Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Woodlarks was a special holiday camp to which Vulcan sent boys. I knew that Luke had been there before. Until I got his note, the idea had never held any attraction, but that soon changed. Then I was on fire to go, and pestered Mum and Dad to let me. They must have been puzzled by an enthusiasm that was rather out of character for me, but went along with it happily enough. I can’t remember if they had to contribute financially, or if the school bore the cost. Despite all my pleas, Mum insisted on replacing the Velcro on my trousers. Every time I had a pee I made a noise like ripping sheets, which didn’t seem a particularly favourable omen for a week away in which I was counting on losing what little virginity I had left.

  Before Woodlarks, though, I had a date with destiny, or I suppose it was an attempt to head destiny off and buy myself a little time. I was fine with shaving at school. I even enjoyed it. But I had an absolute horror of shaving at home. Even the thought of it made me go red in the face. My electric razor stayed at Vulcan. No question of taking it home.

  The only thing I had which gave me a tiny bit of privacy was the Chinese brick I’d been given by the great man Ben Nevin. It was only about four inches by five, and two deep, so of course the secret compartment was much smaller than that. I’d learned where to press to make the compartment open, but I’d had more sense than to show the trick to anyone else – even Peter – or to reveal that there was a trick involved. As far as anyone else was concerned, it was just a wooden brick with some decorative patterns cut on it. Purely ornamental.

  Finally one day I got up the courage to go into town on the Wrigley, on my own. I was desperate. I couldn’t bring the box with me. Then I headed for the chemist’s. I think it was called Pedley’s. There were a couple of steps outside the shop, so that was as far as I could get for the time being. I had decided to nobble an old dear, and get her to run my errand for me. You never had to wait long in Bourne End for an old dear.

  When an old dear came along, she didn’t make difficulties. I gave her the money and told her what I wanted. I said it was for my mother – though what sort of mother sends such a boy out on such an errand?

  While the old dear was in Pedley’s I had second thoughts about her suitability. She had whiskers herself. If that still counted as bum fluff I might give bums a wide berth after all. And what if they took one look at her and gave her Extra Strength Formula?

  The old dear came through with the goods, though, and I could nip back home before I met anyone I knew. Even a small tube of Immac wouldn’t quite fit into the internal compartment of the Chinese brick, but if I squashed the bottom of the tube over I could just about jam it into place. As the level of the cream in the tube went down, of course, the compartment could accommodate it more easily.

  I think it worked. I think it made a difference. I was lucky that my facial hair was only on my upper lip so far, not on my chin. So that’s what I did in the holidays, while the shaver stayed at school. I used a depilatory ointment to suppress the teenage changes. It was quite a business.

  I was at the limit of my mobility. I had to put Immac on my right fore-finger, and then rest my hand on my stick. Then with a combination of leaning-down and pushing-up movement it could just about be made to happen. It was very tricky.

  It’s hardly surprising that I was ambivalent about growing up, about becoming a man, because neither I nor anyone round me had the slightest idea of what being a man might mean in my case. But in there with all the queasiness was a certain excitement, a certain anticipation. It wasn’t really me that had the horror of the adult male and his body. It was Mum. I dreaded the changes to come because of their consequences, not for themselves. I felt I had more mileage as Mum’s Little Boy than I ever would as Mum’s Little Man. And Immac kept me on the right side of that barrier for a few extra months.

  When I did irrevocably move from one category of life to another, from boy to man, then she too would be evicted from one compartment and forced into another. It may be that terror of her own ageing was what lay underneath that whole painful passage between us. Mum always said that she wouldn’t be able to stand being fifty, though that was still comfortably a decade off.

  Ordinary lovely boys

  Woodlarks camp was only about half an hour’s drive away. In a funny way I was nostalgic for the old Bedford van. Not that the school’s Leyland bus was new. It must have been built in the 1940s. But I had come to prefer travelling separately from my wheelchair. There was always the possibility of sitting on someone’s lap. In the wheelchair I felt my erection was terribly noticeable, unless I adopted the hand position which had got me into trouble in the past.

