Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  ADAM MARS-JONES

  Cedilla

  { novel }

  For Claude, whose sharp eyes …

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1 Merry Hell

  2 Swimming Like a Stone

  3 Guest of the Mountain

  4 Dark Ages

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  1

  Merry Hell

  When I left Vulcan, that self-proclaimed ‘boarding school for the education and rehabilitation of severely disabled but intelligent boys’, a phase of my mundane education was over. I was now an Old Vulcanian, though not in any hurry to attend reunions – if any were even held.

  I had been much changed during my years on those premises. Perhaps you could say I had been Vulcanised, vulcanisation being a process for treating rubber by adding sulphur or other substances in the presence of heat and pressure. Vulcanisation enhances rubber’s strength, resistance and elasticity. The description can be made to fit. I (or actually only ‘I’) had been strengthened and weakened in a complex simultaneous process, fortified and adulterated.

  Then gradually the whole world became Vulcanised, in a different sense. A few years later the Star Trek series started to be broadcast and became extremely popular. English fans were told that no work was done at NASA on a Friday evening, because staff were required to watch Star Trek. They too had to learn what the future would be like.

  Some of us loved the graceful shape of the Starship Enterprise itself, others coveted the weaponry, those stunning phasers, or the ability to beam down onto planets directly, descending like gods in a cascade of molecules. Others loved the comely communications officer Lieutenant Uhura (of the United States of Africa). No one had any respect for the theme tune – a swoony number which would have gone better with Come Dancing – or the nasty nylon trousers worn stupidly short.

  I personally was spellbound by the automatic doors on the Starship Enterprise, which opened and closed with a distinctive squawking swish.

  It was obvious to me that there would be automatic doors in the future, superseding every other sort of mechanism. There would be no more awkward pushing and pulling, no more knobs out of reach. The technology was elementary, surely? No real challenge for a boffin. I wasn’t holding my breath for matter transporters or warp drives, but I was confident that there would soon be automatic doors everywhere, swishing open to admit me to privileged spaces, swishing closed behind me to seal off the outside world. I was eager for that future to begin, and I’m a patient person. I have to be, and I’m still waiting.

  One element of the Star Trek saga threw a light backwards on my past as a severely disabled but intelligent schoolboy. This was the enigmatic character of Mr Spock, impassive and elfin, who came from a planet with the same name as my old school, Vulcan. Technically in fact he was only half-Vulcan, but nevertheless he made us familiar with a number of practices from his home planet, techniques of combat and communication: the Vulcan Death Grip and the Vulcan Mind Meld.

  I went along with the general enjoyment of the programme, but I experienced an extra layer of response. To me the phrase ‘Vulcan Death Grip’ could only conjure up Judy Brisby holding me by the ankles over the stairwell of the school after I had refused a meal of slimy fish, even when she tried to cram the hated pilchards down my throat. The manœuvre as performed by Mr Spock and his kind, though, was a nerve pinch rather than the nerve punches which were Judy Brisby’s speciality. It produced unconsciousness without involving pain, a set of priorities for which Judy Brisby would have had no use.

  ‘Vulcan Mind Meld’, on the other hand, seemed a perfect way of describing the ecstatic episode in the Music Room, when Luke Squires and I played the melancholy waltz called Plaisir d’Amour and were mysteriously played upon in our turn by a poorly tuned upright piano transformed into a blaring Wurlitzer of synæsthetic sensation.

  Hip hurdles

  In my final interview with Miss Marion Willis, sole Principal of Vulcan, I had made out that Burnham Grammar School was waiting with open arms to shield me from the cold winds of special education, holding out a blanket and a steaming mug of cocoa, to make sure that I was never again exposed to the piercing blasts of winter, as I had experienced them in a frozen turret bathroom of Farley Castle, a folly imperfectly turned into a school.

  In fact we weren’t quite ready for our encounter, the school and I. There were two hurdles that I had to clear before I could take my rightful place in the state educational system. A perverse way of putting it, perhaps, the clearing of hurdles, since those hurdles were my hips.

  Even after I had started being a pupil of Vulcan School I would return every few months to the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital in Taplow (known to initiates as CRX) for the eminent Dr Ansell to give me the once-over. The measuring process no longer included nude photography, as it had done when I had lived in the hospital, and the object in view was explicitly spelled out. She was waiting for me to stop growing. To the untrained eye I hardly seemed to be growing at all, but I was doing it on the sly, and Ansell was patiently waiting for that furtive impulse to spend itself at last.

  Usually Ansell spoke to me as grown-up to grown-up, but sometimes she forgot and talked to someone else as if I wasn’t there. Even in the days when I was living at the hospital, I had hated the way Ansell would start off in her friendly vein, encouraging me to develop an understanding of my physical situation and a relationship with the medical experts, and then turn to a colleague and say something entirely different, something that was clearly designed to exclude me from understanding. It seemed so rude. On my return visits from Vulcan for monitoring she fell into the same bad habit. So she might say to me, ‘John, we’re examining your legs in such a lot of detail because when you’ve stopped growing we can do something about those hips of yours. I’m sure you’d like to sit down properly after all this time!’ But then she’d turn to a junior doctor and say something about epiphysis.

