Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  I could see I was getting nowhere so I changed my approach, saying that it was never wrong to make neutral comments about the weather – it was expected. In fact that was probably why he had moved to Bourne End, to escape the chore of being clever all the time in London. She wasn’t reassured, I have to say, but for the moment her nerve held steady. She might adjust the lie of her scarf in the hall mirror for a long moment before she left the house to go shopping, taking a deep breath as if she was about to go on stage, but she made herself do it.

  Mum’s equilibrium was under threat, but mine was pretty sturdy at this time. Eckstein had read my essay. He had got more than he bargained for, I dare say, but then he didn’t know that I had a hotline to Lorca’s secret soul in the person of María Paz Binns. ‘This is a bit sketchy, John,’ he said in class, ‘it needs some more flesh on the bones. But the bones aren’t too bad.’ This faint praise was a deafening accolade by Eckstein’s standards, and just as well. There weren’t many people I’d let talk to me about bones in that way. ‘I take your point,’ said Eckstein, ‘about Lorca’s … women …’ He was signalling pretty clearly that my knowledge of Lorca’s most tortured thoughts should remain private. I’m not sure anybody else at school would have been particularly interested.

  With Mum feeling so shaky, there was more than enough agora-phobia around. I began to suffer from the opposite condition, and to feel the urge to get out and about, to profit from my new mobility. One weekend I decided I would hurl myself out of the nest good and proper. I set off for London with only the vaguest idea of how to get there, or what I would do when I did. Would Dad draw me a map? He would not. Dad, who was perpetually on the lookout for strangers looking even vaguely lost, so that he could overwhelm them with hand-drawn maps and sketches of landmarks, instructions in numbered paragraphs, told me to use my initiative. Initiative! If Dad had had any initiative himself, he wouldn’t have ended up under my orders, growing mushrooms that had a death-wish.

  I wanted to find Covent Garden, having fond memories of My Fair Lady, and fetched up in Soho instead. At first I thought the women who accosted me in my car were flower-girls like Eliza Doolittle, but they weren’t, not quite. They were themselves the flowers they sold, and very good saleswomen they were too. Very friendly, very confident of giving me a good time. There was no talk of giving me a discount, which was a definite sign of progress.

  I didn’t tell Mum and Dad about the chatty prostitutes, but Peter was fascinated and wanted to come with me on my next expedition. I let him do the map-reading, and somehow we ended up at the Palm Beach Casino Club. I got Peter to push me inside, more or less as a dare. The moment we were inside he said, ‘This place is rigged. Everything’s crooked.’ Under the tacky glamour it smelled of stale flowers and desperation, and I was sure he was right, but that was no reason not to play. It turned out, though, thanks to the Gaming Act, that you had to join the club 24 hours before you played, so I joined on the spot and made plans to come back the next weekend. Peter, not yet eighteen, wasn’t eligible to play, but I was all right. Peter could come to push, and watch.

  During the week I worked out a system. I didn’t want to make a killing, just incremental earnings. Peter had a toy roulette wheel at home, and I cut my teeth on that. The system wasn’t very sophisticated, but it either guaranteed small wins or limited your losses. I may even have got it from a book or a film, though I’d like to think I was on good enough terms with numbers to work out something of the sort by myself.

  It isn’t complicated. You wait, without betting, until either the red or the black has come up three times in a row. Then you put a pound on the other colour. If you lose, put two pounds on. Then four pounds. Then stop.

  I didn’t do badly, small wins and smaller losses. Peter did notice, though, that any time I won anything, there were men who came round inconspicuously to make a note of what I’d done. It wasn’t getrich-quick – it was more like get-poor-slow, but it was a night out. I made a few pounds and we had fun.

  Until Dad got to hear of it. He was fascinated, and got me to teach him my system. He couldn’t wait to try it himself, and he wasn’t going to take me along with him either. I wish I had held out on him about the address, refusing to give him directions, but he’d have found out another way if I had. All I could do was emphasise that it was crucial to follow the rules exactly. He didn’t. What a time for Dad to stumble across his hidden hoard of initiative and spend it all at once!