  Luke, of course, since he had been there before, knew the ropes at the camp. I was beginning to realise that he was the sort of person who was born knowing the ropes. The camp was run by ordinary lovely boys in their late teens, wearing jeans and the chunky suède lace-ups called desert boots. I suppose one or two of them may have been in their early twenties. It was all I could do to take my eyes off their ordinary jeans.

  Luke and I were the oldest disabled boys in the party, allowed to stay up after the tinies had been stowed away in their tents. Luke and I had a tent to ourselves, which was an immensely exciting prospect.

  Luke called our helpers ‘lads’, and talked to them relentlessly about girls. Almost his first remark was, ‘Who have you got lined up for us tonight, then? I like blondes, but my friend John here prefers brunettes.’ He got them talking about their girl-friends and occasional conquests, doing a very smooth job I must say. Buttering them up a treat. I tried to join in, even though all this girl talk was getting me down. I was baffled that Luke showed so much enthusiasm. Fucking fucking fucking. Every sentence seemed to need at least one fucking.

  There was a proper camp fire. We had baked beans washed down with mugs of tea. We had marshmallows, impaled on twigs and toasted by the fire. They were almost too hot to eat, fiery puddles of sugar that would fall off the twig if you weren’t careful. We learned to blow on them to cool them down – even when they were already in our mouths. We would pull our lips back and try to balance them on the tips of our teeth. Somehow the taste buds seemed to send their most intense messages of sweetness when they were fighting for their own survival.

  The lads had brought a radio with them, and I remember the ordinary god-like boy who undressed me for the night singing along with the Ivy League. The words should have been ‘I can’t sleep at night, tossing and turning’,’ but he changed the last phrase into ‘too much wanking’ instead, and gave me a wink.

  The helpers were planning a sneaky pub visit and said Luke was welcome to join them if he liked. They thought he looked old enough not to be challenged (which I didn’t). It was an agonising moment. If he’d said yes it would have entirely scuppered my evening and possibly my whole life, but at the last moment he said, ‘You know what, lads? I’ll stay with John. You go on ahead. Save a girl for me!’

  Before they left they put us to bed while the fire died down. Our sleeping bags were laid out side by side, with a ground-sheet underneath. I liked the lads, but I didn’t enjoy being helped into bed by them, though at least my pyjamas didn’t let me down. Mum’s needlework skills meant they were tailored to fit, not clumsily altered. The lads eased us down onto the ground and into our sleeping bags. I said I was still a bit hot from the fire, so I didn’t need to be zipped in just yet. I thought this was a brilliant piece of strategy. I wanted the shreds of my virginity to fall away quite silently, without effort. The wheelchairs certainly cluttered up the tent, and it was a relief when the helpers took them away.

  That ecstatic clench

  Luke said, ‘I thought those lads would never go,’ but I didn’t dare to put into words what I felt or what I wanted. I wanted a cuddle. I wanted to interlock legs. The convention of the evening seemed to be that we talked about girls, though, and I stuck with it doggedly. I was wittering on about a girl I knew in Bourne End when Luke cut in with, ‘Why are you talking about this Trish girl?’ He was alre
ady sliding smoothly towards me.

  ‘Well … she lives in Bourne End and she seems to like me. I was thinking I should start seeing her.’

  ‘Good idea. Now I’m going to suck your cock.’ All I could say was, ‘Why in the world would you want to do that?’ It was no part of my sexual imaginings. He lifted the undefended flap of my sleeping bag away from my body.

  ‘You’ll like it. In fact you’ll love it. Everyone likes the way I do it.’

  Everyone? Who was everyone? ‘Who, for instance?’

  If Julian was right and everything connected with Vulcan was picked up by hidden microphones, then on the tape this would have sounded like spirited resistance, but in fact Luke had already taken my cock out of my pyjamas and was holding it by the base, giving it little shakes. Checking it for the wobble of half-heartedness, I expect, and finding none.

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised. Chris Hudson, for one. He can’t get enough.’

