Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  The black dot marks the tree line

  I had learned my lesson from Write Off Tuesday, to the point where I was able to write off whole clumps of days, and all without a drop of liquor passing my lips. Everything that was entering my system was legitimate and prescribed, but those are judgements which are subject to revision, and in any case, legitimate and prescribed can be very different from sane and sensible.

  When Flanny first took charge of me she put me on mefenamic acid, trade name Ponstan. It’s a member of the aspirin family – call it the family’s rich eccentric uncle. She also tried me on Doloxene, which is the trade name for dextropropoxyphene. That was all very well for a while, but then I was in the market for something stronger. So she moved me up to Fortral (pentazocine), which has been a controlled drug for ages now but wasn’t then. In that innocent time there was no warning black dot against such things in MIMS, meaning ‘restricted’. It had an unblemished reputation. It was freely prescribed, and no one ever said it wasn’t good at its job.

  In those days the MIMS was very straightforward about side-effects. It didn’t hesitate to spell them out. The Monthly Index was lagging behind the times. There were a good few toxicomanes out there (apart from me) for whom the desired effects were only part of the story.

  These days the MIMS is very cagey about (for instance) hallucinations, for fear of tipping the wink to people who are actively seeking them out, homing in on the extras and indifferent to the main thrust of the drug. One man’s poison is another man’s meat. One man’s sideeffect is another man’s illicit buzz.

  These were perhaps no longer the nursery slopes of analgesia, more like the middling pistes, but still far below the dizzy peaks of Mount Morphine. The black dot in MIMS marks the tree line, if you like, the point where the chill becomes permanent and life approaches the point of no return.

  If the phrase ‘a cocktail of drugs’ had been invented by this time, I hadn’t heard it, but I was already a dab hand with the shaker. While I was playing doctor with myself in this wholly irresponsible fashion Audrey would sometimes pester me to let her play nurse. She was a good girl. She wanted to help. In fact earlier in the day I had let her help me get my tablets out of their bottles.

  Medicine bottles weren’t childproof in those days, they were only John-proof. My hands can’t easily deal with any assignment much more challenging that manipulating a snapdragon. Pressing the cheeks of the flower, making its jaws close and then open again. That’s my style. Audrey helped me to line up the numerous antidotes to the day, Maya’s little cancellations of herself. Her expression was solemn and eager, as if she was concentrating on a tricky exam question.

  There was a mocking symmetry about the whole operation, all the same. Maya was having fun at my expense. In the past I had dosed Audrey, when she was a fractious child, with hundreds and thousands, sorted by colour and consequently charged with magical power. Now she was lining up the medication for me in her turn. The drugs weren’t sweeties any more, though I was wolfing them down no differently. I was treating the medicine cupboard, lavishly stocked from the local pharmacy, as if it was the Pick’n’Mix counter at Woolworths.

  Analgesics kill pain, and any excess of such drugs performs a function that can be every bit as valuable, mopping up consciousness, promoting oblivion. By this stage I couldn’t honestly have said which part of its operations was the more precious to me, suspension of joint pain or of the poisonous boredom of home.

  My drug use could slide in a single dose from the medical to the slyly recreational. In terms of pain I had my good days and my bad days. That summer I preferred the bad days. On my bad days I could gobble down the hundreds and thousands of nothingness with a clear conscience.

  A great advantage of the wheelchair was that it masked many of the effects. If my movements were poorly coördinated, who would ever know? Not everyone expected prodigies of mental alertness from me either. At home with Mum and Dad, ritual exchanges were the norm. I could fit in perfectly well while being, to be blunt about it, off my head half the time.

