Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  I enjoyed the privilege more than the content of the comics. My favourite publication was still Judy, my favourite serial (and character) ‘Backstroke Babs’. It didn’t excite adverse comment at Vulcan that a thirteen-year-old boy should read a girls’ comic, or if it did, the objection was soon neutralised by the sheer excellence of the story, when I was gracious enough to let Judy pass from my exclusive possession. It beat the boys’ comics hollow. The plot was well-constructed, the situations not too repetitious and the psychology a cut above the competition. This was a proper story. It showed real people and their sneaky nasty plans.

  Even at home in Bourne End, Judy had a readership. Peter wasn’t expected to be much of a tough lad, and he was attending a Quaker school, but there would still have been social consequences if he had read Judy on the premises. Even at Trees he continued to swear allegiance to the Dandy. Yet while I was devouring a new issue of Judy (leaving ‘Backstroke Babs’ till last, naturally), and he was turning the pages of the Dandy hot off its presses, it was perfectly plain that his heart wasn’t in it. It was all he could do not to ask what was happening to Babs in the latest instalment. Finally I would let him read it for himself, while I cast a patronising eye over the antics in the Dandy.

  On dry land Backstroke Babs used a wheelchair, but in the swimming pool she was in her element. She was her school’s strongest swimmer, always turning the tide in competitions and thwarting the plans of those who envied her talents and her popularity, her utter niceness. It’s a little strange that I don’t remember the exact nature of Babs’s disability, considering my unsought connoisseurship in this area of life. Was she paraplegic? She’d have had to be a bloody good swimmer all right, to churn her way past the able-bodied, disregarding the way her legs let her down in the pool. Even if it was polio the set-up was remarkably unlikely. So perhaps I realised that this was consoling fantasy – better not to examine it too closely.

  I didn’t lose face in the school after my ‘accident’ in the Vulcan grounds, though I amply deserved to. No one was rude enough to point out that since the tiller had to be lifted off before I could dismount from the E&J, the tableau in the woods could hardly be anything but a planned event.

  Nor was ‘suicide’ a possibility. How, exactly, was I supposed to have climbed out of the wheelchair in my self-destructive despair? I had to have help.

  Julian Robinson was the obvious candidate. He was very happy to remove the tiller and help me clamber out of the machine. For once I blessed the rigidity his callipers gave. He held me up and we tottered a few feet together, until I could get a grip of the branches and make my controlled fall. We had agreed beforehand that he wouldn’t help me with rolling down the slope unless I really got stuck. Realism was important. It was a matter of pride. The last little bit of effort makes all the difference between slap-dash work and something you can be proud of.

  Julian didn’t ask why I wanted to give the impression that I had come to grief in the woods. He was bound by his temperament to join any conspiracy that offered itself. He wasn’t fussy.

  Madly propitious

  The calliper fiasco had created a certain embarrassment between us, and I still hadn’t satisfied my curiosity about Julian’s private parts. Then only a few weeks later he was served up to me on a plate. Quite suddenly the circumstances were propitious, so madly propitious that nothing could hold me back, and it happened in the unlikely setting of the Blue Dorm. Not only that, but it was with everyone in attendance, everyone taking part in my sexual exploration of the boy whose humiliation I had once engineered in the duel of the chemistry sets.

  Roger Stott was sitting on another boy’s bed, helping him stick stamps in an album. There were a couple of boys from another dorm too, paying a visit. There was an atmosphere of great ease and licence. Julian was in his bed writing a letter. His callipers had been stood down for the day. Perhaps they had been cutting into him. He was defended by nothing more daunting than the winceyette of his pyjamas. Suddenly I knew that I must get into bed with him. I called out, ‘Julian! Julian! I bet I can stop you writing that letter.’

  He didn’t even raise his eyes from the paper. ‘And how do you imagine you’re going to do that, John?’

  ‘Well, if my bed was next to yours,’ I said, ‘I’d be in there with you in a moment and I’d find a way to break your concentration!’

  ‘It wouldn’t make the slightest difference,’ he said, ‘and besides, there’s no way you could get over here.’

