Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  He himself wasn’t married. ‘My needs are met by a very special lady, John,’ he explained. ‘Known her for years. We get on very well. Of course I have to pay, but that doesn’t worry me. Just think about it for a moment. People end up having to pay for their sexual business one way or another. No exceptions. Those that get married pay most of all. And it’s good to have things settled – I don’t like going to different ladies. I keep to the same one. She knows me, y’know. Once you’re a regular, her charges are very reasonable. She likes to have things settled too, y’see. Monica says she’s fond of me, and I believe her. We have a nice chat and a cup of tea afterwards. We’ve become good friends. She tells me she wants to take me out to a meal one day, when she’s not quite so busy. I can tell you, I’m really looking forward to that!’

  Mr Thatcher looked at me rather wistfully. ‘We could always meet up after we’ve both got better and left hospital. We could visit the lady I’ve been telling you about. If you were with me, and I recommended you, I dare say you’d get a discount. Especially if you’ve never done it before.’ Of course I’d ‘done it’, just not in the way Mr Thatcher meant – I’d had assignations in school lavatories and music rooms, I’d been pounced on in armchairs and fellated, without my permission though not exactly against my will.

  He searched my eyes for any flicker of interest, saying, ‘You shouldn’t worry too much about the money side of it, John. In fact, why don’t you take it as a present from me?’

  He really liked the idea of having me as his little pal, but I was getting a bit fed up with people offering me special rates on their prostitutes. What was it that made people think, ‘He looks a bit down in the mouth – let’s treat him to a working girl’? First Jimmy at the Vulcan School and now Mr Thatcher. I have to say that Jimmy’s Minouche, with her cute scrunched-up face, sounded more fun than Mr Thatcher’s Monica with her cups of tea and busy schedule. If a similar offer was made a third time I’d get quite shirty, particularly if the downward trend continued, towards the shabbiest drabs and doxies of Slough. Did I really look so helpless? If I’d wanted what they wanted I wouldn’t be shy about it, but it so happened that I wanted something different.

  Plutocrat in embryo

  Still, the ice had been broken between us, Mr Thatcher and me. I particularly enjoyed our conversations on the subject of money. He said he’d got a tidy sum put aside, but was cagy about how much exactly. Still, when I asked if he could raise £1,000 he looked pretty smug and said he thought he could manage that. I was impressed. I had managed to amass £72 10s 5d over the years, and I liked money very much indeed. That’s why I kept it in the Guardian Bank, which had its offices in Jersey. I was a plutocrat in embryo. It was a canny decision to put my funds there, because the Guardian Bank, avoiding U.K. tax, paid 8% per annum. I kept my assets out of the taxman’s reach. My money wasn’t just saved, it was sheltered, safe from the storms of the business world. It wasn’t just in a bank, it was in a haven.

  Then the news broke on the radio that the Guardian Bank Ltd had been taken into receivership. It was reported the next day in the Telegraph, which is where Dad read about it.

  I lay in the bed on Ward Three of CRX and considered my newly acquired poverty.

  Was the roof over my head about to fall in? No.

  Would my food now be stopped? No.

  Would I stop getting medicines and nursing? No.

  Why, I was even sipping beer that I didn’t have to pay for.

  Along the corridor I could hear the echoes of Dr Ansell’s voice, and I knew she’d be at my bedside in a moment, checking whether I was doing my exercises. She would ask if I was enjoying my Mackesons. I was and I wasn’t, but life was good and warm, and I felt as though I was being cradled in an enormous tender hand.

  Mum, though, visited in tears because of what had happened to the Guardian Bank. She was literally wringing her hands as she asked, ‘What are we going to do about your money now?’

  I replied that I wasn’t going to do anything. Then Dad came in, stiffly formal, dressed for work. Any whiff of crisis made their incompatibility glaring. They didn’t seem anything like husband and wife – more like an unhinged widow and the military policeman detailed to inform her of her loss. While Mum went on falling apart, Dad brandished a stiff upper lip that could have knocked down walls. He advised me to take it on the chin, saying he hoped this setback wouldn’t deter me from a future in the world of finance. He even said something about him and Mum helping out if the receiver was unable to recover my money.

