Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  I was told not to move, and I was a good boy. I had to move something, and if it wasn’t my body then it would have to be my mind. I learned my numbers. I got Mum to teach me to count to a hundred. Then I’d reel off the tally, time and time again. Counting up, counting down. Mum was very patient. She didn’t baulk even when I upped the stakes and went as far as a thousand, not even sighing when I asked, ‘What comes after a hundred, Mummy?’ If I had known about times tables I would have made short work of them. I loved every little number. I didn’t let her read the paper or do her sewing while I did my counting. I made her say, ‘Very good, John,’ or ‘Correct!’ after every single number. I made her concentrate on me absolutely. She was never allowed to be off duty.

  Mum would soothe me by brushing my hair. As a special treat she would use Dad’s brush, a Mason Pearson with no actual handle, a military oval of manly grooming, the bristles set in a bed of dark pink rubber. My own brush was softer but conveyed no electrical tingle to the scalp. Sometimes she would leave Dad’s brush with me when she left the room. On some primitive level it seemed wrong that my hairbrush had a handle and his didn’t.

  When she was out of the room, counting lost its interest, and I explored the few movements I was allowed, things that didn’t count as moving. There were various activities that could be managed while lying perfectly still, as the doctor had ordered. It counted as keeping perfectly still as long as you didn’t move any bones. There were no bones in eyes, for instance. I rolled my eyes until I felt a sort of dizziness, although I was flat on my back and there was no danger of falling. I could fool myself I was falling while remaining perfectly still. I learned to cross my eyes. I practised breathing in different ways, concentrating on one nostril, for instance, at the expense of the other.

  A Great Big Figgieman

  Some of the rules of the house were suspended in my interest. If I retrieved a crumb of snot and rolled it between my fingers, Mum would pretend not to notice. Talk about making your own entertainment! The privilege of my situation, in which boredom lay so close to over-excitement that there was hardly any space between, was that snot qualified as a toy. The home word for such a crumb was Figgieman. In the days before I was bed-bound, Mum would say, ‘I can see a Great Big Figgieman!’ in a tone of ominous triumph. When my life thinned out, she just looked the other way and let me get on with it. She took pity on my dirty little ways, even when I accumulated a whole gallery of waxy snowballs. When they dried out I would flick them at the wall when nobody was looking, or else amalgamate them into one revolting whopper with a little supplementary spit.

  My tongue was a rich source of games. I would tickle the roof of my mouth with its tip. It didn’t quite make me burst out laughing, but it brought laughter to mind. Anybody who says that tickling yourself is impossible, and that the sensation depends on someone else doing it, hasn’t tried tickling of this type. It’s not perfect but it works, and that made it a precious game for me then.

  Then I stuck my tongue out and started rotating it very slowly at full extension, feeling the wet trail I left on my chin or my cheeks or the groove above my lips as it slowly evaporated. I learned to touch my nose with my tongue, gradually improving its flexibility. I discovered for myself that the tongue is a muscle, by straining it. Then it was back to eye work for a while. When the speaking muscle had recovered, I would combine the eye-rollings and the tongue sweep, sometimes synchronising the movements, sometimes making them contrary, even contrapuntal. When Mum came into the room and surprised me while I was engrossed in my little theatre of grimaces, she was shocked. She thought I was having a seizure. A fit, on top of all her troubles. Even then I understood that they were her troubles.

  Mum was my jailer, but she was also the Entertainments Officer, even the Escapes Officer. It was her responsibility to see that I didn’t break the rules of my confinement, but also to fill my time with any amusement small enough to be smuggled between its bars. On top of which she was necessarily my fellow prisoner, though there was no one to organise entertainments for her.

  Once she brought the local bobby to pay me a visit. He was wonderful in his uniform. She left us alone, after warning him not to sit on the bed. He said I’d been in the wars, hadn’t I? I said that I had – in fact I was still in the wars.