  Epiphysis. I hated that word, hated and feared it though I learned to say it correctly in my head. Four short syllables, with the stress on the second.

  It was being kept in the dark that felt so horrible. There was obviously a reason for it, and I knew what it had to be: I had an extra illness that they weren’t telling me about. I didn’t just have Still’s Disease, I had epiphysis as well, and considering how foul Still’s was, epiphysis must be much worse, or else they’d tell me about it, wouldn’t they?

  It took me a long time to realise that Ansell wasn’t saying anything very different to her junior than what she was saying to me. She was just changing from plain English to technical language. An epiphysis is the growing end of a long bone. Once I understood that, I calmed down and even rather enjoyed the word. There’s nothing like a technical vocabulary for conferring the illusion of control. I could see that there were parallels in other parts of the natural world, the growing tips of plants, for instance. It’s one of my great regrets that I’ve never climbed to the top of a coconut tree, to witness the glory of that vegetable epiphysis. Still, who’s to say it’s too late? Perhaps a fork-lift truck could be commandeered.

  Slow frenzy of growth

  In my early teens my epiphyses played me merry hell. My legs developed excrescences. Nasty ugly lumps. It began to look as if I had a knob stuck on the outer edge of each leg, to the side of where a working knee ought to be. I thought them very unsightly. I felt they let me down, though I don’t have great expectations of this body.

  I was almost fond of ‘epiphysis’ by this time, the word though not the thing, but the same trick didn’t work for ‘excrescence’. By derivation the words aren’t so very different – they both mean something that grows out of something else. Their overtones don�
��t overlap, though. Nice ethereal epiphysis – nasty brutish grotty excrescence.

  Luckily my excrescent epiphyses didn’t hurt. I thought they did, but I was wrong. One of Ansell’s deputies explained that since the knee joint was fully fused and had no moving parts, there could be no pain. In those days it was up to the doctor to decide whether the patient was in pain or not. Personally I thought my epiphyses hurt quite a lot, they weren’t just eyesores they were bloody sore, but I was outvoted and told otherwise. I had a certain amount of experience of pain by this time, but apparently I could still be fooled like any novice.

  The doctor who pooh-poohed my idea that the lumps hurt didn’t deny that there were pain sensors in the area of the knee, and also working nerves, he just maintained that there was no movement to set them off. Personally I think that he was defining movement rather narrowly. The end of the tibia was moving all right, in the slow frenzy of growth, blindly pushing against a socket that couldn’t accommodate it. Possibly I mean the fibula. But either way – bone grinding against bone. Whatever the explanation, I disliked what I fancied I felt, like the ‘faith-healer of Deal’ in the limerick. I disliked it more than ever before.

  Over time the pain diminished and the excrescences themselves seemed to shrink. Logically this should have prepared me for the idea that my epiphyses had settled down and that my body had done all the growing of which it was capable. I should have been relieved, but I experienced it as a surprise and a worry when Ansell told me that the waiting was over at last. Now it was time to operate.

  I wasn’t exactly overjoyed. I didn’t look forward to going under the knife. Mum was the impatient one. She had been saying for years, ‘I can’t think why they haven’t done the operations yet. Why don’t they do them now? They should get a move on!’

  I wasn’t in a hurry. When I was told it was time for those operations I burst out with, ‘But you said it wouldn’t happen until I was sixteen!’ I sounded like a betrayed child, the very thing I wanted so badly not to be taken for. Ansell told me as gently as she could that my body was ready and I should be too. I should be pleased – she said that. There was nothing to be gained by any further delay.

  In fact Mum and I were both behaving out of character. We were like clumsy actors with some amateur troupe who simultaneously drop their scripts at a read-through, and pick up each other’s without noticing. I was always the one who wanted independence and normality at any cost, and now I was dreading a decisive move in that direction. Mum was convinced that I would never be able to manage on my own, but here she was showing impatience about something that would help (fingers crossed) to bring that about.

  For a long moment we spoke each other’s lines without finding it strange. The tone of the family drama was remarkably unchanged by the actors going off the rails for a little while, and we soon got back in character.

  We made so much of our differences, of course, because we had so much in common. Often the difference was only one of emphasis. For instance, Mum’s greatest fear was that she would die, and then there would be no one to look after me. My greatest fear was almost the same. I was afraid that Mum would make me helpless without her, and then die. Almost the same thing, you see, but not quite.

  Loving care and domination

  My whole grammar-school scheme played into Mum’s hands, in a certain sense. Our minds were set on different phases of the future. Grammar school pointed me away from the disabled world, it addressed me firmly to a wider set of possibilities, yes, all of that, except that in the short term (a short term to be measured in years) it didn’t. I had made the subtle transition from in-patient to boarder in a disabled school, but now on my triumphant progress towards the main stream of life I would pass through a period of being a day-boy, someone who returned after school hours to the loving care and domination of his mother.