  I’m sure I was supposed to erupt in tears of joy. I was committing one more crime against the laws of family temperament. Mum wanted more drama and Dad wanted me to hide my shattered feelings behind a mask of indifference. I offended them both in different ways by not really being bothered. I cheated them of any sort of display, either hysteria or stoicism. It didn’t sit well with either of them that I took things so much in my stride. Meanwhile the love of money dropped off me like an old scab.

  Before he left, CRX kept its promise to Mr Thatcher by giving him the jar with his gallstones in it, and he kept his promise by letting me have a look. It was an ordinary jar with a screw-top, the sort of thing Mum kept in her spice-rack. His gallstones turned out to be more or less in the middle of the range of styles and colours. There were five or six of them, yellow in colour, slightly streaked and glossy. They looked like old-fashioned boiled sweets that had been sucked but not chewed, mint humbugs, perhaps. I wondered what they would taste like, but we weren’t sufficiently on intimate terms, he and I, for me to ask if I could pop one in my mouth.

  Of course Mr Thatcher was only serving a short sentence at CRX, while I was an old lag. The way things were going, I would be lucky not to become a lifer. Before he left he asked for my address and telephone number, and I gave them with a little reluctance. I didn’t want any discounts on suburban courtesans. Perhaps Monica in her turn would be shown the fossilised confectionery cooked up by his misbehaving insides. I hoped Mr Thatcher would have the sensitivity to show her after the act, rather than before.

  The law was changing that year, to allow the desires of people like me some legitimate expression. If I selected my partners with great care (screening out under-21s and members of the armed services and Merchant Navy, and one at a time, please), making sure everything happened in private, I could have a sexual life all of my own, within the law. Oh, as long as I waited three years or so without jumping the gun.

  I had heard mention among the nurses of a Mr Peever, who had been in the hospital and was ‘queer as a coot’. They had to watch him in the toilets. They had to watch me in the toilets, too, in case I fell down, but I realised this was different. He had been loitering with intent – tottering with intent, really – more or less from the moment he could stand up after his surgery. Sister Wright, who smoked eighty Consulate a day, sniggered and said ‘Who’d go with him?’ Well, I would. And wouldn’t anyone rather ‘go with him’ than kiss her mentholated mouth?

  I started to pray to Mr Peever in my head, Please, Mr Peever come back to hospital and I’ll go with you. Please, Mr Peever. I asked as discreetly as I could when he’d been in the hospital and they said about six months previous. And will he be coming back soon? Of course they looked at me as if I was mad. I’d come back to CRX myself after an absence, but of course I was a special case. I had a season ticket, I was a hospital yo-yo. Mr Peever never did come back, or not while I was there. Meantime I broadcast on all frequencies to Mr Peever, Mr Peever, please, Mr Peever. I wore a track in my mind with my prayers. We can be flitty together, Mr Peever, just the two of us. Apart from anything else, his name was so perfect, an unimprovable compound of pervert and peeper. It seemed unfair for God to make such a creature and then withhold him from me. It was a big day when I could finally go to the lavatory under my own steam. That was the proper chapel for my prayers.

  Physiotherapy was unrelenting. Eventually they broke it to me that the right hip, despite having the more mobil
ity of the two preoperationally, would never have the final mobility of the left. I managed to act surprised. Gosh, that’s a pity. Nobody remembered that I had predicted this outcome, and I never knew how I knew.

  Before the pins I tottered, afterwards I came closer to hobbling. Those aren’t technical terms but approximations. My walking also was an approximation. The later motion was sturdier and less precarious. It could cover more ground – but it looked worse. A crutch and a cane advertised the deficiences of what doesn’t altogether qualify, even now, as a gait. Strangers have never found my progress reassuring. They look on in alarm.

