Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  The trick seemed to work differently from the medication. Instead of the pain going away, I went away from the pain. I was practising a sort of home-grown meditation. It was hardly surprising that my method wasn’t very sophisticated. Transcendental meditation hadn’t hit the headlines just yet – I dare say the Beatles were only just beginning to hear of it. But it was a lot better than nothing, however rough and ready my technique.

  Only when I had been transferred to CRX for my rehabilitation, did I get an explanation of why the discomfort had disregarded the promised limits. How my body had failed to coöperate in its mauling as everyone had assured me it would.

  CRX seemed to be where I ended up when no one else knew what to do with me. Sometimes I wondered what would happen if I died – would I wake up in CRX on Ward One Thousand, with the tea trolley looming and Ansell doing her rounds, ready with another display of medical words I didn’t understand?

  When I was installed in Men’s Surgical Ansell sat on the bed and came as close to an apology as an authoritarian ever can. ‘John,’ she said, ‘I’m not in the habit of lying to my patients – in fact in the past I’ve got into trouble for telling them too much of the truth. But in your case, though I didn’t lie, I discounted a crucial aspect of your case and seriously misled you as a consequence. My excuse can only be that you – my dear John – are so very unique.’ Ansell was teetering on the brink of tenderness, such a joyous novelty that it even interfered with my pedantic urge to point out that there can be no degrees of uniqueness. We’re each of us unique, or at least that’s the idea we all (identically) cling to.

  There were considerate actions as well as kind words. Ansell scrounged up a set of linen sheets from somewhere, for old times’ sake. My wardmates made do with cotton, but flaxen whispers lulled this battered body to a threadbare sleep.

  Ansell at her softest got through to me. My sense of natural justice, which had become badly inflamed and even infected in the aftermath of the operation, began to heal over at last.

  Brimpton or Frilsham

  The reason for my swearing, all my foulmouthed groggy screaming, was that from a surgical point of view I was such a special case. One of a kind. It’s possible to get just a little sick of being Mr Special.

  There was something different about my history. It had been in my medical notes from my first week at CRX – in red ink, by rights – and still it had somehow been forgotten. ‘The illness has raged’, as Ansell had said the first time we met, and there was nothing to be done about that.

  There had been no point in putting me on steroids so late in the day. In my whole life I had only been put on cortisone for two weeks. No time at all.

  All this was on the record, yet had somehow been missed. People always worry about not noticing the small print, but sometimes it’s the large print that becomes invisible. It’s something that happens when you pay very close attention to a map, until your eye is calibrated to spot the tiniest hamlet with the silliest name (Brimpton, say, or Frilsham), and BERKSHIRE, or ENGLAND itself, looming hugely in widely spaced capitals, eludes you completely.

  So we had surprises for each other in the operating theatre, the surgeon and I. He was expecting bones softened up by steroids. He felt entitled to that amount of coöperation from the raw materials of his art, before he went under the flesh to find my bones and save them from themselves. But softness was not what he got, anything but. My bones were hard-core.

  I was expecting skilled intervention of a routine sort, a more sophisticated version of a householder changing a plug. It’s probably a bit of a fantasy, my idea of the standard operation from which mine deviated so sharply. I seriously doubt whether the pins ever actually slide into the bone-putty, with the surgeon hardly needing to bother with his drill – whistling tunefully as he instals the spare part into the machine disassembled on his bench. But my case, at the opposite end of the spectrum, was more abattoir than workshop. It was certainly no sewing circle.

  My hip was so dense and so fused that the designated engineer couldn’t get any purchase on it. In the end he had to break the bone, in the only way he could think of. That was the surprise my body got in its sleep, the nightmare which made it wake up screaming. The surgeon sitting on my left hip to break it.