  He lost the housekeeping money and some savings as well, and had to get a part-time job driving a van to make good the losses. He came home very crestfallen and blaming me, saying it was the last time any of us went to that hellhole. Which was very unfair, but didn’t make much difference anyway, since Palm Beach Casino was closed down very soon afterwards by the police for rigging their wheels. I didn’t grieve. I’d more or less lost interest once I’d proved my system within its limits.

  With Dad being a van driver at weekends, the mood of the house lightened. Mum and I found a little hobby of our own, not as ambitious as wine-making or mushroom husbandry. We started to indulge in the gentle art of candle-making. At first Mum resisted the idea, because of the element of danger: saucepans became hot, wax could scald. Precisely what appealed to me about the whole thing. I had to convince her that I was a different person from the callow boy who had scalded a neighbour’s child. Finally she said that it would be all right so long as I read out directions and gave instructions, while she took care of the lifting and the pouring into moulds and so on. I tried to look disappointed for form’s sake, but this division of labour was exactly what I had in mind. I was delighted.

  Fizzy drinks frozen in time

  Soon we were ordering pounds of slab wax. We learned to hack bits off without making too much of a mess. Then we heated it gently in a bain-marie, which Mum told me was also the proper way to make custard. In another saucepan, a much smaller one, we melted a little stearin and added dye to it. The quantities were so small that Mum sometimes let me do that. I had the idea from the name that stearin must be a sort of steroid, like the ones that had done so little lasting good to my generation of Still’s Disease patients, but couldn’t find out for definite.

  Mum said we couldn’t buy a wax thermometer. They cost too much. We found out the hard way that thrift can be wasteful. Our candles often developed a sort of dandruff, which is what happens when you pour your wax too cool. Other times, when we poured too hot, they became filled with small bubbles so that they looked like fizzy drinks frozen in time. Then Mum’s hatred of imperfection led her to change her mind, and we invested in a wax thermometer after all.

  I was aware that candle-making was a little bit babyish, even as hobbies go, but I didn’t care. No one seemed quite sure what matur ity would mean in my particular case, and nobody made it sound in the least bit attractive. Mum had the clearest idea, I suppose – her idea was that I would depend on her every day until one of us died. Which of us? I wonder if she gave that question any thought. Some married couples manage not to, after all. If she died first then I would be well and truly helpless, any independent spark long since extinguished, but if I died first then so would she. She was prone to saying, with ominous tenderness, ‘What would you do without me, JJ? You’d be lost, it’s as simple as that.’ My needs were a handy screen for hers. I would never escape from her loving clutches. Puberty meant that she delegated certain unsavoury tasks, but apart from that there was to be no growing away from her in my growing up.

  In theory Dad was all for pushing me out of the nest, that being nature’s way, but in practice he dithered, pulling me back from the brink by my tail feathers more often than not. One holiday, for instance, Peter and I heard screams and mechanical music. Our ears had detected the possibility of a funfair, and soon our noses picked up the clinching smells of ozone and candyfloss.

  Peter wanted to spend all his holiday money on the dodgems. I wasn’t so ambitious. I had my heart set on the Ghost Train.

  When I to
ld Dad, he said, ‘Negative, John. I can’t allow it.’ Under pressure he agreed to go on it himself, in case the ride was smoother than it looked. At the very least he would describe exactly what went on, though we both knew that wasn’t the same thing at all.

  He came out rubbing his head, looking rather pale. I begged him to tell me what had happened, and he said, ‘Well, there was all the usual stuff, screaming, cold damp gloves trailing against your face, and then some great rubber thing comes down and donks you on the head. Made me see stars – Damn good job you weren’t in there too … I couldn’t’ve protected you from something as sudden as that, Chicken. In any case, those tracks jerk really sharply inside there. They could hurt your joints and do a lot of damage. Tell you what, though …’

  His idea was that it was almost as much fun watching people’s faces as they came out of the Ghost Train as it was riding it yourself. There was a place where doors were flung open and the cars clattered out, only to swerve and dash back in again, so that’s where we positioned ourselves. Dad said it would be a good way for me to become a student of human nature.