  ‘Oh couldn’t I?’ I said. ‘Just you watch!’

  Roger had finished his business with the stamp album, so I signalled him to come over to my bed. I whispered to him that he must carry me over to Julian’s. Without a word he picked me up and carried me over, putting me on the bed right next to Julian – who went right on writing his letter, just as if nothing had happened. I whispered to Roger that I needed to get under the covers.

  He pretended to be exasperated, saying, ‘If I do that there’ll be no end to it. Next you’ll be complaining that I haven’t tucked you in properly,’ and I said, ‘Yes of course I will. You’re getting the hang of this.’ Next minute Roger was holding me up in the air again and asking one of the bystanders to pull back Julian’s sheets and blankets to let me in. Julian was doggedly writing his letter and not acknowledging my existence at all. Soon I was tucked up next to him while the other boys at least pretended to carry on with their activities.

  ‘You see I’m going on writing this letter exactly as I said I would, don’t you?’ said Julian breezily. ‘Your being in the bed hasn’t made the slightest bit of difference to me … Except that now I’ve run out of things to write … What shall I say?’

  ‘Say … “John is lying on top of me …”’ I said. ‘Good idea! That’ll do,’ said Julian, happily scribbling away, ‘and incidentally I don’t think it’d make a scrap of difference even if you were …’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘It’d take a lot more than that to break my concentration.’

  ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you, that’s all.’

  ‘Go ahead then.’ He actually said, in the blithest possible voice, ‘Do your worst, Cromer.’

  People are always talking about the cover of darkness, but what I had working for me in the Blue Dorm was the cover of light. The cover of light made everything perfect. No one could have suspected that my intentions towards Julian were anything other than honourable. We were playing a game. I was overjoyed that my plans were coming to fruition at last. Without waiting for him to change his mind, I made to mount him.

  The logistics of the thing meant that I might just as well have tried to climb Everest. There was no way that I could get on top of him. I got as far as wriggling onto my side and trying to swing my leg over his. No good. Then Roger Stott, the lucky boy who more and more saw George Harrison in the mirror, and who had been watching with a grin on his face, gave a sigh of mock exasperation and said, ‘And now I suppose you’ll be asking me to lift you up and put you on top of him?’ I waggled my head to say Yes.

  Mount Julian

  As he lifted me up and I began my descent onto the well-cushioned territory called Mount Julian, I gave thanks to Roger Stott, the guardian angel of my wayward desire. He was helping me be a bit of a devil. I could appreciate in a more general way that Marion Willis and Alan Raeburn had been very much on the ball when they had opened the school to ABs. It had partly been a tactic, to cast their net as widely as possible, and to maximise the money coming in. ABs could have managed well enough at any school, but for the proper working of Vulcan as a complex organism they were indispensable. Without them, there would have been a much higher staff-to-pupil ratio, and consequent squashing of a lot of fun and freedom. What matron, however enlightened, would ever have had the nerve to lift me onto another boy, purely to serve the sparky mood of the dorm?

  The next few seconds were a feast of sensation, and I gorged myself. My previous fantasy had run aground because I had failed to factor
Julian’s callipers into the equation. Now I had learned my lesson, and delayed my pounce until the callipers were off. Bravo John! Sound tactics. On the other hand, I hadn’t thought things through properly. I hadn’t fully understood what it meant that his callipers were now off. After all, they were worn for a reason.

  The legs which had been so hard and unyielding in the castle classroom still had the reflected glamour of motion and masculinity, but without the hated supporting brackets they had no power. I had fantasised about interlocking my legs with man-boy or boy-man, but now that I was in the desired position Julian couldn’t play his part. For once the assignment was beyond the schoolboy agent QM. For all I know, Julian was throwing all the appropriate switches in his brain, but the wasted poliomyelised muscles in his legs couldn’t respond to the messages, though they still had a full range of movement. My case was the opposite, so that once again there was a fatal dove-tailing of disabilities. Messages from brain to legs came through loud and clear. Willing muscles pulled in the proper planes. Ankylosed joints refused to budge.

