A woman emerged from the common room with a baby’s bottle filled with milk and handed it to the bearded man, who immediately thrust the teat between the shit-smeared lips of the woman in his grasp. She began sucking on it with a passion, and allowed herself to be led away, distracted and consumed by the feeding process. The remaining residents moved aside, like a parting of the Red Sea, to let them past, then several went running around the hall opening all the windows.
A small, bald man walked up to the front of the stage and grinned at us, revealing two missing front teeth, one top, one bottom. ‘That’s Alice,’ he said. ‘The star of the show.’ He took a pull on his cigarette, then pushed the tip of it into the cavity in his lower teeth so that it stuck there and moved with his mouth when he spoke. ‘She’s about six months now.’
‘What show?’ I said, confused.
‘The Victoria Hall show. Johnny’s prize patient. Stripped back to the womb, and growing again to childhood.’ He closed his lips around the cigarette and sucked in smoke. ‘Gets all the fucking attention!’ He turned and stomped across the hall back to the common room.
Not for the first time, I had been unable to discern whether this was a doctor or a patient. A distinction, I was to learn, as fine as that between madness and sanity.
I turned to look at the others, and saw in their faces the trepidation that I felt. None of us was sure that this was a gig we really wanted.
III
The hall was so big and dark that the few candles carried by shadowy figures barely made an impression. Joss sticks burned in unseen corners, filling the air with a sweet, pungent scent. I was aware of bodies all around us, forming a large, loose circle. Four of us moved slowly around its interior circumference. Me and Maurie and Luke and Dave. And Rachel. She had insisted on being a part of it.
She’d had a bad afternoon, slowly succumbing to the shakes and an insidious itching that had her scratching her arms and scalp. There was nothing I could do to comfort her, and in the end JP led her away mid-briefing, an arm around her shoulder, his voice soft and filled with reassurance. When he brought her back half an hour later, she had been calm, almost serene, and I was torn between jealousy and relief, wondering if he had given her medication, or whether it was the power of his personality that had triumphed over her craving.
Now she was back to normal, if any of this could have been described as normal.
Suddenly, a rectangle of yellow light fell from the door of the common room, cutting through the crowd and extending to the back of the hall. A man stumbled through it. A silhouette. And although we couldn’t see his face, we could feel his confusion.
It was our cue to surround him, the wider circle closing around us as we did so. We were close enough in the dark now to touch and smell him, and I pushed him as instructed into Luke’s arms. Luke immediately spun him round, passing him on to Maurie, Dave, Rachel and then me. Round and round our tight little circle. His body relaxing into trust, growing heavier as it did, his momentum preventing him from falling. Faster and faster, as we ourselves moved round the bodies that encircled us. Until a crack like a gunshot was our signal to stand back.
Both inner and outer circles moved out from the centre, like rings of water from a pebble tossed in a pond. And the man dropped to the floor, crouching on his knees. The bearers of the candles moved in to create a circle of light around him, and he got unsteadily to his feet, dizzy and confused after all his spinning.
Another figure stepped into the circle, a sweep of white robe swirling around him as he turned to reveal himself in the flickering light. A young man, face powdered white, his lipsticked mouth a slash of red. He wore a felt hat with a toy parrot affixed to the top of it. Although I knew it was Jeff, I would never have recognized him. He cut a dramatic, half-comic, half-scary figure.
I could see the light of fear in the eyes of the man in the centre of the circle as Jeff drew a pistol from beneath his robes and pointed it straight at his head. The man raised his hands, as if somehow he believed they could stop the bullets.
‘No!’ he shouted. ‘No! No!’
But Jeff held his arm straight and steady, a slow smile spreading itself across his face. He was enjoying this. Then, very slowly, he began to lower the gun, still at the end of a ramrod-straight arm, until the barrel of it was pointing directly at the man’s crotch.
He was very nearly hysterical now. Screaming at Jeff. Urging him not to shoot. Hands grasping his crotch as he bent himself almost double.
Then, Bang! Bang! Bang! Jeff fired three times, and the man’s scream ripped through the darkness like a knife through flesh. He collapsed, whimpering, to the floor, clutching his private parts, rolling back and forth, moaning and weeping.
Almost immediately, several figures detached themselves from the crowd and stepped forward to lift him to his feet, hurrying him away through the yellow glow of the common room as the lights in the hall itself snapped on to leave us blinking in their sudden glare, pale startled faces all around, like floating Chinese lanterns.
JP stood by the door, a solitary figure whose lone clap resounded around the rafters. ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ he shouted. Then, ‘Time to eat.’
As at lunch, we ate very little. But there was wine on the table, a seemingly unending supply of it, and we drank to lose ourselves. It had been the strangest of days.
The coloured candles in their pools of melted wax burned all around the common room, sending the shadows of the diners dancing across the walls. A pile of albums played on a Dansette record player on the sideboard, and the sounds of the Beatles and the Beach Boys, the Kinks and the King thickened the smoke-filled air. The man at the centre of the evening’s little drama seemed perfectly recovered from the shots to his crotch, and he ate and drank hungrily. Jeff had washed and changed, but a residue of lipstick left his mouth unnaturally red, and he looked strangely feminine.
Rachel and I flanked JP, but it was Rachel who had the courage to ask what I had only wondered.
She was blunt and to the point. ‘What was all that about tonight?’
JP’s smile, it seemed, always reached his eyes, and he appeared genuinely amused. He kept his voice low, beneath the hubbub around the table, and said, ‘Richard suffers from what I can only describe as castration anxiety. Several months of psychotherapy have made very little progress. So tonight was an experiment of last resort. A kind of shock therapy to make him confront the illusory nature of his anxiety. Not to put too fine a point on it, Jeff blew his balls off. Or so he thought, or feared. Now he’ll have to deal with the fact that his testicles are still intact, and that his fears are groundless.’ He nodded acknowledgement to the possibility of failure. ‘Only time will tell if it has worked or not.’ He looked at each of us in turn. ‘That’s what the Victoria Hall experiment is all about. Taking an unconventional, non-pharmaceutical approach to problems that conventionally would be treated with drugs.’
His eyes sparkled, and I felt his excitement.
When the food was finished more wine was opened, joints were rolled and passed around the table. The residual excitement of the earlier drama was gradually dispelled, and the mood became more mellow. I noticed for the first time that there was no sign of Alice, or the big, bald, bearded man who had pulled her away.