  He didn’t perch gingerly on my hip, as you might mime sitting on a balloon in a party game, since the idea after all was to break it. He had to come slamming down. It must have been more like what happens when schoolboys misbehave in a playground they’re too old for. I don’t mean the ones who sprint to the swings to exploit the unlimited power of their teenaged bodies, making time stop as they pause at the highest point. I mean the ones who monopolise the seesaw, bucking and plunging wildly until the pivot groans, slamming themselves down onto the seat after being suspended so high above it that you can see blue sky beneath their uniform trousers. It must have been like that in the operating theatre at Wexham Park Hospital, Slough, until the pivot of my hip finally gave way beneath the grimly bouncing surgeon.

  I could tell that Ansell was being sincere in her apologies. She took an interest in my diet, recommending wholemilk yoghurt to build me up. Calcium, I suppose, for healthy bones. She tried to get me to gain some weight, putting me on a course of anabolic steroids, making sure I understood that they weren’t the same sort of steroids that were prescribed for Still’s itself.

  Cream of yoga

  Yoghurt seemed a very exotic substance to me then, but I liked its grainy sourness from the start. Mum started making it rather than go to all the trouble of tracking it down – yoghurt was hard to find in the mid-1960s, at least in the environs of Bourne End, a town that was no great magnet for epicures. Making yoghurt was hardly a more conventional occupation than taking asses’-milk baths, come to that, but it didn’t take long for Mum to get the knack. She would cook the milk, reduce it through evaporation, add the live culture and then leave it in the oven on the lowest setting.

  I acquired a real yen for yoghurt, partly because it seemed to me linked to yoga and to yogis, two things that fascinated me. It pleased me to think I was consuming Cream of Yoga in slow spoonfuls. False etymology can be very seductive, but it couldn’t help me to put on any weight, and Ansell continued to fret over me.

  I don’t know how long it was supposed to take a normal case to rehabilitate after McKee pins, or even a normal case of Still’s. In my case it took a good six months – and that was just one hip. A fused joint with only a shred of tenuous muscle attached to it doesn’t come back from the dead so easily. We were dragging my hip out of the Stone Age and into the twentieth century.

  In the short term (which actually lasted rather a long time) my new hip brought total immobility rather than walking power. I was back in the suffocating cocoon of bed rest, after all the trouble it had taken for me to pupate the last time.

  Books were my life-raft – or books were the sea on which my life-raft bobbed. My reading lists got me through that time, both Mr Latham’s and Mrs Buchanan’s. I loved Pamela, and it’s gloriously long. I pretended to groan at the very idea of long books, but secretly I adored them. My impatience was put on. I was like the child on a journey who keeps on asking, ‘Are we there yet?’ but actually wants to be told, not ‘Nearly, darling’, nor ‘Pipe down you little pest!’, but ‘Nowhere near’. We’ve hardly started.

  Even so I took a break between Book 1 and Book 2 to read The Catcher in the Rye. If my Premium Bond (I had just the one, a present from Granny) had come up and I’d received some fantastic jackpot (say £1,000), I would have hired someone to make the experience of reading less physically taxing. I wouldn’t have minded being read to, though I like to hear a book’s voice in my head without anyone else intervening, but an infinitely adjustable human lectern would have been even better, to hold the book at a suitable distance in front of my eyes for hours on end, so I could rest my arm and didn’t have to stop reading until my brain itself was tired.

  I shouldn’t exaggerate. Reading wasn’t that much
of a martyrdom. Granted, having palms that can’t turn and face me is an obstacle to cradling a book as other people do (though it would have to be a light book to be manageable – this explains my fondness for pamphlets). On the other hand, my left elbow being fixed immovable has certain compensations. I can lie on my left side with the elbow tirelessly holding the book open, though these days my left eye tends to lacrimate (without any particular reference to the content of the book) when I hold the position for too long. In those days, though, my tear ducts were in fine fettle, and any crying I did for poor Pamela was properly symmetrical.

  Pain and the radio

  Sometimes while I was reading Pamela ‘Pamela, Pamela’ would come on. ‘Pamela, Pamela’ the song, by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. It’s almost perverse, the convergence between pain and the radio. So many songs have reached me through an intensifying filter of bodily distress.