  Equals futility

  No one helped me understand the disappointment of the second operation. Perhaps they didn’t understand themselves, just shrugging it off as one of those things, but I worked to get to the bottom of it myself. There was a gain of movement in both axes, from side to side and also backwards and forwards, but this wasn’t necessarily a good thing. The problem was that I couldn’t control the lateral component. However much work we did, the physiotherapists and I, there wasn’t enough muscle to support me reliably. All the calculations were correct, but the sum didn’t work out as it should have, and I did indeed become bendy in the middle, in very much the way I had feared. The basic arithmetic was off. The sum didn’t go ‘one successful hip operation plus another successful hip operation equals fully ambulant and permanently cheery chappy, praising the National Health Service with every newly bouncy step’. It went mobility minus stability equals futility. I was worse off than I had been before the second operation.

  There was no second honeymoon after the second intervention in my bones, since it marked an estrangement, a widening of the asymmetry in my bodily competence. To guarantee my balance I now needed to use my new crutch (with a sort of padded gutter on which to rest my arm) as well as a stick. The right side, the second one to be operated on, was much the weaker, which was quite convenient, since the right arm was the one with enough flexibility to fit comfortably into the gutter of the crutch.

  Medical science had over-corrected matters and created new problems. The intermediate stage between operations, with one hip newly flexible, the other still rigid, had actually offered the best compromise and the closest approximation to normal human walking. Dimly I had sensed this at the time, but hadn’t been able to overrule the authorities around me. Instead I had agreed to a painful setback disguised as a technical improvement.

  I managed never to say ‘I told you so’ to Ansell or anyone else about the relative failure of the second operation. I’m capable of suppressing my baser self on special occasions, though there’s something about my expression which makes people assume I’m constipated when I do, and I had taken enough Senokot on the children’s wards of CRX to last me several lifetimes.

  I didn’t point out that I had been right, and no one ever apologised or repeated the offer of re-doing the operation so as to leave my leg fixed in the position of my choice. I wouldn’t have taken up such an offer anyway. I’d learned that there was a tariff to be paid even on a free offer, and I accepted that no amount of tinkering would make my legs keep in step. The whole pattern of my progress (if progress was what I was making) seemed to be one step forward and one step back, which would never be more painfully clear than it was now. One hip forward. And one hip back.

  I was still sinking deep roots into Gardening for Adventure – Mrs Pavey would only ask Mum for a book back if someone requested it. Despite Menage’s enthusiasm I couldn’t get excited about orchids at this time of my life, perhaps because Dad was such an enthusiast.

  Hobbies were a sort of battleground for us. I loved the challenge of imposing one of my interests on Dad (he being far the most hobby-minded of the tribe), having it supersede one of his own. He in his turn tried to interest me in his obsessions, but I was oddly resistant, so that the net flow of hobbies was in the other direction.

  Dad found orchids full of fascination and charm. I went on finding them rather boring – just a load of leaves coming out of bulb-things in pots which sometimes offered you flowers. Perhaps I was working up to a phase of resistance to Dad, and practising on a small scale by rejecting his interests.

  If Dad had really wanted to sell me on orchids, he would have told me that they are like ideas. Or perhaps ideas are like orchids. They’re born from almost nothing, in sterile conditions – the faintest contamination prevents them from germinating. Then, once started, they depend on getting exactly the right balance of nutrients. They need moisture, but almost more than that they need a breeze. They flourish in the crannies of other plants, not dependent but simply sheltered, in the crook of a tree, say. From a million spores only a few plants will establish themselves – but then they can assume an astounding range of sizes and shapes, from the barely visible (Platystele jungermannioides, its flowers barely a hundredth of an inch across) to the towering (Sobralia altissima, which can grow nearly thirty feet tall).

  I had one particular idea in my head, of all the mental spores, cradled and moistened, scrupulously blown on, which refused to die altogether. After the first hip operation (or rather, between the botched first attempt and the agonising second) Dad had tried to cheer me up, telling me that once my hips had been fixed I would be able to do many more normal things. ‘You could travel,’ he said. ‘Why not? You could even fly, if I said the word,’ Dad said.

  ‘Really?’ I was roughly as surprised as Wendy Darling must have been when Peter Pan first held her hand and took to the air.

  It turned out that BOAC let the family members of employees fly at greatly reduced prices. ‘How do you feel about Paris?’ Dad asked me.