  He said to keep my chin up and called me ‘sonny’. He let me hold his whistle. I blew down it for all I was worth, without asking permission in case he said no. Mum came running – her heart was in her mouth, she said. But then her mouth was where her heart mostly lived.

  Metaphysical teeth

  In my spare time I invented a game I called Teeth. All my time was spare. This was the opposite of the eye and tongue games, and more sophisticated. Teeth was metaphysical. It involved keeping still a body part that wasn’t actually under the ban on movement. I suppose I was asserting a sort of freedom by adding a voluntary freezing to the one that was imposed from outside. I put my teeth together lightly, not grinding them but just letting the tips rest on each other, and let them grow together in my mind and become huge. My teeth turned into a sort of cave, and I could disappear inside it, clenched inside myself. Escaping to the interior, knowing that nobody in the family home would ever know what had happened to me. Once again Mum was worried by my frozen state, and even called the doctor in. There seemed to be nothing, in the narrow range of activities that was left to me, that couldn’t be interpreted as a symptom. Any behaviour on my part might be the prelude to a crisis.

  I spent a lot of time looking at the yellow roses on the wall. They were a comfort and a temptation. By crossing my eyes I could make one flower coincide with its identical neighbour, and so produce the optical illusion of space opening up. I knew I was supposed to keep absolutely still, but squirming didn’t count. When I was only inches away from the wall and the yellow roses, I would cross my eyes so that the wall seemed to recede, leaving the flowers floating. Then I would slowly, naughtily, reach out a finger, and come up short, prevented from entering the space that my mind could see and yearn for.

  When I gazed at the yellow roses and let them float freely while the background colour of the wallpaper fell away I was scratching primitively towards transcendence, towards an understanding of the unreality of what surrounds us. The experience was at that stage desolating, and I turned against it. One day I tore the wallpaper away from the wall, at the edge of a seam. After that it wasn’t possible to superimpose two flowers and open up a space that wasn’t there, since the torn and curling strip broke the illusion. I knew I was being naughty when I tore the paper: I waited for punishment but none came. It gave no pleasure that illness kept me safe from disgrace. I had the evidence of my crime permanently close, and that was punishment enough. For the time being it put paid to any mystical inklings.

  It may have been partly for the protection of the wallpaper that one day the bed was moved away from the wall, like the ones in a hospital, so that I could be attended to from both sides. This was a milestone of more significance for the carers than the patient, and not just because it made their tasks easier. It defined me actively as an invalid, rather than someone who happened to be ill without an end in sight.

  Blizzard of attachments

  In the meantime, the long meantime, even Peterkin wasn’t allowed on the bed, small as he was, light as he was. He would inevitably jump up and down, and cause me pain without meaning to. Until I was sentenced to bed rest he might just as well have been a made-up creature. I had tyrannised the poor soul, with no thought of his having a life outside the parts I made him play. The age gap, seventeen months, was just right to set him on a track of slavish devotion to the first-born, and to delay the time that he learned to know better. Only when I was immobilised and Peter was out of my power did I begin to absorb the fact of his separateness. Before then he had only been a small (and reversible) step up from imaginary, as far as I was concerned.

  He had been another person all along, potentially a sidekick rather than a rival, an asset not
a liability, but in my infant egotism I hadn’t thought of that. Luckily he hadn’t lost his desire to please me, and would bring in treasures from the garden that was now his exclusive domain.

  I hadn’t noticed him enough to feel threatened before I was ill, and we weren’t in direct competition even now. The prisoner in his bed, having his meals brought in on trays, cajoled into eating each modest mouthful, and the toddler in the high chair left to feed himself, could hardly resent each other. There was none of the enforced sharing that brands brotherhood on the older party. It’s the appropriated toy that does the damage. The loved object forges a bitter bond, when it turns up missing an ear. The favourite comic is the culprit, defaced with an alien crayon. It’s the blocked path to the breast, usurper smugly at suck. None of this applied to us as brothers. Fashions in motherhood played a part in the area last mentioned. By the time Peter came along, Mum had been persuaded that bottle was best. The nipple remained my symbolic possession even when I’d been weaned from it.

