Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Miss Willis didn’t really approve of physical punishment, and usually she was just bluffing, but this time she made good on her threats. The next thing we heard was the same voice shouting, ‘Now Mr

  Raeburn is coming to give you little rowdies “What for”!!’ Raeburn came lurching into the dorm and got to work walloping bottoms. He turned the lights on and told us all to roll over onto our tummies. Then he went round giving a single tremendous thwack at each bedside.

  I did as I was told. I could turn onto my left side but not the right, because of the way my right elbow stuck forward. Using my head to give a little more momentum I could end up on my tummy, more or less. It wasn’t comfortable, and I had a bit of panic in case I suffocated against the pillow, not being able to raise my neck fully clear of it. Still, I did it. I presented myself for punishment, wondering if I’d be able to stand up to it, or if this would be the death-blow that even Judy Brisby hadn’t dared to deliver.

  Then Old Rabies was by my bed. I felt his warm hand against my buttocks through the material of my pyjamas. ‘Is that your bottom?’ he asked, without anger, almost tenderly. Under the circumstances it was a strange question. Did he have doubts about it being a bottom, or doubts about the bottom being mine?

  ‘Yes,’ I answered, my mouth completely dry. Thwack! went the Board of Education. The noise was terrific, and the pain was non-existent. He had given the bed a mighty blow with the B of E. Then he said sternly, ‘Let that be a lesson to you!’ and moved on to the next bed and the next rowdy bottom to be given ‘What for’.

  I lay there wishing I had known ahead of time that he wasn’t going to hit me. Then I could have paid proper attention to the feel of his hand against my bottom, something that I’d fantasised about for so long. As it was, I rushed through the sublime moment anticipating a dreadful one. That’s always the way with sensation. It claims to be so absolute, but everything depends on the context.

  Even now I’m not sure if he hit the other boys. Perhaps none of us got a whack and no one wanted to own up, but I’m inclined to think that the Board of Education claimed some victims. There was a certain amount of blinking back tears after he had left, and also a certain amount of hatred, which is the immediate as well as the lasting product of physical punishment. So perhaps I was the only one to get a placebo beating, just as I imagine I was the only one to get a loving pat on the bottom, like a little caress from the hanging judge, right in the middle of the Bloody Assizes.

  Adult essence

  By this time my mind was no longer entirely a child’s, and my body was making the same pilgrimage towards maturity. My orgasms weren’t as dry as they had once been. They had begun to produce a few pearls. The adult essence didn’t make its appearance suddenly, from one day to the next, and dribbles could be dissipated. Creamier compounds could be rubbed over the hands until they disappeared. Although there were obsessive hawks in the school, none was so vigilant or well-trained as to spot minor signs like the dandruff snowflakes fluttering from a boy’s hands …

  A lot of the time the fibres of my pyjama trousers simply absorbed the distillate, which turned them crisp and made the matrons frown. It’s true I collected Redoxon Effervescent 1000 mg tubes from my blood brother Trevor Burbage, Trevor the unsinkable, the human suitcase with the riding hat. Purely in the interest of science I would sometimes shut myself away with a Redoxon tube, so as to decant the seminal treasure, what little there was of it. I’d stopper it up and keep it in my pocket to see what happened to it over time. The results were not pleasing.

  So there was sexual practice, in the form of these solitary adventures, and there was sexual theory, in the form of the nightly play, now inconceivably orgiastic. Apart from that single night in the Blue Dorm there was no convergence between the two.

  In any given week so many cowboys and foreign visitors had played with my bosoms and emptied their testicle consommé into my ravenous vagina, that I was a little bored with it all. We had worked our way through every possible heterosexual permutation. What changed the proceedings was a troubling new presence in the audience.

  Soon after flicker-book night in the Blue Dorm, Roger Stott told me he was being moved out. ‘They say it’s temporary, just for a week,’ he said. He was rather cast down by it, as if he was being punished for something done wrong. I asked who was being moved in. Luke Squires, that’s who, and he wasn’t even an AB.

