Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  There were some wonderful descriptions in The Ring, of things far removed from the central situation. The author seemed disgusted by human beings, shuddering at ageing flesh and self-delusion, but he seemed rather in love with nature at its ugliest, or what most people would see as its ugliest. There were quotations from a book about toads and their parasites, for instance, which Boyde was reading. And there was a marvellous description of snails mating. I made the mistake of reading a bit of that to Dad and then he became horribly interested in the book, asking, ‘That’s absolutely terrific! Is it all like that?’.

  There’s a theory that people with secrets secretly want to be found out. I can’t disprove it on the basis of The Ring, since I hadn’t been able to resist drawing attention to the very thing I wanted kept hidden. I went into reverse, though, the moment my secret was in serious danger of being discovered. I recovered as quickly as I could, and gave the book as grudging an assessment as could square with the fact that I was continuing to read it. ‘It started off all right,’ I said, trying to sound as authoritative as any reviewer, ‘but it’s getting to be a bit of a bore. The snails are more fun than the people, really.’

  This wasn’t the best line to take if I wanted to put Dad off the scent. ‘They often are,’ he said. ‘When you’ve finished with it, pass it on, will you? And I’ll give it a go.’

  Which was unthinkable, but I was helpless. I couldn’t hide it from him. I had no privacy, either at school or at home. Anyone could get access to my things more easily than I could. I looked miserably at the label that was pasted in every library book in those days, with the message If infectious disease should break out in your house do not return this book, but at once inform the Librarian. Borrowers infringing this regulation, or knowingly permitting the book to be exposed to infection are liable to a penalty of £5. In the case of The Ring I felt it was the other way about. The book was exposing the household to every germ I spent so much time and energy hiding. And now it was going to shop me to Dad, to expose me as someone whose secret love was not for snails.

  Everything spins like a plate on a stick

  Finally Mum put me out of my misery by saying, all very casually, ‘Do you want me to return that book to the library for you? I could tell Dad someone else had reserved it.’ It was a marvellous bit of mind-reading on her part. I wondered, though, if she had noticed, despite not being the scientific type, that my sheets and pyjamas needed changing more often when The Ring was in the house. While Boyde Ashlar was on the premises.

  ‘Yes, perhaps that would be best,’ I managed to say at last. ‘It’s really not very good.’ Be forgiving, Boyde Ashlar, of the little betrayals of weaker people.

  Mum gave a little sniff. ‘I read a little bit myself,’ she said. Really! Did no one in the family give a thought to my need for privacy? ‘It was about a man getting into the altogether and looking at himself in the mirror. Rather silly, I thought.’ She must have been very careful about her furtive reading. I always left the book in a precise and particular alignment on my bedside table, and it never seemed to be out of place when I came back.

  It wasn’t a special precaution for Mum to wear gloves when she took the book back to Mrs Pavey – she always wore gloves when handling library books. Because you never know. A lot of women wore gloves in those days, and this particular mania of hygiene didn’t make her conspicuous on her bicycle.

  In this way I missed my chance to find out what happened to the thirty-four-year-old hero, handsome and not untalented, of a savagely frank novel of 1967, though I have to say the omens were not good. Boyde Ashlar spent a lot of the book hating himself and his frivolous life, while unable to break free of his obsession with Tex, the masseur at the Turkish Baths, and his involvement with Roddy, a lout with a tattoo of a snake covering almost the entirety of his lithe young body …

  After reading The Ring, playing with myself at night before falling asleep (mental masturbation aided by the pressure of the sheet, mindful to keep my breathing even if Peter was around) became a quite different experience. I was no longer alone. Just knowing that Boyde was probably bringing himself off at the same time as me was a comfort. I knew perfectly well he was only made up, but that didn’t diminish him.

  I felt that every song, every book and every film – even a school essay – has life in it. It gets some sort of charge when it is written or created, and the charge is renewed by every reader, writer and hearer. Everything spins like a plate on a stick, and every tiny encounter prolongs the spinning.

