Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Mrs Pullen, who played the piano thickly and sang, ‘Where there’s a king with a golden crown, riding on a donkey,’ now taught me English and Essays. She tried to soothe my terror by telling me that she also went to Ward Three to teach. I couldn’t understand how she could go there and live. The Sister of Ward Three was known to be a dragon – and don’t even think of looking for a heart of gold beneath those scales. It didn’t help that I was told, ‘No nurse will wipe your bottom on Ward Three, so you’d just better work out a way of doing the job yourself!’

  I’d stay where I was, Wendy or no Wendy. One of the compensations of the school being such a secondary presence in the institution was that it had no power to coerce. If I dug my heels in, they couldn’t make me move. So Mr Turpin went on coming over to teach me in Ward One. He must have thought I was being very silly, but he didn’t make me feel bad about it.

  In fact Wendy had in some strange way lost her power. It wasn’t exactly that she had mellowed. Her body turned out to have another trick to play on her, besides the one that had brought her to CRX in the first place. She had always had a strange dentition, though as she didn’t make her way in the world by smiling it wasn’t the first thing people noticed. Her front right tooth (left when you looked at her) was almost twice as wide as its neighbour on the other side of the median line. It had a groove in the middle, if you looked closely, but no real division.

  Disturbed odontogenesis

  Double teeth are caused by disturbances during odontogenesis, the lovely word that only means the birth of teeth. They run in families. A geminated tooth is one where two teeth grow together, though each one still has a root canal. In true fusion, the tooth germs unite before the calcification process has begun, and the result is a tooth with a single root canal. There’s also a variant known as concrescence, when the fusion occurs in the embryo when the cementum layer of the root is forming. The technical terms of dentistry have their own special magic – really, the whole vocabulary is glorious once you lift the veils of fear and pain which shroud it.

  Wendy couldn’t wait to lose that big tooth, that monster gnasher. When it finally happened she was delighted. She wouldn’t have expected compensation from the Tooth Fairy in exchange for a body part she detested so much. If anything I imagine her leaving a tip under the pillow to cover the cost of disposal. She waited for the adult teeth to erupt, hoping they would be separate and normal. None came.

  This is a classic pattern. A double baby tooth is associated with a missing adult tooth. Wendy was very upset, but there was nothing she could do about it. The Tooth Fairy giveth and the Tooth Fairy taketh away.

  Time drew Wendy’s teeth. It became possible to imagine feeling sorry for her, in the same way that it’s possible to imagine the square root of minus one, even after Mr McCorley had fitted her with a relatively convincing false tooth. Two false teeth, actually, so Wendy got at least part of what she wanted.

  Despite not wanting to grow up, I had come to enjoy testing authority in small sidelong ways. I loved to have the last word. One day there was a film on the ward telly, with a group of men on an adventure. When one of the men was wounded, a lady who had come along (even though she’d been told this was an expedition for men only) tore a strip off her skirt to dress his wounds, using some disinfectant which she kept handy. He flinched and looked the other way while the music went very lovey-dovey indeed.

  When night-time came (in the film) I couldn’t help myself. I called out to Staff Nurse, ‘Come quickly, come quickly!’ Then when she’d trotted up looking rather flustered, I said, ‘See! It’s night-time, and look! They’re sleeping in the forest. Why doesn’t someone come along and take those trees away? Don’t they know it’s dangerous to sleep near all those plants?’

  Staff Nurse seemed a little flummoxed, but said the difference was that the people weren’t in hospital. I said, ‘One of them has just got wounded and that’s almost the same.’ Then she got quite shirty and told me about the Upas Tree. The Upas Tree gave out a gas which stupefied an already sleeping man. It would then bend its branches down, pick you up, digest you while you were sleeping and you would never be seen again. Within a day everyone would have forgotten that you ever existed. I should be grateful I only had daffodils and buzy lizzies to contend with, and not ask so many questions.