  Peter would come to see me but keep on the other side of the room, as if any closer approach would be too stimulating for me. He would wave at me rather solemnly, from the far side of the crevasse which divides the sick from the well. Some days he would steal up to me with his hand clenched, and then open it to reveal one of his toy soldiers, which he would slip between the sheets with me where Mum wouldn’t see, before trotting off to explore his wider world. He was leaving one of his troops with me as a sort of hostage, a kindness which almost made me forget my stubborn lack of interest in games of conflict. Normally the only soldiers I liked were the ones to be dipped in my egg.

  I wish I could claim that illness sheltered me from the blizzard of attachments, so that I freely recognised Peter’s claims to equality, but it isn’t so. Later on I would have to invent techniques to hold onto my dominance, but for the time being Mum belonged to me without question. I was her priority. Silence on my part could bring Mum to my side at least as quickly as Peter’s cries could draw her to his.

  Sometimes Mum read to me, poems and stories. All my time was bed-time and every story was a bed-time story. More than once she read me a poem about a little girl who didn’t eat properly. She grew thinner and thinner until she was as thin as a piece of paper. Mum read it in the ominous tones suitable for a cautionary tale:

  Oh, she was so utterly utter!

  She couldn’t eat plain bread-and-butter,

  But a nibble she’d take

  At a wafer of cake,

  Or the wing of a quail for her supper.

  Roast beef and plum-pudding she’d sneer at,

  A boiled leg of mutton she’d jeer at,

  But the limb of a frog

  Might her appetite jog,

  Or some delicate bit that came near that.

  The consequence was, she grew paler,

  And more wishy-washy, and frailer,

  Ate less for her dinner,

  Grew thinner and thinner,

  Till I really think,

  If you marked her with ink,

  Put an envelope on her,

  And stamped it upon her,

  You could go to the office and mail her!

  Perhaps this was her way of blackmailing my appetite, on days when I was sated by half a boiled egg, or a quarter, or a single teaspoonful, days when I was disenchanted even with magic bananas.

  Something in my character stopped the poem from working on me as Mum must have hoped. At first when she recited the poem and added at the end, ‘You wouldn’t want that to happen to you, now would you?’ I was terrified by the thought. But as the days inched by, the fascination of the idea grew on me in secret. Then when Mum said, ‘You wouldn’t want …’ at the end of the reading, I whispered ‘Oh no!’ but I was secretly infatuated. The idea of dwindling to nothing held a strong attraction for me, which I now see as the magnetic pull of austerity in a previous life.

  There was one story that made us both weep: Paul Gallico’s Snowflake. There was plenty of food for Hindu thought in that story of transformation and essence, if I’d noticed, but I took my cue from Mum and wept. How sad and how beautiful it was, the story of the little Snowflake and her pear-shaped water drop of a husband, her progress from snow bank to river to millstream to estuary to the sea. And however much the Snowflake was jostled or scalded, she was aware of a backdrop of love. When Mum reached the end of the story, her voice vibrated in a way I had never heard before.

  Eight physical signs

  Here the story reached out and held hands with the poem about the girl who dwindled to nothing. The idea of simply evaporating from life was exquisitely beautiful. Its tingle gripped me from head to toe. We were both of us melting in sympathy with the fated life cycle of H2O. As Snowflake’s life ended the Sun said to her, ‘You have done well, little Snowflake. Come home to me now.’ We felt the hairs on the back of our necks standing on end, the very shiver of divinity. Without any idea of what was going on, we were visited by four of the eight physical signs of the presence of God. Horripilation (specifically nirvikalpa samadhi, the horripilation that precedes enlightenment), trembling, tears, faltering of the voice. The other signs of divine presence being perspiration, changing of body colour, inability to move (even the limbs), holy devastation. I really appreciate having a technical vocabulary for religious states. It’s one of the great advantages that Hinduism has. When you think about it, there are sodding great holes in the Christian descriptions. Even Paul Gallico, if he had witnessed the glory-babble of Pentecost or St Teresa hovering in the chapel on jump-jets of grace, would have struggled to put it across without a precise vocabulary to hand.