  Luke Squires was mildly spastic and in the year above us. I’d seen him around – he certainly stood out. There was something about the way he handled his wheelchair that was absolutely distinctive. It seemed to glide him from place to place, and to arrive perfectly smoothly wherever he wanted to be.

  Anything that could be done in a wheelchair Luke could do outstandingly well. He was something of a sports star at Vulcan, equally gifted at basketball (a certainty for the school team at the Stoke Mandeville games) and wheelchair shinty, a game which seemed entirely unburdened with rules. Normally it’s paraplegics who have the wheelchair sports pretty much sewn up, having the strong working arms needed to generate speed and power.

  The Vulcan team enjoyed challenging the staff, whom they thrashed on a regular basis, as they did any able-bodied team rash enough to borrow wheelchairs and accept a challenge. The home team’s familiarity with the chairs gave them a huge advantage. All this sporting activity had no great appeal to me personally, I mean as a spectator, but at least it wasn’t absurdly contrived, as some sports events at the school were. Watching one boy attempting what was called archery, when in fact someone else was holding the bow and he had to be pulled bodily backwards in his wheelchair to draw it, it was hard to see where exactly the element of sport lay. It would have made as much sense to catapult him forward, using the tension stored up in the bow, as it did to pretend he was firing it. It might also have been more fun.

  It was hard to believe that Luke’s lower body wasn’t under the same control as his upper, but of course it wasn’t so. When he got up from the wheelchair he could hardly stand. He wasn’t athetoid – his spasms weren’t dramatic – but his movements were greatly impaired.

  In a gulch of the badlands

  I had a pow-wow with Julian about how I should behave in Luke’s presence. I could hardly stop leading the night’s radio play of erotic adventures, but I’d surely get into trouble if I carried on in the usual way.

  ‘I can tell you one thing,’ said the boy agent QM, ‘– I don’t think much of La Willis’s tactics. She’s being very obvious. You can’t just parachute a spy into enemy territory without papers or any sort of cover story.’

  Julian was spy-mad, but that didn’t mean he was wrong in this case. It was very clear that a spy was what Luke Squires was. He was trusted by Miss Willis, and he was being sent to discover just what boyish-high-spirits were getting up to, amid the excited murmuring after lights-out. I just didn’t know what to do. Acting normally would mean putting on a pornographic vaudeville in which Miss Willis herself, lightly transposed to a brothel in a gulch of the badlands (what was a gulch? what were badlands?), did a star turn.

  For once Julian couldn’t advise me. ‘I can’t get through to HQ,’ he solemnly told me. ‘I think the signal’s being jammed. Of course there’s always a possibility that Squires is a double agent anyway.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Let’s just say he might not be as reliable as the Willis seems to think. I’ve heard of a few interesting messages being intercepted from the lift-shaft.’

  Hold on! Hadn’t I made that up, the stuff about the message drop in the lift? As so often with Julian Robinson, I began to lose track of the distinction, arbitrary anyway, between fantasy and the other thing.

  Julian told me that in the absence of guidance from HQ he accepted full responsibility for whatever I decided to do – but I couldn’t help feeling that this came to the same thing as his washing his hands of me. He also warned me that if contact was re-established by lights-out, HQ would be listening in to the show for once.
Normally the privacy of the dorm after bed-time was respected, and the tape-recorder in my head was de-activated. I’d insisted on HQ’s word of honour about that. Tonight, though, was too significant an occasion for the privilege of privacy from surveillance to stand.

  I made one last attempt to disentangle myself from Julian’s fantasies. I didn’t know who was a spy in what sense (and for who?), what was a game and what might not be.

  ‘Julian,’ I said, ‘what happens to the tapes in my head? When they’re full up, and HQ needs to listen to them?’

  ‘They get changed while you’re asleep.’

  ‘Then there’s another agent in the dorm, isn’t there? You’re not the senior operative at all!’