  Of course the upas tree, Antiaria toxicaria, isn’t like that at all. Only the sap is poisonous, a sort of toxic milk, and you’d be waiting a long time before one got round to eating you. Even so, I was delighted. I admired carnivorous plants unreservedly, and the idea of a carnivorous tree thrilled me to the core.

  My hand-writing was resisting all efforts to improve it. I didn’t see why I had to write things down. I wanted to live my whole life without having to make silly marks. If things were forgotten then so be it. The forgetting made way for new things to come along. Finally Turps had the idea that I should learn to type instead. Perhaps he had noticed my love of fiddling with knobs and buttons.

  ‘Typing’, said Miss Reid grimly, ‘is only for those who have learned to write properly first!’ As if this was tea-time, and typing was the cake reserved for those who had eaten up their bread and butter. I hated arbitrary objections like this – why couldn’t she just scream, ‘No you can’t! Over my dead body will you learn to type! You’re a pesky little nit!’? That would at least be honest.

  ‘Oh I don’t know …’ said Turpin. ‘Why don’t we let him try and see how things go?’

  I suppose he was exercising his authority. Turpin and Reid weren’t exactly the best of friends. They’d had a minor territorial barney a few weeks before, so perhaps their backs were already up. Mr Turpin had come along to give me an English lesson, using a book by Ronald Ridout which I had loved. Reid had been very sniffy about it, saying she would never recommend that book.

  Now Miss Reid went very red in the face, which didn’t suit her. ‘As you wish, headmaster,’ she said. ‘Teaching him such a skill, though, would lie Outside The Orbit Of My Assistance.’ It’s a lost art, I’m afraid, speaking in initial caps. ‘One must be careful not to set a precedent.’

  I didn’t know what a precedent was, but it certainly felt like a variation on a theme of Weetabix. Allow him to type and they’ll all want to do it. Ward One will become a typing pool. ‘Perhaps you can find someone else.’

  ‘As a matter of fact I have someone in mind who I’m sure will be happy to help.’ I noticed that he too was red in the face. ‘Mrs Rhodes.’

  ‘I need hardly remind you that Mrs Rhodes teaches on Ward Three, and John is refusing to go there. If he wants to continue in his childish ways, then he shouldn’t expect to get adult things like typewriters as well!’ Her reedy voice was displaying an unattractive range of overtones, but I didn’t care. Turpentine and Reid were having a row, right there in the ward, and it was all over me!

  At this point Turpentine went on the attack. ‘I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you, Miss Reid, to put yourself in John’s shoes?’ said Turps. ‘If you hadn’t been doing your best to hold him back for four years, he might be on Ward Three right now!’

  This was outrageous, of course. He could just as easily have said it was to her credit that I didn’t want to leave her class. Poor Miss Reid had little enough status, and now it was being trampled on. A typewriter was imported from Ward Three, and so was Mrs Rhodes to teach me how to use all my fingers. Miss Reid learned a new skill of her own – looking straight through me. After all we’d been through together, the sins, the songs, the botany.

  Mrs Rhodes had her work cut out. I remember her training me to type the word ‘alone’ correctly, dividing the work between my hands, rather than pecking haphazardly, but there were limits to what I could do. My hands were not like hers, and not only because she had long nails painted red.

  I instinctively knew that if the point of her long fingernail hit anything hard, then it would give her a nasty jolt, and that if the hard thing was the key of a typewriter (manual, naturally, at that date
), then it would just plain hurt. Even so her typing was rapid and bossy. Not only did her clattering fingers hit the right keys, but on each stroke the pointed nail would fit tenderly for an instant over the rounded key, like a cap designed to fit it, before the next command came from Mrs Rhodes’ brain and her fingers darted away to flirt with another key.

  Scarlet shields

  Between us we lowered our sights. Using all my fingers was not a possibility. She and the machine were made for each other. It didn’t respond to my advances in the same way. Since I had no movement in my left elbow, it was my left thumb and index finger which had the best access to the keyboard. In that position the smaller fingers were angled away from the keyboard.

