartly.
    â€˜But are they like schizophrenic, or manic depressive or …?’
    Actually, that was about as far as I could go with naming varieties of madness.
    â€˜What’s in a name, Gregory?’ Alicia said. ‘Words like schizophrenia or manic depression or paranoia, they’re just labels, just narrow, reductive terms for things we don’t really understand. By naming them we like to pretend we have power over them – like Adam in the Garden of Eden. What we now call schizophrenia we would not so long ago have called dementia praecox. Before that you might have called it being possessed by demons. Perhaps at some time in the future we’ll be calling it Kincaid Syndrome, or who knows, Gregory Collins’ disease.’
    I wondered how it would feel to have a condition named after you. Was that a thing anyone would want? And were they named after the doctor or the patient, the poor bugger who suffered from it or the clever bastard who ‘discovered’ it? Who were these people? Who was Tourette? Who was Down? What was the name of Pavlov’s dog?
    â€˜Put it this way, Gregory,’ Alicia continued, ‘if you were a patient and you arrived here in distress, would you like it if I said, “Ah yes, I know what this is! What we have here is a case of Sydenham’s chorea, or Marchiafava-Bignami disease, or Steele-Richardson-Olszewski syndrome.” Or would you rather we just helped you get better?’
    â€˜Would it have to be an either/or situation?’ I said.
    â€˜You have so much to learn, Gregory. But it’ll be a pleasure to teach you.’
    We had left the clinic and were walking through the grounds. The writer’s accommodation was apparently outside the main building. I could now see there was quite a bit of land attached to the clinic. There were some neglected flower borders, and then a much larger, overgrown area that ran all the way to the boundary wall. There were structures too: some outbuildings, a cracked and scruffy tennis court, and a dried-up fountain with a chipped cement statue of a mermaid at its centre.
    We went just a little further and there, in front of a giant rhododendron bush, was the neatest, quaintest, most appealing little cabin I’d ever seen; the same style as the main building, but its qualities had been distilled and concentrated. It was a structure anyone could have fallen in love with.
    â€˜This would be yours,’ Alicia said. ‘It’s always been referred to as the writer’s hut. All it needs is a writer.’
    Alicia unlocked the door and we stepped inside. The interior smelled musty, like mildewed fruit. The old rattan and wickerfurniture was careworn, there was some peeling yellow wallpaper and the overhead electric light provided only a feeble glow, but the place undoubtedly had charm. There was a desk with a typewriter on it, a chair, a frayed carpet, a pot-bellied stove. There was just one room with a sofabed: no bedroom, no kitchen, no bathroom. Alicia explained that I’d have to shower in the main building, just like everybody else, but that sounded like no great hardship. I’d lived with a similar arrangement at college. It wasn’t luxurious by any standards, except mine, but to me it was a palace. I sat down on the sofabed, looked around me, and of course I felt tempted.
    At that time I had never read Gaston Bachelard’s
The Poetics of Space
. If I had, I would have known he described living in a hut as ‘the taproot of inhabiting’, and perhaps it would have helped me understand why I was so drawn to the place. As it was, I simply started to feel I could all too easily be happy here. This was a nice place