  I pestered Mum to get other books by Paul Gallico from the library, and she came back with The Snow Goose. I hated it, perhaps because it was about war. It was also full of dialect, oddly written out, along the lines of ‘We was roustin’ on the beach between Dunkirk an’ Lapanny, like a lot o’ bloomin’ pigeons on Victoria Hembankment, waitin’ for Jerry to pot us. ’E potted us good too. ’E was be’ind us an’ flankin’ us an’ above us. ’E give us shrapnel and ’e give us H.E., an’ ’e peppers us from the bloomin’ hatmosphere with Jittersmiths.’ Mum couldn’t seem to extract the desired accent from this orgy of apostrophes, and we both felt that it wasn’t proper writing somehow.

  We went back to Snowflake any number of times, and it always affected us the same way. Mum and I had a strange taste of that sublime state in which the ego melts, to return as a shadow if it returns at all. On the basis of that one little book, Paul Gallico is a great magus and swami, and that’s flat. The image of death as a merging resonates so deeply. People understand that the drop merges with the ocean, but they sometimes forget that the ocean also merges with the drop.

  Mum would sometimes leave Snowflake or another book with me when she’d finished reading. I would take it under the bedclothes, understanding that this was a more precious hostage even than Peter’s toy soldier. A boy who was only allowed to move his head and his hands wouldn’t long resist the lure of print.

  My favourite book at that time didn’t have words at all. It was a book of What I Want to Be When I Grow Up. It had pictures of various professional uniforms and styles of dress, each with a cut-out circle where the head should be. Mum had mounted a picture of my face at the back of the book, so that I could see myself looking proudly up through a porthole cut in all the pages of rôles and careers. She must have done that before I was ill. I was always excited by the obvious uniforms, soldier sailor policeman, but I was more deeply drawn to the curative, investigative or spiritual professions: doctor, scientist, priest.

  Engine of hope

  It was in those days that I started talking to God, making prayers. Even the most selfish prayer is a little engine of hope. I prayed for small improvements rather than drastic transformations. At a time when I could only squirm from one side of the bed to the other, I’d pray that some day I’d be able to inch from one side of the room to the other. That would be enough for me. No sense in be
ing greedy.

  When Mum wasn’t reading to me, she would look at the fire. I could understand her fascination when the gas was lit, with my own pyrolatry so incandescent. I liked the way the honeycombed panels behind the grille glowed orange and pink as they grew hot, and held those wonderful colours, yearningly, nostalgically, for a long moment after the flame was extinguished. Perhaps I had a memory-inkling that nirvana in Sanskrit means the state of having been extinguished or snuffed – otherwise it’s a mystery that I should have been happy to see the fire I loved so much die down. Nirvana isn’t ‘extinction’ with all its ominous overtones, more an extinguishment (an indispensable word I’ve just made up) welcomed by the flame. But Mum would sit there for what seemed like hours on a warm evening, with her knitting on her knee unthought-of, looking at the fire when the honeycombed panels were pale and dead.

  One of the games I played, Itches and Scratches, needed another player – Mum. It was fun, though the itch could often get out of hand. Any itch I had was likely to be in a part of the body I couldn’t reach, and I would have to ask Mum to scratch it. Having the itch scratched was sheer Heaven, but it wouldn’t be long before another itch broke out, and then Mum would have to scratch that one also. After three or four such itches, I seemed to be itching all over and would be wondering whether the game was so much fun after all.