She was affectionate to Malcolm but didn’t in the least defer to him. There was sarcasm there, which he accepted and even seemed to enjoy. He was the breadwinner and she didn’t work, though the description ‘housewife’ didn’t remotely suit her. Their twins Joss and Alex were about to start at a fashionably progressive secondary school, and they had long been encouraged to explore other social contexts, or – as Mum would have it – ‘farmed out’ on the slightest pretext. Prissie was like a rich field lying fallow after her single (double) crop, not in the least beholden or unfulfilled, an earth mother who wasn’t unduly addicted to the presence of her children. She certainly didn’t mother Malcolm. I suppose she mainly mothered herself.
Eventually Prissie Washbourne played a walk-on part in the big drama of that summer, the family crisis which was all about me, though I hardly noticed it at first. When I say that she had a walk-on part, I mean a little more than that. She walked up the drive, she knocked on the French windows and she shouted a bit, refusing to go away. But her appearance on the scene, her splendid interference, made everything move up a gear and become more colourful, positively psychedelic in its emotional hues.
Dimly I had noticed that Mum and Dad were having one of their rows, which could simmer on for days. I also registered that every now and then they would seem to address me as much as each other. In some strange way they seemed to take it in turns to badger me. Could this really be happening? It was unlike them to coöperate so smoothly on any enterprise. I wondered vaguely what it was all about. Sometimes, of course, they sent messages to each other through me, bouncing messages off my bonce like schoolboys flicking paper pellets. I let them get on with it.
I had the good sense to absent myself mentally. There’s some debate about whether you should have your eyes open or closed when you’re meditating. It’s a question that often came up among Bhagavan’s adherents and disciples. His answer was that it didn’t matter – should you even know whether your eyes are open or not? That’s just the sort of Western binary opposition that Bhagavan is so good at dissolving.
As if the phone could detect movement
Who is that wants to know? Trace that impostor to his lair. Is it even fair to describe your eyes as ‘open’ when they are absorbing the infinite deceptive variety of Maya, and ‘closed’ when you are perceiving the world in its reality?
Still, it seems very likely that during those days at home a lot of my meditating was done behind open eyes. Even when I wasn’t meditating my attention wasn’t completely attuned to the externals. Whenever I drifted back into my alleged body and took up the reins of mundane vision things looked very much the same. Mum and Dad might have changed places, but they were still taking turns to badger me. The sun might have moved round a fraction, the shadows might fall a little differently, but really that was all.
At one point the pot plant on the table seemed to blossom with a sudden movement, almost a lunge. The great red trumpets of its blooms seemed abruptly larger and more lustrous, which suggested that I had dropped a stitch, or even a whole row, in my knitting together of time and space. The plant itself had featured in earlier disputes between Mum and Dad, with her calling it an amaryllis and him insisting it was technically a Hippeastrum. Mum said he was being ‘predantic’, a mistake which set Dad off on a fresh bout of correction. I’m my father’s son in these matters, which is no doubt why I chose Mum’s womb, wanting to be brought up in a properly pedantic environment, among precise taxonomies and word-use sanctioned by dictionary. I vote for Hippeastrum.
I seemed to have regressed, to the point of needing to be taken to the loo, though it had been second nature for me to manage by myself for years. Mum would escort me and wait in the background while I performed, but there was a sort of truce until she pushed me back into the sitting room. Then it would start all over again – whatever it was.
I knew that there had been a knocking at the door earlier on, and even that it had gone on for some time, while Mum and Dad stopped talking and more or less stayed rigidly in their places. I even knew that the phone had rung a few times, and that Mum and Dad hadn’t answered it. Again they had stopped talking and stayed frozen where they were, as if the phone could detect movement even without being picked up. Then they started right up again the moment it stopped ringing.
