Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  The soloist’s name was a magic spell in its own right, whether I was in my right mind or the righter one brought on by the drug. Moura Lympany. Those syllables struck my mental membranes with the rippled impacts of liquid timpani.

  Over time I had to modify my ideas about the drug I had ingested. It was a matter of simple mathematics. It would have needed 500 milligrams or so of the active ingredient of Lophophora williamsii to deliver the organic version of such an experience. It would have been a substantial tablet, and not the little pill I had bought, which must therefore have been LSD. I had a moment of hallucinated insight, connecting the synthesising of salicylic acid in 1897 by Felix Hoffmann with the synthesising of lysergic acid by Albert Hoffmann in 1943. Might not the Hoffmanns be father and son? Well, no they couldn’t, since in reality Albert’s surname has only the one n. I was reluctant to leave the domain of the drug, where everything links up and nothing is superfluous, nothing dangles.

  It wasn’t sensible to regret my change of subject. The results from my Part I exams had told their own story: a First for my German oral, an Upper Second for my spoken Spanish. A Lower Second overall. Reading Modern Languages had indeed been a lost cause, while reading English was merely a losing battle. Even my strengths (as I saw them) did me no good. An American lecturer came to lead a seminar on Thomas Mann, which I attended. The professor made a meal of the last sentence of Mann’s story Mario and the Magician, saying it was a wonderful ending and the key to the meaning of the whole. Fine, but make sure you’re using an accurate translation. The last sentence in German contains the clause ‘ich konnte und kann nicht umhin’, meaning ‘I can’t think otherwise’, or simply ‘I have to agree’. The translation on which the prof was placing so much weight said the opposite – ‘I don’t think so’, or something of the sort.

  I put up my hand to explain that the translation was defective, and the prof just said again, ‘Such a wonderful ending.’

  ‘It can’t mean what you want it to mean. It’s not possible in the German.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ was the best he could manage at short notice. Then he regrouped his forces and said, ‘Literature can accommodate any amount of ambiguity. That’s a great thing. We must agree to disagree. There’s no dishonour in that. And I thank you for your contribution.’

  Deputising for the tide

  We didn’t agree to disagree. We disagreed about our disagreement. Ambiguity is one thing, ignorance is another. He couldn’t admit to being wrong on the facts of language. He was reduced to pretending that his interpretation could overrule the text, and there was dishonour in that. When he said, ‘Thank you for your contribution,’ it was another twisting of language, this time of the English language (so he had fewer excuses). What he meant was closer to ‘Piss off, you little wretch, and next time you have a bright idea keep it to yourself.’

  I was rather disillusioned about the way the academic world worked. I was naïve. Small boys don’t enjoy it when their sandcastles are swept away by the tide, particularly when an even smaller boy deputises for the tide, on his first day at the beach.

  Not everything in the English department was so uninspiring. I attended some of Muriel Bradbrook’s lectures on Ibsen. She was the Mistress of Girton who had wanted to protect her charges, if not from sex then at least from its repetition, by locking the doors at ten o’clock. As a lecturer she insisted that we couldn’t understand the plays unless we understood the geography of Norway. She would rather we looked at pictures of fjords than volumes of criticism.

  I found this exhilarating, until I started to think it was just another version of what I had heard in the Faculty of Modern (and Mediaeval) Languages. Nothing short of total immersion is any good.

  One German word which had the power to reproach me was a fashionable one in English at the time, gestalt. All I had in the way of a life was a series of interlocking routines – bedder, Hall, lectures, yoghurt manufacture – with none of the feeling of an organic whole. My summer enlightenment had faded like a tan.

  Perhaps I had as strong a claim as anyone to the word gestalt, since I at least knew its derivation from the Old High German stellen, meaning (to locate the core of a cluster of ideas) to shape. My life had no controlling shape.

  Still, there were pockets in my week that gave me pleasure and some small sense of belonging. I had got into the habit, for instance, of drinking a half-pint of beer at the Cambridge Arms on a fairly regular basis. Perhaps as often as twice a week. It was my first experiment in having a ‘local’, a step on the way to the stranger state of actually being a local. The Cambridge Arms, on King Street, was pleasantly nondescript. The public bar at least didn’t attract much of a university crowd. King Street itself was modest, not exactly a back street but mainly used by university people as a short cut, or for sheer relief when the glory of the colleges became too much to bear.

