Peter May - Runaway

We all nodded, and exchanged sheepish glances.

‘Do your folks know where you are?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Well, the least you need to do is call them and let them know you’re safe. Promise me you’ll do that.’

I glanced at Rachel. ‘We will.’

‘Why did you do it?’

‘Do what?’

‘Run away.’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘Listening is what I do for a living.’ He grinned.

And we all sat around the table then and told him the whole sordid tale. My being expelled from school, deciding to run away as a group, being robbed on the first night, and rescuing Rachel from her boyfriend the next.

He listened in grave silence. When we had finished, he said, ‘Well, you’re getting your education, anyway. Ambition is all very well, but you know, boys, you get nothing for nothing in this world, and people are not always what they seem. You’re lucky you landed here, and if things work out I’ll be happy to have you help at the hall for as long as you like.’

His eyes raked around the table like searchlights on a dark night, casting a piercing light into hidden places. But then he brought his own darkness to the conversation.

‘Word to the wise, though. Your benefactor... Dr Robert. He has his virtues, and his uses. But if you take my advice, you’ll keep your distance.’ Then he smiled again, just as suddenly. ‘You can put on a wee show for us tonight. I’ll brief you on that later. Meantime, you’d better stay for lunch.’

Lunch was weird. One by one the patients and doctors began assembling in the common room. And Dr Robert was right, it was almost impossible to tell which was which. They were universally dishevelled, most of the men with long hair or beards, or both, shabbily dressed and often unwashed. I noticed fingernails bitten to the quick, and others that were long, broken and dirty.

According to a rota pinned on the wall, they took it in turns to prepare the food, but a glance into the kitchen revealed that the rules of hygiene were not necessarily being observed. We were hungry, but we didn’t eat much that day.

There was almost an equal number of men and women, ranging in age, I’d say, from early twenties to somewhere in their fifties. Some introduced themselves, some didn’t. Some gawped at us with naked curiosity, others ignored us.

Much of the conversation around the table seemed to me to be gibberish, and I was afraid to catch the eye of Rachel or any of the others in case I would start laughing. Which is shocking, when I think back on it now. These were poor souls, most of them, and we should have been counting our blessings.

One middle-aged man held an animated conversation with no one that we could see, gesticulating wildly, voice rising and falling as if in argument. ‘Now mathematicians have been debating this for centuries,’ he argued. ‘Temperance, that’s the symbol. Temperance, whether reading in the house or not. And I don’t care what you say, but it’s the way of the world. It is. Yes, it is. It is. It is.’

Like the needle stuck in a record, he repeated this assertion until it became almost unbearable. And yet nobody else even seemed to hear him. A large man with a full black beard caught my eye, and smiled and winked, and I wondered if he was one of the doctors.

JP himself sat at the end of the table, locked away in some distant inner thoughts, and paid no attention whatsoever to what was going on around him. We might all have been invisible to him, or he to us.

After lunch the residents began clearing the table and washing the dishes and we went into the hall to examine the equipment on the stage. It was good gear. Whoever was financing this group from Bethnal Green had spared no expense.

The hum and crackle of valve-driven amplifiers filled the hall as we powered up, tuning the guitars and shouting at Jeff to shut up as he tried out the kit. In all my years of playing music, drummers were always the noisiest, most annoying and inattentive members of any band. And when they had no kit in front of them, their fingers would tap on any surface to hand, incessantly, as if some inner urge to communicate drove them to beat out a constant, demented tattoo. I can remember being at Jeff’s house for dinner with his family when the meal was repeatedly punctuated by Jeff’s father, whose almost unconscious admonition to ‘Stop tapping, Jeff’ was nearly as irritating as the tapping itself.

When we were finally set up and ready, we launched into the set that we would normally perform for the first half of a dance gig. Just to get ourselves back in the groove. The acoustics in the Victoria Hall were good, and we were fresh and full of energy, just because we hadn’t played in a while.

In groups of twos and threes the residents of J. P. Walker’s experiment in the democracy of madness trooped into the hall and stood listening to us. There is something universal about the communicative power of music. It cuts through all barriers of language and culture, of sanity and lunacy. And we connected that first day with almost everyone at the hall. Someone began dancing, and very soon all of them were. Crazy, wild dancing that transcended the music. And it was exciting to watch. To know that you were doing this to people and that, whatever their mood or depression, whatever their physical or mental problems, they had left them at the door along with their inhibitions. Music made them, and us, free. And one.

JP himself stood watching with interest, a tiny smile playing about pale lips, and I caught the admiration in Rachel’s eyes. They were fixed on me and filled with an intensity that released something deeply primal inside me. And I remembered her telling me that she found nothing more arousing than talent.

We had just finished ‘Roll over Beethoven’, and were counting in to ‘She was Just Seventeen’, when the most bloodcurdling scream cut us off mid-count. The door into the hall burst open and a middle-aged woman stood there, stark naked and yelling at the top of her voice. Yells interspersed with lung-bursting sobs, then fresh screams.

She was a woman in her forties, breasts like empty sacks, her flesh carried on a small frame like a baby’s jumpsuit that was two sizes too big. Her body was smeared with some thick, dark substance, and it didn’t take long for the smell of it to tell us what it was. She was covered in her own shit.

‘Where’s my bottle?’ she screamed. ‘I want my bottle! Johnny says I’ve got to have my bottle.’

And she started running around the hall, scattering everyone in her path. No one wanted to go near her. The run turned into a skip, and she began singing some toneless, unrecognizable tune.

I glanced at JP but he made no attempt to intervene. He watched disinterestedly for a moment, then turned to disappear into the common room.

The smell was beginning to fill the hall, and Rachel took refuge on the stage beside us. But the woman stopped right below us, staring at us with wild eyes.

‘Why did you stop? Why did you fucking stop?’ Her voice was like tearing paper. ‘I want to dance. Play! Play!’

I glanced at Jeff and nodded. Anything to get her away from us. He struck his sticks together four times, and we launched into ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, wishing in fact that she wasn’t standing there at all. But she didn’t move away. She began writhing and twisting on the spot in the most grotesque and violently malodorous dance I have ever seen. It was all I could do to stop from throwing up.

Then suddenly one of the men who had been at the table during lunch came running out of the common room. A big man, completely bald, all his head hair concentrated in a mass of black beard, and matted curls covering his chest and neck. His arms were spread wide, holding out a large grey blanket which he wrapped around the dancing woman as he reached her, completely engulfing her. I could see in his face his repulsion at the smell. And yet still he held her — against all her kicking, thrashing, screaming protests — until gradually she began to lose impetus, surrendering finally to the hold of his arms, whimpering and sobbing.