I was being asked a lot of questions, or else being asked the same question many times, in slightly different forms. In the course of my engagement with the vichara, the self-enquiry, I’d decided that if you were a non-dualist, resisting the division of reality into This and That, body and soul, real and unreal, then it followed that you couldn’t answer any questions that were put to you, which always rested on assumptions of that kind. I’d read in a book the suggestion that when confronted with a false set of alternatives, you should reply simply ‘Mu’, meaning ‘Your question cannot be meaningfully answered, since it is the product of a misconception. Please examine your premises afresh.’
So when Mum said, ‘Is it your bag or not, John? We need to know,’ I giggled and answered ‘Mu.’
The giggle was there because when anyone of my generation, however estranged from the groovy, asked if something was your bag, it meant ‘Do you like it?’ Is Acid Rock your bag? Is Buddenbrooks your bag? Is the vichara your bag? From my point of view the vichara was the bag in which all other bags could be stored without taking up any room.
The vichara – the only question. Who am I? (Who is it that asks this?) I understood now why I had gone to see The Who in Slough and not some other group. I needed to devote myself to the question of The Who.
And when Dad said, ‘It’s a simple enough question, John. Don’t be mulish. For the last time, is it your bag?’ – the giggle was no longer a temptation but the answer was still Mu. With another annoying giggle because saying Mu got me called Mulish.
At some stage Mum asked me what I wanted for supper, as if this was an ordinary day, which it obviously wasn’t. She put the question in an exasperated voice, admittedly, but that wasn’t such a rare event. And perhaps this time I didn’t answer ‘Mu’, because she said, ‘Better not have eggs again, John, you know how binding they are.’ Om Mane Padme Om. Om Mane Padme Om-pa-pah. I kept losing the thread of my threadlessness, my immersion in blissful absence. I wished Mum and Dad would let me be. I wish they’d let me Be.
‘If it’s your bag, John, then what’s in it is also yours, isn’t it?’ Mu – Mu – Mu. ‘That’s only logical.’ Exactly. Logic based on false premises can only generate nonsense.
Everything happened that day in stages which didn’t quite follow on from what had gone before. They were like reels from different films. I wondered idly if Bhagavan had ever used that analogy. Or they were like different versions of the same scene, not properly edited for continuity.
At some stage Audrey came back from a friend’s birthday party. A twelfth birthday, I expect. We heard her being dropped off in the drive, saying her goodbyes and thank-yous as nicely as Mum could wish. As she let herself in, Mum and Dad greeted her with ‘Nice party, dear?’ Anyone could tell that they weren’t really interested, they were only marking time. They were waiting for her to go to her room, so that they could carry on whatever business was being transacted where I was.
Reels that don’t match
Audrey didn’t go to her room just yet. She went into the kitchen, and then she came to have a little chat with me. Meanwhile Mum and Dad busied themselves nonsensically. Mum started picking up magazines and putting them away in the rack where they lived. The moment she had finished, Dad started searching through it, as if suddenly he couldn’t live without reading a particular article. Mum made one of her many noises of exasperation and went over to fiddle with the telephone. It vexed her that the cord was always getting snarled up – she thought that Dad gave the receiver a half-turn when he answered the phone, and another half-turn in the same direction when he returned it to its cradle. She blamed him for charging the cord with kinks, even if she could never catch hi
m at it. She knew full well that at her mother’s house the flex wouldn’t dare to stray from its spiral.
I roused myself a little and agreed to participate in the illusion of time, out of politeness to Audrey, but strictly on a trial basis. She was wearing a purple party dress, and had been allowed to put on nail polish. Her movements were smooth and assured. Quite a little pile of books, placed on her head, would have stayed there safely in balance.
I hardly recognised her. I had missed a few stages. Of course I hadn’t been paying much attention, to her or to anyone else at that address. In any case girls between about eleven and sixteen always resemble films like the one I seemed to be in, made up of reels that don’t match. The genre switches from fairy tale to love story, and sometimes to horror movie. A world of princes and ponies can suddenly be filled with screaming banshees.
I remembered that in the past she had hated party games, and asked if there had been any.
‘A few specially horrible ones,’ she said over her shoulder as she went to the kitchen.
