Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  We would sometimes run a sort of sweepstake. There was money to be made. People would bet on whether I could tell the twins apart from a single body part displayed round the edge of a door. Betting against me was a mug’s game. Their hands were genuinely easy to tell apart, not just for me but for anyone, since Patrick played the guitar and therefore kept his right fingernails long, for plucking purposes, and the left ones short, for fret work, while Paul kept his all anyhow. But I could even tell the difference when a bared knee and a bared elbow were offered me round the edge of a door. It helped that scuffling sounds and suppressed giggles behind the door might announce that the body parts on offer were a mixed bag – Paul’s knee, say, and Patrick’s elbow.

  If Burnham was an ordinary school, then it followed that I was an ordinary schoolboy. This was a bit of a shock, though the logic was strong. Nobody before Burnham had seriously suggested that a piece of work I did could be improved in any way. At CRX and then Vulcan I had seemed almost freakishly clever, but then the educational aspect of those institutions was partly ornamental. No one expected us to do anything in the outside world except, possibly, to survive it, so my reputation as a brainbox was fairly meaningless.

  School work in my past had a more or less optional status. It was more to keep us happy – which it did, it kept me very happy – than to broaden our world in any meaningful way. At those two schools my intelligence had been on the receiving end, year after year, of slightly alarmed little pats. At Burnham Grammar there was no question of it being treated so tenderly. My brain was pummelled, as if by a relentless physio, brusquely kneaded and squashed until it fought back by gaining in mobility and resource, flexing in the end quite fiercely. It was quite a shock to the system, and the sharpest shocks were administered by Mr Klaus Eckstein.

  My interview with Mr Ashford had contained no formal academic assessment, but Dad had mentioned that I liked German. He passed this on as if it might disqualify me in some way, and Mum had chipped in with her own little qualm, saying, ‘I’m afraid he doesn’t eat meat.’

  Mr Ashford disregarded my dietary eccentricity and simply said, ‘Then I expect you’ll be taught by Mr Eckstein. Quite a character. You’ll either like him or you won’t.’ These formulas reliably indicate unpopularity.

  Volatilised mucus

  Klaus Eckstein was a portly man, with whiskers sprouting in all directions. He had no small talk. In my first lesson with him one boy tried to lay an ambush by saying, ‘My father says the only good German is a dead German.’ There was still a lot of this sentiment around, but I was a little shocked to have it spelled out in this way. Eckstein simply snarled back, ‘Tell your father he is wrong! Even the dead ones stink.’ A horrible, wonderful thing to say, and I was shocked all over again. I didn’t understand that there were people who could be described as German, refugees and survivors, whose feelings for their homeland were not sentimental.

  Eckstein wore a garment that I’d never seen before, and rarely enough since – a suède waistcoat. He took snuff, tapping the yellowish powder onto a mysterious hollow which appeared at the base of his thumb when he contorted it in a particular way. Then he sharply sniffed up the soft clod of powder. Eckstein kept a hanky handy for the inevitable sneezes, but even so his waistcoat became encrusted with grains and stains. Suède seemed to be a material perfectly chosen to welcome into its nap a mist of volatilised mucus suspending particles of ground tobacco. The flecked waistcoat and his snuff habit gave him a spicy smell, like gingerbread gone wrong. Perhaps Eckstein thought his snuffbox and waistcoat made him seem like an English gentleman rather than a startling exotic – but what would an English gentleman have been doing on the staff of Burnham Grammar? Such a person would have been no less exotic than Eckstein himself.

  Eckstein made a point of being stern and abrasive and rude, but I wasn’t going to let a little thing like that deter me from getting into his good books. After his lesson one day, I apologised for how poor my German was, how deficient my general education. This sort of performance I knew to be foolproof: build yourself up and the world will rush to tear you down, but if you tear yourself down the rush is all the other way, to make repairs. Except that Eckstein had not signed up to this convention. He glared and said, ‘Indeed. Your German is appalling, as are most things about you. You’ll never be much good at it unless you can get yourself to Germany somehow and stay there for a year, a season at the least. A horrible country in many ways, but the only place that foolish English boys can be stripped of their bleat of an accent.’

