Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Crawling with asbestos

  Then High Wycombe argued that I should stay in Cambridge because I was more likely to get started on a career there. Brilliant return! Phenomenal racket control!

  It was mentioned that High Wycombe had a very limited number of ‘units’ available, all of which had been allocated to applicants with needs far greater than mine. I’d driven past such units more than once. They were flimsy and draughty-looking pre-fabs, the sort of thing that gets built as a temporary measure and never demolished, unless it turns out to be crawling with asbestos.

  During all these exchanges I tried to pretend I was the umpire and to forget that I was actually the bloody ball.

  The only thing the two authorities were able to agree on was that it might be best for me to go back to CRX. Back into the cage of my childhood. Oh, I say! Very poor play, gentlemen. Highly unsporting. Not tennis, and not cricket.

  There was another episode of sneaky manœuvring: while the two local authorities were knocking me back and forth so happily, playing their best administrative tennis for the privilege of not housing me, High Wycombe had the bright idea of applying on my behalf to the Cheshire Home in Gerrards Cross, with a view to getting me installed as a permanent resident.

  The first I heard about it was when Martha Green phoned me up from the Home to break the bad news that I hadn’t made the grade. Bad news. That was the way we played it. Dreadful pity. Sad turn of events. She read out the saddening verdict on my personality and its unsuitability for communal life: ‘I’m afraid that John is something of a disruptive presence, rather too unconventional for the peace of mind of the other residents.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I knew you’d be disheartened.’

  ‘It’s rather a blow.’

  ‘I wish there was something I could do.’ She’d already done me the immense good turn of organising the veto, making sure the rejection wasn’t scuppered by a misguided softening or any sort of plea for a second chance.

  We kept up the charade of disappointment for as long as we could. Then I became aware of a dusty tinkling coming down the line. After a moment or two I realised that the bureaucrat-gypsy Martha must be wearing one of her favourite scarves, which had coins sewn into the hem, and was shaking with suppressed laughter, until a coughing fit flushed the hilarity out into the open.

  It had been at the back of my mind, when I went to the Cheshire Home for my respite break, that this was a sort of trial run or probationary visit. I might be expected to live at Gerrards Cross sometime in the future. I think I can honestly say that I took no particular pains to make myself unacceptable. It was without ulterior motive that I blotted my copy-book, though the resulting disgrace certainly came in handy. My bad behaviour was disinterested and long overdue. I squeezed a lot of adolescence into a short span of days.

  In terms of respite the Home gave me what I needed. If I had ended up living there I would have lost my vitality bit by bit, or else been frozen in a posture of rebellion against my surroundings, which is only another way (admittedly more seductive) of becoming institutionalised.

  The pans of the scales seemed to be evenly balanced between the two authorities, so I decided I must hurl my trusty typewriter down onto the Cambridge side. I charged the ribbon of the Smith-Corona with its most irresistible ink and wrote a letter to my MP, appealing for help with my housing ‘difficulties’. To prevail over Cambridge I had to appeal to High Wycombe, since that was where I was a constituent, but I couldn’t be choosy about what tiny leverage I had. The MP for High Wycombe, Sir John Hall, wrote back in charming and eloquent terms, though I don’t know whether he actually did anything. If he did, it amounted to foisting me definitively on Cambridge. Wearily they accepted responsibility for me, and wearily I accepted their acceptance. Then all I had to do was wait to hear the details of my new home.

  It seemed to take a long time. Downing told me that it would be all right for me to stay on a bit after the end of term, which took the pressure off a little and made the waiting easier.

  After I had taken my final exams, my Cambridge GP gave me a referral to be looked after. I was booked in for ten days at the Mary Marlborough Rehabilitation Lodge, part of the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre at Headington. This wasn’t really about rehabilitation, though, it was about playing for time, though I picked up some useful kitchen skills.

  I had taken some Gerard Manley Hopkins with me to read. Poetry in general has the advantage of portability, but this was a poor choice. Not because it was too remote from my experience, but too close.