  How would I ever be able to face Chris Hudson? Not that I knew him at all well. He was a nice boy from Birmingham whose parents ran a shop. He stole, or rather things tended to disappear while he was around. I always kept an eye on the Ben Nevin box when Chris was in the vicinity.

  It’s hard for someone in my position to defend himself from pilfering, whether it’s a Chinese box from Hong Kong that’s likely to go missing, or his own genitals, being swallowed by someone he’s been chasing for months.

  Luke started doing what he wanted, which he was so confident would bring me pleasure, but I could hardly assimilate the sensations. I was so used to pressing myself against the sheet. All that slipperiness, that feeling of a membrane, was very alien. His lips closed round my penis in a hermetic seal. Air was as likely to get into that ecstatic clench as it was to penetrate the rubber gasket of Mum’s pressure cooker. I couldn’t understand how he was able to breathe, and I was worried that my excitement might explode in his mouth, and choke him or poison him.

  Then Luke had the brain-wave of using his hand to help things along. I muttered, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ as I came, thinking I was spoiling everything, but he amazed me by swallowing greedily. He lay there licking his lips, and even humming a tune. It was ‘Tossing and turning’ again.

  ‘I’ll be back for more of that, John,’ he said. ‘You kept me waiting long enough.’ Whatever Luke lacked, it wasn’t confidence.

  Before long, the helpers came back from their pub expedition, if they’d really gone. Perhaps they were being tactful to leave us alone together. I’d opened Pandora’s Box at the ripe old age of fifteen, and I still hadn’t seen any penis but my own. It was stiff again and poking out of my pyjamas, and I thought it was a monster, an in-between creature like a basilisk, something unholy and unnatural. It wanted more. But I still wanted a cuddle, and didn’t understand how it was safe to do what we had done, but not safe to hold me as I wanted to be held.

  For years after that night the smell of marshmallows toasting would give me an erection. Caramelisation of any description was likely to set me off. I had to steel myself against arousal when pudding time came round at the Compleat Angler. I’m not sure I’m safe even now.

  It didn’t take me long, that night, to make sense of the novel idea and experience of being fellated. I decided that for a number of reasons it was a good thing. No evidence was left behind, so no one would know what had gone on. If the practice caught on at school, we could keep the staff in ignorance indefinitely of what went on in the sucking academy when they weren’t around. There was also a more mystical aspect. Part of me was now in Luke. Everywhere he went he would take a little bit of John with him. I had no illusions that his interest in me was deep or exclusive, but that too was a good thing. Every time he enjoyed himself so expertly with another male, we would both be bonded to another being down the chain …

  In the morning I woke with my feet out of the tent, wet on dewy grass. The ground must have been on a slight slope, and I’d gone sliding downhill. I couldn’t pull myself back without help.

  The rest of the Woodlarks week wasn’t nearly as much fun. I didn’t enjoy sleeping on the ground. The discomfort didn’t bother me all that much – it wasn’t as if the beds at Vulcan were anything but basic. I just didn’t like the knowledge that I couldn’t get up without help. At a pinch I could get out of a bed unaided, but not up off a floor. When I was older and read Kafka’s Metamorphosis it brought it all back to me, that helpless beetle feeling. I especially didn’t like being helped in intimate things by the ordinary lovely boys. I preferred the school matrons because I was more relaxed. It didn’t seem so crushingly important that they should like me. I wondered whether looking after us was a punishment, and if so what the lads had done to deserve it, looking after disabled boys instead of being out with the girls they liked so much. You always wonder what helpers have done to draw the short straw.

  On other nights Luke wanted to repeat the activities of the first, but I wouldn’t let him. If he persisted I would pretend to be having a bad dream for the benefit of the people in the other tents, shouting and mumbling until he was scared off. Then of course I had to hold my bladder all night, because I could hardly wake Luke up and ask him to pass the pee bottle without offering something in return. I resented the idea that I was a sort of buffet for him to nibble at whenever he felt peckish. After our elaborate courtship on the school premises I felt I deserved better than to be treated as a sort of midnight feast in a sleeping bag.

