Peter May - Runaway

An expectant silence settled itself around the table, and for a time it seemed as if no one was going to step up to the mark.

Then a dapper man in a white shirt and slacks pushed round tortoiseshell glasses back up the bridge of his nose and leaned into the table. ‘I’ll tell you a story.’

He had a lazy, North American drawl, and the streaks of steely silver through Brillo-pad hair made me think that he could be in his forties or fifties, which seemed very old to me then.

He pulled on one side of his short, wiry moustache. ‘This was when Johnnie and I were on that speaking tour of the States last year.’

All eyes turned towards him, and he seemed momentarily discomfited by the spotlight. But he quickly regained his composure.

‘Everyone knows what a hard time they gave us. The Institute of American Psychiatrists weren’t just sceptical. They were abusive. They were rude. They took every opportunity to criticize us in the press, to debunk our research and our papers. They sent hecklers to all our speaking engagements. It was like trying to bring enlightenment to the Dark Ages. After all, these people still believed in electric shock therapy and lobotomies. They were like witch doctors.’

His passion was clear, and I glanced at JP to see how he was reacting. But he was giving little away, lounging back in his chair, one bare foot up on the table, and a tiny enigmatic smile playing about his lips as he pulled on his joint.

‘Anyway, we were somewhere in the Midwest. Ohio or someplace, I don’t really remember. And they laid this ambush for us. A kind of challenge they knew that Johnny would have to accept but could never win.

‘They were waiting for us after the event that night. A group of psychiatrists from a local mental institution. Throwing themselves on our mercy, they said. But it was no coincidence that the press was waiting for us when we got there. The problem they claimed they were seeking Johnny’s help with was a young woman in a deeply psychotic state. She was locked up in a padded cell for her own safety. Refused to wear any clothes, and hadn’t spoken, quite literally, to anyone for more than six months. They had tried all sorts of shit with her and nothing worked. She was catatonic.

‘So we looked at her through the glass in the door. And she’s sitting there, cross-legged on the floor, staring at the wall. Someone says she hasn’t moved from that position since she performed her last toilet. And Johnny says, “Let me in.” So they do. When the door closes behind him, he starts taking off his clothes. “What the fuck!” they say, and I have to stop them going in to pull him out again.

‘Johnny puts all his clothes in a neat pile in one corner and goes and sits cross-legged on the floor beside her. He doesn’t say a thing. Doesn’t even look at her. Just sits there. Half an hour goes past. Forty minutes. Then after about three-quarters of an hour, I see her half turn her head to look at him. He continues to ignore her. By the time we’re an hour in she’s staring at him. Then suddenly she reaches out and touches his face and says, “What’s wrong?” Within fifteen minutes they are telling each other their life stories.’

The storyteller grinned in the candlelight.

‘Totally backfired on them. Press the next day was full of how Johnny had brought this woman out of catatonia in an hour, when the local psychiatrists had failed to get through to her in six months.’

There was a ripple of delighted applause around the table.

JP tipped himself even further back in his chair and said, ‘I was only after her body.’

Which provoked a roar of laughter. As it died away, so did his smile.

‘Trouble is, most psychiatrists like the sound of their own voices too much. It’s what the patient has to say that’s important. Listening is the virtue.’

And I thought how true that was. Not just of psychiatrists and their patients. But of everyone, in any relationship. And it wasn’t too long before I wished it was a lesson I had put into practice sooner myself.

We never got back to South Kensington that night. We were drunk on wine and high on dope. And by the time we realized the hour, the last tube train had already gone. So everyone went off to find himself a spot to curl up and sleep for the night. Rachel and I were about to make our way up to the roof when Maurie insinuated himself between us.

‘I want a word with Jack,’ he said.

I hesitated, sensing the danger in his voice, then nodded to Rachel. She sighed theatrically and went to wait for me in the common room. Maurie’s voice was low and tight, and his fingers held me by the fleshy part of my upper arm, bruising me, I was sure.

‘I told you, Jack. She’s not for you.’

I looked into his eyes for a long time, trying to find some reason in them for this obsessive protection of his cousin. But all I saw was hostility. ‘Yeah, you did.’

We stared each other out for a very long moment before I pulled my arm free and went off into the common room to find Rachel and take her up to the roof.

The weather had changed during the course of this spring day, a shift of season, and the night air was positively balmy up there. Like a summer’s evening. You could smell the blossom and the scent of leaves bursting out of their buds, and from somewhere the perfume of lilac, sweet and cloying. It was a fragrance I had always associated with the arrival of summer, burgeoning invisibly from the lilac tree that grew outside my bedroom window at home.

We lay back in the deckchairs, gazing up at the sky, and I forced myself to stop thinking about Maurie.

‘What did he give you?’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘JP. This afternoon when you got the shakes.’

I sensed her hesitation in the dark, her reluctance to tell me.

‘I don’t know,’ she said finally. ‘But whatever it was I felt better after it.’ More hesitation. Then, ‘I think he might be an addict.’

I sat up, startled. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘The needle marks on his left arm.’ Maybe she felt my disappointment, because after a moment she added, ‘But who knows? Maybe he’s just diabetic.’

I lay back again in the deckchair and gazed at the cosmos, lost in its vastness, my mind drawn to all those pinpoints of light like a moth to a million flames. ‘You ever wonder what’s out there?’

I turned to see her shake her head.

‘I never do. What’s out there... well, we’ll probably never know. And chances are we wouldn’t understand it even if we did. I only ever worry about what’s in here.’ She put a hand on her breast, and turned her head to meet my eye.

‘And what’s in there?’

‘A day or two ago I couldn’t have told you.’

‘And now?’

Her smile was pale and washed with moonlight. ‘You,’ she said. ‘You’re in there. Filling the big empty void that used to be me. Filling it up with something better. Something good.’

While I might have whispered ‘I love you’ in the throes of passion the night before, I knew now in my heart that I meant it. Whatever it was, whatever it did to me, however long it would last, I knew it was what I felt. I eased myself out of the deckchair and took her hand. She stood up, then, and we kissed. And the big furry coat my old headmaster had thrown at me that day in his office got laid out on the bitumen. Our bed for the night, and the cushioning beneath us as we made love again, this time under the stars, as if all of eternity had existed to create only this moment.

It’s funny how the bizarre nature of that first experience at the Victoria Hall became not only familiar, but routine. In the next month or so we fell into a pattern of time spent between Dr Robert’s house in Kensington and the dafties at Bethnal Green. I use the word ‘daftie’ in that fond, Scottish way that is not meant to offend. Because, in fact, all of us very quickly ceased to think of the residents of the hall as dafties at all. The norm became extended to include what had, at first, seemed outrageously abnormal.