Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  I remember nothing about Beamish’s temporary replacement except that he was a historian. As he opened my file and then Mum’s a look of amazement spread across his face. What a teeming archive of pathology he had in his hand! Such bad luck that it wasn’t from the formative years of a Beethoven or a Churchill.

  ‘How is your relationship with your parents?’ he asked.

  ‘Non-existent.’

  ‘Well, you’re already getting the maximum grant, so that won’t change. Do you have resources of your own?’

  ‘My Granny helps out.’ These few words painted a wonderfully pathetic picture. Granny would have given an elegant snort of glee at it.

  ‘I see that the Bell Abbot & Barnes Fund helped out in another … emergency. Do you want me to try them again?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Said with the right amount of swallowed pride. In fact it was resentment I was swallowing, at the way the college had used an outside agency to reward its own greed, in the matter of the ceiling rail. And indeed Bell Abbot & Barnes came up trumps, matching Granny’s £10 monthly. I was now better off than I was before the bust-up, though I had to budget very carefully if I was to get through the vacations (and I had no idea where I would be spending them). God bless Bell, God bless Abbot and God bless Barnes. Bless their cotton-rich socks. Bless every fibre.

  The Zeitgeist had me fooled

  I was now an undergraduate of means. I was more or less flush. So when an English student called Robin Baines-Johnson I met at a Tragedy lecture asked to borrow £5, I gave it to him. He was already known to me at second-hand, since his uncle was the Governor of the Bank of England. He was a mini-celebrity of the student body. I hardly hesitated. If anyone in Cambridge – anyone in the whole world – was good for a loan, then surely it was the nephew of the Governor of the Bank of England! I entirely misunderstood the mood of the times. The Zeitgeist had me fooled good and proper. This was a period when all institutions were considered evil by student culture, above all those which were explicitly capitalist, and personal responsibility was felt to be a bourgeois perversion. I should have understood. The nephew of the Governor of the Bank of England was the last person in the country who would risk repaying a debt. Existentially it would be a disaster. It would strip him of his last shred of authenticity. At all events I never got my fiver back.

  I didn’t really relax until my phone connection was installed. It didn’t seem impossible that Graëme would reappear from wherever he had gone, with a tan and a straw hat, a suitcase in each hand, specifically to hiss at the engineers, ‘Kindly disconnect that phone!’ In the event he stayed away, and at last I had a proper link with the world.

  In one respect the timing was perfect. In previous years I would have had to tell Mum about the phone sooner or later, and then she’d have been calling me the whole time, sparing Dr Beamish and putting pressure on me direct.

  I had some enjoyable little chats with the operator. In those days the telephone wire went straight into the wall, and if you put the phone off the hook you could be reported. They would put the howler on to get your attention. I used to enjoy teasing the operator, saying I had sabotaged the bell with a wire so I didn’t hear the bell if I didn’t want to. Technically this would have been tampering, and a punishable offence. I was living dangerously.

  As a third-year I had lost some of my social fear. I was beginning to be anxious about the future rather than the present, wondering what life after Cambridge would be like. I couldn’t imagine it. Clearly, though, it was a good thing that returning to the bosom of the family was no longer an option. The family bosom was off limits and out of bounds. Family and I were giving each other the cold, the frozen shoulder.

  One worthwhile ‘side-effect’ was that there was no need to worry about my reputation any more. I had nothing to lose. My parents already thought I derived sexual pleasure from pictures of youngsters lolling in socks.

  Still, when someone at a CHAPs meeting first disparagingly mentioned the ‘meat market’ I thought, as a long-serving vegetarian, that these gloating carnivores were referring to an actual market where carcases were displayed, all the marvellous machinery of life impaled on a hook and cut up to be sold. In fact the reference was to the Stable Bar, off Trinity Street, a narrow premises where homosexuals not enlightened enough to attend meetings might be found. It had the look of a hotel bar, with plenty of red plush and folksy bits of beaming which looked fake even if they weren’t, and plenty of horse brasses to back up the name, though there would only have been the space to accommodate a single horse.