  I used to refuse to leave the cinema while the credits were still running. I’d complain when people walked into my field of vision on their way out that I was trying to watch the film. Dad would say, ‘The film’s over, Chicken, time to go home,’ but I’d sit tight and so would Peter, out of solidarity. ‘Somebody’s taken a lot of trouble to write all these names down for us,’ I would say, while Dad sighed in the dark. ‘If it was your name, wouldn’t you want people to read it, even if you’d just made the sandwiches? And besides, there may be an extra bit of the film at the very end which is just to reward the patient ones.’ Though actually there never was.

  If there are levels of reality below us, then it follows that there are levels above, superior to us as we are superior to characters in books, but not themselves absolute. Nothing that possesses characteristics is perfectly real, not even the guru. The guru himself is in some sense unreal – but he doesn’t need to be absolutely real to get the job done. When an elephant dreams about a tiger and wakes up in alarm, the tiger wasn’t real, was it? But the elephant has been awoken, and that is a real thing.

  I was still far short of wakefulness myself at this time, and more preöccupied with lower realities like Boyde Ashlar than higher ones. You could even say that I’d left Boyde Ashlar in the lurch by not finishing The Ring. I had neglected to give the spinning plate the full charge of attention to which it was entitled. I told myself that I would borrow the book from Mrs Pavey again after Dad had forgotten all about it, so as to find out what happened in the end, but I never got round to it.

  The Red Spot on Jupiter blinks in shock

  Eckstein’s manner didn’t soften as my German improved. Instead he opened up a campaign on another flank by pressuring me to learn another language. He kept me back after one German lesson to make his case. ‘You are taking things easy at a time when your brain is still able to absorb new things without difficulty. Absurd! Take advantage of this – it will not come again. You should learn Spanish. Starting immediately.

  ‘Here – I’ll start you off. I’m about to teach you something you will never forget. My own learning of Spanish was very rapid. My tutor gave me a copy of Don Quijote de la Mancha by Cervantes and told me to get on with it. I had to reach degree level from nothing in eight months, and I did. If you decided to learn Spanish, you could get to A-level in a year, very easily. Don’t bother with the O-level. It’s just a distraction.

  ‘When you leave this room in three minutes’ time you will know more of the language than I did when I was thrown in at the deep end with Miguel de Cervantes and his knight.’ He walked over to the blackboard, took a piece of chalk and carefully wrote something on the blackboard. It was:

  ¡ Que te joda un pulpo!

  Then he stepped back from the board and said, ‘You start with the advantage of knowing this charming sentence, which I discovered relatively late in my own progress. When I did, I vowed that it would be the first thing I taught any pupil, if I was lucky or unlucky enough to acquire one. It means,’ he said with a deep hissing sigh, ‘“May you be fucked by an octopus”.’

  The world stood still. The Red Spot on Jupiter blinked in shock. He went on, ‘It would be more accurate to translate, “May an octopus fuck you”, but such a sentence is not idiomatic in English. It lacks the proper cadence. Joder means fuck, and is transitive, for obvious reasons.’

  When Klaus Eckstein said ‘joder’ he used the proper Spanish sound, like a heavy ‘H’, not far from a guttur
al German ‘ch’. ‘No doubt your English teacher will have told you to avoid passive verbs, on the grounds that they are weaker and vaguer. This is an example of the opposite, with the passive construction being the more forceful. And there you are – I have done as I promised. I have taught you something you will never forget. From this day on, you will always have one phrase of Spanish at your disposal. If you do in fact choose to learn the language, not everything will come so easily, but the difficulties are not overwhelming. Now, I have somewhere to be even if you do not.’

  I saw that those five little staccato words, those (he was right) entirely unforgettable words, remained on the board, and a wave of fear swept over me. Not entirely selfish fear – I didn’t want Eckstein to be compromised in any way, though why was I worried? His unpopularity was already exemplary. He had nothing to fear.

  ‘Sir –,’ I piped up, ‘shouldn’t we clean the blackboard?’