  I am soft sift

  In an hourglass – at the wall

  Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,

  And it crowds and it combs to the fall …

  The same rhythmic trick, dragging then racing, Faustus’s nightmares. Not at all reassuring to my thoughts of that season.

  Mary Marlborough gave me a refresher course in the forked nature of institutions, in case I had forgotten. The establishment harboured contradictory attitudes towards its own goals. Independence was the be-all and end-all of the place, and yet a Plan B was provided at all times. You were encouraged to make a meal for yourself – but when you signed up to do it you also had to order a meal from the kitchens, in case yours was a disaster. A slightly insulting precaution. We weren’t painting the Forth Bridge. This wasn’t the Normandy landings. This was a lentil bake.

  I was confident in my own modest culinary skills and shocked by the proposed waste of food, so I wouldn’t choose from the menu. Then the staff would get quite shirty and end up ordering meals over my head, since that was the approved procedure. A very strange attitude in a place with Rehabilitation in the name. They wanted me to fend for myself and were rather put out when I did. They protected me from the possible consequences of my actions (lentil bake burned to buggery), though how this would fit me for independent living wasn’t clear. Safety-nets are fine, but no one wants to be tripping over them the whole time. Is it going too far to suggest that staff felt rejected when their help wasn’t needed, and were quite pleased by dehabilitation and back-sliding?

  The people at Mary Marlborough kept me housed and fed. They offered me a selection of gadgets for use in the kitchen, mainly picker-uppers which my hands were too small and stiff to work. The only handy tool was a little bill-hook, which I use to this day. The most valuable lesson I learned was from a Pakistani occupational therapist called Mariam, who taught me how to skin tomatoes by scalding them. So I showed a modest profit on my stay in Headington.

  Mariam was fun. She was lovely. She would always say, ‘I’m just going to sneak to the fridge’ or ‘sneak to the bathroom’, making the most wholesome activities seem unauthorised, loaded with the promise of transgression.

  A ghost in hibernation

  After my stint at Mary Marlborough, though, I really did feel I was sneaking back to Downing, where everyone else was getting ready to leave and I was getting ready to overstay my welcome. There was nowhere else for me to go. It wasn’t as if I could go home to Mum and Dad, after everything that had happened. Of course I was glad that I had closed off that option. If further education was a dead end then ‘home’ was certainly another.

  The examiners worked against the clock to mark our exams promptly, as if it mattered. On the day that results were posted up outside the Senate House the academic air was so tense it crackled. I stayed where I was in my room. Nothing on those lists could make a difference to me. A few times friends came to knock on my door, but I didn’t answer. Eventually someone pushed a note under the door to tell me where I stood. I was in no hurry to go over and read it. The future could wait, particularly as I didn’t have one.

  At last I punted the wheelchair over and read the note where it lay. I had landed one of the coveted, and strictly limited, First Class degrees – the counter-cultural ones, technically known as Thirds. I had collected the whole set, and completed my downward progress from that First in spoken German. I had
found my level. Still, going to Cambridge hadn’t been about scholastic achievement. It had been about … I couldn’t remember.

  If the note had been pushed under the door face downwards, or folded over, I really don’t know when I would have bothered to read it. My hunger for abstract knowledge seemed to have been stalled for the time being. I had no burning need to know. The ceremony of graduation, the supposed consummation of my undergraduate career, seemed so stunningly futile as to cast a favourable light backwards on the rigmarole of matriculation.

  I left the note, my badge of honour, where it lay. Mrs Beddoes picked it up, glanced at it, and put it on the desk. She at least sincerely didn’t care.

  We parted with real emotion, she and I, when the time came. We had been ‘John’ and ‘Jean’ for ages by then. I’d taught her to make coffee the way I liked it, and she’d even started to like it that way too. I’d say we were like an old married couple, but that seems a rather slighting comparison. I’d say she loved me like a mother, though the same objection applies.

  She said she would come in to college as usual during my overstay, to make sure I was all right, but I told her not to be silly. If she hadn’t earned a holiday, who had?

