Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  I said I had to go to the toilet, partly as a way of testing this new Mum, to see if there was any trace of the old one left. The old Mum would never have let the word ‘toilet’ pass, but this new one just said absently, ‘Of course you must,’ and promised not to take her turn at the game until I had come back.

  Audrey. The new baby was called Audrey. It was a girl. Good news. Lucky Mum. She was tucked away in a cot, snoozing.

  Later Audrey woke up and a nurse handed her to Mum. This little baby was a stranger. I felt she had nothing to do with me – but the woman who held her was also a stranger. I felt that Laura Cromer had disappeared and been replaced with a substitute, one who could only have fooled people who didn’t really know her, like the nurses on the ward. Despite a superficial resemblance, this person had nothing in common with my mother. She had already seemed strange while the baby was inside her, but having the baby taken out had left the strangeness still there. It hadn’t brought Mum back. I felt sure that Dad would feel the same way when he saw her, but he greeted her and the new baby as if there was nothing unusual going on except having a new person in the family.

  While new motherhood was still working its alarming miracles on her, Mum made a suggestion to me. She’d heard that Sister Heel was going to retire, and she knew that Heel was unmarried and lived alone. How did I feel about giving her Charlie as a retirement gift? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? My first reaction was to think, ‘What a cheek! Give away your own blooming budgie!’ But she had done that already, when she gave him to me. She couldn’t help herself. She was baby-happy, swollen with the joy that a new life brought.

  Even so, the moment she said it, I knew it was the right thing to do. I’d already said good-bye to Charlie once, after all, when I first went to CRX. If the only thing I wanted for Charlie was to see him happy, then happy he certainly was, and he made his mistress Heel happy into the bargain. The truth was that I had grown out of him rather, quite apart from the fact that for all practical purposes he was Heel’s already. Handing him over for good would be a legal detail. I was only transferring title.

  I still had to nerve myself a little. It was another irrevocable change, even if I was making it happen myself. My voice even cracked when I asked her whether she would like to take Charlie with her as a retirement present. Her voice almost didn’t work for a moment. She was close to tears. The dragon had long since unmasked herself and we were almost friends. Then she said that she would be honoured.

  Soon after that she was logging off on her last duty, walking quietly out of the ward. She had warned us that she hated good-byes and would rather everyone behaved as if it was the end of a normal day. Except for the birdcage in her hand, of course. That wasn’t normal.

  I wasn’t very good in those days at following people in my mind when they left the room. There seemed no end to their options – it was dizzying. Perhaps as an ex-toddler confined to one room, I was slow to learn that if you leave a space you must enter another one (the whole thing is an illusion, but the illusion is roughly consistent). It wasn’t that I had thought of other people as toys in a box to be put away. I felt like a toy in a box myself, that no one was allowed to play with. Still I found my mind could follow Sister Heel, budgie cage in hand, all the way home, right up to the moment when Charlie hopped into her mouth at last. He need never come out again.

  I soon got my old Mum back. Audrey wasn’t the sort of baby to sleep through the night if she could help it. The unreal or just unfamiliar light began to die from Mum’s eyes.

  After that, Mum had her little girl. She had what she wanted. If she still wasn’t happy, it wasn’t a matter of there being something actually missing from the pattern, more that she didn’t have the knack.

  I hadn’t seen much of Peter for a while, but that began to change when he came to see the baby and decided it would be fun to take charge of my wheelchair. I was very happy to have a chauffeur. He found it heavy work at first, so we just pottered round the CRX grounds. He wanted to find a secret passage – he was sure it was just the place to have one. The best we could find at short notice was a manhole cover that hadn’t been put back properly, so that it lay at an angle. We decided that this must be the entrance to an underground labyrinth. It was far too heavy for Peter to lift. The Famous Five would have made a better job of uncovering a mystery.

