Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Patrick felt awkward showing me the ring, on the usual basis. Any activity seemed to be inhibited which might draw attention to my incapacities, and my fingers certainly couldn’t provide any sort of perch for the ring, but what was Patrick going to do, refuse me? When I was at my most pretty-please-with-cream-and-sugar? He pulled the ring off his finger and held it over his palm. Then he dropped it those few inches, giving it just enough of a spin for it to come apart into its connected fragments before it landed. Then he put it back together at top speed, racing through the enigmatic moment when a looping-the-loop movement was needed to make the individual rings nest against each other properly and coalesce into a unit, their kinks unified into a sort of turk’s-head motif.

  I wasn’t satisfied. ‘You haven’t told me the story. The story is a part of it – you can’t show someone the ring without telling the story. You have to do it again.’ He sighed and said, ‘All right.’ He dropped it back into his palm and the one ring became many.

  ‘Once there was a Sultan …’ – the owners of other identical rings might say Maharajah or Sheikh, we had a very undifferentiated sense of the exotic – ‘who gave his wife a silver ring to be sure of her fidelity. Everyone in the kingdom’ – if I was feeling mischievous I might correct him with ‘Sultanate’ – ‘knew the ring of the Sultan. Now the Sultan went away on a journey –’

  ‘Was he a Muslim?’

  ‘Er … possibly. Why?’

  ‘He might have been going on the hajj, you know, the pilgrimage to Mecca.’

  ‘Fine, he went on a pilgrimage. But before he left he gave her this very special ring. Then while the Sultan was on pilgrimage, to Mecca, his wife fell in love with a noble at court. With her husband’s deputy.’

  ‘Deputy?’

  ‘Chancellor.’

  ‘“Grand Vizier” sounds better. Go on.’

  ‘The Grand Vizier fell in love with her too, and they went to bed. But before they did, she took off the ring …’

  ‘Why did she do that?’

  ‘Because it was her fidelity ring and she was being unfaithful.’

  ‘Why not leave it on, all the same, with someone who knew all about it? The story would work better if she was going to bed with someone who didn’t know she was even married – say a travelling lute-player.’

  ‘How is a travelling lute-player going to fall in love with the Sultan’s wife and not know who she is?’

  ‘She could go to a concert of his in disguise.’

  ‘And then she says, “Come back to my palace for some Turkish delight?” How’s that going to work any better?’

  Eventually we’d hammer out a more or less plausible story. If I suggested that a sensible adulteress would carefully slip the ring off her finger and onto, say, a candle, he would agree rather uneasily and then say, rather desperately, that the lovers were so passionate that the candle fell off the Sultana’s dressing table. Sometimes I could persuade him to say ‘Sultana’. A burst of invention along those lines would cheer him up. The point of all this from my point of view, of course, was to make him concentrate on the narrative – on the Sultan returning so that the wife panics as she tries in vain to reassemble the pledge of her honesty – and not think of his hands while he spoke.

  Not all hands are beautiful. I’ve seen plenty that have made me feel happy with what I’ve got. But Patrick’s hands were both large and handsome. It was part of the mystery of the twins that they should be so broad and well-built. It seemed miraculous that a single wombful could yield such a tonnage, even after a decade and a half’s regular feeding.

  At the end of the demonstration Patrick would return the ring to his finger – the little finger, the only one on which it would fit. Perhaps it really was made for a woman’s hand, though there was nothing effeminate about the way the cheap silver gleamed on his adult paw, despite the nails left a little long for extra purchase on the fretboard of his guitar. It was the other, plucking hand which had the calluses on the tips of its fingers.

  As he slipped the ring on, I could see the grey-green ghost of its tarnish on the finger. The Sultana herself either had a higher grade of silver jewellery, or gave her hands a good scrub before she risked betraying her marriage vows.

