Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  The ascension glide which had conveyed me up the steps of the temple in Tiruvannamalai, a hundred hands in mystical unison, didn’t seem likely to be duplicated on a secular climb in Cambridgeshire. The young men who made the offer were really only paying lip service to a favourite notion of the period, that everything was always possible for everyone without exception, with no clear idea of how it might be done.

  I remember the Mistress of Girton (I think it was Muriel Bradbrook) defending the exclusion of men from the college after ten at night, though it was pointed out to her that anything men could do after ten o’clock they could also do before. ‘Oh yes,’ she replied, ‘but if they stay after ten they may do it again.’ One testy don was reported as describing this as shutting the stable door after the mare has been mounted. In circumstances like these the don being quoted was invariably from Peterhouse.

  I let Noel take charge of me. My need of help was a sore point, of course, but then by this time I was mainly sore points. I do more than my fair share of sitting and my bum was sore from the pressure of the Arts Cinema’s worn-down plush upholstery. If he didn’t help to transfer me from car to room and wheelchair then I’d only have to hitch a carry from someone else.

  In the car, Noel started to talk about how terrifying he had found Wild Strawberries. He didn’t see how he was going to sleep that night. I was puzzled. ‘But I thought you’d seen it before.’

  He opened his eyes very wide. ‘What makes you think that?’

  I said I must have got the wrong end of the stick, but I was sure he had referred to the film as one of his favourites.

  Apparently it was the dream sequence at the beginning of the film which had done for him – a famous example in that line, virtually an encyclopædia of oppressive imagery. Clocks without hands, runaway hearses. The face appearing from between the boards of the shattered coffin turning out to be the dreamer’s own.

  I had enjoyed the film, but I can’t say it touched any particular nerve. It wasn’t even an X-certificate, for Heaven’s sake! Still, it made sense to assume that my history had left me with off-kilter fears and immunities. Perhaps Noel’s upbringing had left him unusually vulnerable to the Gothic in some way. At the same time, I was thinking back to that part of the film. At the moment when the professor in his dream sees his own body in the coffin, I could swear that I had heard a distinctive sound from my neighbour’s mouth. I could have sworn it was the juice-muffled snap of a tablet of butterscotch being divided in two by a rooting tongue unable to defer the pleasure any longer.

  No epidermis off my proboscis

  Of course existential dread and greedy sweet-sucking can occupy a single individual simultaneously, but I had to wonder if Noel wasn’t putting it on. The Angst, I mean. My own tablet of butterscotch was still fat in my mouth at that stage of the film, only just beginning its dwindling to a brittle blade of sweetness.

  When the porters had been sweet-talked and I had safely parked the car at the back of A staircase, Kenny Court, I was in a little quandary. I didn’t particularly want to invite this person in, but I needed a certain amount of assistance to get back into my room. Those two steps in my path had social repercussions. I couldn’t dismiss Noel after letting him install me in the wheelchair, because it would then be obvious that I was stuck on the lower level. But if I let him help me up those steps then it would be impossible not to invite him in.

  Those steps had a lot to answer for, but if ever I mentioned them to someone sensible – such as Alan Linton while we savoured the excellent vegetarian fare in Hall – he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Steps? What steps?

  I’ve noticed that steps have an almost evanescent quality. Are they there or are they not? It seems to be a moot point. They evaporate and then condense once more. As stone and brick they should have got the knack of seeming substantial, but they’re hard to see and hard to hold in the memory.

  I phone you up in advance of a visit, and I ask, are there any steps where you live? And you say, ‘Steps? No, no steps.’ As if it was an outlandish question. Obscurely insulting, even. Except that when I arrive, there are little steps, one, two, even three. Multiple changes of level between the street and the path, the path and the door surround, the surround and the door itself. Very real obstructions, all of them. You scratch your head, as if you have never seen them before, or as if they’ve only just appeared. Earthquakes aren’t common in these parts, and even the ones that happen at night make a bit of noise. They’re not usually so tidy either, simply extruding a building a few inches up from the ground. We stare at your puzzling steps, you and I. I’m the one who doesn’t subscribe to the doctrines of materialism, and you’re the one who thinks the external world is constant and consistent, but perhaps this is not the best time for either of us to draw attention to the fact that we’re dressed in each other’s clothes.