  Adjusting my bow tie

  The public bar of the Cambridge Arms had the advantage, from my point of view, of an outstandingly friendly and coöperative Australian barman. He was called Kerry Bashford, and after a while we evolved a routine. I would park outside and sound the horn in my trademark pattern, the series of blasts which spelled out Om Mane Padme Om, and Kerry would come out and help me get into the wheelchair, after lifting it out of the boot of the car. He lifted the chair one-handed, swinging it in an effortless arc. He was quite unselfconscious about his strength and the grace it produced. I liked the fact that he didn’t suddenly freeze up with the realisation that he could do such a lot with his body that I couldn’t. Why is it supposed to please me when people hunch their shoulders to atone for being tall, or restrict their movements to apologise for being flexible? There’s nothing wrong with enjoying your body. I would if I could. I do when I can. It’s much easier to see that the body is an illusion if you’ve actually spent some time there.

  Kerry always insisted on fitting the wheelchair with its footplates. I didn’t usually bother asking people to do this – say what you like about ankylosed joints, but at least they don’t need support. There was something motherly about Kerry’s attention to detail in this, as if he wanted me to be turned out at my best, the equivalent in wheelchair terms of adjusting my bow tie.

  Kerry was a Jehovah’s Witness from Newcastle, New South Wales. My first tame Jehovah’s Witness, though he’d more or less grown out of that strange faith. He had fair skin and a big broad face, with a scrawny beard more or less holding the whole unstable gestalt together. He told me of a time when he’d gone to an open-air pop concert back home and been so sunburned he went a sort of purple. To finance his European adventure he had worked on a gang repairing railway track. His was the sort of skin that will never take a tan, wrapped round an antipodean boy slow to take the hint that peeling is not how epithelial cells say Thank you, we enjoyed that.

  Kerry would always be reading Howards End out of sight behind the bar, but he wasn’t exactly spoiling for literary chat. If I asked whether he was enjoying the book, he’d just say, ‘Bloke can write,’ sometimes with neutral appreciation, sometimes dogmatically. Once he even struck the closed book lightly with his fist, but the verdict was always the same. Bloke can write. He wouldn’t be coaxed into detail. He’d said all he had to say.

  Kerry was very good at anticipating my needs without making me feel like part of a social worker’s caseload. Even on my first visit he didn’t need to be told that I needed my half of Abbot in a glass with a stem or a handle. Not a straight glass which calls for a capacious fist.

  On subsequent visits he came up with the game of giving me a free half of Abbot on the basis that I was required to declare it fit for drinking. I would take a slow suspicious sniff of the bouquet of esters, then a small sip, which I swilled around my mouth. I pushed my lips forward like someone trying to kiss himself on each cheek in turn. Then I would pass judgement, as if I was an itinerant palate retained by Greene King to check on the standard of their products, a roving taster. There are worse jobs.

  The
real-ale movement was in its cradle in those days, but it was possible to pick up a few technical terms and use them knowingly. I would praise the maltiness and depth of the brew, but wonder politely if the original gravity of this batch was really the stipulated 1048. Gaining confidence, I would announce that I could detect the cannabinoids in the brew, explaining that hops are after all members of the lovely hemp family, the cannabinaceæ.

  Playing to the balcony to some extent, I might point out that cannabinoids were not illegal as such, the legal maximum for possession being twenty microgrammes. This enlightened legislation was to protect real ales, and it showed admirable consideration on the part of the Government.

  Perhaps Kerry and I were flirting with each other in some way. It isn’t always easy to tell. Usually we respected each other’s boundaries, though one day he surprised me by asking if I had a spare key for the car. I agreed that I had, and he asked me to bring it along on my next visit and lend it to him for a few days. I agreed, but I must have looked unhappy because he said, ‘Relax, mate – no offence, but if I was going to swipe a car I’d swipe a nice one.’ The next time I saw him he gave the keys back, but with a difference. Now there was a sort of amateurish welded flange extending the body of the key sideways by a couple of inches.