  I certainly learned to fuck that week, though. By the end of it I was the fuckingest fucker who had ever fucked. Every sentence was stuffed with fucking. I didn’t know what the word meant, but its rhythm was a very addictive addition to my conversational repertoire. When Dad was driving me home in the car I told him that having a camp fire at night was fucking great, food cooked outside was fucking tasty – mind you, the ground was fucking hard for sleeping. I loved my new word. It could make itself at home in any part of a sentence.

  Dad didn’t say anything. He pulled over and parked with care, signalling and using the mirror, and then he gave me a good clout on the ear. I was stunned, and really didn’t know the reason why.

  Dad seemed to calm down once he’d shut me up so effectively. When we were nearly home he said, ‘Be sure to try out your new word on your mother. I’m not sure she’s ever heard it …’ Did he think I was born yesterday? If he wanted to upset Mum, he could fucking well do it himself.

  The tensions between Mum and Dad weren’t exactly tucked out of sight, even though they were never talked about. Raeburn and Miss Willis managed to maintain a façade much more skilfully. We pupils of the school were unaware of any differences between them. It’s true that someone had once heard her saying, ‘Alan, please don’t,’ when he was about to let loose with the Board of Education, whether from squeamishness or real disapproval. Otherwise the co-principals kept up a united front.

  Then suddenly all that changed, and each of them dealt the other a terrible wound. Each felt betrayed, though the betrayals were different in kind, one professional and one personal.

  Old Rabies is tying the knot

  The rumour came round the school’s bush telegraph, so that I felt like somebody near the end of the circle in a game of Chinese Whispers, hearing a formula so garbled it bore no relationship to the original. ‘Old Rabies is tying the knot with Ponky-doodle.’ What on earth could that mean? A little later it was made official. Alan Raeburn was marrying Millicent Baxter, she of the sensitive sniffer and the blue-pencilled swear-words. There was going to be a party laid on to celebrate the happy event.

  By chance Kim Derbishire, the school’s first pupil, primal Vulcanian, was paying a visit just then. He attended the party. To me he was a figure from legend. I was trying to get the meat of a walnut out of its shell, wrestling with the little vice provided for the purpose. A crotch wrapped in brown corduroy entered my field of vision. The very limited movement of my cervical spine made it hard for me to look at tall boys’ faces. It was a pain in the neck. It wa
s much easier to look at their groins. With an effort I followed this particular pair of trousers up to the shirt and beyond, to his smiling face. He reached into the nut dish and picked up a handful. There was a noise like bones crunching and I realised to my amazement that he was breaking them in one hand. He handed them over to me with a gallant flourish, and then he quietly continued his walk round the dining tables. He was like an ambassador or minister, but to me he was little short of a god.

  Kim radiated sex appeal, not musk but aura. Everyone except Miss Willis knew that Kim was having nightly trysts in the school library with one of the new helpers, little Dagmar Bosch from Oberammergau who hardly came up to his shoulder. It wasn’t hard to pull the wool over Marion’s eyes when it came to her pets. And if Kim didn’t get enough of a frisson from having sex after lights-out on the premises of his old school, he could tickle himself even further with the thought that Dagmar’s brother had played Christ in the Oberammergau Passionsspiel.

  Marion’s eyes had been shining all evening at the engagement party for Millicent and Alan. Emotion wasn’t necessarily out of place on such an occasion, but of course it depends on what the emotion is. She seemed very restless, moving from place to place, but she happened to be near me when the speeches started, and I could hear quite clearly what she said.

  ‘Oh Alan, please, don’t do this to me. I can’t bear it.’ Then with a sob she hurried away.

  It was the smallest possible outburst, swallowed up by the noise of the party, a genteel death-rattle kept well back in her throat. Teachers learn to project as a matter of course, clarity of articulation an occupational requirement, but this was something that her divided larynx fought with, half to shout out to the castellated roof-tops and half to swallow down like a cyanide pill. Even in a culture that hated scenes above anything, where murmuring ‘For God’s sake, m’dear, don’t make a scene’ could bring all but the most hysterical or actively foreign to their senses, it didn’t count as an unwarrantable parading of emotion.