  Peter got quite a taste for pushing me around, though controlling the Tan-Sad, when I came home at weekends, was much more of a challenge. It must have been about this time that some adjustments were made to Trees which made life easier for me and for everyone else. There was an L-shaped bedroom annexe, with a ramp. Even so, the extension was always a bit bleak. There was no carpet, for fear that the Tan-Sad would track in mud from outside. There was just lino. I told Mum I had seen enough lino at CRX to last me a lifetime, but she was adamant that she didn’t want to spend all her life cleaning up after me. There was a utility room, too, so Mum also benefited from the re-modelling, and a second bathroom on the ground floor, so that I didn’t have to be carried upstairs to have a bath.

  As Peter grew more skilled at handling the Tan-Sad, we began to make little expeditions round Bourne End. It was rather unnerving, being stared at. At CRX I was often invisible, which wasn’t always a bad thing, and when I was out with Mum her adult aura neutralised curiosity. I don’t know whether it was worse for me, protected from noticing most of the stares thanks to the immobility of my neck, or for Peter who was spared nothing. I don’t think it was much fun for either of us.

  There were compensations, of course, times when we could stare in our turn. One day we saw a dog with its head in what looked like a loudspeaker – actually a ruff to stop him scratching a healing wound or biting out stitches. We thought it must be a joke or some strange sort of advertisement. As if the dog from the record label, listening raptly to recorded sound, had finally climbed into the gramophone to find out where exactly His Master’s Voice had taken up residence. We thought it was killing.

  In the open air the whole business of pushing and being pushed worked against conversation, but when we stopped for Peter to get his breath back we had some fine chats.

  He had obviously been giving my situation some thought. ‘You should go to an ordinary school,’ he said. ‘– you can come to my school if you like. It’s all right. Except you’re getting too old.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll be too old.’ I had been dreaming of a proper school, all the same.

  ‘And you should be able to go to prison. If you robbed a bank you should go to prison like everyone else.’

  ‘They’d probably put me in the prison hospital, which isn’t at all the same thing.’ I hadn’t given the question any thought before this moment. Now I began to feel cheated of my right to do time, hard time.

  ‘What a swizz. But I was thinking … if you did rob a bank, the police should count to a thousand before they started chasing you. Then you’d have the same chance as everyone else.’

  He was ahead of his time, really, was brother Peter. His philosophy of handicap was sophisticated in its own way. Equal rights plus a few courtesies.

  With Peter’s help I was able to resume my interrupted career of mischief. One day we got into rather a lot of trouble, but after all, I was owed. There had been years when I hadn’t been in any position to get into trouble at all.

  Being unsupervised and out of doors was intoxicating in itself. Fire was the specific lure, as so often – I’ve never understood why fire in the afterlife seems to be relegated to Hell, and defines it. As far I’m concerned, without fire it can’t be Heaven.

  Peter made a very willing lab assistant. The special equipment for one particular set of investigations was the empty tin of a Fray Bentos steak-and-kidney pie. I didn’t approve of the pie, and had eaten only a little of the pastry, but I heartily approved of the tin. It was circular and had sloping sides. When washed up it made a very decent crucible. Peter had been hoarding candles for some time on my instructions, and now he wedged them all in
the tin and lit them in rapid succession. Soon they started to melt together and flame became general. We had made one giant candle with multiple wicks. Then under my direction he fed more combustibles into the flames, scraps of old wax and torn-up bits of cloth, until the whole tinful was boiling and getting really hot.

  We weren’t being irresponsible. We were conducting our experiments outside in the open air, the way we knew we were meant to. We were behind the shed in the garden. The tin was safely on the ground, and we weren’t touching it.

  There was only one moment when the experimenter couldn’t avoid getting close to the tin, and that was the moment when he was going to pour onto the tiny inferno a tablespoonful of cold water. The experimenter was really me, but Peter had to do the pouring. Doing things at arm’s length isn’t practical for me. The arm isn’t a standard unit of measurement, and mine don’t really count. I would operate Peter by remote control. I gave him the timing, saying, ‘Ready … set … GO!!!’