  I was very touched. Kerry had seen that it was difficult for me to turn the key in the lock, and had made modifications for my benefit. Over the years lots of people had seen me struggling with the car keys, but he had actually done something about it. Many had observed but only one had undertaken an empathetic metalwork project.

  Then early one evening, one spring Monday, the whole modest idyll unravelled. Half-way through the half-pint that I had (after much ritual gargling) pronounced fit for drinking, I became aware that the pub was getting crowded. It began to smell much more like a pub, as if a huge disembodied tongue of beer-breath and ashtrays was lapping our faces. A bunch of students had come in, animated though not quite rowdy. They were all talking at once, but I didn’t take too much notice of that. In any university town there are more talkers than listeners.

  Alcohol the pickpocket

  One of them plonked himself on the other side of my table, and then set a pint glass in front of me with a crash. ‘We’ve ordered one too many …’ he said. ‘You have it.’ His face was flushed and there was something not right about his eyes. He had trouble focusing. His hair was dark, but his skin was almost eerily pale and shiny. Like the others, he was wearing a scarf, in fact they all wore the same scarf, but I didn’t pay much attention to their tribal insignia. Their tweed sports jackets were enough to make them stand out in the public bar of the Cambridge Arms.

  I tried to say that I didn’t need any more beer, since my small body weight made half a pint a sufficiently intoxicating dose for one session – and I wouldn’t be able to lift such an awkward glass to my lips in any case. The newcomer didn’t seem to be listening, though, so I stopped trying. I shot a glance over to Kerry at the bar. He was picking the appropriate coins from the helpless thrust-out hands of one of the recent invaders. Alcohol is a compulsive pickpocket, and from these lads it had already filched arithmetic, or else the ability to recognise the coins of the realm.

  The man at my table took a huge gulp of his beer and frowned. ‘Haven’t seen you on the river… perhaps you’re not a wet-bob?’ To this day I don’t know the meaning and derivation of wet-bob. It may have been a specialised Cambridge word, but not one that was used in my little circles. ‘With your build you’d make a decent cox.’ My jaw has a certain amount of mobility, though dentists are always complaining, and I’m sure it dropped. It must have. He called out, ‘Benny! Come here! I’ve found us a cox!’

  Benny turned out to be the helpless payer at the bar. He wore his hair in a centre parting. Choose this style and you are more or less insisting that spectators assess your degree of facial symmetry. Barely one face in a thousand is regular enough to pass such a test – this wasn’t one of the privileged few. As he came over, he was bellowing, ‘Two and tenpence a pint, Wop! Not a bad price!’ He was still thinking in shillings and pence, after more than a year of decimal currency. Perhaps the new system would always elude this group.

  Benny slammed his glass down onto the table with even more force than his friend had, following it with a packet of cigarettes. The general level of noise was becoming hard to bear. He thrust his face into mine. ‘Is this your cox, Wop? I’m not sure he’s got the lungs for it. Give us a sample, why don’t you? Sing out STROKE … STROKE! … STROKE!!’ I begin to detect a whisper of sense under all the bellowing. In rowing, wasn’t the cox the compact lightweight person who sat at the end of the boat and shouted? So I was clearly in no possible sense a cox.

  I didn’t sing out as directed. I made my position clear. Actually I was having a quiet drink. For all the notice they took I needn’t have gone to the trouble of speaking aloud. The one called Benny took from his pocket a stopwatch on a loop of dirty string and hung it around my neck. ‘Now you’ve got the tools of the trade at least. But you need to work on the voice projection or no one will hear a bloody word you’re saying.’

  Then it was the other’s turn to speak. ‘Perhaps we should introduce you to your eight. But first, what’s your name? John? Very good, but we’ll mostly call you Cox. This is Benny – Benny the Dick. Christened Benedict, hence Benny the Dictator.’ He put on an ingratiating ecclesiastical singsong. ‘Benedicite benedicatur, Benny’s a benevolent dictator.’