  Meaning osteotomy

  While I looked at Patrick’s hands, he was preöccupied with my right knee, and how bent it was. He asked me if it hurt, and I tried to laugh it off by saying, ‘Only when I pole-vault.’ He said at least once, ‘I don’t know how you cope – I could measure that angle with my protractor!’ and I admit I winced. His protractor wasn’t the relevant part of his geometry set just then. It felt more as if he was sticking the points of his dividers into the unbeautiful joint which jarred his sense of proportion.

  I began to brood about it a little bit. My sense of unlovability began to take up residence in that knee. Perhaps he (or someone) would only be able to love me back if I did something about its ugly protrusion. ‘Something’ here meaning ‘osteotomy’.

  The cult of Broyan made a good stop-gap when I felt ill at ease with Patrick. In the early days I sat in the back of the taxi, and then I decided to change things. I took a vow to get myself promoted to the passenger seat, so as to sit by Broyan.

  It was roll-call all over again – a major campaign of attrition. When I was given a privilege I wanted to renounce it, but if I was treated equally I pined for my perks. And this time, when I’d got my way, with much wheedling and blackmail (greymail at the very least), I wished I’d left well alone. It wasn’t the same at all. Promotion to the front of the car didn’t solve anything. My head turns to the left much more easily than the right, so I saw no more of Broyan. What I really wanted to see was his thick neck, which didn’t look as if it could turn at all. I found myself wanting things the way they were, before I had shaped them to my will and spoiled the morning drive to school.

  I would sit there next to Broyan grieving while he drove, and dully revising my Latin, which wouldn’t go in. I seemed to have some sort of specific resistance to the language. Particles of Latin were so compacted they failed to travel osmotically in the normal way across the semi-permeable membrane of the page, and on into the language tanks of my brain. No sooner had I absorbed an irregular verb into my bloodstream than it was attacked and destroyed by the antibodies of ignorance. I had a pack of Latin Grammar cards (Key Facts) which I would wrestle with in the taxi on the way to school, a plastic pack of revision aids in its own little wallet, moderately well tailored to the measure of my hands. The process was satisfactory, but there was no product. Wasn’t I supposed to be good with languages? Perhaps it was just German that I was good at. Latin words just lay there on the page supine and senseless.

  Everyone else groaned at the very idea of grammar, but that wasn’t the problem with me. Mr Nevin had slogged me through all that at Vulcan, and I rather enjoyed it. Grammar was like the algebra of language, except that I could understand it. I could grasp the underlying structure of Latin, but not put flesh on its bones.

  I was entered for Latin O-level, but was regarded as very much a borderline case. The set book was Georgics IV – the one about bees. By rights I should have been fascinated by this snapshot of past attitudes to the natural kingdom – Virgil, like everyone else until about the eighteenth century, took it for granted that the supreme bee was a king and not a queen. Aristotle installed a piece of polished horn into a beehive so he could watch what went on, without managing to spot that it was a matriarchal society on the other side of that yellowy window.

  The exam was scheduled for a Tuesday. On the Saturday night I opened the book for one last despairing bout of revision, and the language looked quite different. It was lucid. It coöperated. Dead language or no dead language, it had come alive. It had only been lying doggo, and it wanted to play after all. The Key Cards shone with meaning in Broyan’s taxi on the day of the exam, as if someone had turned on a spotlight on the other side of a keyhole while I crouched to spy on the principal parts of verbs.


  In a strange way it was modern teaching methods that had held me back. Previous languages I had learned by rote and repetition, at least in the early stages, whereas Latin at Burnham was taught by stages, through progressive understanding. It’s a splendid notion, but I wonder if it suits the brain, really. It’s a question of neurology. To learn and understand at the same time is a perverse undertaking, like that silly thing people are always trying to do – what is it, to pat your head and stroke your tummy in a circle at the same time? It’s something like that.

  I know I’ve always managed better when I’ve learned mechanically and understood after the event. Fewer simultaneous mental processes are required. That seems to be the key. It’s best if new shapes are allowed to sink into the brain-mush undisturbed. Then they’ll pop up somewhere else, in another lobe perhaps, bathed in understanding. Whatever the exact mechanics of my late burst of comprehension, I who had given such ample grounds for doubt earned a 2 Grade and the school’s usual response to surprises of this kind, a little flattering sheaf of book tokens.