  I never heard anyone refer to the Stable Bar in anything but damning terms, yet everyone turned up there at some stage, even Ken, though he looked rather lost. I saw the Tonys there once or twice, although they hardly noticed strangers and were the only people present whose motives were blamelessly social.

  Ken only visited the meat market to spread the word about the group, to tell those writhing in the coils of the patriarchy the good news that there existed an independent forum, not far away, where issues of sexual and political liberation could be freely discussed and worked through. He would nerve himself with a couple of pints then spread the word from table to table. His reception from groups was sometimes mildly abusive, so he tended to gravitate towards single strangers, less prompt to defend themselves. There was something about him, as he advanced heavily towards people who often edged away or tried to avoid his eyes, reminiscent of Gladstone scouring Piccadilly for loose women to coax back to Downing Street for soup and Bible-reading. He had the same admirable and slightly suspect motives, even if his success rate in these mercy swoops couldn’t compete.

  On Saturday nights George took to pushing me up to the street entrance to the Stable, then over its awkward threshold. He would pause outside the door of the bar to take a deep breath. Entering the premises with a wheelchair required careful choreography: a vigorous push to the door followed immediately by a judicious pressing down on the handles so as to clear the change of level before the door came back and bashed me, while also swinging the chair round to negotiate the cramped space inside the doorway.

  Practical criticism

  There was another reason for George’s intake of breath, every bit as understandable. The mass turning of heads was unnerving, though conversation didn’t stop. Nor did the jukebox stop playing, but its music seemed to be replaced for those crucial moments of appraisal by a drum-roll, the ominous linked paradiddles that precede a star turn or a public execution.

  George pushed me ahead of him in the wheelchair like a hostage-taker advancing into police spotlights behind a human shield. I could hardly blame him for that, but my invisibility despite its impressive candle-power was only enough for one.

  He shrivelled under the fusillade of judging eyes. This was scrutiny, if you like. This was practical criticism. No Leavisite concentrating the intellectual X-rays onto a page of Our Mutual Friend or Sons and Lovers could send out a beam of comparable intensity.

  Of course George wasn’t particularly informed about the Cambridge tradition of English Studies. Nothing in his life of genteel retail had prepared him for this raking blast of icy assessment. Then its wave-length shifted as we were classified as unattractive and (worse) familiar. I can’t say I was too bothered, but then for me it was much of a muchness, more or less business as usual. It cost me nothing to absorb some of the impact, and I was happy to screen him from the worst of the mutagenic exposure, the crossfire from whole emplacements of appraising eyes.

  When I wasn’t actually in the firing line, there was some fun to be had from noticing the nuances of the examination. Some people only looked at the bottoms of people with nice faces. Others only looked at the faces of people with nice bottoms.

  I don’t remember making any new acquaintances at the Stable Bar, except when one man came over to me and said he worked in the University Library. He was good enough to tell me that I had a nickname at the UL. Toad of Toad Hall (Poop! poop!). Not the worst nickname in the wor
ld and yes, I dare say I could seem a little imperious when I sounded the car horn, to signal that the books I had ordered should be toted down to me.

  While the leaves were still on the trees I began to be preöccupied with the ritual midwinter festival. Over the years I had borne various grudges against Christmas. First because it came round so slowly. Then that it crowded out my birthday by being so close to it. Next that it was too commercial. Then that it was too Christian. Now I felt that it came round too quickly. The Christ Child seemed to be bearing down on me at the wheel of his holly-trimmed steamroller, and this was the first year that he would find me out in the open, with nowhere to hide.

  If I had been able to send a message about what I wanted for Christmas using Granny’s special system of chimney semaphore, a slip of paper burnt in the fireplace to give Santa his cue, mine would have been along the lines of Yule! Yule! Steer well clear! Come again another year!

