Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  I remember at one point Audrey poking me quite hard with a ruler, just to get a reaction. I didn’t give her the satisfaction, and she went away. I was expecting her to return with something else from her pencil-case, the compasses perhaps. I thought I would probably react to them.

  Insects and other small deer had made no inroads into my flesh. Not only did I chew my food without prompting, I put it in my mouth myself. It seemed foolish to imagine that I was travelling so far inwards, à la Maharshi, that my surroundings had become a matter of indifference to me. I was just Mandied up.

  She must have found some other distraction, because she didn’t come back. Mum never acquired the knack of withholding a reaction, so she was probably Audrey’s next port of call. There was a sort of hysterical escalation to their confrontations, which would only end when Mum said, ‘You leave me no choice,’ picking up the phone and asking the operator to connect her with the Remand Home.

  Then Audrey would go down on her knees pleading not to be sent away, and after a proper interval Mum would think better of it and put the phone down. It was always very melodramatic. Obviously Mum didn’t mean it (children don’t vanish into the disciplinary system quite so smoothly, and anyway isn’t eleven a little young?), and I don’t think that Audrey believed for one moment that she did. It was more that the charade of an ultimatum allowed her to back down without loss of face. It was only after exhaustive exploration of anguish and disgrace that she could find any sort of calm.

  Distillation of goodwill

  I had the same college room for all three years of my undergraduate life. I stayed put in A6 Kenny. This was a significant concession. Other students were shunted all over the place during their time at the university, while I only needed to get used to one set of arrangements. Even so, of course, the human context changed around me, and I was deprived of the little arrangements that had grown up with the people I knew. P. D. Hughes, for instance, went to Lensfield Road, which was very sad. My set of immediate connections was destroyed as decisively as if a child had swept a cobweb away with a stick, and I had to start spinning the old charm-threads from scratch.

  Still, there were compensations to the process of starting all over again. I was an initiate, an adept, and could often answer freshmen’s questions. I learned to presume on my seniority when it came to asking for little bits of portering. I told myself it was the new-bugs’ privilege to oblige me. I owed them nothing for their trouble. I cultivated mild insensitivity, a much healthier thing than spending your whole time conscious of being in the world’s debt.

  Belatedly I was beginning to find my feet. With my change of course I could tell myself I was a freshman all over again, only this time I could play the system a lot better. I attended the Societies Fair on my own. Second-years normally gave the whole jamboree a miss, since their social lives needed less propping up, but I threw myself confidently into the maelstrøm of the Corn Exchange. I hitch-lifted without any trouble. In fact it was intoxicatingly easy. Why wasn’t it always like this? I suppose because this was a meandering and a milling crowd, rather than a bustling one. I tried different approaches. Everything seemed to work. I felt like a gambler on a winning streak.

  For a short time even the corniest lines brought me a smile and a hand on the tiller. ‘Hey, man, can you help me keep on truckin’ to the next stall but one?’ That worked more than once, on those with hippy pretentions. Drawling ‘Sister, Do You Know the Way to San José?’ produced as much of a beam on one young woman’s face (oddly reddened, a drinker’s face on someone who was little more than a girl) as if I’d stuffed a handful of fivers into the pocket of her coat, a military coat which was far too big for her. She pushed me where I wanted to go and then took my name and college address. She said she’d be in touch. The wheelchair ran perfectly without the need for a motor, chugging smoothly on a distillation of goodwill.

  I made a beeline for the Zoology Club, which I was charmed to learn held ‘conversaziones’ rather than meetings as such. That was what was missing from my Cambridge life – conversaziones. Then, as I negotiated the loudly echoing spaces of the Corn Exchange, idly wondering which human ripple I would graciously allow to carry me forward, I could hear a subdued rhythmic chanting. It struck me immediately as ominous, before I could make out a word.

  Eventually I could make out the slogan being broadcast: Two Four Six Eight – Gay Is Just as Good as Straight. Crazily I thought that everyone would look at me, that my blushing in that confined space would spark an explosion. It wasn’t so much a blush, more of a heart attack displaced on to my face. And so soon after I had mentally disparaged another human being for undue redness of complexion!