  So from Mum’s point of view the independence I had promised myself was a cloud with a silver lining – and the silver lining preceded the cloud. There must have seemed every chance that the cloud would simply drift away in its own sweet time, leaving the two of us curled up in its lining.

  You might think that having a young daughter would give Mum all the maternal focus she needed. Mum had thought so herself, before the young daughter actually arrived and showed what she was made of. Audrey was no picnic. She was very watchful as a baby, but once she had seen everything she needed to know she started to throw her weight around.

  When Audrey chose the womb, as according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead we all do (with the benefit of an unobstructed view free of time and space), she must have seen her chance to continue the family tradition of conflict between the generations, as shown by Mum’s hopeless struggle against Granny. The day Audrey had her first tantrum she showed that she was already a force fully formed. This was a hurricane that would never simply blow itself out. Local seismographs must have scribbled on slowly moving paper the initial tremors of the Bourne End Fault.

  Her behaviour, though, was never quite predictable. Like any sensible volcano, she learned the virtue of long dormant periods, emitting just the odd sulphurous puff to make the villagers in the lava path look up and tremble.

  My volatility was necessarily more limited. Mum’s thinking started to go in reverse. She began to hedge her bets. Whatever my shortcomings as a son, my huge advantage in Mum’s eyes was that I would – surely? – never leave her. She wrote me back into her future, when Audrey started showing how spectacularly unfitted she was to the rôle of the dutiful daughter. My job was to be the bitter consolation of a disappointed life. But only if I let it happen.

  Mum hadn’t either opposed or strongly supported my bid to escape from Vulcan, but there was no doubt she would be the beneficiary. She would minister to my needs and fall back, unless I was very vigilant, into her old rôle of interpreting me to the world. She would try to be self-effacing and I would try to be grateful. For a couple of years it wouldn’t be too bad – but what happened afterwards? No one had suggested any plausible future for me at the end of my education. We were not much further forward than in those days of the 1950s when we looked, she and I, at the uniforms of various careers with a photograph of my smiling face pasted at the back and showing through portholes cut in the illustrations. Since then Dad had suggested I might be an actor, perhaps playing an old lady marooned in a chair who nevertheless bossed everybody about (an immobile Granny, essentially).

  Mr Turpin at CRX had suggested I might become a clerk, though it was never clear how someone whose handwriting was the weakest point of his whole academic performance would ever make a go of that. Since then there had been silence about my future. Miss Willis, the Principal of Vulcan, had wanted me to do my A-levels under her ægis, but that was really so that she could point to me as evidence of what the school could do, a sort of high-water mark which would galvanise supporters of the school into paroxysms of funding, not because the academic achievement would usher me into a world of fulfilling work. Or unfulfilling work, come to that.

  Mum was the last person to visualise me finding a real place in the world, one that would challenge her monopoly on suffering. She could let events take their course, and rely on their leaving me stranded, with no other options. So I must think of myself as a lodger only. If I let the waters of home close over my head I would never be heard from again. No door would close behind me with any finality, but no new door would open ever.

  The human cloth

  The end of physical growth is I suppose a sort of rite of passage. High tide. They measured me at the hospital twice in one day, just for the record books. In the morning I was four foot nine and one eighth inches. Comfortably taller than Edith Piaf. They measured me again at the end of the day – since the spine compresses in an upright position, even an upright position as approximate as mine. At the end of the day I measured four foot eight and seven eighths inches. Still just a little taller than Edith Piaf. She was the lady on the radio who had no regrets (and showed you how to roll the Fre
nch r correctly, at the back of the palate), but wouldn’t she have wanted to be a tiny bit taller? I couldn’t see that she could object to that – in which case she must have at least one regret, about being so diminutive without the robust excuse of bone disease. This was logical, but human beings, as Mr Spock was not the first to point out, are not logical.

  There was logic, though, to the plan laid out for me in my next phase of life, logic in abundance. I would be having artificial hips installed, first one and then the other. There would be plenty of recovery time between. More than the standard period of rehabilitation would be required. I would spend whole months after each operation learning to use my legs. I wasn’t starting from scratch, exactly, but the last time I had the benefit of functioning hips had been when I was three. It would be a long process learning to manage such amenities again. For my years of bed rest I had lain down, then gradually I was able to add standing up to my repertoire, but there hadn’t actually been anything in between, unless you count lying rigidly at an angle in one wheeled contraption or another. Now whole teams of professionals would be devoting themselves to extending my world of movement. It would be a year-long crash course in flexibility.

  So I had a good long time to wait before going to Burnham Grammar School, which wouldn’t happen until the autumn of 1967. Educational normality wasn’t bearing down on me at any great rate. 1966 was an interregnum, a sort of premature gap year, but I wasn’t exactly going to be idle. That gap would be filled to bursting with activity – even if it was largely activity that would be visited on me, namely surgery and physiotherapy. Cutting and then stretching the human cloth. My diary was empty but my days would be full.