  This was a baffling change of gears. Might they be a gang of rogue classicists on the razzle? ‘And I’m Thomas da Silva, known as Wop on account of my dago name, at your service. Delighted.’ I wasn’t delighted but dismayed. They weren’t at my service, in fact I seemed to be at theirs.

  ‘Have you explained the rules to your man, Wop?’

  ‘No Benny, I thought you’d like to do that.’

  ‘Fine.’ He took a cigarette from the packet on the table, but instead of smoking it he tucked it horizontally under his nose, holding it in place by curling his lip upwards in a way that suggested hours of practice. Then he started to rattle off information at amazing speed. The restrictions placed on his vocal apparatus by the prehensile-lip trick made him sound like what Dad would have called a silly ass, giving the noun a long vowel as service protocol demanded.

  ‘The King Street Run. Classic university tradition. Bit of fun. Separates boys from girls, boys from men, sheep from goats, your top Wop from the regular dagoes. Basic idea: eight pubs, eight pints. Easy as pissing off a log. Refinement: time limit. Eight pubs, eight pints – in an hour. Rate of one pint every seven minutes and thirty seconds. I know – sounds easy. Reward: special tie, respect of peers and inferiors. Complication: eight separate pubs, so journey time to be factored in. Seven journeys of, say, two minutes each – fourteen minutes in all. Leaving in fact … forty-six for drinking proper. Eights into forty-six: no idea. Five and a bit, maybe. Hence importance of stopwatch. Your department.’ Effortlessly he overrode my protests, my footling squawks.

  ‘Further complication: peeing forbidden during event. Penalty: letter P embroidered on trophy tie. Humiliation. One chap went to the other extreme, peed almost continuously, tie almost invisible beneath embroidered Ps, comic effect. Great success. Sort of trick only works once.’ I suppose he was doing a compound Monty Python impersonation, combining every mad major and silly-walks minister from that programme. With my lack of up-to-date television awareness I thought of the Pickwick Papers.

  As I watched Benedict’s little act, my own upper lip curled spontaneously upwards. It’s possible I looked mildly demented. Then he gave a sharp upward nod which dislodged the cigarette. He caught it smoothly in his mouth and lit it.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’re only doing a practice run today. Peeing permitted.’ I was glad of that, since the half-pint of Abbot had run swiftly through my system and was now anxious to move on.

  A citizen’s arrest had already taken place

  I watched his smokin
g style admiringly. Benedict caught my eye, smiled, and then ran the lighted tip of his cigarette, with agonising slowness, across the palm of his hand, just where it met the bottom of his fingers. He never stopped smiling. Then he winked at me.

  Thomas da Silva leant towards me and breathed admiringly, ‘Benny has the hardest calluses on the river. Isn’t he remarkable?’ No doubt, but this was not a party trick I coveted.

  ‘To be frank,’ Benedict went on, ‘we’ve done a certain amount of practice in private before this dummy run. Don’t expect too much from us. We’re not after a record time.’ He lifted the stopwatch from my chest and took a look at it. ‘Tempus fuckit, men! Time to go!’ He left the watch where it was, though, around my neck. He seemed to have forgotten it.

  Thomas da Silva had finished his pint and now pointed a finger at mine, which of course I hadn’t touched. ‘Have you finished with that, old man?’ I nodded and he picked it up. ‘You’re sure?’ He drank it in one long gulp while Benny looked on admiringly. ‘Our secret weapon,’ he said proudly.

  ‘Don’t forget your stopwatch,’ I said. ‘How do you mean?’ he said. Then they were off.

  We were off, rather. Of course they hadn’t forgotten the stopwatch. They hadn’t left anything behind. They were taking the stopwatch (and me) with them. I barely managed to grab the crutch and the cane.

  ‘You chose the cox, Wop,’ said Benedict. ‘You can drive him.’

  Thomas da Silva wasn’t in a fit state to drive anything. He was young and strong and clueless, ‘unsafe at any speed’ as a famous book title of the time put it. He was topping up his bloodstream with alcohol faster than a dozen livers plumbed in parallel could have hoped to clear it. He pulled the wheelchair roughly free of the pub’s furniture and charged the door with it.