Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  You were supposed to see everything as it was, not as it claimed to be. Be a ‘bare observer’, not a partisan one. So for instance you would see a banknote as a piece of paper, no more and no less, divorced from the illusion of its buying power. This was an exercise designed to neutralise the workings of imagination, which finds so much more in the world than there is. This was a rather risky piece of chastening in my case, since my life was more or less entirely imaginary. But perhaps that was the point.

  Presumably as you got really good at this game you would reach a point where The Satipatthana Sutta and Its Application to Modern Life itself became no more than sheets of paper and arbitrary squiggles of ink. Then you could lay the book aside in a state of blissful blankness, the Nibbana – curious spelling – mentioned in a text whose meaning had now dissolved in fulfilment of its own teaching. This was the disappearing-ink idea which I had loved so much as a child, given a mystical twist, flowing by capillary action into the Indian Rope that would perform the Trick of fulfilment by vanishing.

  Fathom-long carcass

  There were aspects of the teaching that didn’t sit quite so well with me. Buddhist monks are supposed to reflect ritually on the repulsiveness of the body, from the soles of its feet up, and from the top of its head-hairs down, this ‘fathom-long carcass’ enveloped by skin and full of manifold impurity. They are supposed to itemise the body’s individually repellent elements in their meditation, thinking, ‘There are in this body hairs of the head, hairs of the body, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews, bones, marrow, kidney, heart, liver, midriff, spleen, lungs, intestines, mesentery, gorge, fæces, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, grease, saliva, nasal mucus, synovial fluid, urine.’ Curious that synovial fluid hadn’t been left out. Did I have any of that transparent viscid lubricant left in my joints, after so many years of Still’s?

  There were moods when I felt that the task of finding my body (this bag of tubes) repulsive could safely be left to other people. There was one nurse, for instance, Derek, who would sometimes sail right past me, ignoring my requests for help. I knew that nurses were busy people – I had been studying them for years in their natural habitat. They weren’t servants, and they weren’t responsible for me alone. Still, how hard is it to say, ‘I’ll be with you in a moment, John’? All the other nurses seemed able to manage it. When he was wiping my bottom, a procedure that didn’t give white-goose joy though much improved since my first days at CRX thanks to those slide-away panels, he completely ignored my attempts at chat. Perhaps repugnance came into the picture.

  Derek wasn’t a physical genius in the Jack Juggernaut class, but he was still easy on the eye. He was blond even if he wasn’t tall – well, everybody’s tall (except Edith Piaf), but Derek was no taller than many of his female colleagues.

  What made being ignored by Derek so wounding was that he was very thick with another young man with Still’s. David Webb. I say ‘young man’, but although at fifteen David wasn’t much younger than me he still seemed a boy. He still had a piping voice. I had to admit he looked quite cuddly – it’s only now that I see the cuddliness as a consequence of steroids, nothing more or less.

  Derek always found time for David, who was blind. So the question for me was: am I too disabled to attract Derek’s attention, or not disabled enough? Perhaps it was the bonus of David’s blindness that gave him a competitive edge in the nurse-attraction business.

  Understandably the question of physical repulsiveness was much on my mind at this period. I decided that simply finding my body repulsive, à la Satipatthana Sutta, was too easy to count as a mental discipline. My task was more complicated: first I had to promote my body to equal status with everyone else’s, and then despise it along with all the others in its class. I tucked away for later chewing-over a rebellious quibble: if indifference is the goal, then isn’t cultivating feelings of disgust an odd way to attain it?

  When Derek was chatting to little David, it was as if he wanted everyone on the ward to know about it. He was loud about everything he did. Loudly he cultivated David, and loudly he ignored me.