  I tried to take this in my stride, telling myself that the compliments when they came would be sweeter for the wait. Buttering people up had always been my bread and butter, and I wasn’t going to be cured of the habit just because I’d been fed a mouthful of dry crumbs. ‘I’ll try my hardest, sir. And sir? Since Ecke is the German word for corner and Stein is the German for stone, perhaps you, Mr Eckstein, will be the cornerstone of my German education?’ I had been practising this little aria of flattery for days.

  He gave a grunt. ‘Not unless you dig down into the rubble of what you think you know, and lay some proper foundations. Your accent is execrable.’ I knew it could hardly be so bad, since the native tones of Gisela Schmidt, star physiotherapist of CRX, throbbed behind every syllable, but I had to salute the mileage Eckstein got from the packed consonants of his chosen adjective. ‘You’ll never be any good unless you can get yourself to Germany and stay there until it all sinks in.’ He didn’t acknowledge with his tone that there could be any excuse but laziness for my not heading immediately to Germany, and getting stuck in to the sort of Deutsches Leben they don’t tell you about in Deutsches Leben or any other book, German Life away from the page.

  Eckstein belonged to a strange category of teacher, those who can frogmarch pupils to excellence without ever sullying their mouths with a single word of praise. One of his tricks was to say to a pupil, ‘With all due respect,’ adding with no change of tone: ‘which is none.’ Following up a standard piece of wheedling good manners with some bad manners all his own. He was extremely unpopular. I loved him from the first.

  One bit of regression connected with living at home was my lack of bathroom discipline. I can’t fault the National Health Service, which provided me with some equipment at about this time, by paying for a wheeled commode made to my measure. I even remember the name of the man who made it, a Mr Heard. After the trouble he went to, it’s only right to commemorate him. It was such a pleasure to have something that really was tailored to my requirements – even NHS hips seemed to be off the peg. I wish Mr Heard had made those! But I was happy enough with my trolley upholstered in maroon leatherette.

  As a newly acknowledged normal schoolboy, I came into my birthright of laziness. Schoolboys aren’t the most hygiene-minded of creatures. Along with the commode I was the proud possessor of a National Health bum-wiper, an elegant accessory in sculptural terms, a curve of perspex which looked vaguely like a snorkel. I was shown how to use it, but it was a bit of a business and I was happy enough with things as they were.

  Mum and Dad, reluctant wipers, weren’t so happy. This was an area where they were united for once in wanting me to grow up, though normally Mum fought to hold on to her privileges. Meanwhile I dragged my heels. Re-learning something is very different from learning it the first time. There’s no glamour, is there? I knew I could do it, I’d done it well enough before I was ill, so there wasn’t a lot of incentive. I’d get round to it sooner or later. In terms of potty-training I was in a state of arrested development, in no great hurry to manage things on my own. This was a time when my personality was made up of plates of artificial maturity and babyishness which were always shearing unstably past each other. This too made me a normal schoolboy.

  Advertising homunculus

  It was the swimming teacher at Burnham, Mr Marshall, who opened my eyes. He didn’t scold, he couldn’t have been nicer, but I got the message loud and clear. There was no actual provision for disabled
swimming, no extra help assigned. Somebody was going to be neglected, either me or the rest of the class, and for once it was going to be the others. Mr Marshall devoted almost all of his time to me, giving everyone else the dregs of his attention. I’m surprised nobody decided to drown out of pique.

  My swimming lesson was really hydrotherapy rather than actual instruction, gentle supported movement in water. It would have taken all the buoyancy aids on hand to counteract the heaviness of my bones (I would have looked like a little Michelin Man, the advertising homunculus composed of tyres) if Mr Marshall had withdrawn his helping hand.

  He even dressed and undressed me, and that’s how they came to light, the shameful stains that go by the jaunty name of skid-marks. Skid-marks, yes, if you must – but I hadn’t been the one at the wheel. So much for Mum’s high standards. So much for once-a-nurse-always-a-nurse.