  The witching hour was 4.20

  One more thing I hadn’t really considered before I started at Burnham Grammar was that a day school only functions in the day. Another sad lapse of common sense, another bit of clever-person’s stupidity. The whole point of attending a mainstream school was to be absorbed into a wider world, but that wasn’t really on the cards. The problem was Broyan. The magic coach which carried me to the academic ball every morning also came to fetch me, and its summons was imperious. The witching hour was 4.20 rather than midnight, but that was a technicality. Yes, Broyan would wait, but why should he? True, Broyan was employed on a contract basis and there was no meter running except the one in my head (I was very aware that the local education authority wasn’t made of money). I could have sent him away but then my predicament, as a young man in an invalid carriage with no way home, would be at least as awkward as Cinderella’s.

  I was effectively debarred from teenage society by my exclusion from loitering. Teenage society and loitering are two words for the same thing. Without hanging around there can be no hanging together. I did my best to loiter in free periods, but you can’t get into the swing of loitering when you’re on the clock. In fact I was debarred from taking part not only by the practical difficulties but by my own exhaustion. I just wanted to ride back in Broyan’s taxi to Trees, where the cry of ‘The ruddy crutch!’ could almost sound like ‘Welcome Home’.

  Unable to build relationships with my fellows at the end of the school day, I couldn’t really hope to fill up my schedule at weekends, except with homework. So normally I would badger Dad into taking me to the library on a Saturday. That’s where I did my loitering instead, while Dad ran errands. I can’t imagine what they were, Dad’s errands – shopping wasn’t on the agenda for a husband and father of that vintage, except when it came to special errands to select things that women couldn’t possibly know about, such as wine.

  Dad wouldn’t stay when he took me to the library, not being on good terms with Mrs Pavey, whom he described as ‘doolally’, saying he couldn’t understand how she kept her job. It was true that she had her little ways, but none of the patrons minded that. We all have our little ways.

  Certifiably insane remedy

  Mrs Pavey was a martyr to migraines. Sometimes the pain was so bad that coming to work was out of the question, but more often she struggled in. She always wore a silk scarf – it was part of how she dressed for work – but when the torture inside her head got too much for her, she would blindfold herself with the scarf and lie down behind the counter. Regular users came to know the signs, and would process their own returns and borrowings, tucking the slips into the cardboard pockets and stamping the issue page, taking care not to make too much noise with the stamping machine. I suppose newcomers to the library must have found it strange that the person in charge was lying concealed behind the issue desk, moaning faintly at the slightest sound, but this was really only a tableau expanding on the sign on the desk: Silence Is Requested.

  Mrs Pavey treated her migraine with a standard remedy of the day. It was an incredibly exotic, certifiably insane remedy, but in those lax days it was readily available. It was called Cafergot Q. A chocolate-flavoured, caffeine-enhanced chewable ergotamine. They looked like sweets, and Mrs Pavey gobbled them down as if that’s what they were. When she went to Bourne End surgery for a repeat prescription, our rather flinty GP Flanny (Dr Flanagan) couldn’t believe how much she’d got through. Two months’ worth in ten days. She didn’t make a fuss, since after all in those days a chocolate-flavoured, caffeine-enhanced chewable ergotamine was all part of the pharmacological sweetshop, no more than a quirky flavour of Spangles, latently hallucinogenic. She simply said, ‘It’s a wonder your fingers haven’t fallen off.’

  Mrs Pavey was a sweet woman, melancholy-seeming even when her brain wasn’t held in its vice of pain. Her skin was oddly creamy and her blue eyes had a lot of grey in them. She lived with her elderly mother, and I never heard a Mr Pavey spoken of.

  Sometimes after she had done a particularly inspired bit of truffle-hunting on my behalf, running down some esoteric oddity in the stacks, I would pay her a visit in the library to express my thanks. She would shy away from my gratitude, dismissing it almost, as if she was only doing her job. Which was true, but if everyone did it at that level then ‘job’ would be a holy word.