  When I ask if there are steps, I don’t necessarily mean a grand staircase leading up to the entrance. I rather hope you’d tell me about that without being prompted. I’m talking about the little changes of level that your legs take in their stride – and that your automatic pilot negotiates without your needing to switch to manual control. I suppose it all comes down to maths, to rounding up and rounding down. If there are fewer than five steps people round down and say there aren’t any. If there are more than five, that counts as a flight. That’s makes a quorum and can’t be ignored. But fewer than five doesn’t count, apparently. It’s only me that feels excluded, and I apologise for being small-minded. It’s actually this body that is small-minded, and can’t get over the fact of your steps.

  I imagine the little meeting at which rooms were assigned to the incoming freshers of Downing. Someone would be sure to say, ‘Cromer, J., uses a wheelchair, poor beggar, so we’d better give him a room on the ground floor, don’t you think?’ And somebody else would say, ‘How about A6 Kenny, that’s just the ticket.’ I realise that university business in 1970 was not conducted by World War II personnel, but I can’t help that. That’s how it plays out in my mind. Then the pretty WAAF comes in with the tea, and says, ‘But aren’t there steps outside A staircase Kenny? That’ll be jolly awkward.’ Everyone looks at her as if she was mad, and someone says, ‘I say, little girl, you’d better not poke your nose in where it’s not wanted. We’re not fools, you know. We’ve put him on the ground floor, haven’t we? He’ll be rocketing about, you’ll see. There’ll be no stopping him.’ And the WAAF sniffs and says, ‘No epidermis off my proboscis, I’m sure.’

  With those steps taking his side, Noel simply assumed that he was coming in with me, and then something happened that took the initiative away from me for the duration. It wasn’t anything in the least dramatic – it was just that I had a bit of trouble opening the door. It was locked (I had learned my lesson) and I could manage perfectly well, as long as I wasn’t hurried. I could refuse Noel’s help in opening the door, and I did. But I couldn’t prevent cutting a figure of bravery and pathos in the eyes of a spectator, and then the drama took on its own meaning and momentum. On an ordinary night the scene would have been one of serene difficulty unobserved, but not now. I could send Noel smartly away, but that would only emphasise my bloody bravery and the sodding pathos of it all. Better to let him come in and hope to get rid of him soon.

  After that Noel pretty much had his own way. I said as nonchalantly as I could, ‘Perhaps you’d make me a coffee – and one for yourself, of course, if you’d like.’

  Noel went on and on about the haunting power of Ingmar Bergman’s images. They had bored into his head. They had tapped into his darkest dreams. He wouldn’t be able to sleep, unless … Unless what? Unless he stayed the night with me. All Ingmar’s fault, of course. Noel wouldn’t be able to close his eyes for existential terror unless I was there to comfort him. I had been chosen (chosen from a list of one) to keep the Scandinavian demons at bay in A6 Kenny.

  As Granny would have said, it was all very inconvenient, but I could hardly chuck him out, cou
ld I? Even if I had a phone in my room, I couldn’t quite see myself using it to call the Porter’s Lodge and asking them to repatriate a stray blond.

  Once I had resigned myself to my fate, there was no further mention of Noel’s fears. He was obviously shamming, but why should he bother to tell untruths? Perhaps he really was suffering from angst – angst in his pants, that is. And he was presentable enough, but was he my type?

  I wasn’t sure I could afford to have a type. There wasn’t enough traffic for me to risk putting up road blocks. That would lead me right back to celibacy without even needing to take a vow.