  Nothing he said seemed to be private. One day I heard him boasting about his knowledge of drugs. There wasn’t much he didn’t know on that subject, to hear him talk, from opium to purple hearts. You could hear him from several beds away. I was feeling very starved of his attention. I may as well admit that. So when I had finally got him cornered I told him I’d heard about this stuff called mescaline, and it sounded just the ticket for me. I tried to whisper to get a nice conspiratorial atmosphere going. I like a good conspiracy – the good ones are the ones that don’t exclude me. He was practically shouting, and couldn’t seem to catch the name of this funny drug. He wanted to know if it was written down somewhere. I said no, but I wrote it on a piece of paper for him. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘I’ll see what I can find out.’ I was certainly intrigued by Lophophora williamsii, but once I had got Derek’s attention it was mission accomplished, really.

  A snail’s eyes on stalks

  He came back the next day with a book in his hand and a strange alarmed look on his face. He asked, ‘How on earth did you find out about this stuff? It’s very hush-hush. Who told you about it?’ He looked at me very intently.

  I said I didn’t remember. Gardening for Adventure had got me into trouble, just as Mr Menage had warned, and now I was afraid that the book itself was in danger of being confiscated. I had been silly to be so blatant about dark desires and taboo subjects. Fortunately I realised that if I snapped the book shut straight away, even supposing I could do it discreetly, I would give the game away. So I left it open and said as casually as I could that I’d heard the name somewhere – probably from one of the doctors talking.

  Derek picked up Gardening for Adventure and ran his eyes over it. My heart was beating hard. The word ‘mescaline’ seemed to stand out from the page like a snail’s eyes on stalks, and still Derek didn’t see it. When he shut my book I asked if I could see his book in return. Fair dos. He said no. He wasn’t in a hurry to admit that his know ledge was every bit as second-hand as mine – but my book was better than his book. Or at least more broad-minded. His book obviously regarded poor Lophophora williamsii as a very wicked piece of vegetation indeed.

  Soon after this moment of cosiness I encountered the other sort of conspiracy, the less nice, in the form of a human bubble which sealed me out and left me to suffocate.

  As I practised the defective repair which was my walking I became aware of silences on the ward, zones of inhibition which blossomed as I approached. Suddenly membranes of secrets closed in front of me, opened up behind me, like parodies of the automatic doors on Star Trek.

  In this way I received my birthright, my minority birthright, of paranoia. Information is always in movement and the best way to keep up with it is to move freely yourself. Gossip has a naturally fast pace, it’s a game of tag, and there’s something very artificial about being included when you can’t compete, like a child who’s not supposed to feel patronised being patted an easy ball by a grown-up.

  Patients on Ward Three would be discussing things in a group but would suddenly hush up when I approached, or even if I stuck my head up from the bed to show I was listening hard. I soon found that the best way of hearing what they were saying was to keep my eye very firmly on my book – The Count of Monte Cristo – and not to look up. I felt thoroughly got at until I understood that they weren’t talking about me. The conversation was actually about Derek, and I soon realised I wasn’t the only one to be excluded from it. The group went quiet when all sorts of people were nearby. There would be quite a gaggle of patients talking about Derek, and then the ward orderly would come in to mop up. By the time he had put his bucket down there would be a pregnant hush – pregnant specifically in the manner of a viviparous fish, say a guppy. The moment the orderly moved on from the ward, that hush would spawn dozens of lively wriggling murmurs.

  For two or three weeks I struggled to solve the myste
ry, and then at last, when two or three insiders were huddled in conspiracy, one of them called me over. He waited for me to hobble over, not letting any impatience show. ‘You don’t look as if you’re the type to grass on a fellow,’ he said. ‘I think it’s time we told you what’s what.’ He told me Derek’s secret. Derek’s career was at risk, and everyone was trying to help.

  He had a creeping deafness. It had been detected when he was interviewed for nursing, and he was told that he was employable so long as it didn’t get any worse. It got worse. It was so bad now that he was all but deaf.

  ‘But that’s impossible!’ I said. ‘I was chatting away to him only yesterday. We talked about all sorts of things …’ Which wasn’t entirely true. The pressure to converse was entirely on my side, and I had always detected a reluctance, which now I began to understand.