  It began to seem that my speciality in life was going to be the theory of things. Theory of First Aid at Vulcan, theory of car maintenance with the BSM, and now the theory of the Ghost Train.

  The main thing we learned about human nature was that courting couples, clattering into the open for a few seconds mid-snog, with their hands all over each other, don’t much like it when they find they’re being watched by a middle-aged man and a teenager in a wheelchair. One boy flashed us a V-sign (not the one that Dad was familiar with, the triumphant one from the War) and for a moment it looked as if the girl was going to throw the remains of her toffee-apple at us, before the mechanism whisked them away again into the darkness full of muffled screams. We pushed off before we found ourselves up on charges. At the time I thought Dad was being unnecessarily hasty – I couldn’t imagine ever having a criminal record. I didn’t see how I could hope to get my mugshot on the list of Most Wanted. A criminal record was just one more wonderful thing out of reach. I needn’t have worried. Karma has been kind – though of course it wasn’t all that much fun when it finally happened.

  You’ve gone all cock-eyed, dear

  From the start, my desire to drive had overlapped with the desire to find sex. In that respect I was a normal adolescent. The intimacies I had enjoyed in the past, at the Vulcan School, had been laid on inhouse. No travel was necessary – it was just a matter of seizing the moment, or of failing to get out of the way. But if I wasn’t planning on living in an institution then I would have to stop relying on such windfalls of pleasure. I would have to cater to my own appetites and meet pleasure half-way.

  With a car I was able to seek it out, and to take myself to places where wickedness might be found. Someone mentioned that there was a disreputable pub in Windsor, ‘louche’ if not positively queer, but without further details I couldn’t find the sins I sought. I had to rely on instinct. It helped if I imagined there were three of us looking for what the world might offer, loitering and looking sidelong at promising strangers (to the extent the neck allowed) in the hope that they might look sidelong back at us. Federico García Lorca, Boyde Ashlar and me. We should really have brought Tennessee Williams along, for a bit of humour and common sense, but we didn’t think of that. There just wasn’t room enough in the Mini.

  In a cartoon my two escorts would have perched on my shoulders, one with a halo on his head, the other with horns, arguing the case variously for risk-taking and the straight-and-narrow. In reality Lorca and Ashlar were both on the horny side, and they spoke with a single voice. Ashlar even had a little shoulder-perching devil-angel of his own, the effeminate friend always ready to murmur, ‘You’ve gone all cock-eyed, dear.’ Everything conspired to push me towards bravery and the outrageous.

  Only a few months after I passed my test I took the Mini down a side alley in Marlow. It was the louchest place I could find, though I had only the dimmest notion of what I was looking for. I knew that there should be light but not too much of it, preferably coming from the side. There should be a suggestion of neglect or dereliction but also of waiting for something. The picture would be completed by a figure in shadow with a cigarette. Smoke swallowed and then breathed out. Weight being shifted from leg to leg with a sound that only woodland creatures, and I myself, could hear.

  The lane was promising. And there he was – a figure under the trees at the end, exaggeratedly at his ease. There seems to be a deep instinct that tells us if an unreadable figure, a figure in silhouette, is smiling. The man came up to the car without hesitation, all business, almost before I had parked, and opened the door. He got in. The Mini’s suspension lurched, and so did my heart. Would it manage to keep beating, during what must follow?

  For all the encouragement my demons had given me, of course, they left me in the lurch when I needed them most. Boyde and Federico had scarpered. Cowards! After all their bold talk.

  The stranger parked himself on the seat next to me. Where else was he going to go? In a Mini intimacy is the only option. His cologne was strong, the smell of his cigarette was stronger. He was chewing gum as well as smoking. I could smell that too.