  The best approach seemed to be this: anyone who fetched up in my bed for whatever reason, including sham fears of clocks without hands, was my type until proved otherwise. Of course there was a snag when I considered my romantic prospects. It seemed unrealistic to expect anyone to help me go to bed and then enjoy my company once I was in it. I couldn’t quite visualise that. The waiter doesn’t sit down as guest of honour – though actually it’s an awkwardness that has come to pass often enough, when I have guests to a meal and then expect them to do a certain amount of fetching and carrying.

  In my daydreams things were different. One person prepared me for bed and a quite different one joined me between the sheets, which is an arrangement reserved for the wedding nights of royalty. As a commoner I couldn’t see how Noel was going to combine the rôles. Still, rules were made to be broken. I had college authority for that.

  Noel seemed rather fidgety as he boiled the kettle to make coffee. He asked if I had anything to eat and I reluctantly revealed a cache of biscuits. He looked through my record collection but found nothing that matched his mood, or perhaps his taste.

  He couldn’t keep his hands away from his hair, smoothing it down far more, surely, than ordinary narcissism demanded. It made me grateful for my own narrow vocabulary of body language. What a waste of nervous energy, to thrash your hands about so! Every now and then he gave a little cat’s yawn, rolling his shoulders and even sticking out his tongue, as if he was poking fun at the idea of sleep as it slyly advanced on him.

  I was ensconced in the Parker-Knoll with my drawbridge raised so that I was poised and nearly horizontal. Noel couldn’t seem to settle. He sat on the edge of the built-in desk, pushing back books and papers to make room for his narrow bum. I tried to protest, and then decided that I would make sure to ask him to reinstate everything in the morning. Unless things are near the front of a desk they’re not much use to me.

  ‘That’s a wonderful chair you’ve got there,’ he said. ‘I didn’t even see you get into it. How do you manage?’ There is occasionally something quite refreshing about unembarrassed curiosity, and I ended up giving a repeat performance, struggling slowly to my feet and then relapsing onto the Granny-subsidised upholstery. It seemed unlikely that Noel had missed the first show, all the same, which must have taken perhaps two minutes from beginning to end. ‘Thanks – I feel privileged to see that,’ said my uninvited visitor. ‘You’ve really got your life worked out, haven’t you? Well done you!’ If I had really got my life worked out, I would have been alone in my room at this point, wouldn’t I? And spared this whole conversation.

  Impotent mandrake

  Yawns are catching, alertness is not. By this time I was unconsciously copying Noel’s spasms of tiredness, and agreed that it was time for bed. Then Noel wanted to see how I managed in the bathroom. You would have thought, from his reaction, that he was positively jealous of my trolley commode, as if it was something he had wanted all his life. Finally he wanted to see how I used a flannel. Not very easily, would have been the short answer. I demonstrated, inwardly protesting. I used a table knife to bring the cloth within range of my face, and the whole operation was rather approximate. By this time I was feeling that naked curiosity wasn’t so very charming after all. Perhaps it should put on some clothes like the rest of us. Noel’s desire to know everything about my adaptation to life was beginning to seem rather oppressive. Of course he was just a little academic blob trying to rustle up a personality at short notice, like every other fresher, but I had stopped enjoying my part in the process.

  ‘You aren’t going to write an article about me, are you?’ I asked, realising as I spoke that this was a dreadful possibility. ‘I’m not going to be on the front page of Varsity, am I?’ To hold back from Jack de Manio and the Today programme only to end up as an item in Varsity! Quite a coup for the ego-diminishment project.

  ‘Of course not, I’m just interested. But you have to admit you’re one of a kind.’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  By now I was uneasy about the sharing of a bed. What if Noel did want to undertake the activity decriminalised by both the lower chamber and the Lords Spiritual and Temporal? How could I refuse? It would be no earthly use squeaking ‘Stop what you’re doing at once! I won’t be of legal age till after Christmas!’, since he was clearly younger than me. If he wanted something to happen then happen it would.