  Nevertheless there was much that I could achieve in these seconds. I was lucky in having Roger Stott as a willing collaborator. My body didn’t usefully respond to my commands. Roger’s could and did. I was pulling his strings very nicely, but he was also following his own mischievous agenda, at a tangent to mine. We weren’t moving as one, which would have been boring. We were improvising some sort of unprecedented dance, full of cross-rhythms.

  Throwing myself open to the spontaneity blossoming in the room, I raised my little fists and brought them down on Julian’s chest, shouting, ‘You will stop writing that letter. You will stop writing that letter! If you don’t stop writing I shall beat you up.’

  ‘That’s it John, you tell him!’ said Roger. ‘I’ll make it easier for you …’ He put his arms round my waist and lifted me slightly, and soon we had become marvellously syncopated. As I raised my hands a few inches, Roger lifted me a little and when I brought them winging down he gave a downward thrust at the same time to amplify the movement. I was a tender battering ram, storming the walled town that was Julian Robinson with the help of a passing volunteer army.

  We soon got into the swing of it. Julian let the letter slip out of his hands and called out in a show of panic, ‘Oh no please, don’t do it! I surrender. I’ll do anything you want. Just name your price!’

  By now I had captured the attention of the entire dorm. Someone said, ‘Come on John, do some of your “Darling I luff you” stuff now.’ ‘Naahhh!’ said someone else, charitably. ‘He always gets stuffed in the play. He should be underneath.’

  ‘Oh don’t be so old-fashioned!’ said the first voice, ‘he can do anything he wants. Just give it to him, John!’

  Roger obligingly moved his arms down to my hips and started using my fused pelvis to hump Julian’s body. I took advantage of those seconds to tell him I wanted to mate with him. The word which I had heard used by an ambulance man all those years ago still had power over me. I mouthed the words as if they were part of the play, though I was perfectly sincere. I pretended to be only pretending to mean them. I also used those precious moments to explore Julian’s body with my hands.

  It wasn’t easy. As I was bounced up and down I was reminded of the flicker books other boys used to play with – they resisted my fumbling – where a series of still pictures turned into a miniature film when riffled with a competent thumb, some jerky chase or other. I needed to assemble these moments into a fuller portrait. I would have liked to take my time over the exploration, but I knew I had only seconds before the mood of the room changed. Ideally I would savour each new sensation, comparing it with what I had thought it would be like. I would let each batch of information be smoothly absorbed before moving on to the next one. Pretend to be playing with his tummy, admire the firmness, comment on the muscles, let your hand go down further accidentally on purpose, see if he flinches away, if his reaction is neutral it might mean he didn’t want you to think he enjoyed it. Take your time, as much as seems decent, a whole day if you can spare it. Later in the sequence, put your hand between his legs and give a gentle nudge, in order to feel … whatever was there.

  That was the problem I faced. I still didn’t have much idea about what I was going to find. For all I knew, tailies might get smaller and smaller as you grew older until they’d diminished to a residual bud. In any event, my chances to explore his body had to take place in flicker-book flashes. As Roger held my botty and plunged it down onto Julian’s body I was able to feel something. The problem was interpreting the data. It was the first time that I’d been on top of another human being since I was running around making bomfires in 1953. Now my ankylosed joints were being pumped on top of the minotaur boy. His top half was perfect. The bottom half was a mystery waiting to be solved.

  My brain must have been working as fast as it had for many years – probably since I had lain in bed in Bathford listening to ‘the song where the lady wins in spite of not knowing about pies’, also known as ‘Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better’. The camera in my head was taking pictures at a huge rate. Flash-bulbs were popping. My hand was being squashed in rhythm against Julian’s body. My thumb on his firm tummy slipped into a little hollow that I knew must be the belly button. I’d located the central dent of his anatomy. Now I should try to slide my thumb southward an inch or two at a time. Blow the thumb southerly, south or south-west. My lad’s in the dorm whom I love best …

  It’s not usually possible for me, with my fixed wrists, to lay my palms against the parts of the world that interest me, so I’ve learned over time to transfer tactile sensitivity to the backs of my hands. I’ve done as much mental re-wiring as I can manage, and I’ve learned to interpret the data that streams in from surfaces which nature left only meanly supplied with pleasure sensors.