  I experienced horripilation, yes, and lowered body temperature, but none of the other classic signs of the proximity of God. What I felt was the proximity of terrible fear. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

  Every now and then the chant was replaced by another, which went Three Five Seven Nine – Lesbians Are Mighty Fine. This was much less threatening to my peace of mind. In any case, since it was uttered by male voices exclusively, the slogan gave the impression of hearsay rather than any great conviction.

  I can’t explain my panic flight. I seemed to have lost a lot of confidence. As a Vulcan schoolboy I had been positively cheeky when confronted with evangelicals, taunting Billy Graham’s minions with their gnawed fingernails and penchant for hell-fire. As a freshman I had groped a botanist in the presence of my bedmaker. Now I had relapsed. I had become re-infected with depressive strains of narrow-mindedness, guilt and shame. Perhaps it’s an indication of how low my state of being actually was, during this my higher education.

  With a heavy heart I realised that sooner or later I would have to come to terms with the Cambridge Wing of the Gay Liberation Front, or CHAP, as it was actually called, rather than drive round Trumpington looking for the Monarchist League. But not just yet. Perhaps my dread was based, deep down, on something quite simple. This was one group whose rejection I wouldn’t be able to shrug off. If they wouldn’t have me, who would? If these untouchables refused any contact with me then there was no further to fall.

  Didn’t have the hips for the job

  In the meantime, their slogan echoed in my head for the rest of the day. The trouble with such ear-catching formulations is that they’re so vulnerable to rewording. After Two Four Six Eight my mind kept supplying starker conclusions for the couplet.

  Cheery Chants Won’t Change Your Fate.

  Join and Feel the Force of Hate.

  Not to mention: John Will Never Find a Mate.

  The red-faced young woman who had taken my address at the Societies Fair tracked me down in my Kenny lair a few days later. She was tiny and elfin, with masses of red hair and many scarves. She wore glasses with octagonal lenses, which were fashionable at the time. I dare say she was modelling her style on Janis Joplin, as so many women did in those days, except that she didn’t have the hips for the job, and somehow I doubted that she’d ever drunk anything stronger than Earl Grey. She did have a lot of vitality, though. She lit up my room like a little auburn bonfire.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ she said, as if we’d bumped into each other on the street. ‘Good to see you again. I was just wondering – would you like to be part of a Day of Action for disabled people?’

  Would I? I didn’t know. What would it involve? I played for time, saying, ‘I really don’t know – some of my best friends were disabled, of course.’ This wasn’t even true, not since the day I had left Vulcan School and started to sink slowly into the mainstream.

  She said, ‘You might enjoy it. We’re planning a consciousness-raising event, though actually it may turn into a zap.’

  ‘Very good. What is a zap?’

  ‘You really don’t know? Oh, man … a zap is a piece of direct action intended to open people’s eyes and bring about radical change.’

  ‘Can you give me an example?’

  ‘Easy. You know the drinks containers there used to be
deposits on, so that you could return them and get a refund? Big business wants you to throw away your bottles and buy new ones. So consciousness-raising would be getting everyone to realise that this is wasteful and stupid, and zapping would be dumping, let’s say, a million bottles outside the headquarters of Coca-Cola.’

  ‘I see.’ The idea of being dumped outside an uncaring institution had a certain appeal. Perhaps this dynamic waif would chain me to the railings outside Downing and set in motion some very overdue radical change. ‘Can you give me some more details?’

  ‘We plan to do a comprehensive survey of facilities in Cambridge – shop, restaurants, pubs. To see whether disabled people are fairly treated. Whether they can get into those places, for a start.’

  I was impressed. It was the first time in Cambridge I’d had any inkling of social consciousness along these lines. ‘And when is it, this day of action?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, let’s see,’ she said. ‘When are you free?’