  One Saturday in the library I came across a book on shorthand, and immediately decided I must master it. I loved the way shorthand looked. It seemed to be an entirely alien language, yet it was still English under the surface of squiggles. When I started to study it seriously I was disappointed to learn that the shapes of related consonants – p and b, say – were the same, the only difference being thickness of line. Perversely I wanted every sound to be represented by a different shape, which would have turned Pitman into mere hieroglyphics and made huge demands on the memory.

  I could never make the pens work anyway.

  Campy spoofing

  I transferred my allegiances from Pitman to Gregg, a rival system which did at least use differences of size, if not shape. I got hold of a magazine from the library which promised to teach you eighty new short forms a week. I enjoyed the element of esoteric knowledge, writing words that not one in a thousand people would be able to reconstitute – I suppose it was Yod Hé Vau Hé all over again. I didn’t really see shorthand as a means of communication, more a cipher with considerable ornamental merits. There was nothing ‘short’ about it. Everything took a lot longer than if I’d used the uncryptic full-length forms.

  It was always against the odds that I could hide an actual object, so my interest was drawn to metaphysical hiding, in other words to secrets. It mattered relatively little that they were secrets everyone knew already, under the heavy disguise of shorthand, or had no interest in, like the arcana (major, minor and downright silly) of the Tarot.

  I had turned down all Dad’s offers to buy me a subscription to the Telegraph, but I sometimes read the paper just the same, if he left it lying around. It’s really only my hands which are satisfied with a tabloid. Sometimes I want a broader view than I can comfortably hold. Mum would occasionally fold the paper into a tight little packet for my benefit. One day I read a review of a novel that set whole peals of bells ringing. It was called The Ring by Richard Chopping, and it was a story of love between men. Hateful, horrifying love between men. Now that I think about it, the book’s title, even its author’s name – Dick Chopping! – show signs of campy spoofing, but I wasn’t attuned to that then. The Telegraph review was full of a mesmerised disgust, and I immediately knew this was a book that would change my life. It was ‘savagely frank’. I must read it immediately.

  I induced Mum to order this sulphurous book from Mrs Pavey’s library, to pick it up when it arrived in stock, and to deliver it to the family home in the basket of her bicycle. Better for so radioactive a volume to be transported in a lead box. I worried that the cove
r of the book would betray its contents. That would be no way to repay Mrs Pavey for all her thoughtfulness, tracking filth all over her nice clean library.

  When Mum gave me the book, I saw that it had no dust jacket, just a plastic sheath over the hard cover, and I wondered if there was censorship involved. Then again, Mrs Pavey might not even have set eyes on the book. Mum told me that she had been having one of her bad days. Her bad days tended to come along in little groups, festivals of migraine.

  I quarantined myself from the public spaces of the house and read The Ring in my bedroom. If Peter was around then I hardly noticed him. It was a wonderful experience. I don’t mean necessarily that it was a wonderful book, but it was a wonderful thing for me to read at the time. I needed a hero, and the central figure of the book gave me one. Boyde Ashlar, ‘thirty-four, handsome and not untalented’. A name to savour. He was my James Bond, I suppose. I’d read some Bond books when the craze was at its height, and I’d got something out of them, a sort of second-hand worldliness (which is what adolescents crave, after all), but Boyde Ashlar instantly superseded him. He gave me second-hand romanticism and second-hand self-hatred as well, more than Bond could ever do. What do I remember from the book? Not very much. The hero lived with his hideous bloated mother in separate parts of the same house, communicating by way of a speaking-tube.

  I remember one very exciting phrase, about Boyde Ashlar after an unfruitful night out ‘returning to his onanistic bed’. I seem to remember that he had a less manly, chattier friend. If ever Boyde caught sight of an attractive man, this friend would say, ‘You’ve gone all cock-eyed, dear.’

  Boyde Ashlar gave young men the eye at flower shows – so why shouldn’t I? Given licence by a fictional character, my eye contact grew in daring and intensity. I had a few nice looks back, and that was all the encouragement I needed.