  On the other hand I could move my right elbow, so it made sense to exploit this splendid power, letting the fourth and fifth fingers take charge of the right-hand sector of the typewriter. I became a dogged and very happy four-finger typist, tapping out reams of drivel. It’s just that the four fingers I used were a motley bunch of digits, not crack troops like Mrs Rhodes deployed, with their scarlet shields, but ragged volunteers. Yokels with pitchforks, really.

  For a while I could keep change at bay by sheer force of will. I could refuse to move to Ward Three and I could hypnotise Turpentine into coöperating. But then it turned out I couldn’t stay in Ward One. None of us could.

  CRX was being struck by an administrative earthquake. We would all be moving, the girls and I. We wouldn’t be going far, though. We would only be moving from Ward One to Ward Two, and everything else would stay the same. I wasn’t drastically upset. It didn’t seem too much of an upheaval. Perhaps there weren’t enough Still’s patients any more to justify two whole wards. Now Ward One was going to become a maternity ward.

  It wasn’t as if we had many possessions, and we weren’t expected to shift them ourselves. People cling to their routines, of course, whether they choose them or not. We would be exchanging one configuration of bed and wall and window for another, unfamiliar but essentially the same, and that was that.

  Except that the move got mixed up with other things. Sarah told me that when the nurses were changing Ivy’s knickers, there was yellow sticky stuff in them, which meant her periods were starting. This held terror for me. I didn’t want my periods to come. My taily had been developing its own ideas about what to do, and I was frightened that sticky stuff would come out of it, maybe blood. Nearly everything else about me seemed to be abnormal, so I couldn’t take anything for granted. The most surprising thing, really, would be for me to follow the standard pattern.

  I asked Sister Heel if I would be allowed to stay on Ward Two, or if this was all a trick to move me to a men’s ward. She could normally be relied on to tell the truth, but she hardly seemed to hear me. She told me she had been a nurse for a long time. She thought this would be a good time to retire. Her voice was unusually soft, as if she was already retiring in instalments. It felt as if she was washing her hands of me.

  Then when we were safely established in Ward Two I learned something about the move that made it much more serious. Ward One was being turned into a maternity ward, yes, fine. People had babies, I knew that. People had babies all the time. Mum was going to have a baby too – that I knew. She’d told me about it, I had it in the back of my mind. She wanted to have a little girl. Perhaps it would happen this time. I didn’t see anything wrong in that. A baby girl might make her happy. I didn’t have strong objections.

  It was putting all the information together that made things unbearable. All the little propositions combined into a terrible theorem. Mum was going to go into Ward One to have her new baby.

  There was something primal about my revulsion, no question of that. It made my skin crawl, the idea that Mum would be full of baby and so near. Couldn’t she go and have her stupid baby somewhere else?

  There was also an intense social discomfort. The different rules of home and hospital meant that there was a dividing line between them on my mental maps. What linguists call an isogloss, a contour representing changes in language. On one side of this line was ‘toilet’, ‘close’ and jeering at the posh. On the other was ‘lavatory’, ‘stuffy’ and sneering at everything common. It was awkward enough when the two worlds were a few miles apart, but in a little while there were going to be only yards between them. The isogloss would slice right through CRX, the isogloss would hang above me like a curtain of ice, quivering in every breeze, as if it was going to fall on me and slice me in two. The ice curtain was horribly permeable to sound. If the hospital was quiet Mum would be able to hear me saying ‘toilet’ to the little ruffians I shared the ward with, and Wendy would be able to hear me talking posh to her ladyship. I’d catch it coming and going. I’d be mocked and chastised by all parties. It made me feel sick just thinking about it.

  The obvious thing to say would be that I was jealous of the baby that was coming. That wasn’t how it felt. I wished the baby well. I wished the baby well away. It certainly didn’t occur to me that tailies must have been busy in pockets, one taily in particular. If I was blotting out an intolerable truth for the sake of my sanity, I did a good job.