  ‘As I understand the situation, young Mr Cromer, you cannot do so, and I myself … cannot be bothered. No one will understand what those words mean,’ he added airily, ‘and if they do … well, who cares? I am here to provide instruction, am I not? Let them learn …’

  He didn’t abandon me quite as brusquely as I feared. He pushed the Tan-Sad roughly to the stairwell, wheezing as he did so, but then summoned up enough breath to produce an enormous whistle which summoned some of the boys with which those premises were so richly supplied.

  Orthographical paraçites

  Perhaps Eckstein gambled on Spanish attracting me as a language of secrets and obscenities. Presumably the octopus featured in the unforgettable curse because with its eight arms it could quite easily explore a lady and a man at the same time, and still have fingers left over for the eating of its lunch. Eckstein instilled in me the idea that Spanish was a language of adult intimacies. German as I first experienced it was a motherly language, full of lullabies, endearments and diminutives, while Spanish was more of a lover from the start, a fount of forbidden knowledge. German was a familiar hand on the cradle. Spanish was an unknown tongue in my ear.

  From then on, at the end of a lesson, Mr Eckstein might mention some virtue or peculiarity of the Spanish language, contrasting it as if casually with German. He thought German and English were both impoverished compared with Spanish in the matter of punctuation, specifically the punctuation of exclamations and questions. In English we would think it very odd if someone only bothered to indicate the end of quoted speech, and not the beginning. ¿So why not apply the same principle to questions? ¡And exclamations! ¿Why not prepare the reader for what is coming? ¡It’s silly not to!

  Or he might remark that Spanish, unlike German, had two verbs meaning ‘to be’. They weren’t interchangeable. Estar and ser. One referred to the merely accidental and contingent, while the other dealt with permanent, existential characteristics. He said that there was a lot more German philosophy than Spanish, but perhaps that was because the Spanish needed less, so much being embodied in their language. When he made these remarks in passing on the relative merits of languages, he didn’t address them to me. He never even looked at me, but I realised it was my interest he was fishing for.

  He knew what he was doing with these sidelong comments. Ever since I had fallen out with Miss Collins, the tutor of my bed rest years, over the sacred symbol æ, disputed 27th letter of the alphabet, strange forms and symbols had been my chosen playground. If I had been less prudish I would have seen at once that the punctuation of the five-word curse he had chalked on the blackboard was as thrilling as its meaning. Eckstein was drawing my attention to two symbols that were right up my street. ¡If they’d been any further up my street they’d be sticking their tongues and so on!

  I vowed from then on to import these useful symbols into my own essays and letters, in any subject, for every teacher. ¿Wasn’t it logical, as Eckstein said? ¿Why should English remain at its historical disadvantage, when help was at hand? Any page of my writing crawled with orthographical paraçites. I didn’t much mind that my attempts to Iberiçise English punctuation were invariably crossed out and çingled out for reproach. That’s always how the world treats pioneers.

  It took me ages to chasten these flourishes and exorcise the cedillas from my cs. I loved making those expressive little hooks, dainty curls like stray typographic eyelashes. I wanted to study them under laboratory conditions, magnifying them to see if each cedilla had a little cedilla of its own, and so on down into unthinkable realms of subordination … in my mind’s eye, my mind’s microscope, the inside curve of each cedilla had the dull gleam of something whetted and oiled, like the edge of an infinitesimal sickle.

  Little cs have lesser cs upon their tails to bite ’em / Lesser cs have lesser cs, and so ad infinitum! Unless it might happen that electron microscopy revealed at supreme magnification some final clinger-on, some depender without dependants, the loneliest and most necessary of his kind, his perfect uselessness underwriting a sense of purpose for all the rest.

  Eckstein was scrupulous, within the limits of his abrasiveness, to let me down lightly. He explained that although the word cedilla is Spanish and means ‘little z’, the mark itself does not feature in the modern language, or not in the Castilian master-dialect which was the only one possible to study in schools. I was disappointed but my fondness for the little diacritic held firm. Curaçao was still my favourite drink, of all the ones I had never tasted.