  Peter had found a job at a hotel near Bristol, an old coaching inn. He had accommodation there and gamely offered to play host, but I couldn’t quite see that as a practical proposition. So what were my options, realistically? Well, now that I no longer had a home, there was always a Home. A referral from my GP would be child’s play. No exaggeration would be necessary. It was a perfectly routine request. Still, I was in no hurry to meet the Ghost of Christmas Future, the many Ghosts of Christmases to come. What sort of person ends up in a Home at the time of year when even the most abject orphans are taken in? I wasn’t in any hurry to find out.

  I decided that I would put myself about, socially, and accept the first offer I got, no questions asked. Call it Russian roulette, only played with Christmas crackers rather than the customary revolver. The trouble being that if ever I pull a cracker and win, it’s because someone is being kind and would like me to have a tie-pin.

  Socially the hot spot of the moment was something called King’s Bop, that is, a disco in the cellar of a modern building in King’s College. Downing could offer no comparable attraction. King’s was ever a trendy hotbed. Girls had been sighted there, rare girls, girls never seen elsewhere. A different species from those who manifested themselves in common room and lecture hall, shop and street.

  I had already experienced the event. Part of its fashionability lay in its unpredictable disc-jockey and part in its exclusiveness, since there were people at the door who were supposed to make sure that only students of King’s were admitted.

  The policing of King’s Bop was hardly rigorous – someone at the door would politely ask for your locker number – but surely no one would question the right of the chap in the wheelchair to attend?

  This was a reasonable hypothesis. It reached me, though, not as an abstract proposition or social experiment but in the form of an ambush after Hall one Wednesday evening. A little party wanted to make an attempt on King’s Bop, using the wheelchair’s magical powers as a pass-key, or else an enchanted textile, not so much a cloak of invisibility as a small trundling marquee.

  I was a good sport about it. I would have screamed bloody murder if I had known I would be carried downstairs by people I hardly knew, but the trauma was well under way before I had any idea. The word ‘cellar’ had not been part of the approach that was made to me.

  At the door we were waved through with smiles of embarrassment. The hypothesis was confirmed. The wheelchair belonged everywhere as well as nowhere.

  The noise was extreme and made conversation difficult. There’s a limit to how far I can stretch to bring my ear close to someone’s mouth, and if all the bending is done by others then they must feel they’re part of something more like limbo dancing than chat. As for whether there were any rare girls in attendance, I really couldn’t say.

  Indoor magnetism

  I wasn’t expected to buy drinks since I had made the whole expedition possible, which I took as no more than my due. The beer was from kegs and served in plastic glasses, either to save washing-up or from fear of rowdiness. A glass without a handle or a stem is pretty much useless to me, and I was reduced (if I really wanted to wet my whistle) to having people hold up to my mouth the nasty beer in its nasty plastic glass.

  The Mini was always an asset, but it turned out that the wheelchair had an indoor magnetism of its own. It stimulated and intoxified. People too awkward or shy to dance by themselves would grab hold of the wheelchair and push it about in rhythm, swinging me around with sickening force.

  There were also people who would prise me out of the wheelchair and hug me to themselves while they danced. It seemed to be their feeling that the main deprivation in a life of restricted mobility was the experience of centrifugal force in raw form. My value to these dance partners may partly have been the low risk of treading on my toes. There was no factor working to reduce the speed and recklessness of our whirling.

  I learned to spot the type. When I saw someone approach me with a particular look of glazed joy, I would start reeling off excuses, saying ‘I’m afraid I’ve got a cold,’ or even ‘I’ve eaten a bad mushroom and I’m going to be sick,’ though no threat of mucus, virus, even vomit in the pipeline had a reliably deterrent effect.

  After that visit I had refused to consider a return, but now I had an agenda of my own. I volunteered, and though there was obviously something fishy about my change of heart no one worried too much. My fear of Christmas outweighed, just about, my fear of being dropped downstairs in a slapdash re-enactment of the Senate House occupation.