  It felt as if there was almost nothing in my life I could control, and now everything was bearing down on me. I was counted precocious by the modest standards of CRX, but I hadn’t read Edgar Allan Poe at this stage. If I had, I might have found my nightmare well expressed in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. The walls gliding towards me, ready to crush me in my bed or push me into an abyss. The isogloss playing the part of the pendulum with its wicked blade, swishing in wider and wider arcs as it approached my bound body. Swishing one way with a whisper of ‘Nugget’. Swishing back with a murmur of ‘Noo-gah’.

  I tried to explain to Sarah but for once she didn’t get it. She couldn’t imagine not wanting Muzzie near her, and wasn’t a baby the best news in the world? It’s reading too much into the past to suggest that this was the first time I wondered if she was keeping up with me mentally the way she had always done before.

  When Mum was actually in the hospital waiting for the baby to come I was almost hysterical. Liquorice Allsorts were my only comfort. A nurse came to say that Mum was coming to say hello. I couldn’t bear it. I tried to scramble off the bed to intercept her. Whatever my joints felt about it, I wanted to totter down the corridor to head her off before she got to Ward Two. The nurse told me to lie down and be patient. Everything was fine and my mum was on her way.

  Then she came in, with the glow that pregnancy can give, eerily amplified in her case so that she seemed unnaturally calm and loving. Not herself at all. The nurse said, ‘Doesn’t your mum look well?’ Yes she did, but it didn’t suit her. It wasn’t her. The baby had put something strange inside her.

  She asked me how I was and she called me ‘darling’ – Gran’s word, but with its briskness replaced by something tender. ‘How do you like your mum coming to stay in your hospital? Isn’t it great fun?’

  I couldn’t speak. To speak in full hearing of both Mum and the cruel girls on the ward, to choose between pretending to be common and remembering to be posh, was not something I could do. All I could think of to do was to cough and mumble, ‘Sore throat,’ while Mum and the nurse looked at each other at a loss. No wonder they were baffled. I’m baffled myself when I look back. I was a boy whose body was distorted by an illness that would never go away, I was living in a hospital, and here I was transparently faking a trivial ailment. One thing I had no experience of was pretending to be ill. Funny that I made such a fuss.

  Disastrous convergence

  When the baby was born I did my best to prevent the disastrous convergence of the two worlds that I tried to belong to, by saying that Mum would be tired out and it would be better if I went to see her in my old ward rather than have her come to my new one. Luckily childbirth was still treated in those days as an illness in itself, and new mothers were discouraged from putting their feet to the floor for some time after the birth. Then they really did feel ill and weak w
hen they finally got up. So bed rest came to my rescue for once. That was the only time it did me any good.

  I brought with me the game of Flying Hats I’d won in a competition in the hospital. I don’t even remember what the competition was, and the game wasn’t really what I had my eye on in the matter of prizes. I wanted the loom that was also on offer. Looms were felt to be beneficial at CRX, in some way therapeutic, and I would have liked to have a go on one, but this particular model was unwieldy. It needed two hands to work it. It was described as ‘easy to operate’, but it was only easy to operate if you used both your hands. It required considerable motor skills to work it, which made it a completely perverse prize in this context. Presumably someone had one to spare and was getting rid of it, in a nice way.

  It wasn’t nearly as good as the special loom Wendy Keach had, whose shuttle you could flip over one-handed, but she wasn’t about to let me have a go on that. In the end I settled for the Flying Hats. There’s a picture of Lord David Astor bending down to give me my prize. He owned the Observer newspaper. He didn’t like Cliveden very much, I don’t think. He certainly didn’t spend much time there.

  Mum and I played Flying Hats as best we could, though I was still as much of a Dropper as I had been when Miss Reid gave me that name, after having to pick up so many pens and pencils. Mum wasn’t supposed to move more than the minimum, so if we dropped hats a nurse had to retrieve them. It’s not a very thrilling game at the best of times. At the end of it, though, Mum hugged me, in the barely-touching way she’d mastered by then, and said, ‘We do have fun, don’t we, John?’ It was so out of character it gave me the shivers. Everyone kept on and on about how she glowed, but what if I didn’t like the new light in her eyes?