  So much for drugs. There was also a sex-scandal component to the family bust-up of summer ’72, and again it had its origins in the tapestry shoulder-bag. That bag grassed me up pretty thoroughly. It provided the authorities with evidence of more than one kind. There were any number of occasions in which my CHAPs acquaintances could have availed themselves of the convenient storage I innocently provided. Josh Tosh had entrances on more than one street, and could be used as a short cut. This short cut would inevitably turn into a long one, since we would end up dawdling by the perfume counter to try out fragrances from sample spray bottles. If I tried to hurry the party up, I too would receive squirts of clashing fragrances, asked which I liked best. There was sometimes a certain amount of rummaging in my bag, which meant that I was being used as a sort of mule in a narcissistic, mercifully small-scale shoplifting operation, smuggling an expensive bottle of Eau Sauvage or some such elixir past the gates of the shop and into the street.

  A stray copy of Nigel

  There was no cologne forgotten in the Greek tapestry shoulderbag, but it turned out to contain, along with the ancient roaches, a magazine. It was a picture magazine, and the pictures were of young men arranged in dreamy poses on piles of cushions, wearing socks and not a lot else. Looking sultry, if thumb-sucking strikes you as a maddening come-on. Some CHAPs fellow or other, some friend of a friend of a friend, had slipped this tentative smut into the community pocket and forgotten to retrieve it. So there I was, delivered into my parents’ hysteria by a stray copy of Nigel. Or was it Rupert?

  I can remember only too well. It was Jeremy. Mum brandished it at me often enough, waving it in my face as if she was a street-hawker trying to get me to buy the bloody thing rather than a mother losing her always elusive sense of proportion. ‘Where did you get this? Who else knows about it? Who sold you the drugs? Who sold you this filth?’

  I wasn’t going to admit to them that the magazine wasn’t mine. I refused to be ashamed. Of course it was stupid that Mum and Dad would think I had a secret life based round those insipid images. If I was going to overcome all the practical obstacles in the way of getting hold of a dirty magazine, I’d want something properly vile for my trouble. And someone who looked as if he’d been shaving for more than a week. Mum and Dad were both angry and upset, but through the chinks in the oblivion I had so patiently contrived for myself I could detect a complicating emotion. In some way Mum was partly blaming him for the rotten way I was turning out.

  Once again the Inquisition was on the wrong track. If Mum and Dad had wanted a sex scandal, they could have had one, and it would have been a little bit spicier than a few pictures of dreary ephebes languid on the pillows. I’d broken the law in a public toilet on the A505 outside Royston, on the way home from Cambridge. It wasn’t a private place, and still I had dared to have carnal congress with another man. No one had interrupted us, so my exhibitionistic streak was mildly frustrated. I wanted to shout out to the shocked air of Trees, Abbotsbrook Estate, Bourne End, ‘It only lasted a few minutes and it happened in a public bog, but it was bloody beautiful!’ Knowing that the words ‘bog’ and ‘bloody’ would have as much impact as the deed itself.

  The man who was my first real sexual partner said something wonderful to me. It wasn’t wonderful in a conventional way. He didn’t say, for instance, ‘People fear you and turn away from you, yes, and they are right to do so, since love flows in implacable streams from your eyes and loins alike. Your gaze and your desire pierce the fogs of matter. You must forgive people for feeling inadequate to such splendour.’ What he said was a thousand times better. He said, ‘If anyone comes in, I’m helping you out, okay, mate?’ Mate! We mated and he called me mate. He certainly was helping me out, though no one disturbed us so I couldn’t pass this revelation on. He was helping me out and no mistake. Afterwards he helped me to wash my hands. I let him, though I didn’t feel the need of any cleaning up. I didn’t feel soiled. I felt elevat
ed, charged up. This too I would have liked to pass on to Mum and Dad, not in a spirit of boasting, but humbly wishing to share.

  About the time that even the most ardent fan of androgynous pop might have been becoming sick of ‘Starman’, Maya took a surprising turn. The scene that I was absorbing through drifts of medicated meditation suddenly shifted in a way that made me sit up and take notice.

  My dud of a mantra froze in mid-repetition. It had never been a really effective transcendental tool since India – it had developed a slow puncture, but now it just went phut. Prissie Washbourne was shouting through the French windows, ‘Laura? Dennis? Is John all right? I’d like to see him, please.’ She wasn’t shouting out of rudeness, but because the music from Audrey’s room was so loud.