  Roger, bless him, was working me in a reasonably slow rhythm, though it wasn’t as slow as I would have liked. I would have liked to freeze time at the bottom of each plunge, deadly earnest at the centre of the laughing group. As things stood, each downward thrust gave me barely half a second’s time to explore. I located Julian’s legs, and wondered at the exquisite softness of them. If I could get the secret of those legs and how to copy them, Julian and I could set up in business. We’d make cushions which would sell in every country of the world. We could charge any price – but there was no sum of money that could make me want to let go of what I was touching, this glorious prototype. It was the most astounding sensation. Inwardly I wept, while busy gloating, that such tender softness must spend its days imprisoned by leather and metal. How much I would have loved to drift off to sleep resting against those legs!

  Our high jinks in the dorm were getting rather rowdy. Miss Willis’s voice called up from the bottom of the stair-well to ask what on earth was going on. Roger froze in the middle of a thrust, just when my pioneering arm was investigating the uncharted territory between Julian’s soft legs, and called out that everything was fine. ‘It’s just boyish high spirits, Miss Willis,’ he shouted. ‘Nothing I can’t control.’

  Then he said, more quietly, ‘Settle down, everyone – play-time over,’ but he was merciful enough to leave me snuggling against Julian.

  ‘Come on,’ said Julian. ‘You spend so much of your time mothering us and feeding us, I think it’s about time I gave you a cuddle. Come here, my sweet baby, come to Mummy! Let Mummy make a fuss!’ He took me in his arms and kissed me, and moved me about quite a lot with those strong arms, making sure not to rest any weight against me.

  Soon we heard Biggie and Gillie setting off up the stairs to tuck us in and turn the lights out. The boys who had strayed in from elsewhere scattered to their proper dorms. Roger scampered over to pick me up and carry me back to my bed. There was a flurry of sheet-straightening and tucking in of blankets.

  There was no adventure story after lights-out that night. It would have been an anti-climax. I stayed awake for a long time, with my brain fully engaged in the sifti
ng of new information. I couldn’t swear to it, but I thought I had managed to locate Julian’s penis, in the last half-second before Miss Willis called out and Roger Stott froze. If I had, then my ideas about the world would have to be revised one more time. The dwindling-bud theory of sexual development would have to be abandoned. It wouldn’t wash.

  While I waited for sleep I imagined that there would be many more exploring times to come. My expedition into the interior of the manly groin was only just under way. I understood, though, that conditions would never again be so favourable to the project. Just that one time, everyone had lent a hand with my homework. With a lot of help, I now had my mental Julian flicker book bound and safely shelved.

  I know there’s a theory that experience works by contrast – without the lows you wouldn’t enjoy the highs. By that logic Judy Brisby was necessary for me fully to appreciate that night in the Blue Dorm with Roger and Julian, with a whole innocently whooping crowd helping me to stuff my face with forbidden fruit. I disagree. Riding the rollercoaster of Julian’s body was a peak independent of any trough. It was mystically separate, and strangely, for that reason, it didn’t blot out my awareness of Judy Brisby, her cruelty lurking in the institution like dry rot that undermines everything, a fruiting body hidden in the walls.

  Bloody Assizes

  It would have been some sort of fitting end to that evening if Raeburn had burst in and walloped us all. In fact it was a few nights later that the wrath of the Board of Education was visited on the Blue Dorm. I suppose we had been making a ruckus, and we’d ignored Miss Willis when she shouted up the stairs, ‘Quiet in the Blue Dorm!’ We would simmer down for about a minute and then start up again. We forced her to take more drastic action. ‘Now you’ll be sorry!’ she shouted up the stairs again, ‘I’m going to report you!’ We knew what this meant. There might be two co-principals but only one used physical means of discipline. She was threatening to summon Old Rabies and unleash the B of E.