  She brought me a leaving present and helped me unwrap it. It was horrible, but it showed she had come a long way. It was a Harlequin Beetle in a little case, Acrocinus longimanus if memory serves, framed like a painting, something which she had found in the market. It was a great credit to her that she could see that this arthropod, at least, was beautiful – was a Nice Thing. It had a wonderful colour scheme – the camouflage pattern really did look consciously designed, as if someone like Braque had had a hand in it. I oohed and aahed like anything, and I think I convinced her I really liked it.

  It was too much to expect, after all the imaginative effort she had expended, that she would realise these things stop being beautiful the moment they are killed, dried and fixed behind glass. I gritted my teeth and tried to persuade myself that in the natural course of things this lovely creature would have long died and been broken down into nothingness by now, and that it was permissible to appreciate it as being a storage system for Jean’s emotional impulses, a bulb lit up by her feeling for me.

  I had never been able to generate a very solid presence for myself on those premises, but now, left alone after the other students had gone, I felt so tenuous as to be positively allegorical, like the ancient servant forgotten in the great house at the end of The Cherry Orchard. If I did represent the passing of an old order, though, it would have been nice to know where exactly I had once fitted so snugly, what heyday I had so unwisely outlived. I felt like the shadow of a shadow, a ghost in hibernation. I almost looked forward to being exorcised. I would go quietly.

  Downing didn’t become deserted in vacation time, just because the students had gone away. In due course it played host to a conference of doctors. This was a godsend, and not just because the college catering system started up again for their benefit, so that I could be sneaked in, the staff turning a blind eye as usual. One waiter who had always made a bit of a pet of me even started calling me Doctor.

  The medics and I had some amusing times together. I’d been reading my Martindale, so it wasn’t hard for me to bustle my way into their conversations with some informed nonsense, asking for instance, ‘Are you up to date about the enhancing relationship between benzodiazepenes and simple analgesics?’

  I also saw something of the hazards of the profession. One delegate offered me some Pethidine as casually as if he was talking about a packet of crisps rather than a synthetic narcotic analgesic. There was something sexual about the way he slid the tube of Pethidine out of his pocket and waggled it in front of me, murmuring, ‘If you like I can let you have these when I leave.’

  The little sod knows too much

  He also told me that Proladone was ‘really nice’, as if he was talking about a girl he’d just met, and not another heavyweight drug. He was obviously an addict, in the part of that trajectory where despair is still muffled by numbness and masked by nervous excitement.

  Another delegate, rather handsome in a hangdog way, came to my room for coffee and sat on the bed, a promising situation until he started moaning that he’d ruined his life. ‘I’ve got a sharp tongue,’ he said, ‘I can’t help myself. I drive everyone away. My woman has left me and I have no friends. I have periodic incontinence of the anal sphincter and no one to love.’

  I had nothing to offer him but the coffee I had promised, except for a nice yellow Valium to hold him together on a temporary basis. It was a treat to give drugs to a medic and fascinating to witness doctors at play. I saw at first hand that their lives were at least as disordered as anyone else’s. I’ve never met a physician who could heal himself (as opposed to medicate himself). I don’t think such a creature exists, which is why my medical interests can only ever be a sideline for me, not the main thrust of the journey.

  I took it upon myself to inform as many of the medics as I could buttonhole over the week of the conference that it was no part of a doctor’s job to tell the patient whether or not he was feeling pain. I preached this sermon on a text of my own, The Epistle to the Epiphyses, Chap. 1 verse 1. It had been simply insulting to be told that I couldn’t be experiencing pain where there was no movement.

  It wasn’t easy for the medics to change gear from treating me as a pseudo-colleague to listening to the informed complaints of an ancient patient, but most of them seemed to manage it. There’s an outside chance that I made a difference to their professional practice further along the line.

  On the last night of the conference one of the delegates, a Dr Love (originally from Canada), even proposed a toast to me in Hall. He warned the others against me very charmingly, saying, ‘If this little sod turns up in your area, for God’s sake don’t let him on to your list. He knows far too much! It’s not healthy. If they were all like him, the jig would be up for the lot of us.’