  The two Pamelas worked quite differently, of course. Today I could pick up Richardson’s Pamela and read it afresh, overriding my previous impressions – but ‘Pamela, Pamela’ is hopelessly porous. I can’t hear it except with teenaged ears. It’s a magic hanky in which my tears will never be dry … A song about growth and regret, really. When the rest of your childhood forgets as a dream / And the harshness of life dims those peaches and cream. God-awful grammar, mind you, but still young Wayne had put his finger on something. I was just mature enough to regress emotionally.

  Reading is the worst possible mechanism for making time pass. Reading makes time unreal, not by shrinkage but expansion. Look up from your book and be amazed at how little the clock has moved while you entered the stream of mental events. How freely books pour into consciousness. Those books, Salinger and Richardson alike, were doses of atropine instilled into my mind’s eye, dilating it to admit a stream of rich blurred images.

  There was some startling stuff in Catcher in the Rye. One passage in particular made me tense up while I read, though my lying posture made it physically impossible for anyone to look over my shoulder and surprise my guilty thoughts (if I was benefiting from a hired bookholder I would have had to work on my poker face). He said it didn’t matter if a guy was married or not. He said half the married guys in the world were flits and didn’t even know it. He said you could turn into one practically overnight, if you had all the traits and all. He used to scare the hell out of us. I kept waiting to turn into a flit or something. The funny thing about old Luce, I used to think he was sort of flitty himself, in a way. He was always saying, ‘Try this for size,’ and then he’d goose the hell out of you while you were going down the corridor …

  Perhaps America was uniquely wicked. Otherwise I could reasonably hope to encounter that sort of thing in the corridors of Burnham Grammar School, when the next phase of my mundane education got under way at last. I would have to keep my eyes peeled and my wheelchair oiled for every flitting opportunity.

  Surly crackle

  During my rehabilitation I had to adjust to an unfamiliar style of physiotherapist. The previous physios I had known, the two German ones at CRX, though as different as night and day, poison and balm, had both been what we would now call holistic. Each in her way addressed the whole person. Miss Krüger wasn’t satisfied simply with making pain, she wanted to snuff out something essential in the patient. That was her game. Perhaps it really was a game, and she wanted to snuff out her charge’s vital spark and then bring it back, as if children were like the Magic Candles in the Ellisdons catalogue which it was so much fun to blow out and watch rekindle after a few smoking moments.

  Gisela wanted to make me wholly better, not just the parts of me that lay under her hands. Now I was dealing with physios who took a narrower view than those thorough German ladies. When these ones spoke, it was only to say, ‘Again,’ or ‘One more time.’ Or ‘Same time tomorrow.’ They attended strictly to business and seemed to have been vaccinated against conversation.

  My life at CRX had begun on Ward One and continued on Ward Two. Now I had made it all the way to Ward Three, Men’s Surgical. Being on a male surgical ward was the first time I had been an adult among adults. The atmosphere seemed very benign, after what I had known before. Once everyone got acquainted it didn’t matter that there was no privacy. My wardmates would lend me their newspapers – always the Mirror or the Sketch, occasionally the Mail, which was definitely my favourite. The Mirror was physically compact, a tabloid, while the Mail was rather larger but not as big as the papers Dad favoured, a happy medium.

  They bought these papers from the WVS trolley in the mornings, along with cigarettes and magazines. I found tabloids much easier to manage from a lying position than the unwieldy quality press could ever have been. There’s nothing to be gained from reading a high-toned editorial if the recalcitrant unwieldy page keeps falling forward onto your face.

  Reading a newspaper not meant for Upper People was a real thrill. Sometimes at home, Mum would buy a Mirror out of the housekeeping. ‘Let’s take a peek,’ she said, ‘Just to see how awful it is!’ Then we would devour it, absolutely devour it. We pored over every page, reading against the clock since the paper had to be destroyed before Dad got home, every shred of it burnt.