  Almost the moment we arrived I was caught up in a piece of musical torture. The disc-jockey put on something which wasn’t even a single but an album track, and it wasn’t a recent release, but it had a stubborn popularity in student circles as a stereo showpiece. People used the song to make sure that their speakers were wired the right way round. It was a track called ‘Industrial-Military-Complex Hex’ from the Steve Miller Band’s album No.5. The song had outlasted the album, which had been controversial when new (in 1969, I think), not because of any musical content but something written in small print inside the gatefold for the sharp-eyed to discover. It was dedicated to President Richard Nixon, a betrayal of hippy ideals only partly excused by the infantile phrasing. We luv you cuz you need it.

  ‘Industrial-Military-Complex Hex’ starts with a sombre atmosphere rather than a tune as such. Then an electric guitar makes its entrance. The sound is supercharged with reverberation and echo. It’s also strongly directional. This golden noise is flung from left to right of the stereo picture. It’s an acoustic projectile which finds the target and hangs there for a moment, pulsing. Then the pattern repeats with the polarity reversed, the note catapulting back from the right to the left. Two more convulsions of the guitar and the song itself gets under way, murkier and less dramatic, less memorable in every respect.

  In those days records were supposed to contain subliminal messages, Satanic commands played backwards – God is dead, Paul is dead, Kill the piggies till the piggies are dead. Thousands of undergraduate hours were spent dragging gramophone needles backwards through the final grooves of ‘A Day In The Life’, to yield everything from ‘We’ll fuck you like supermen’ to ‘The gardener was hellish unmathematical’.

  No one ever implicated the Steve Miller Band in this practice, as far as I know, yet the opening of ‘Industrial-Military-Complex Hex’ sent a strong message to a number of people at King’s Bop. The song told them Commandeer John’s wheelchair and propel it at high speed from one side of the stereo image to the other. Grant him the joy of embodying this king among riffs.

  If I had known what was coming, I would have put on the wheelchair’s brakes, so it’s a good job I didn’t, because that would have made things worse. We were off.

  Be careful of what you wish for – I had wished to ride the Ghost Train, and my wish was coming true in debased form as I was flung about in deafening darkness, all the more alarmed because no conscious attempt was being made to scare me.

  After the performance there was an outburst of applause, which was
n’t really for John the human riff, the riff on wheels, though some came my way in the form of rough handshakes and shoulder-pats, but for whoever had abducted me. Nobody seemed to find it strange that I had so little say in my part of the floor show.

  The disc-jockey responded to the happy hubbub by encoring the beginning of the song. Apparently I hadn’t been shaken up enough yet.

  There was a scuffle behind me, presumably for control of the wheelchair. Everyone wanted a turn. Some beer slopped down my back. The worst part of the ordeal was the instant U-turn required to reposition me for the next guitar entry, and then the next. The wheelchair slewed sideways, as the struggle for control became more heated. I don’t know who won, I only know it wasn’t me. The blast-off to accompany the final guitar note was delayed by several seconds.

  Now there was a concerted call for the song to be played a third time, insistent shouts of ‘Again! Again! Once more from the top!’ This time, though, I was spared. I think the disc-jockey must have seen the horror on my face and perhaps even regretted his part in a joyride with the joy taken out. I could hear people grumbling ‘Unfair!’, which seemed a bit much. What was so unfair about giving me a reprieve from being shaken to pieces?

  No diamonds at all

  Then the disc-jockey soothed the mood of the room by playing a single, and one that was even in the charts at the time. John Lennon’s ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’, that rather tentative anthem. ‘War is over’, yes, but only ‘if you want it’. A man and a woman danced together for a few moments, and then the man said, rather roguishly, ‘May we?’ Meaning, include me in the dance. I said, ‘Why not?’ and then they did. They really did include me. They pushed the wheelchair back and forth between them, but always smoothly, always with consideration for what it was like to be sitting in it. They didn’t seem quite student-y, though I don’t know in what way, exactly. They seemed like a proper couple. Then the man whispered in the woman’s ear, she shrugged and nodded, and then he was asking, ‘So what are you doing for Christmas, little man?’