  I was struck by a thunderbolt of shame, there in the changing-room. I was about to explain that I didn’t wipe myself, but I stopped myself in time. There’s only so much of an alibi you can claim when your bum is the guilty party. Admitting that someone else did the dirty work at home would make me seem even less of a grown-up than doing the job, badly, myself.

  So belatedly I got to grips with the instrument provided by a grateful Government. It wasn’t a picnic – the bum-wiper was a bit of a bugger to use. There was a slit in the perspex into which I was supposed to tuck a length of toilet paper. Then in theory I would pass the snorkel back between my legs, where my arms don’t reach, and dab away hopefully at my mucky bottom. With a little paper-folding (though origami was never really my sport) it was even possible to make several wipes with a single length of bog roll. I should make clear that by ‘single length’ I don’t mean a single rectangle between perforations. I’m not a magician! I needed six – four at a pinch.

  The whole system was pretty unsatisfactory and first results not impressive. How to put it? The sensitivity of my anal region was more highly developed than the agility of the hands which wielded the tool. I felt sore afterwards but even so I wasn’t sure of being clean. If you don’t know for a fact that you’re clean, then you can only suspect you’re dirty.

  Gradually I acquired a competence and then an expertise. Even before my performance on the instrument improved, I began to see the virtue of the independence I had so stoutly resisted.

  It was wonderful, a fundamental liberty. I had been given the title deeds to my anal zone at last. From now on I didn’t have to delegate the upkeep. I had the freehold, full ownership and full responsibility.

  In illustrations of fairy stories the wandering hero, such as Dick Whittington, is always shown with his possessions wrapped up in a hanky (always spotted red and white, for some reason) tied to a stick across his shoulder, striding confidently into the future. I’ve never felt quite like that, but in my mental image the stick is my perspex bum-wiper, and of course the knotted hanky contains a supply of lavatory paper. O for a commode on the open road, and a star to steer her by!

  Any fantasy of being the owner-occupier of this body, though, kept running into snags and obstacles. I was still reliant on third parties for a lot of the fetching and carrying, the basic maintenance on fixtures and fittings.

  For the first year at Burnham I travelled to school by taxi. The cost was borne by the Department of Education, and the driver was always the same. My personal chauffeur, and my personal porter as well, since he lifted me in and out of the taxi. He hardly spoke, and he had the radio on in the cab all the time. I doted on him. His name was Broyan – Brian, obviously, but Broyan was what he said and how I thought of him. Anything working-class was far more interesting than the tedious world of the middle class. I was enchanted by the little I got to know about Broyan, his hobbies, his phobias, and I passed my enthusiasm on to Peter. We were quite the little cult, obsessively worshipping what we decided represented the wonder of the absolutely ordinary, the real. Broyan hated portion-control butter. ‘I like a bit of butter,’ he would say, ‘but I can’t stand those little bitty bits. It makes me go all shivery just to look at them.’ It was the idea of touching the foil that set off the horrors. He had to get his wife (his wife Joanne) to open them and keep the wrappers out of sight. The idea of Broyan going all shivery made me all shivery too.

  To give a deep sheen to metal objects Broyan recommended something called ‘gunmetal blue’. I thought that sounded wonderful, and so did Peter.

  Broyan and his wife sometimes went dancing at weekends. He was getting used to the new style of dancing that was being done in Bourne End, so different from what he was used to. ‘Nobody does proper steps, mind,’ he explained. ‘Everybody just shakes.’ He demonstrated in his seat, writhing crazily. ‘They just go roop-ti-toop-ti-toop.’ Roop-ti-toop-ti-toop. I couldn’t wait to pass that on.

  If Broyan wasn’t really much of a talker, at least he whistled along with songs on the radio, not pushing his lips forward but producing the sound between his teeth in a way that seemed wonderfully earthy. I tried to do the same, practising around the house while Mum rolled her eyes and sighed.