  That was her way of letting me know another important detail: between us, we were the Day of Action. There was no one else, but I didn’t think that was necessarily a bad thing. It made choosing our Day relatively easy and unbureaucratic. We settled on the next Saturday. She thought a busy day in the shops and the streets made the point about the exclusion of people like me more vividly, and I’d always had trouble solving the problem of the Cambridge Saturday.

  Her name was Rebecca. She said she was reading Sociology, and perhaps this was her fieldwork, but that didn’t put me off. I was raring to go, impatient to be excluded from shops I had no interest in entering.

  Our first port of call on the Day of Action was W. H. Smith’s in Market Hill. Rebecca wanted to buy a clipboard, to lend a more formal edge to our inspections, but it made sense to treat the shop as our first official port of call. Someone held the door open for us, and Rebecca did her best to get me inside, but the task was beyond her. There wasn’t really a step, more of a ridge, but she was too little and too light to nudge me over. ‘Looks as if we’ve got our first failure to record,’ she said. ‘Wait here.’ What else was I going to do?

  By the time Rebecca came back with her clipboard, an assistant from the shop had come over to me. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, and Rebecca answered for me. ‘This young man can’t get into your shop.’

  ‘Well, that’s easily taken care of, miss. I’ll give him a hand.’

  ‘And what’s supposed to happen if he doesn’t have a friend with him? How’s he supposed to get help when he’s stranded outside the shop?’

  ‘I don’t know, miss. He could shout, or ask someone passing by to alert a member of staff.’

  ‘And how is that supposed to make him feel, when he has to go to such trouble even to get inside?’

  How was it supposed to make me feel, come to that, being used as an object lesson in this way? I felt a warm and nasty glow. Shouldn’t I being doing some of the talking? But Rebecca was in full spate. ‘Do you want this young man’s custom or not?’

  ‘We want it, I expect, up to a point. What is it he wants to buy?’

  ‘Nothing at the moment, thank you. But I’ve bought one of your sturdy and economical clipboards, and I’m writing down what you say about your disabled customers.’

  ‘Are you from a newspaper?’

  ‘No. Why? Do you only care about disadvantaged members of the public when a reporter takes an interest?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said the assistant, beginning to get angry at last. ‘When this young man wants to make purchase – which isn’t today, apparently – he can rely on our most devoted attention. Thank you!’

  ‘Thank you!’ barked Rebecca, grabbing the handle of the wheelchair and giving me rather a jolt as we set off to our next targeted business. ‘What a lackey! What a running dog! The sooner everyone like that gets stood up in front of a wall the better for the rest of us!’ She seemed to be in a high good humour, all the same, and looking forward to the next ideological scrap on my behalf.

  As we went from place to place we started to vary our approach. Sometimes I would get up out of the wheelchair, with her help, and try to totter in to premises that resisted me with every blue line on the architect’s plans. We got a lot more attention after Rebecca started to mention that she was writing a piece for Broadsheet. It wasn’t much of a lie – it was as hard in those days to get an article rejected by a student newspaper as a poem. If she had ever written such a thing up it would certainly have appeared.

  I tried to get a look at Rebecca’s face whenever she was in my line of sight, which was usually at times when she was using me as a reproach to a heartless world of business. I had decided that my first interpretation of her facial redness (the demon drink) had been prejudiced and wrong. Some redheads do have rather brickish complexions, of course, but I was working on a different theory. My diagnostic nose twitched and my pencil burned to label a vial of pillules.

  Cashmere tufts of ideology

  After a few more skirmishes with lackeys and running dogs I was beginning to get hungry. I wondered which restaurant or café we were going to patronise and upbraid. It seemed fairer, somehow, to be pointing out the defects of establishments we actually wanted to attend, though embarrassment would run much higher in a place that offered atmosphere as much as food and drink.

  There was also a budgetary element involved. We couldn’t afford the Blue Boar. In fact we settled for the Corner House on King Street. Rebecca seemed much less committed to the struggle than she had been in the shops that morning, which was partly explained when she said that there was nothing on the menu she could eat, since she was a vegan.