‘None that involved kissing, I hope?’ She made an odd stylised sound, which I took a few seconds to understand without benefit of visual clues. I imagine she was miming a retch, with or without the embellishment of a finger pointing down her throat, though the whole display was as far removed from what it represented, human emesis, as something in classical Japanese drama.
Actually she sounded less disgusted than she would have done the previous year. She was going through the motions a little bit. It wouldn’t be all that long before the kissing games were the only ones that interested her. I imagined she would play them as ruthlessly as she did all the others.
‘Sally’s mum made her invite all the boys from our class,’ she said, ‘but only three of them came.’ I could hear the clatter of a plate. ‘The really pathetic ones.’
Audrey was reading from her own little script while Mum and Dad took a reluctant break from their interrogation of me. The noises from the kitchen continued as she went about some mysterious domestic business. There was the sound of her pushing a chair against the kitchen counter so she could reach something from a high cupboard. Then I heard a familiar scrape as she pulled a particular tray out from beside the fridge, where it lived.
When she came into the sitting room, she was carrying a tray of treats for me. She had taken her party trophy, a slice of chocolate cake, and cut it into cubes, pushing a cocktail stick into each cube. It must have been the little box of cocktail sticks which was kept in the high cupbard. She set down the tray in front of me, where it rested snugly across the side-pieces of the wheelchair. All this was done with the grace of a hostess rather than the conflicted sweetness of a sister. She was growing up.
She was playing a part, of course, but so were Mum and Dad, and at the moment I preferred Audrey’s.
As she came out of the kitchen with her tray of cubed cake, I saw her in a new light, despite the Mayan darkness of that afternoon. As she moved through the sitting room to the wheelchair, threading her way through the distortions of family life in her party dress, bearing her tray of John-adapted cake, I began to think for the first time that perhaps she had known, better than any of us, what she was doing when she chose the womb. Perhaps she would pick her way through everything that was wrong and out of kilter with the family. The gala purple nail-polish lent her gestures a self-conscious overtone – a finishing-school or ladies’-academy touch. She looked like the serene housewife in a television advert serving canapés to her guests. Her hands were going before her into adulthood. They were leading the way. Their movements were taking on the sophistication of things practised in front of the mirror, time after time, until they were effortless.
She gave me a smile which changed in mid-flight, becoming gravely enchanting, an expression with two distinct phases like a two-stage rocket – as if an air hostess had suddenly thought of Grace Kelly. She was growing up more or less as I watched.
My mouth was dry. My lips were sticky as I tried to mumble the chunks of cake. Audrey fetched me a glass of water and then, great refinement of refreshment, a damp flannel. She wiped my mouth with it.
Lemon juice in her eye
I don’t mean to idealise Audrey’s performance too much. She knew perfectly well that Mum didn’t want her around, though she can’t have had much clue about the interrogation that was taking place (I certainly didn’t). Audrey was giving comfort to the accused in a way that was guaranteed to cause irritation.
Mum said, ‘Audrey, your room is like a pigsty. You promised me you’d tidy it up the moment you got in from your party, remember? Now’s the time.’ Audrey said, ‘Yes, Mum,’ very demurely, but she gave me a wink. I think it was a wink – she hadn’t quite got the knack as yet, not quite in control of the facial machinery, so it was a rather wild spasm and she looked as if she’d got some lemon juice in her eye.
My habit was to hoard my various tablets in term-time so I had plenty when I went home. Alertness seemed a waste of time at that address. To be compos mentis was a mug’s game, or so I thought, and exposes you to all sorts of nonsense. Well, yes, but the same is true of a medicated doze.
Audrey went upstairs to her room at last. She put a record on the record-player and played it eleven times in a row. It was David Bowie’s maddeningly catchy and childlike ‘Starman’. She was playing it louder than she was allowed, but I fancy she had a canny sense of the disruption in the household, and what it enabled her to get away with.
Or she may simply have been trying to blot us all out, or even sending a message to the starman in the song, who was supposed to be waiting in the sky after all, to say that she needed immediate rescue. The last record she had played so many times on the trot had been ‘When You Wish upon a Star’. Or perhaps ‘Would You Like to Swing on a Star?’ I see now that the star theme was a constant.