  ‘Yes I am!’ he said. ‘There’s only me! I change them myself.’ Then I knew that I had him. Pride had gone before a fall, as Miss Reid of CRX had so often promised. We both knew that once Julian’s callipers were off he wasn’t going anywhere.

  It was strange, even so. Under torture – and QM had alluded darkly to that possibility – I would have said that there wasn’t a tape-recorder in my head and never had been. But I still half believed in the gun in my walking stick.

  By the time the lights were turned out that night, I had decided on my plan. Defiance. It would be business as usual in the honky-tonks of the Old West. Business as usual, plus over-time.

  I pushed the storyline recklessly in new directions. I started off playing the serving wench who timed her cake-baking to allow for a quick fling in the pantry with the stable lad, making sure that the romping was properly finished before the mistress of the house returned or the cakes caught fire. Of course, we weren’t fools about narrative. To keep the tension going, the mistress had to return some days while we were still in the act. I also played the part of the mistress, the technical challenge adding considerably to my sense of unreal delight. I marched in and caught us red-handed, and I acted all strict, as though I was Miss Willis herself. Normally the other boys in the dorm would have been in hysterics about that, but with Luke listening in they kept mum. No one would even help me out with sound effects. I had to do all the sex groaning myself.

  Sump of dirty dreams

  I smacked her/my bottom, almost in silence because of my deficient smacking skills, but making up for it with enthusiastic ‘Take that!’s and ‘How dare you!’s. I pleaded with myself and begged for mercy, and said I would do anything not to get the sack. Then at some stage I (as Miss Willis) spotted the bulge in the stable boy’s trousers and scolded the wench, saying the worst fault to be found in a working girl was selfishness and the inability to share lovely things. Did she think it was really fair for a poor working lad to be fiddling around with a callow girl who hardly knew one end of a man from another? If she was going to behave in this manner behind my (Miss Willis’s) back, it would be well for her indeed if she were to take a few lessons from an older woman and at least have the common decency to learn how to share, and to do a good job into the bargain. Heaven knows where I got all this fine and juicy stuff. The collective unconscious is a sump of dirty dreams, and I just lowered my little bucket into it.

  The greater mystery, I suppose, is that all the time I thought we were being secret and absolutely disgusting (not realising that the Kama Sutra was way ahead of us) I had never thought to include any element of my own fantasies into the performance. In an all-boy school, the filth I produced was rigorously heterosexual, and now that I felt I had exhausted those possibilities, I broke ground in a new area. Far from feeling my way towards what actually aroused me, I moved further in the other direction.

  The wench’s first lesson was to hand the boy over to me (Willis) while I put him through his paces until I had him moaning with delight. The moans would have been better done by third parties, but there was no helping that. It was my first real experience of a resistant audience, and it made me lose confidence. I dispensed with the boy and made love to the wench, but my heart wasn’t in it. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing. At some stage I told the stable boy to make tea for us and took the wench to bed with me.

  For once the story fizzled out. There was a silence of a fairly ghastly type, and then Luke spoke very quietly. ‘John?’ he said, and my heart sank. ‘You’re every bit as entertaining a performer as I’ve been told. But perhaps there are one or two things we should discuss.’ His manner was off-hand, except that murmurs after lights-out can never be off-hand, and everyone in the dorm knew he was a man on a mission. ‘If you have nothing better to do,’ he went on, ‘might you meet me for a few words after school tomorrow? Would it be convenient to meet by the bus?’

  If the mood of the dorm had been put into words at that moment it would have been Now you’re for the high jump!, with a certain amount of satisfaction. Ungrateful beasts. And I wasn’t so sure about the high jump anyway.

  The meeting-place meant that there was a high degree of secrecy involved. The bus was round a corner and easily fifty yards from the front entrance of the Castle. It was an old London Transport Leyland (Raeburn drove it, which can’t have been easy). But then Julian was always saying that there were microphones planted all over Vulcan School, to monitor our conversations. It made sense that an older boy would know where to go to avoid being overheard. And why care so much about privacy if he was only going to dish me with Miss Willis?