  ‘Yes,’ came the answer. ‘He’s become very good at lip-reading. Just watch his eyes when you talk to him again. We’re all doing what we can to help him keep his job. Of course if he has to go on night duty he’s sunk …’

  With my new knowledge I tested Derek by mixing up the labial consonants, asking him to bull me pack in the chair, etc. He watched my lips very intently. Perhaps one of the factors in his friendship with David Webb was that he could watch as closely as he liked and David would never notice. It was a strange idea to me, that someone could be invisibly disabled. Part of me felt that if your disability could be kept secret it wasn’t up to much. Kids’ stuff. There should be a different word for it. Perhaps that was where handicap should come in. I was disabled and Derek was only handicapped. He had to work harder to keep up, but he was still in the game.

  All the same I wanted to justify the confidence I had been given, and tried my hardest to be on Derek’s side. The other nurses did their bit, but they couldn’t swap their shifts around indefinitely to help him avoid working at night. When the day (night) finally came that he couldn’t dodge a late shift, a staff nurse quietly turned up and spoke to him from behind, and that was that. He was given his cards. Obviously there had been some sort of tip-off, and one of the same people who had tried to help him had informed on him to the authorities. Everyone claimed to be shocked, but I wasn’t so sure. Were we really saying that Derek had a right to his job even if he couldn’t hear the patients in his care ringing for attention? I found myself reluctantly siding with the authorities.

  With an imaginary spoon

  One thing at least was clear, with Derek’s departure. I wouldn’t be getting that mescaline any time soon.

  I adored The Count of Monte Cristo. A long rehabilitation demands a long book. First hip Pamela, second hip Monte Cristo. Richardson and Dumas both knew how to play the long game. I wasn’t in a hurry. The Count of Monte Cristo wasn’t prescribed by any reading list but it was still irresistible. I identified pretty strongly with Edmond Dantès. He was gloriously cold and nasty, and we were both stuck – if he had the Château d’If, then I had CRX. Perhaps it’s perverse to find your release in an account of someone else’s confinement, but that was how it was with me. Dantès was accused of treason and imprisoned – it was almost a disappointment when he got free. And what is juvenile rheumatoid arthritis if not a treason of the body, physical mutiny? My most trusted generals turned against me, leaving me to tunnel my way out with an imaginary spoon.

  The only thing against such a big book was its physical awkwardness (or mine). If my human-lectern idea lacked practicality, then I didn’t see why the National Health Service, if it could run to linen sheets and bottles of stout, couldn’t afford to pay for a reader. Bernard Miles, perhaps, why not? Since he was philanthropically minded (a benefactor of Vulcan) and had a juicy voice, though CRX wouldn’t be able to match the fees he got from Mackeson. There would be a certain amount of grumbling from the ward codgers at first, but I was confident that in time they would surrender as wholly as I had. I wouldn’t have minded starting again from the beginning. The nurses might not be so happy, since they’d have to pull themselves away from the story to wipe bottoms and save lives.

  I wish I’d known then that being read to as they worked was one of the perks traditionally enjoyed by the cigar-rollers of Havana. The lector was paid out of the workers’ wages. He would start with the daily papers and move on to essays or novels, according to the votes of the workers. Supposedly the workers named a new brand of cigar after the book they enjoyed most of all as they rolled the carcinogenic leaves of their livelihood … hence the Montecristo. I might have put in a plea for the Pamela, but their choice has a lot to be said for it.

  The book itself was as close as I have ever come to a big fat cigar, rolled by an expert, delivering the slow-burning pleasure of narrative intoxication. I inhaled it page after page. I blew smoke-rings of pleasure up at the ceiling.

  I had an invisible cigar, and since the collapse of the Guardian Bank my money likewise was invisible. Still, I had my evening Mackeson and my copy of Satipatthana Sutta and Its Application to Modern Life – so much better as a guide to life than the Daily Telegraph. I could even look forward to legal sexual expression only a few years down the road, as long as I could keep my desire for uniforms under control. For now, only the songs on the radio gave a feeling of what I was missing by spending most of the Summer of Love in the Château d’If.