  When Dad caught me reading the tabloids in Ward Three he was shocked that a son of his could sink so low, but he rallied and tried to bribe me into better habits. ‘Tell you what, John,’ he said, ‘What do you say to having the Daily Telegraph delivered every morning? Not just to the hospital, not just to the ward, but right here to your bed? Right into your hand? What do you say?’

  My fiscal mind got busy. At 4d a throw, I thought the Telegraph a scandalous waste of money. And six issues a week would come to two shillings! I asked for my pocket money to be increased by that amount instead, to seven shillings a week. I pointed out that this gave me the choice of how to use the extra cash. I might buy the odd newspaper, but would certainly make it last more than a single day.

  This attempt at striking a bargain was rejected out of hand. It had to be the Telegraph or nothing, and so it was nothing. Dad couldn’t see that I wouldn’t have accepted his offer even if I’d enjoyed reading the Telegraph. It would have driven a wedge between me and the men on the ward, who were kind enough to turn a blind eye to my reading just so long as I was discreet and didn’t start group discussions about the epistolary novel. They made sure the radio wasn’t so loud it derailed my concentration.

  I was back in the limbo of bed rest, but the limbo was different and so was I. There is actually no limit to the range of limbos – they’re like the greys on an infinite paint card. In various ways the new one was lighter, since I had consented to this period of deprivation and I knew what I had to gain from staying still. There was an end in sight, however distant, a horizon over which rays of unknown wave-lengths would eventually send their light. All the same, I wasn’t patient. My body would be seized every now and then with wayward energy, a surly crackle that could only be adolescence.

  At various times of life there have been words which have had a sharper significance for me than they did for the world at large. The first word of this sort was obviously ‘Granny’, not in my family a cloud of lavender-scented sweetness but the inventor of her own style of conversational judo throw, using her opponents’ strength against them and leaving them panting on the mat.

  The second such word was librarian. A librarian for me is a sort of lay magus, broker of knowledge and fascination, and all thanks to Mrs Pavey, the head librarian in Bourne End. She was a melancholy-seeming woman plagued by migraines, but remarkably conscientious. She didn’t see her job as passive, a matter of meeting requests merely. She anticipated needs. I think she saw herself as a sort of matchmaker, arranging encounters between books and readers whose affinities weren’t obvious. Love at first sight can look after itself. Love at second sight requires careful planning.

  So Mrs Pavey would search out books on subjects which Mum told her might interest me, to beguile those long months of rehabilitation, but she was a
lso quite capable of sending something along unprompted. You could never predict what might turn up in Mum’s bicycle basket, in the slightly sticky plastic covers that library books wore in those days.

  In Hinduism there’s a technical term for someone who has been well on the Path in a previous life and then stumbled. A brahmarashtra. The point being that such people are surrounded by helpfulness on their next go-round – just as everyone will be particularly patient with a learner driver who has failed the test a few times.

  Isn’t this exactly my profile? I’ve never felt hampered by an avarana, a veil of ignorance. I’ve been beetling after enlightenment from the word go. By ‘my profile’ I mean increased difficulties but a prodigal scattering of hints and clues, inklings galore, signposts as far as the eye can see.

  Come and get me, Copper!

  Mrs Pavey got hold of The Tibetan Book of the Dead at my insistence, though I must admit I found it a rather penitential read. There was just one wonderful idea in it, which I immediately made my own – that we choose the womb in the privileged instant between lives. The idea seemed very familiar. That jewel of insight was like the ear-ring which turns up at last in the dust-bag of the vacuum-cleaner. It gave me a sense of relief and restitution rather than new discovery.

  A real bull’s-eye of Mrs Pavey’s was Gardening for Adventure by R. H. Menage. Mum made a good pitch for the book. ‘It’s got a section on sundews,’ she said, ‘Venus Flytraps, pitcher-plants and butterworts. Mrs Pavey and I felt it would be right up your street. And it would give you and Dad something to talk about, and things to do when you come home …’ By saying this Mum was recognising a profound truth about the man she had married, that he was always happier and more amenable if there was a project of some sort on hand. Marriage did not fit his definition of a project.