Stephen

When I first went up to University, I was allocated rooms on a 16th Century staircase. Over the intervening centuries it had been plastered and patched as the moment required with no regard for aesthetics and little for utility. The doorframes had sagged and twisted so that each sported an inner and outer door (the latter known as the “oak”) cut to the irregular shapes needed to match the opening. The floors were bare boards; worn and sat on beams that had shrunk and moved so much that walking across a room was like crossing a ship’s deck.

Each set of rooms opened off a little corridor which was cool and dark in summer and cold and damp in winter. At night, the unlit corridors were ominous. I don’t believe in ghosts, but at times I found it comforting to remind myself of that under my breath. Stood with my back to the corridor opening my door in the early hours, it was easy to imagine that any second I would hear the usual creaking of the boards turn into the sound of feet pounding – an unseen person running towards me. I would race to open the door.

Halfway through the first term, the weather turned cold. The early evening pattern was already established: a miserable dinner in the hall, sat on benches and then continuing the conversation first in the snug college bar and then, later, in each others’ rooms over instant coffee. It was during those early weeks that I turned into a nocturnal worker. It’s a pattern I still follow. The morning became a stranger to me and essays were produced by a process of procrastination followed by crisis and early hours scribbling.

On this particular evening, the night was still. I had left the evening conversation early and taken my work to my room. One by one the other inhabitants of the staircase clumped their way to bed and by two in the morning it was silent but for the sound of the occasional car out beyond the college walls. I worked using my desklight – the rest of the set was in darkness, which I found tended to avoid me becoming distracted. At around 2:30, I heard a noise of a foot on the boards in the corridor and stopped working. Just one step. I realised I was holding my breath.

Perhaps 10 seconds passed without any further noise, so I sighed out the air in my lungs and went back to my essay on Roman Law. Then I heard two more steps. I tensed. Another step. Whoever was in the corridor was only a yard from my door. I sat as quietly as I could, trying to persuade myself I was hearing things. Then two more steps. They were at my door and they knocked.

As clearly as I have known anything I knew I did not want to open the door. It was foolishness of course; there were no ghosts, nor was a psychopath likely to have scaled the walls to pay me a visit. Nevertheless, I sat at my desk suddenly feeling more a boy than the young man I had been holding myself out as being and, most of all, very very afraid. I got up and crept to the door. Standing close to the wood, I could hear breathing outside. I stood still. They knocked again. I decided to stop being afraid and reached up and opened the door.

Standing in the corridor was someone I am going to call Stephen. Stephen was a history student: an intense man who sat at the edge of the circle of my new friends. He was a fiercely intelligent student and spoke, not with a stammer as such, but with a hesitation followed by an eruption of words. I caught his eye and found him staring at me from the shadow beyond my threshhold. He spoke first. He asked me if I would talk with him. I looked back to my desk and the work crisis but politeness forced my hand and I invited him in. I turned on the lights in the room, hoping that it would make the whole scene resolve into something friendlier; something less strange. I made him tea and he asked me a series of questions about God. As I answered he would sit, looking anxious and on occasions mumbling. I could not catch what he was saying but I could sense that most of it was dismissive and uncomplimentary. After an hour or so he stared at me again and said:

“I wish I was like Nietzsche: I wish I had the courage to be insane”

This seemed an absurd thing to say. Not just absurd but somehow self-regarding and self-piteous at the same time. It was keeping me from my work.

I told him that I did not think insanity was elective, nor did it take courage to acquire – it took courage to cope with. I told him I didn’t think mental illness was romantic. It blights lives and brings misery. He angered. His anger was instant, white hot and then gone in the time it took his emotion to flicker across his face.

He thanked me for the tea and left. I closed the door behind him and heard his slow steps down the corridor, past the staricase and out into the quad. I finished my essay and woke just in time for lunch. As I shuffled along the queue with my tray, a friend appraoached me: “Have you heard what happened to Stephen?”. I felt a sudden dread. “He went crazy last night. He smashed up his room, attacked a porter and was taken away by men in white coats”. Oddly, my first thought was to marvel at the fact that the cliche was true: there really were men in white coats and they really did turn up to take you away. My second thought was to feel I had had a lucky escape and only then did humanity and a proper concern for Stephen’s wellbeing assert itself.

We went to see him a week later. He sat mumbling, hands trembling, in his shared room. He had a black eye. He explained that he had racially abused his roommate, who had felt obliged to punch him. This time Stephen was not staring. He was not holding anyone’s eye. I remember thinking that now we were adults, problems were suddenly bigger. At school people got flu or broke up with girlfriends, they did not develop psychoses. The world sudddenly seemed big, and empty and locked from the outside.