  I didn’t feel much about Paris, either way, but I let the idea take root inside me. After that I would remind Dad from time to time of the promise he had made. He hadn’t come close to anything as binding as an actual promise, of course, but it did no harm to let him think he had. I jogged his memory from time to time after that, and though he never committed himself in definite terms he seemed to concede that an undertaking had been made to me.

  Far more interesting to me than any possible orchid was the succulent known as the Mescal Button, Lophophora williamsii. According to Menage, it was sacred to a tribe of Indians in America (the Kiowas of the Rio Grande) who took it as part of their religious rites. I read that slices of Mescal Button were used to replace the bread and wine in church services in Mexico ‘as late as 1918’, though that didn’t seem very recent to me.

  The communicants would get coloured visions and coloured emotions and then see the colours of their God. This was really starting to be fun. Mr Menage explained that the phenomenon was caused by a substance in the cactus called mescaline. Researchers who had eaten mescal were unable to describe sensations which lay so far outside ordinary experience. One side-effect was that the drug sometimes ‘fixes the limbs in strange, grotesque positions where they remain for a considerable time’. That didn’t scare me. I felt sure I was immune. The words ‘Mescal’ and ‘Mescaline’ acquired a shimmering aura for me, and I decided that some mescaline tablets would greatly accelerate my convalescence. I wondered if CRX had any tucked away.

  Tendrils and serifs

  The song on the radio every few minutes was Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, an oddly solemn and gloomy song, more dirge than anthem. I loved it – even before I was told that the group took its name from a pedigree Burmese cat. I loved Burmese cats in their own right.

  Nurse Oliveira, a pretty Singhalese girl on Ward Three, was also mad about the song, and wanted to know the words, which were notoriously cryptic. I listened every time it was played, and had soon caught most of them. I wrote them out as neatly as I could and gave them to her. She was thrilled and said, ‘Now it’s my turn to give you something,’ and she wrote something out in her native script. It was wonderful – so much nicer than our alphabet. All those pretty curls. Tendrils and serifs luxuriantly multiplying.

  She had another gift for me, a little book which re
vived my love of such things, the style of mini-book (not even 30 pages) that Dad disparaged as a ‘tract’. It was called The Satipatthana Sutta and Its Application to Modern Life, a lecture on a Buddhist text delivered by V. F. Gunaratna (Retd. Public Trustee, Ceylon) to the Education Department Buddhist Society, Colombo. It was printed at the Sita Printing Works in Kandy for the Buddhist Publication Society as No. 60 in its series The Wheel.

  I liked the stress in the little book on Anapana-sati, mindfulness of breathing, as a key to unadulterated blissful abiding. As he breathes in a long breath, the Buddhist monk knows, ‘I am breathing in a long breath.’ As he breathes out a long breath, he knows, ‘I am breathing out a long breath.’ Ditto with short breaths. Ditto with John, though no Buddhist monk. ‘When practising mindfulness of breathing, attention should be focused at the tip of the nose or at the point of the upper lip immediately below where the current of air can be felt.’ I had groped my way towards this practice with my breathing games during bed rest, and more recently after the McKee pins.

  It was good to be told, too, that the lotus position or padmasana was optional (‘nowadays rather difficult to many, even to easterners’). And there was ripe irony in being urged to set aside ‘a special time for sitting-practice’. Why else was I in CRX? When I wasn’t learning to totter again, with two semi-functioning hips, I was learning to sit.

  The emphasis on mindfulness was refreshing, and new to me. It made sense to tame the mind by concentrating it on humble processes, to use its strength against itself.

  One set of exercises was a bit like spiritual isometrics, to be practised wherever you happened to be, on the bus, in the queue at the bakers, in the doctor’s surgery. This was spirituality that demanded no sacrifice, content with scraps of time to do its work. ‘You come tearing down in your car and as you approach a junction, the green colour of the traffic lights have just given place to amber. You curse youself, and come to a halt. It is all tension for you as you impatiently wait a seeming eternity until the red colour gives way to amber and another seeming eternity until amber gives way to green.’ In those two seeming eternities you can retire into the silence of your self and practise a little mindfulness.