The interrogation began again. The bust-up of summer 1972 was about what all proper family rows are about – sex and drugs. In that respect it was exemplary. And still Mum and Dad got completely the wrong end of the stick. They could have got the wrong end of a marble. They were going by what they had found in my Greek tapestry shoulder-bag, with its discreet embroidered lambda, hanging invitingly from the handles of the wheelchair, not what they would have learned if they’d talked to me.
They thought I was on dope, simply because they had found a couple of roaches in the tapestry shoulder-bag. Pitiful stubs of joints long gone. Fossils – antiques. They should have been in the Fitzwilliam Museum, properly docketed: Marijuana leavings of the Unknown Student, early 1970s. Private collection. My collection, though, was no longer private.
Mum and Dad wanted to know how long I’d been using reefers. The demon weed, wrecker of young lives, bringer to its knees of the undergraduate brain. Cannabis sativa, a plant I respect for its hardiness, but not one that has ever done much for my consciousness.
They didn’t actually bother to ask if the joints had anything to do with me. Even a policeman would have done that, just for form’s sake. Mum and Dad jumped to conclusions instead. They jumped to their own confusions.
They really were the leavings of the Unknown Student, if he (conceivably she) was even a student. How much control did I have over the Greek tapestry shoulder-bag, really? It was anything but a private preserve. Friends thought nothing of using it as a communal asset, a shared pocket, even a portable dustbin. What were their reasons? Laziness, disorganisation, reluctance to spoil the line of their trousers by putting things in pockets of their own. So there was nothing unusual about people slipping their joints into my bag for safe-keeping, or their roaches for eventual disposal (which of course they never got round to).
If I had no control over what went inside the bag, the same was true of what went on it. Members of CHAPs who lost their nerve in mixed company, for instance, would slyly pin their more confronta-tional badges to its unprotesting weave. After a while it was almost armour-plated with revolutionary slogans, GAY IS GOOD, SAPPHO WAS A RIGHT-ON WOMAN a
nd, more mysteriously, THE ENGLISH THINK LIBERTY IS A SHOP ON REGENT STREET.
I hadn’t much enjoyed my bag becoming a dumping-ground for the flotsam of the counter-culture. I particularly resented the one that said HOW DARE YOU ASSUME I’M HETEROSEXUAL? being transferred from the denim of my colleagues to the faintly stinky wool of my bag. In common with the world at large, no one in the CHAPs revolutionary echelon assumed I was sexual in any way whatever. That was one issue of exclusion that was never going to be freely discussed and worked through in our little independent forum on Glisson Road. No one ever asked about my erotic past, or imagined that I might run to such a thing as a present, perhaps even a future.
The pin fastenings on the backs of the badges were well beyond my powers to undo. When I arrived home for the summer it was a priority to have them removed, but Peter, the obvious choice of helper, had already left on his travels. I had to draft Audrey in for the job, though I wondered what she made of the slogans. She didn’t need telling that this was something to be kept quiet. That didn’t worry her – she liked a secret, did Audrey.
Looking back, of course, I would have done well to ask her to sanitise the contents of the bag as well, but I hadn’t realised there was anything in the bag that might cause embarrassment. I had forgotten my lack of privacy, on two fronts. It didn’t occur to me that Mum and Dad would search through my reticule with their prehensile digits, screeching and tut-tutting as they went, like moralising spider-monkeys.
‘Are you on drugs, John?’
Mu. ‘Just tell us. We want to help.’
Mind your own Mu.
‘Are you on drugs?’
Well, of course I was on drugs. Ask a silly question! The only question was what kind. I had steered clear of hallucinogens since my trip to the Salley gardens, and I wouldn’t have considered indulging without Peter there to lean on. But I was self-medicating as if there was no tomorrow. I was self-medicating because there was a tomorrow, and I wanted to take a short cut, avoiding today, even if tomorrow turned out to be no better. There was always the day after tomorrow, and the day after that.
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