  Light blue touch paper and retire immediately. I’d given him a proper briefing. He knew that he had to pour the spoonful of water in with a single rapid motion, then run like hell.

  Gratifying little bomb

  It all worked quite beautifully. Nothing happened instantaneously. There was a fractional pause which allowed Peter to make his escape. In that pause, the seething wax seemed to be assessing the cold water that had been dumped into it with a sort of elemental incredulity. It held its breath. Then it exploded. There was a marvellous caustic burp, a great rising cloud of steam and ash, and boiling wax was richly deposited on our clothes and any flesh they didn’t cover. I had the glorious sensation of having challenged Nature to a duel and survived. It was a draw. It’s true that there was a scrap of cloth which landed on my lap still burning, but Peter easily patted it out. He was as exhilarated by our discovery as I was myself.

  It was all throughly worth while. From candle-ends and a pie tin we had fashioned a gratifying little bomb. I suppose Peter must have been a bit worried about the incendiary wax-shower and the burning shreds in flight, because he confessed to Mum in dribs and drabs while she was putting us to bed. He was always a good boy. She said nothing about it. She didn’t seem to take it in. She just smiled absently and said, ‘I’m glad you two amused yourselves.’ As if we’d been playing Scrabble.

  The next day we did it all over again. Only this time a boy staying with neighbours insisted on being in on it. Parents didn’t keep children on a tight rein in those days, even in cities, and the Abbotsbrook Estate was no city. We told him it was dangerous. We told him it was only for big boys. I suppose Howie was about five – not nearly old enough to understand science. We told him to stay far back but he wouldn’t listen. Howie said if we didn’t let him see he’d tell his mother we’d hit him.

  That was too much for me, and I said, ‘You’ll really tell your mum that I hit you?’ And he said, ‘No I won’t.’ He pointed at Peter. ‘I’ll say that he hit me and you bit.’ So we let him stay. Of course we didn’t let him pour the water into the tin, but he stood right next to Peter, watching, and he wasn’t so sharp at backing off.

  He got very little of the wax on him, but of course he went howling off to his mother, and then she came round screeching, ‘How could you burn my baby?’ If Howie was five then he wasn’t a baby, or alternatively, if he was a baby she shouldn’t have let him out of her sight, should she? She wasn’t being at all reasonable.

  Howie’s mum told the whole saga to Mum and soon Mum was bellowing, ‘What in the world did you think you were doing, burning poor Howie?’ A scolding can be just as bad as a scalding because you just have to stand there and pretend it doesn’t hurt. However unfair it is.

  Mum absolutely denied that we’d told her the day before what we’d been up to. ‘Do you really think’, she said, ‘that I’d have let you play with fire if I’d known what you were doing, with or without Howie being there?’ It’s true we had been puzzled by how calm she was the night before. I suppose we twigged that she hadn’t taken it in, but we’d told her just the same. Wasn’t that the point? It wasn’t our fault that she was hypnotised and not listening. And what were we supposed to do when Howie started pestering us and wanting to be in on the experiment? Tie him up?

  We had discussed tying him up, as a matter of fact, Peter and I, but Howie was the sort of child who runs to his mother about everything, so he’d be off complaining about that the moment he was set free. So really it made quite as much sense to let him witness our experiment and take his chances. He might learn something, even if it was only to listen to what bigger boys said.

  I couldn’t seem to get the hang of how I was supposed to behave. Everybody kept on about how awful it was that I couldn’t do normal things, but the moment I made a normal bomb they came down on me like a ton of angry bricks. Mum’s face even looked like a brick when she shouted. I’d seen her plucking her eyebrows, anyway, hundreds of times, so I couldn’t understand all the fuss about Howie’s. She always said they grew back overnight.

  Somewhere in this turbulent epoch I managed to find the time to fail my eleven-plus. Quite why we were all put in for this ordeal I don’t know. The results wouldn’t have made a difference to our futures either way – it’s not as if there was a grammar school and a secondary modern both reaching out for us, waiting for our results to see which institution would get lucky. I dare say participation in the eleven-plus charade was (like the entirety of our education) no more than a legal requirement.