  Beta-adrenergic stimulation

  My feeling for Broyan wasn’t really a romantic thing. I suppose he was the first person that had ever been served up to me on a plate, day after day, in conditions of neutral intimacy. My heart was involved elsewhere, heavily mortgaged. It was yoked to a double star. Paul Savage was a lovely person in his own right, a charmer and a tease. He was also a decoy. It was Patrick who was my infatuation. I was head over heels. Patrick was in italics permanently. Nothing he did or said could be neutral or unstressed. There were no roman characters anywhere in my infatuated font.

  Did either of them know? I think they knew. I mean, they didn’t know. But they knew. They weren’t looking it right in the face, but they weren’t in the dark either.

  And talking of looking things in the face, that was a strange thing … I noticed that I could make Patrick blush, but not Paul. Patrick’s conscious brain might not have been in on it, but his sympathetic nervous system knew all about my feelings. The facial vein supplying the small blood vessels in the face is very susceptible to beta-adrenergic stimulation. Adolescence is the heyday of blushing, and localised blood volume tells no lies. Every blush is a confession of some little shame, written in the heart’s blood.

  It was Paul who liked to crack his knuckles. The habit had a ghastly fascination for me, once I understood that it wasn’t painful. Imagine having so much confidence in your bones that you would meddle with their safe socketing like that! But Patrick must have thought it was a tactless habit to indulge in front of me. He would blush and start to send Paul agitated glances if he saw one hand getting ready to yank at the fingers of the other. Paul would usually get the message, which was a shame. I’d always rather see uninhibited behaviour than something that has been tidied up for my benefit. According to principles that are pure guesswork anyway.

  The same thing happened in the larger world of the school. There was a craze, for instance, for boys to stand in doorways pressing their arms outwards and upwards against the frame for a whole minute. Then when they stepped forwards and let their shoulders relax, their arms would rise to the horizontal of their own accord. Their faces wore stupid grins as their bodies were caught out, adjusting to one set of pressures and lagging behind when the situation changed.

  If I was around they would tend to stop the game, as if I would rather not see them enjoy it. But why so? Their bodies were no sort of reproach to mine. Why wouldn’t I like to see them wandering the corridors of the school with their arms spread out wide, like a band of gormless probationary angels?

  It was normally Patrick who pushed the Tan-Sad, and Paul who was at the front, and consequently in my line of sight. I had the impression that this state of affairs was engineered by Paul, to keep the object of my interest out of sight, but if so he wasn’t too hot on psychology. In matters of the heart there is nothing more persuasive than the evidence of things unseen. With Patrick o
ut of sight I could tune my ears to his breathing and even to his imagined heartbeat, and use my specialised knowledge of breathing techniques to inhale his smell through a single discriminating nostril.

  Within the limits of unfulfilled desire I could get away with a lot. I could persuade Patrick Savage to come with me to the library for private chats, unattended by Paul. School libraries are traditionally unstaffed and deserted, and therefore fertile grounds for sexual experiment, even if (as at Burnham) the library wasn’t some gracious suite of wood-panelled chambers but something more like a sliproom, the scanty shelves filled with dog-eared paperbacks and public-library surplus. In privacy, nevertheless, Patrick and I would sit together and play games.

  We played some exhilarating cricket matches in that library. For me the sound of the game will always be supremely evocative, the lazy air of summer, the sound of a distant mower or nearby bee, the muffled clatter of metal on a laminated table-top. By cricket I mean the handy distillation of it called Howzat, in which the distracting physical side of the game is stripped away. Howzat was essentially a dice game, even though the dice were non-standard shapes. One looked like a primitive garden roller, though its cross-section was a hexagon rather than a circle, the six faces labelled NO BALL, LBW and so on. Patrick was a useful cricketer, though Paul was the star, but in this tinned version of the game (the pieces came in a little tin, with a leaflet) I outplayed him on a regular basis.

  I would ask him to show me his fidelity ring. These were craze objects of the time – compound rings of silver wire, easily tarnished, which fell apart (when taken off the finger) into half-a-dozen linked subsidiary rings, mysteriously and irregularly kinked.