  It was July before I heard anything much from Cambridge Social Services. Then I was told where I would be living, in Mayflower House. I liked the sound of that. The Mayflower took pilgrims to a new world. When would I be moving in? When the flat was ‘ready’.

  My application to be a parasite had been accepted, but parasites can’t dictate terms. Nothing I did could qualify as ‘dropping out’ because I hadn’t been sufficiently ‘in’ to start with. My destiny seemed to be a sort of evaporation, one long exercise (a vast amplification of my sessions in the bathroom on Kenny staircase) in the loss of latent heat. Hadn’t I arrived at Cambridge with a good head of spiritual steam, even a bumptious sense of my own purpose? I was now entirely cold and dried up, shivering and desiccated.

  I had assumed I would be riding the Vichara Express, in the luggage compartment (but then the body is always and only luggage), but this was the stopping train at best, if it wasn’t actually old rolling stock abandoned in an overgrown siding. The sense of forward motion, so precious and so hard to come by, was now too faint to be detected. Only when the metaphysical speedometer was patiently tapped and then scrutinised with the eye of faith was it possible to see that the needle wasn’t stuck at zero.

  Evaporation is a gradual process. When had mine started? I had felt quite monstrously present during my Cambridge years, clogging the pavements in the wheelchair, waiting hopefully to be helped through a door or up a staircase, but perhaps that wasn’t the impression I made on other people. Possibly even before I started to withdraw from community life, buffeted by traumas familial and academic, the shrinkage had begun. Edith Piaf towered above me now, and I had enough regrets for the two of us.

  The lessons of my university life seemed to have been overwhelmingly negative. What had I learned at Cambridge? I’d learned that a hand once placed on the handle of the wheelchair was hard to dislodge. That a bag slung over that handle, nominally mine, could be filled with things that had nothing to do with me. That a fussy manner could cloak a sensitive soul or a hard one. That once
people had entered my room I couldn’t actually throw them out. And once someone had lifted me up in his arms, it wasn’t up to me whether we reached the bottom of the stairs in the conventional manner.

  In my three years as an undergraduate I had made any number of acquaintances, but friendship was a different matter. I could lay the blame on the world at large, and say that nobody wanted to venture beyond the outskirts of intimacy in my particular case, but that’s too easy. It lets me off the hook, when the truth is that I had mixed feelings about friendship myself. Of course the original plan was for me to be a beacon of enlightenment for my guru, and to fill my entire generation with his truth, but somehow that idea got lost along the way. A strong connection with other people would have been a decent consolation prize. But my experience of life from day to day over those three years made me think twice about trusting people’s good intentions.

  To claw back some control over my environment I had learned to take charge in psychological terms. I would requisition favours without granting any of the rights in return, having found that they were disproportionately hard to retract. In the free social setting which I had worked so hard to enter I had walled myself away from my fellows, whose freedom often seemed to be at my expense.

  Emotionally I closed myself off. I didn’t actively seek out situations in which I might be hurt. Why would I do such a thing? Why would I give away chances to hurt me as if they were tickets in a raffle?

  There were certainly people I knew in those years who could be trusted. Alan Linton was one, who kept in touch after he left Cambridge at the end of my first year. Yet even then I responded to his letters in a rather tepid way, writing just often enough to go through the motions. Eventually he wrote saying he had the feeling that he was keeping our friendship going single-handed. He went on to say that it was quite all right if I had lost interest, such things happened, friendship had its rhythms and its seasons, but I wrote back saying no, no, it was always good to hear from him, which was great hypocrisy on my part. I let Alan dangle. I did nothing to extend the life of our friendship but wouldn’t take the active responsibility of ending it. I let him strangle himself on his own goodwill. I didn’t even have the good manners to behave badly, and I may have left him with a feeling of guilt rather than the proper annoyance. A few years ago I saw his name listed in Yellow Pages as a homœopath based in Saffron Walden. The alternative medicine he had resisted so fiercely when he first encountered it ended by wooing him away from his first, his conventional love. And perhaps the part I played in his life wasn’t entirely ignoble, thanks to those early exchanges, conversations in which I was largely showing off.