  I failed the eleven-plus. I don’t remember the details. Apparently I wasn’t as clever as everyone said, or at least not good at getting my brain across to people I didn’t know, who didn’t know me. I don’t even remember whether I used a pen, writing fast and with doctorish illegibility, or the typewriter, readable but painfully slow. Either way, in the separation of sheep from goats, I was officially a goat. I think we were all goats at CRX.

  Not that it held me back. The eleven-plus was a sort of dummy exam, in my case at least. Failing it didn’t hamper my progress, any more than passing it would have moved me on. It turned out that a new school had already been thought of, to provide secondary education tailored to my needs, or my body’s.

  I’d understood by then, without knowing the word, that Dr Ansell was an assimilationist. She felt that the disabled should – wherever possible – go to mainstream schools. She said she’d heard all the arguments about bullying, the sheer vulnerability of the handicapped (as we were then, before we became disabled), and she didn’t think much of them. In practice it didn’t happen. People got on with their lives. The arguments about bullying were all pretexts for a sort of fearful apartheid. It was touching that she assumed bullying would be a new danger for a child who had been a citizen of her little kingdom.

  Even so, no mainstream school was proposed for me, by Ansell or anyone else. Perhaps I was just too disabled. I fell foul of the small print, of that ‘wherever possible’. Ansell had a splendid motto, very enlightened for the period: ‘Every child has his own disease.’ Even so, my own disease seemed horribly classic. I was text-book – but an old text-book, a pre-war or even Victorian text-book, from before the arrival of steroids.

  What I was offered wasn’t a normal school. Still, if it was a school at all, if it wasn’t a hospital lightly disguised, then it could only be more normal than what I was used to. ‘More normal’ would have to stand in for normal.

  I had exhausted the educational possibilities of the school inside the hospital inside the Nissen huts in the grounds of the stately home, but I hadn’t exhausted everything the place had to teach me. One thing I completely failed to spot during my time at CRX was that the place itself was one colossal clue. There were esoteric secrets on the premises beyond the ken even of the Famous Five. I didn’t know that Nancy Astor was a Christian Scientist. Of course I also didn’t know who Nancy Astor was, or what she had to do with CRX. I didn’t know that she was the first woman to be elected an MP – well she wasn’t, so I have that excu
se for not knowing it. She wasn’t the first woman to be elected an MP (who was a member of Sinn Féin campaigning from prison in Holloway) but she was the first to take her seat in the House.

  I also didn’t know at the time what a Christian Scientist was. If Christian Scientists had bombarded CRX with anything like the fervour of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I’d have been better informed. Nancy hadn’t been raised in the faith but had seen the light of Mary Baker Eddy. Her husband Waldorf had seen it too, if only because it was bounced off the reflective surfaces of the formidable Nancy. If Nancy had taken up ritual cannibalism, Waldorf would most likely have gone along with it, not tasting the human sacrifices, necessarily (perhaps refusing with a wave of the hand when the plates were brought round), but ready with a toothpick afterwards, to help Nancy dislodge the human gristle from her teeth. So both of them adhered to a faith that says the pain is unreal – and then the moment a war comes along they volunteer their house as a hospital. It’s more than a gesture. They pay the wages of thirty-odd people, Lady Astor helps on the wards.

  She had her own style of nursing, admittedly – if she didn’t rub salt into servicemen’s open wounds, she certainly grated ginger over them. What she didn’t do was tell them, as a good Christian Scientist should, that their pain was caused by Error and not real. If pain is unreal, why take pains to relieve it? Indifference would seem the better response.

  So even in the foundation of the institution in which I lived for so long, with its two addresses and two pronunciations, there was a huge clue about the double nature of pain and the double nature of everything else. Both real and not real. Or (if that makes it simpler) neither. Neither real nor unreal.