he’s not pissed. I’d better have a look at him, hadn’t I? At
home, are you?’
I did
some more explaining.
‘Fine,
no problem, with any luck I should be along in about fifteen minutes. Don’t
worry, my old Stan. If he turns violent just hit him with an iron bar.’
The
phone was a pre-war one, or a replica. I went on sitting in front of it after I
had hung the receiver back on its hook. The room had probably got itself called
the study, or even the den, with a roll-top desk like in the films, a
word-processor, a row of theatrical directories and an incredible number of
photographs of Nowell — in what looked like Shakespeare, in something to do
with Dracula, talking to Princess Margaret, talking to Sean Connery, as a tart,
as a nun, on a TV quiz-show, on a TV chat-show. The ones I recognized had an
out-of-date look. Bert was in two or three of them but there were none of her
with Steve at any age.
Words
like mania and schizophrenia and paranoia ran through my mind. I tried to
remember what I had heard and read about madness and the treatment of it over
the years but it was all a mess. I just had the same settled impression as ever
that the fellows in the trade had a very poor idea of what they were up to. Now
I came to think of it I did recall looking at a classy paperback where a
psychiatrist had said that the only actual help they could give you when you
went off your head was to keep you comfortable and safe and stop you doing
things like killing yourself until you got better of your own accord if you
were lucky or for the rest of your life if you were not. Cheers. But he had
been making out a case, exaggerating, paying off scores or trying to write a
bestseller. Of course he had. The business was bound to look pretty ropy from
outside, all wild theories and rich people going to the shrink every week for
twenty years and mental hospitals with no roofs, and never mind the successes,
the new drugs and therapies, the thousands of patients quietly though perhaps
slowly improving. That was certain to be going on. Things were just the same
with medical science, you only heard about the scandals and the mistakes and
not about the marvellous cures. Well no, it was not the same exactly but there
were similarities. And that psychiatrist’s book had been published quite a long
time ago.
I
decided to ring home while I was about it just to say what was going on, but
there was no reply — Susan must have slipped out for something. Till then I had
not realized how much I had wanted to hear the sound of her voice. Immediately
after that Steve shouted something next door and there was a violent noise that
was really two noises at once, a crash end a kind of giant pop, and then more
shouting and some shrieking. I guessed what had happened and I was roughly
right. When I dashed in I saw a lot of glass on the rug in front of the television
set and a large hole in its insides surrounded by odds and ends of electronics,
also the remains of a puff of smoke. A big grey stone ashtray was lying among
the glass. Steve still looked bewildered but not in such a detached way, more
as though he was worried at not understanding what the excitement was about.
All the other three were yelling, Nowell at him, Bert more or less in general
and the small girl at everybody, and that was the worst of the three. I shouted
in her direction, not too loudly but I probably looked a bit alarming. Anyhow,
she shut up and so did the other two, only a moment though, in Nowell’s case at
least.
‘Get
him out of here,’ she ordered me in ringing tones.
I tried
to ignore her and tell Steve he was all right. It was not very constructive, I
dare say, but it was all I could think of.
‘Get
him out of here,’ said Nowell, bravely sticking to her guns. ‘He’s raving mad,
the boy’s raving mad.’
I said,
‘Never mind about that. Now just quieten down, will you? Come on, cool it. The
doc’s on his way.’
At this
stage Bert tried to shove himself
home, are you?’
I did
some more explaining.
‘Fine,
no problem, with any luck I should be along in about fifteen minutes. Don’t
worry, my old Stan. If he turns violent just hit him with an iron bar.’
The
phone was a pre-war one, or a replica. I went on sitting in front of it after I
had hung the receiver back on its hook. The room had probably got itself called
the study, or even the den, with a roll-top desk like in the films, a
word-processor, a row of theatrical directories and an incredible number of
photographs of Nowell — in what looked like Shakespeare, in something to do
with Dracula, talking to Princess Margaret, talking to Sean Connery, as a tart,
as a nun, on a TV quiz-show, on a TV chat-show. The ones I recognized had an
out-of-date look. Bert was in two or three of them but there were none of her
with Steve at any age.
Words
like mania and schizophrenia and paranoia ran through my mind. I tried to
remember what I had heard and read about madness and the treatment of it over
the years but it was all a mess. I just had the same settled impression as ever
that the fellows in the trade had a very poor idea of what they were up to. Now
I came to think of it I did recall looking at a classy paperback where a
psychiatrist had said that the only actual help they could give you when you
went off your head was to keep you comfortable and safe and stop you doing
things like killing yourself until you got better of your own accord if you
were lucky or for the rest of your life if you were not. Cheers. But he had
been making out a case, exaggerating, paying off scores or trying to write a
bestseller. Of course he had. The business was bound to look pretty ropy from
outside, all wild theories and rich people going to the shrink every week for
twenty years and mental hospitals with no roofs, and never mind the successes,
the new drugs and therapies, the thousands of patients quietly though perhaps
slowly improving. That was certain to be going on. Things were just the same
with medical science, you only heard about the scandals and the mistakes and
not about the marvellous cures. Well no, it was not the same exactly but there
were similarities. And that psychiatrist’s book had been published quite a long
time ago.
I
decided to ring home while I was about it just to say what was going on, but
there was no reply — Susan must have slipped out for something. Till then I had
not realized how much I had wanted to hear the sound of her voice. Immediately
after that Steve shouted something next door and there was a violent noise that
was really two noises at once, a crash end a kind of giant pop, and then more
shouting and some shrieking. I guessed what had happened and I was roughly
right. When I dashed in I saw a lot of glass on the rug in front of the television
set and a large hole in its insides surrounded by odds and ends of electronics,
also the remains of a puff of smoke. A big grey stone ashtray was lying among
the glass. Steve still looked bewildered but not in such a detached way, more
as though he was worried at not understanding what the excitement was about.
All the other three were yelling, Nowell at him, Bert more or less in general
and the small girl at everybody, and that was the worst of the three. I shouted
in her direction, not too loudly but I probably looked a bit alarming. Anyhow,
she shut up and so did the other two, only a moment though, in Nowell’s case at
least.
‘Get
him out of here,’ she ordered me in ringing tones.
I tried
to ignore her and tell Steve he was all right. It was not very constructive, I
dare say, but it was all I could think of.
‘Get
him out of here,’ said Nowell, bravely sticking to her guns. ‘He’s raving mad,
the boy’s raving mad.’
I said,
‘Never mind about that. Now just quieten down, will you? Come on, cool it. The
doc’s on his way.’
At this
stage Bert tried to shove himself
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