  In all the mixed feelings about Luke’s invitation and what it might mean, I was overlooking one practical difficulty. I only realised it in the morning. The Everest & Jennings was a decent enough machine, but it wasn’t suitable for all surfaces. It certainly wouldn’t go over gravel. Not very handy, now that perhaps the most important appointment of my life, demanding absolute privacy, was due to take place on the far side of fifty gravelled yards.

  Perhaps this would be the one day when the low-specification machine would simply zing along, gravel no obstacle. That was Plan A. If Plan A didn’t work, I had no Plan B. I certainly didn’t want worldly Luke, who might be wanting to talk man to man, to find me stranded like an over-sized pebble among the little pebbles of the drive.

  When the Everest & Jennings ground to a halt on the gravel, grit buggering the relays in the usual way, I found I did have a Plan B after all. Plan B was to wave my arms feebly about and shout ‘I say’ in as loud a voice as I could muster. And amazingly, my cries of P. G. Wodehouse distress were heard. An AB spotted me from an upstairs window and came to help. I couldn’t believe my luck. It was Roger Stott, the motive power for my sexual assault on Julian. He had shown great despatch and discretion then, and surely he would be equal to any demand I made on him now.

  Roger called out of the window and said he’d come and help. He brought a pushing chair with him, to transfer me. When I explained that I was meeting Luke out by the bus he raised his eyebrows, those George Harrison brows, but he didn’t pass comment. Rather pathetically I said, ‘It’s all rather hush-hush.’ Then he said something that was rather alarming, bearing in mind I had been impersonating Miss Willis as a prodigious insatiable harlot less than twenty-four hours previously: ‘He’s rather one of Marion’s pets, isn’t he?’ Well yes, but I clung to the thought that if all he wanted to do was denounce me there were better ways of going about it than making a rendezvous by the school bus.

  The school’s ABs paid quite a price for their over-class status. They might seem effortlessly superior to us, but they were being exploited all the same in a way that wasn’t necessarily to be envied. They were a mild form of slave labour, expected to help with the running of the establishment in a way that would have been unthinkable, surely, in a mainstream school. Even so, there was an obvious difference between an AB like Roger, who would positively offer to help, and the ones who undertook their tasks grudgingly and never did favours.

  Roger even offered to join me later if I wanted help getting back to the Castle, which was sweet although it may also have shown some curiosity about my meeting. Would half an hour be long enough? I had no idea, but I thought I’d better say yes. I w
as getting wildly excited and even a little panicky. Would Luke even come? Perhaps I’d be left alone with the pounding of my suspect heart.

  In fact he arrived when I’d hardly been waiting a minute. Luke Squires was as much a good-looking boy as Roger Stott, but in a different style. He was sleek with secrets. He had fair hair, which was always tousled, but tousled just so. And if Roger was the sort of incredulously handsome teenager who can’t resist looking at himself in any reflective surface, even the back of a spoon, Luke had the ability to glide past a mirror on his enchanted wheelchair without raising his eyes to it, and still to take in all the relevant information.

  Lesbian Sandwich

  As he approached I noticed again how smoothly he managed that wheelchair, but this time I also noticed what made his mastery of it possible. Luke was the only boy in the school to have the large wheels at the front of his wheelchair, and not the back. Most boys had to do some delicate finessing when it came to even a little bump, but Luke just lazily glided over, the little back wheel following obediently in the slipstream of his smooth momentum. Luke didn’t wheel along, he flowed. I’d been feeling pretty good about my electric wheelchair, even if it was the most basic model, but now Luke’s grace made me feel like a bumbler all over again. Not that his chair would have done me any good, without the strong, supple, only marginally spastic arms that powered it. Of course it was his air of sexual knowledgeability that gave his simplest actions a tantric aura.