  Mum went to the windows to block any possible view into the room, and called out sharply through the French windows, ‘He’s fine,’ adding in an undertone, ‘Though I can’t see that it’s any of your business.’ Perhaps it occurred to her that Prissie might have heard this comment, despite the lowering of her voice. She sang out more sweetly, ‘Prissie dear, why don’t you come to tea tomorrow? Or at the weekend?’ Upstairs, Audrey must have realised that something out of the ordinary was happening. She took the needle off the record at last, and the sudden silence made the adults self-conscious.

  Prissie carried it off well, though. Her voice was firm as she said, ‘I’d like to see John now, Laura. I’d like to know what has happened to him. In fact I think I’ll just sit here on the lawn until I’m satisfied he’s all right.’ At this point Dad cantered to the French windows and roared, ‘Go away! You’re not wanted here!’ through the gap. Then he slammed the windows and locked them.

  He and Mum bundled me out of the room, charging into my bedroom with the wheelchair, then hauling me roughly out of it and laying me on the bed. They seemed possessed. The arrival of an external threat intensified the sinister impression of teamwork. It didn’t seem right that they were working so smoothly together. It was unprecedented. The soothing deadlock of their marriage had been violently broken, and the combination of drug scandal, sexual delinquency and an interfering neighbour had turned them into pantomime villains.

  They actually hissed ‘We’ll deal with you later’, before they rushed back to the sitting room. If the railway track had been any nearer I dare say they would have tied me to it. Perhaps they were saving that for later. I could hear them opening up the French windows again to shout at Prissie. Then the needle returned to its groove upstairs and David Bowie took up his invocations of the starman in the sky all over again.

  As I lay on the bed I tried to grasp what was happening, working from first principles. For Prissie to intervene so forcefully she must have grounds for worry. So how long had it been since I had left the house? Prissie wasn’t the hysterical type, and she wasn’t used to seeing me every day. This pointed to a long absence from the world. Had I been indoors being harangued for days on end, while I wrapped myself in the shawl of my drug use and the tatters of my mantra, trying ineffectively to concentrate on the blooming pangs of an amaryllida-ceous plant?

  Calligraphy in the sky

  It was only then that it occurred to me that I might have been held hostage for quite a few days. This nuance of life in Bourne End might have escaped me, disguised by a madness that had become familiar.

  While the shouting continued, ‘Starman’ maintained its monopoly of the turntable, but Audrey came downstairs to find me. If it was Audrey. It seemed not to be wholly Audrey. The girl who had geometrically modified some left-over party cake for my benefit was already somewhat different from the girl I was used to, but the one who came into my room was different again. She was determined and full of purpose. Her purpose was to help me escape. She would help me get to the garage and into the car.

  I can’t explain the change in her, except in terms of the song she’d been playing so loudly upstairs. Not the song in itself but the message that rode on those frequencies, the signal below the signal. Ramana Maharshi had exerted himself once again for my benefit. The guru acts with obliquity and tact, and Bhagavan’s miracles in his lifetime were always discreet. They didn’t draw attention to themselves but shaded in with their surroundings. If there was a storm, for instance, and anxious devotees asked when it would stop, Bhagavan didn’t go out and shout down the elements in the style of certain spiritual showmen (such as Sai Baba, a holy man with a streak of ham a mile wide), he would just say, ‘I think it’s clearing up now,’ as anybody might, but those who were waiting to embark on journeys could pick up their luggage with confidence. The magic of the smallest intervention – homœopathy all over again.

  The reason for this is actually expressed in the lyric of ‘Starman’: a personage from another dimension would like to meet us but he thinks he’d blow our minds. A very elegant exposition of the guru’s polite use of a screen, a filter to protect us from rays too strong. When he was communicating with me in one of my dark times at Cambridge, the guru had tenderly ventriloquised Kafka. Now, with Audrey as his instrument, he was vibrating in sympathy with the voice of David Bowie, singing from the inmost marrow of the song, the core, where neither writer nor performer had ever been.