  ‘Oh, I’m a vegetarian too,’ I said, ‘but I’m sure we can find something.’ I had misheard her, and now she misheard me in her turn.

  ‘You’re really a vegan?’ she asked. ‘I thought I was the only one in Cambridge. I’m certainly the only one in Newnham.’

  ‘Really? There are three of us in Downing, and I thought that was a pretty feeble showing!’ Then the word she had used finally sank in. ‘Hold on – what was it you said? You’re a vegan? What’s that?’

  ‘I thought you said that’s what you were!’

  ‘I’m a vegetarian. What’s a vegan?’

  ‘A vegan is a vegetarian with a bit of backbone. Sorry, that’s what my parents say but it’s true, isn’t it? Good luck being high and mighty about your lifestyle when you keep cows and hens as your slaves.’

  I’d never thought about it in quite those terms, and it was a novel sensation having the ethical rug pulled from under me, when I had become spoiled by the feel of those cashmere tufts of ideology between my toes. Rebecca abandoned the disabled-access project for the time being, sitting me down to instruct me in living without cruelty instead. She took only a contemptuous glance at the menu, which was laminated and greasy. Even licking the menu at the Corner House could make you complicit in what she explained was called zooicide, the killing of living things.

  ‘Vegetarians are really fifth columnists, aren’t they? They commit zooicide just as much as the outright flesh-munchers. Where do you think the milk you drink comes from? Do you think the cows had no other plans for it? That they sent their calves away to school, perhaps, and had a surplus? Wake up! And how about cheese? Don’t you know what rennet is? It’s used to coagulate cheese, and it comes from a calf’s stomach! Isn’t that disgusting? Calves don’t give it away out of charity, they only want to use it to digest their own food, but then they’re killed and the lining is scraped out of their stomachs. S-c-r-a-p-e-d out. And all so that you can order a cheese omelette and feel pure. Slavery and slaughter on a single plate! Meaning no offence.’

  ‘Taking none,’ I said, through gritted teeth. I had indeed been about to plump for the cheese omelette. It was as if she could read my hungry mind. Admittedly the rennet question had bothered me from the moment I had heard about it. In those days vegetarian cheese seemed a purely theoretical possibility, like the eternal light-bulb and the ra
zor blade that never lost its edge, neither of which big business would let us buy. I couldn’t find it in shops and I couldn’t expect even the most punctilious college kitchen to track it down.

  Rebecca explained that her parents had been ‘almost’ founder-members of the Vegan Society, certainly among the first hundred to sign up. Her parents were Welsh speakers who had met, classically enough, at an eisteddfod. She herself had been brought up avoiding dairy produce as well as meat. Her body was uncontaminated with the pain of other species. In that respect she was like the hero of Roald Dahl’s story ‘Pig’, except of course that he ends up hanging from a hook on a conveyor belt in an abattoir with his throat slit open. I hope I haven’t spoiled the story for you.

  The moment she mentioned her parents, Rebecca’s voice started to betray the Celtic lilt for ever associated with Dylan Thomas. Perhaps it was true that she had avoided all dairy products from birth, but she hadn’t altogether been able to steer clear of Under Milk Wood.

  I had to ask Rebecca to attract a waitress’s attention so that I could order my fifth columnist’s lunch, my feast of indirect animal suffering. The waitress was trying so hard to treat me like everyone else, not staring or anything, that I could have set fire to my hair and she wouldn’t have looked my way, telling herself it was all part of my unfortunate condition. ‘Plain omelette, chips and salad, please,’ I said, my voice a chastened whisper. I was still abusing the chicken, but cow and calf had a provisional reprieve.

  Part of me, the part that loved rigour and clarity, found this new doctrine of eating very appealing. What a shock it would give Mum and Flanny if I returned to Bourne End saying No to a whole new range of foods! What consternation in the kitchen and the surgery. At the same time I had to acknowledge that as a vegan child in the bed-rest years, refusing to embark on Mum’s scrambled-egg boats, I would simply have faded away, my precious Christmas-present watch dangling loosely from my shrivelled wrist.