  I was relatively indifferent to my surroundings during this period, not entirely thanks to my absorption in The Count of Monte Cristo. This was something that made an impression in its own right. I wasn’t my usual chatty and forthcoming self. My fellow patients hardly seemed worth the trouble of cultivating, since they were mainly in-patients for a few days only. Why waste precious charm on transients?

  My appetite for books had slackened off, and this too was interpreted as a sign of low mood. Of course I finished reading The Count of Monte Cristo, but that was different. I was on the last 400 pages by then, so I was really only coasting home. A certain amount of chivvying was set in motion on an administrative level, which took the final form of Ansell sitting on the bed one more time and urging me to cheer up – I was on the last lap, after all, and mustn’t lose heart. The second operation hadn’t been a roaring success, but I was still much better fitted for life than I had been before the whole cycle of surgery and rehabilitation began.

  I’m not sure my mood was really so low – Western culture, uncomfortable with inwardness, tends to interpret it negatively – but I went along with the fiction of depression, smiling wanly and promising to buck myself up.

  Of course it’s natural, as Dad was always pointing out, for baby birds to be pushed out of the nest by their parents, to fend for themselves. But it’s also natural, when it’s time to leave any place of safety, for even a senior chick to go back to bed and pull the bedclothes over his head.

  Chronic female veto

  There was a surprise waiting for me when I came out of CRX the second time, as rehabilitated as I ever would be: Mum and Dad had put up a greenhouse! I was delighted. I showed every shade of appreciation and wonder that the human face can manage. Possibly I overdid it. I didn’t know when to stop. I couldn’t recognise the point where plausible extremes of joy had been acted out to everyone’s satisfaction.

  It was an act because I knew quite well what had been going on. My plan all along. I’d been using Peter as my cat’s-paw in a campaign of action-at-a-distance, briefing him when he visited me and sending him letters with additional instructions when necessary.

  First he had suggested the whole scheme to Dad. The experiment was designed to exploit Peter’s standing in the family – I had the idea that Dad was less fully armoured against his second-born than his first-. Dad didn’t dismiss the scheme, but he wasn’t exactly encouraging, pointing out that Mum would exercise her chronic female veto.

  After a suitably calculated interval, Peter was primed to remark that Mum would dearly love somewhere to sunbathe out of the wind. What a shame there was nowhere suitable in the garden … particularly as you could divide off one sectio
n of a greenhouse – if you had one – and call it a sun-lounge. Was there a nicer word than ‘greenhouse’, do you think, Dad? Didn’t some people say ‘conservatory’ instead? Perhaps Mum would like the idea better if we used the word ‘conservatory’…

  The vocabulary was a critical element. I thought of using the word ‘solarium’ instead of sun-lounge, but it was a matter of knowing your market. Dad might enjoy the word, but he wasn’t the one with a passion for burning his skin, and Mum would find it intimidating.

  Dad said he’d think about it. Maybe it wasn’t out of the question. Then the final touch was for Peter to say that Mum would have to be careful not to get sunburn even if there was glass between her and the sun, wouldn’t she? I relied on this very oblique hint tipping the scales with Dad.

  This was string-pulling in the grand tradition of Granny, although on a humble scale and without real ruthlessness. Everyone was happy, weren’t they? I had somewhere to grow Drosophyllum lusitanicum, Dad had an indispensable aid to his own more ambitious gardening projects, and Mum had somewhere to bask like a lizard in sunny weather, even on windy days.

  That greenhouse was as much my work as if I had slipped out of the body every night, using the handy exit of a dream of knowledge, and dug the foundations with my own astral hands.

  I wondered how Granny found the strength to conduct such campaigns on a number of fronts at a time. Yes, I had got my way, and it was fascinating to see that under certain circumstances people could be flicked against each other in predictable pathways like so many marbles, but still I felt depleted and even a little sick.