  I tried to gather my wits. I asked her how long I’d been stuck inside the house, but all she said was ‘Far too long. It’s time we got you out of here.’

  Before I could ask her to be more specific (had it been three days? more?), she had picked me up and carried me to the garage. She didn’t look strong, but she managed. The last time I could remember her trying to pick me up was when she was about five. She had gone through a phase of wanting to lift me because she saw Peter doing it (very put out when she was told she was too young). Now she had her moment of heroic porterage – for a few steps, and then our mode of motion became the conjoined stagger-hobble.

  It would have been easier for us to take the wheelchair, but Audrey seemed to know exactly what she was doing. It’s more common for the guru to speak through a person than physically to take over, but perhaps that’s what was happening. It’s true that Audrey was soon breathing heavily and making little grunts of effort, but the presence of the guru is also a great strain on the organism that houses it.

  I prayed fervently that Mum and Dad would keep on bawling at Prissie, and that she went on answering back. If the showdown played out too quickly they would see that I was gone and intercept me double quick. I thought that Prissie’s earth-mother persistence, once roused, would see me right. Failing that, I prayed that Mum would wail, ‘I’m at my wits’ end’ and rush upstairs. The stair carpet was worn thin by the scuffing of hysterical feet.

  Audrey helped me out of the kitchen by the rear door and round the side of the house. There was a side-door there leading to the garage. Of course there were stops along the way for changes of grip. She had to prop me up against the wall while she opened the back door, and again when we came to the garage. One more time when she opened the door of the car. But the moment we were in was so concentrated that everything seemed to happen in a single breath. To me that’s supporting evidence for this being actual intervention – not to minimise Audrey’s bravery and desire to help. Godhead itself is content to take the line of least resistance. Even Sai Baba didn’t make the lightning do calligraphy in the sky or dance in lazy loops. He worked in the grain of the wood.

  In normal life Audrey wasn’t afraid of the garage, but she was certainly afraid of the creatures that lived there. Spiders. Never before had she been so blithely indifferent to the presence of arachnid arthropods. Proof positive, as far as I’m concerned, that she wasn’t at the controls. She was growing up fast, but it’s a slow business overcoming phobias or (more likely) becoming more skilled at hiding them, better at coming up with cover stories.

  Audrey slipped me smoothly into the blessed Mini and whispered, ‘Good luck, Godspeed.’ Except it wasn’t going to be quite as simple as that. I had to break it to her that I didn’t have the car keys. They would be on the hall tabl
e, where Mum put them in her periodic fits of confiscation.

  The car keys were one of our little battlegrounds, cause of many a tussle. I liked to leave them in the ignition of the Mini in the unlocked garage, but she was all against it. I reminded her that she was always saying that one of the reasons we had moved to the Abbotsbrook Estate was that it was safe from thieves – unlike the long-ago married quarters they had lived in when I was a baby, where her wedding-ring had been stolen from the sink where she had been doing the washing-up when she looked in on me for five seconds to make sure I was all right …

  Mum said that leaving the keys in the car was asking for trouble, but how was it any riskier than Peter and me sleeping with the door open? Not that I said so, for fear that she would act against that privilege also, in the name of consistency.

  So the hall table was where the keys would be, and Audrey must go back for them. She swallowed once or twice at that, but she was still game and guru-guided. For the two short minutes she was away, I tried the worn-out syllables of Om Mane Padme Om one more time, but they did nothing to slow my racing heartbeat. My mantra was like a tyre worn smooth. It had no grip. Really, I would have done just as well with ‘Starman’, or indeed ‘When You Wish upon a Star’.

  Contrary to Dad’s precept in his guise as my driving instructor, I hadn’t backed the Mini in. I had been lazy and would have to take the consequences. I was facing the rear wall of the garage. I would have to back my way out. This would be a type of manœuvre that doesn’t feature in any driving test that I know of – the emergency start.