  At first I didn’t look at him directly, but I thought that I’d made rather a brilliant catch. He reached over with his hand and gave my hair a ruffle, which was exciting if perhaps a little too much an uncle’s action, a liberty but also a dead end. The ruffling hand passed my field of vision on its return journey. The skin tone was darker than mine. There were follicles. There was dark hair on the dark wrist. My heart was going like mad, now that I had achieved what had taken so long to bring about. I had brought something uncontrollable into my life, something swarthy, to sit beside me in the car and turn life upside down. When I shifted awkwardly round to return the smile in the passenger seat, I found it belonged to Granny’s pet waiter from the Compleat Angler.

  The brain is a standardised organ. My brain was like the Mini I was sitting in, marginally adapted to my circumstances but little different from every other brain. It went on producing the standard responses. That evening my brain supplied me with the most foolish possible thought. Perhaps he doesn’t recognise me. The staff in my mental press office could come up with no better bulletin than that to paper over the cracks. They should be fired. They should all be fired, and they could forget about references.

  Of course he recognised me. Of course he recognised me! He might not remember my name, but he knew me all right. I didn’t drive into the dining room at the Compleat Angler at the wheel of the Mini, but that didn’t mean I was in disguise now. He had known who I was long before I recognised him, and the ruffling of my hair had been indulgent but the opposite of the touch I wanted.

  He’d only got into the car for a chance to talk about old times, the splendours and miseries of the waiting life. I felt I could tell him a thing or two about that – the waiting life. ‘I see all sorts at the Angler, believe me,’ he said, ‘and your grandmother is absolutely special. A one-of-a-kind sort of lady. ¿When will she come to see me again? ¿To make her little road across the plate?’ His Spanishness was beginning to grate on me, and it was mortifying that I couldn’t command enough vocab to communicate usefully. ‘¡When you next speak to your fantastic grandmother, you must ask her to come to the restaurant again soon so we can play our games and have some fun!’

  To rob and murder you

  Up to that point it had never occurred to me that waiters could feel anything but contempt for those they served. It was actually rather unbearable that everything turned out to revolve around Granny, in Marlow and the wider world. She’d paid for the car, and perhaps if I asked her nicely she’d pay for her special waiter to come home with me, to be nice to me the way Mr Thatcher’s lady friend was nice to him. I didn’t want that.

  I made a supreme effort and said nothing. I tried to nail my tongue into a corner of my mouth, to stop myself from prattling. I wanted to be excused for a mo
ment from my life’s long charm offensive. I wanted this man to reach over across to me without being wooed, teased or hypnotised. I hadn’t concentrated on the inside of my mouth so fiercely since the game of Teeth, way back in my early days of immobility, when I imagined living inside my own mouth, wandering through the stalagmites and stalactites set in the smooth pink rock. I was determined not to blurt out some winning wheedle.

  I gave him the Cow Eyes, more for form’s sake than anything else, just in case there was a chance of turning the encounter in a new direction. The silence in the car began to seem oppressive. Then he shifted and said rather sourly, ‘You know, I had your number from the word go, from the first time you ate at my table. Absolutely had your number. And all I can say is – good luck!’

  Silence had failed and speech must have its turn. ‘What is your name?’ I asked, wanting to make him stay. ‘¿Cómo se llama Usted?’ I’d have asked him whether he didn’t prefer black-tobacco Ducados to bland blond English smokes, but I couldn’t muster the vocabulary.

  ‘My name is whatever you like,’ he said, between chews on the gum and drags on the cigarette. ‘Waiter –You There – Garsong – Boy.’ Granny didn’t know his name, but for some reason that was all right. I was the one who had to stand in for the hotel’s whole patronising clientele. Granny was fun and I wasn’t. Against such judgements there is no appeal. On the whole I’d have preferred it if he’d just wished me fucked by an octopus. The amiable old multiple-violation-by-gastropod routine.