  What Eckstein alleged about the absorptive powers of teenaged memory certainly seemed to be true of mine. It seemed to be actively hungry rather than passively registering, and I trained it to do tricks. I threw random scraps to its surplus capacity. I would memorise shopping lists and reel them off to an amazed (or mildly diverted, or not quite bored) audience. Once Dad thought he’d caught me out, until I explained that it was more of a challenge to retain last week’s shopping list rather than this one’s. I made him dig the old list out of the kitchen drawer and check every item, rather than take my word for it.

  Duly mashed

  I performed just as willingly with numbers. The trick was to forge associative links – to impose a grammar on numbers, building on their resemblances to creatures or objects. So 2 was represented by a swan, 6 by an elephant’s trunk, 1 by a magic wand, and to establish 261 firmly in your memory all you had to do was think of a swan eating an elephant that is waving a wand.

  Possibly Mum and Dad thought these hobbies were morbid signs of some sort. They wanted me to make some friends outside school, which in my special case meant ‘outside the school buildings’, to have things to do in the evenings. And so did I, but their idea was that I should go to a meeting of the Young Conservatives, described by Dad as ‘a nice bunch of youngsters’. The Bourne End meeting place of this cult wasn’t far away, by the level crossing, within wheelchair range so that I wouldn’t need to be delivered like a child to a birthday party.

  I agreed, to keep them happy. This was a very abstract display of independence (of ‘independence’ prescribed by someone else!). I didn’t want to go where I was going – I was going there because I could. But I did always love going over the level crossing in the Wrigley, bumping outrageously over the uneven sleepers, almost willing myself to come a cropper. If I’d got stuck and been duly mashed I dare say Mum would never have forgiven herself and the Young Conservatives.

  It turned out that their lair was well defended. The only access was by way of a metal spiral staircase. I wasn’t having that. I wasn’t going to ask someone to carry me up such a frightening structure for the sake of company I didn’t want. I went to the Red Lion instead, and drank there till closing time. I can’t say I had a whale of a time, but at least I was in a place I had chosen for myself, and someone put ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ on the jukebox. A nice young man in a floral shirt came over to see if I was all right, saying if there was anything I wanted I should just give a shout. I began to wonder if I hadn’t stumbled on a ‘queer pub’ just round the corner from home, hitting the jackpot wi
th my first pull on the handle. What luck! I wouldn’t have to go to the extreme lengths favoured by Boyde Ashlar (I had no idea how to find a Turkish Baths, let alone get myself through its turnstile). This nice young man was positively chatting me up. He twinkled at me. Nothing was too much trouble. Then I realised that this lad had found the easiest possible way of impressing a girlfriend with his essential niceness on a first date, bouncing a twinkle at me for her benefit. If I’d been a kitten stuck up a tree outside the pub I’d have served his turn just as well. After that I had no qualms about letting him refill my glass. Pathos has a price, and it was the least he could do. This stranded kitten doesn’t come cheap.

  Mum and Dad had left the door of Trees open for me as usual. The system was that the door of the bedroom I shared with Peter (when he was in residence), which gave access to the outside world, stayed open except when we all left the house. It stayed open even in cold weather, though on days of actual snow it might be closed when a few satisfying flurries had been admitted. The gain in convenience – the easy flow of unescorted wheelchairs in and out – easily outweighed any inconvenience of temperature. If I couldn’t circulate freely myself then I could at least give the air that privilege. It was better than a consolation prize, a pleasurable sensation in its own right.

  When I came in that night I was exhilarated out of all proportion to the actual pleasures of my night out. I had mounted an expedition solo, across the tracks and back, over an unknown threshold, and I had come back safe. Peter came in just after me, from his pub job at the Spade Oak Hotel. I sang at the top of my voice while he helped prepare me for bed. I sang ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, inevitably, with particular repetition of the bit about calling out for another drink and the waiter bringing a tray.