  Consent and refusal in my case were abstract notions. My Yes was taken as read, and my No was a silent scream that no one would hear, impotent mandrake struck dumb at the moment of its uprooting.

  It was too late for second thoughts. I hadn’t made my bed, and now I would have to lie in it. Noel sat on the bed and supported me between his knees while he took my clothes off. His touch was awkward but not incompetent. This was the moment I must get through without my self-confidence shrivelling, buoyed up by nothing more than the habit of buoyancy.

  Noel didn’t ask me what I wore at night. It would have been a polite enquiry to make, unless naked intimacy was on the menu. If he had asked me, I would have said ‘Nothing’, not because I had read the James Bond books and knew that a real man sleeps in the buff, but because it was enough trouble taking off one lot of clothes without having to struggle into another. Deprived of the Margaret Erskine Dream-Cloud I dare say I would have frozen to death in my undergraduate years.

  He helped me onto the bed and then undressed himself. He kept on his singlet and Y-fronts. He even looked doubtfully at his socks for a moment before taking them off. This disparity in our costumes didn’t seem promising, but who was I to know what was promising? Perhaps there was striptease to come.

  My sexual experiences had been fleeting, though rich in their way, and they had rarely been connected with beds. I had spent too long trapped in one to expect to discover much novelty on that terrain. A bed was far less promising a venue for me than a music room, a dark lane or a nice public lavatory.

  He turned the light off and climbed into bed, moving carefully to avoid squashing me. He had a faint nutty smell, which started to interest me all over again. In the dark my nose came alive and had a sniff of something it liked. Free of visual reality, I could idealise his features. My third eye took a good look round and my third leg flexed.

  I wondered if we were about to have carnal congress, and if so how much I really wanted it to happen. My consent and refusal had become elusive even to me. This was all so entirely different from any script I had ever imagined. All those back roads and lanes I had driven down, looking for the person who would inflict his secrets on me!

  Was it possible to be sought out in my own bed, and be shown the skeleton key to intimate behaviour there? The thing that can happen between people who lie down together, the shiver of what is possible.

  Then it turned out that Noel had no such plans, or if he had ever had them they had been overtaken by sleep. Angst or no Angst, he was well away. There would be no tickling-too-deliciously pleasure for me that night, and my reason was safe from being derailed by a landslide of bliss. Every fifteen minutes the Catholic Clock with its defective mechanism ironically saluted the protraction of my virginity. Unless I had lost it to the Yeti. Though I have to say, going by my shreds of memory about our encounter, that the Abominable Snowman behaved like a perfect gentleman.

  It was strange that I regarded myself as a virg
in despite having been superbly fellated more than once by the depraved and accomplished Luke Squires at Vulcan. Somehow that didn’t seem to count.

  Having someone sleeping so near to me was a novelty, even without the active sensuality of touch. Peter’s life had been warm in our bedroom at Trees, but Noel’s life was warm in my actual bed – yet I got little joy from his presence. At one point I became so overheated that I had to nudge the Dream-Cloud aside.

  Unconsciousness dissolved any pact between us, in terms of my separate space, which he invaded. In sleep he was all bones and angles. Bones and angles and rapt little snores. A hot hand inched between my legs, but it was innocent of any impulse to grope.

  In the night I needed a pee. I lay there wishing my bladder could sit tight for the whole night – life would be so much easier if it could. There was nothing to stop me from using the pee bottle as usual, except that it wasn’t in its usual place. In the flurry of going to bed in company, I hadn’t left it within reach, so I gave Noel quite a bolshie nudge. Since he was here by his own wish, he might as well be useful. He groaned as he woke and went like a sleepwalker to fetch the pee bottle.

  The shock of rapport

  Then I must have slept more heavily. When I awoke I was alone in the bed. Then I started to hear strange grunting from floor level. When I wriggled myself round I could see Noel doing photogenic little press-ups. He grinned at me when he caught me looking. ‘I made you a cup of tea,’ he said.