“Holy SHIT,” said Jeremy, slapping at his head.
From his side of the palliasse, Pete said, “Oink, oink, OINK,” which roughly translates as: “Shut the fuck up, will you? I’m trying to get a little shuteye here.”
Jeremy calmed, nodded over at Pete, and smiled his first smile in a long time.
“Okay, pal. Point taken,” he said. “Just trying to get the madness out of my mind, that’s all.”
“Oink,” said Pete, who took to snoring.
No sleep for Jeremy, though, because the madness issue continued to torment him. What actually was madness, he asked himself. Clearly everybody he knew would conclude from his current behaviour he was the one who was mad because they were continuing to play the games required of them for social acceptance. So they would obviously consider themselves “normal” and him “mad.” Jeremy saw that and didn’t blame them for it. But that still didn’t answer his central question.
Dimly, from an Oxford symposium he’d attended all those years ago, he recalled the words of a shrink called Laing. R.D. Laing, maybe? What was it he’d been quoted as saying again? That insanity was a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world, something like that. Jeremy also remembered the work of a Frenchie called Foucault discussed at the same event. How it was that civilisation constructed ideas of madness—or “unreason”—for its own devious purposes but this said nothing about the condition itself. Indeed was fundamentally misleading. And had not the ex-Beatle Paul McCartney once been heard to remark, “I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird.”
“Mmm, not just me then,” Jeremy mused as Pete continued to snore contentedly.
Then there was a novel the audience been advised to read, by a writer called Ken Kesey, who’d been conned by his publishers and never made a dime from his work about a falsely diagnosed “mad” guy who gets lobotomized for causing trouble and telling the truth about the mental institution he’s been incarcerated in. What was it called again? One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s something. Nest? That was it. A fiction, but nonetheless a persuasive one when he considered the ways “madness” was used as a convenient excuse to ridicule or lock away opponents of political systems that brooked no dissent, vide the ways of the ex-Soviet Union or the current psychopath in the Kremlin. Or indeed the psycho in the White House whose routine response to criticism was to brush it off as “fake” and/or “insane” and fire its exponents.
“Sooo,” Jeremy asked himself. “Is it really me that’s mad, or is it the world?”
To address this question, he opted to narrow the focus to only recent history and take a cold look at the facts—if there were still “facts” in a post-truth society where lies were told with a “fuck you and your mother if you don’t believe me” impunity. In which a mega-rich narcissist could get himself elected American president by lying through his teeth, abetted by his psychopath pal in the Kremlin and the corrupt social media. In which British electors had been conned into voting to leave the European Union through a campaign targeted to arouse xenophobic delusions of their specious grandeur. In which parliamentary democracies built across centuries were under threat from meddling personal data banks like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. What sane person could contemplate such a scenario and think it anything but insane? Not Jeremy, that was for sure, so maybe it was Laing’s version of insanity he needed rationally to adjust to. And what better way to face up to this dystopian chaos than to confront it? How, he had no idea, but at least it was in his mind as a possibility.
“Better late than never,” he muttered, covering his head with a smelly blanket and snuggling down on his palliasse. “Nightie, nightie, Pete.”
“Oink,” said Pete in mid-snore.
“Mmm, who knows?” Jeremy mumbled. “Meanwhile it’s sleep for me too, perchance to have a happier dream this time. That would be a turn up for the book.”
As fate would have it, Jeremy’s first confrontational opportunity came with a tapping on his barn door at eleven thirty-five the following morning just as he was enjoying a happier dream. In it he featured as an elf called Yarume who could morph into any form he wanted, human or bestial, depending on the nature of the adventure he faced, and nobody ever called Yarume crazy and got away with it. Gurgling happily to himself, Jeremy slept on far beyond sunrise. Never, ever, even on a Sunday, had Jeremy slept so late, but now he was Yarume who was never defeated in any task he undertook, so let’s enjoy the ride…
Then there came the tapping. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tappity tap, it went.
Followed by a knock, knock, knock, knockity KNOCK.
Jeremy snuggled deeper into his palliasse, terrified his only ever happy dream might have taken a turn for the worse. Worse even than the Kafkaesque one that had caused him so much trouble in the first place. You know how it is when you emerge from sleep betwixt and between one form consciousness and another. How you don’t know what’s real and what isn’t, how long it can take for the mists to clear and “reality” to clutch you back into its grip.
“Ug? Grrrrr. Nnnnn?” he said, covering his head with the hay sack he used for a pillow.
Then came the voice. Blurred, distant, but nonetheless recognisable even to Jeremy/Yarume as a human voice, and one he had no desire to hear.
“Jeremy, Jeremy?” it said.
“Fuck off,” moaned Jeremy into his hay sack pillow.
“Oink!!!” agreed Pete, who didn’t like his sleep disturbed at the best of times, but certainly not at eleven thirty-five in the morning.
But on… and on… and on went the knock, knock, knockity, KNOCKing. And the voice, now hiked in decibels.
“JER-EM-YEEE. JEZZA. We know you’re in there,” barked Sir Magnus Montague, hammering harder on the door and wincing at Frau Professor Doktor Gisela von Strumpf, the Harley Street shrink he’d brought along at the family’s behest to make Jeremy normal again.
“FUCK OFF,” counter-barked Jeremy, finally recognising the voice and rising from his palliasse.
“OINK, OINK, OINK,” said Pete.
“Clearly off his trolley, wouldn’t you say?” whispered Sir Magnus to Gisela. “We’ll need to tread very carefully.”
“Natürlich,” said Gisela.
Such were the circumstances leading to Jeremy Crawford’s first attempt at asserting his sanity in face of a mad, mad world. And, recognising it as such in the nick of time, he pulled himself together, abandoned his fury at being awoken and, attired in one of Sophie’s diaphanous taupe nighties with the frilly neckline, the only nightwear he’d managed to snatch from the laundry basket before heading to the barn, opened the door.
“Do step inside, I was expecting you sooner or later, Sir Monty,” he said, bowing thespianly and waving inside his ex-boss and the sour-faced blonde bint accompanying him.