Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Eileen couldn’t digest milk properly, or so she said, and would make up mugs of something called Slippery Elm Food. This was a powder which she added to a pan of milk to thicken it, making it porridgy and easier to absorb. It was like glue, in fact – it even said ‘mucilage’ on the packet. She told me she got it from Boots the Chemist. That too became part of our ritual, the sharing of Slippery Elm Food, that potable glue. We bonded.

  In our late-night sessions Eileen passed on the lessons which life had taught her. Her habit on holiday, in Ireland and elsewhere, was to look at the local paper and find out the times and places of funerals. She’d made many good friends that way over the years, going to the funerals of strangers, starting off with ‘I’m sorry for your loss’, playing it by ear after that. It sounds rather a splendid exercise, a sort of spiritual party game. Gatecrash the funerals of strangers, and end up recruiting them for your own. Not many funerals are standing-room-only, after all.

  She said I should try it myself, though I think she underestimated my personal distinctiveness, my sore-thumb tendency. That was the great thing about Eileen. She would come and help me out of the Mini and into the Home, but nurse-Eileen and chatterbox-Eileen seemed to be separate agents, and she would talk to me about anything. I told her that the only stranger’s funeral I had attended was in India, the pyre on Arunachala. I told her about the necessary piercing of the skull and the rearing-up of the body once combustion was established.

  Eileen took in the grisly details without dismay. From the look of her face it was unlikely that she was contemplating the end of human existence. She was probably wondering whether I’d complain if she started frying some rashers. Irish people never seem to say bacon. It’s always rashers.

  That first night I didn’t go to bed until well after two, and bedtime could be even later than that on the nights which followed. Then in the morning I’d give breakfast a miss, and not roll out of bed properly until ten or even eleven. This was more than respite, it was close to paradise.

  I would probably have met a certain amount of resistance during the day, but luckily Martha Green, who was in charge of the office, turned out to have a soft spot for me. She always wore gypsy scarves, advertising the free spirit within the administrator, and she knew how to keep everyone sweet. I’d call her a breath of fresh air except for her chain-smoking. Her cigarette consumption was conspicuous even at a time when smoking was seen as a human right, and faculty libraries at Cambridge still had designated tables for smokers.

  Martha wouldn’t be able to defend me in frontal conflicts with our dear Director, but she could certainly block any complaints that came from Molly. Quite often there’s someone tucked away in the middle of an organisation who quite likes troublemakers, as long as the conflict is amusing and can be contained.

  Meanwhile I benefited from what the establishment offered without needing to feel either respect or gratitude. I had a friend at night and a nice balance of forces during the day: an ally in the office and an enemy cleaning the floors.

  Molly hadn’t retaliated in any real way for her humiliation at my hands, or so I thought. Just the once she hissed, ‘You think you can live by your own rules, don’t you? You’ll find out soon enough.’ It seemed logical that she would keep her counsel about the incident with the stick and not make waves. There were only two witnesses, Louise and me. It made sense that Molly would keep quiet.

  I’m glad I didn’t know that she was phoning Mum up and telling her that I was upsetting everybody in the Home. That I was evil. She must have broken quite a few of the rules of the establishment to get hold of the number. The Director’s office certainly had a lock, as I had pointed out in our interview, but perhaps it wasn’t used very often. Or she had got hold of a copy somehow.

  If Dad had happened to pick up the phone, he might have enjoyed the conversation in his own perverse way. I can imagine him hearing this stranger’s voice describe his son as evil, and coming back with something quite unexpected, along the lines of:

  ‘You don’t have to tell me! I’ve had years of it. What with one thing or another you’d think John would have learned to fit in by now, but that’s not the way he does things. Gets it from his grandmother, I dare say. Count yourself lucky she’s not in residence where you are! Thank you for bringing me up to date about his activities, my dear. I might have guessed he’d not lose his gift for rubbing people up the wrong way. What did you say your name was?’

  But no – she had to get through to Mum. That was bad luck. It could never be that way with Mum, the taking things lightly, making a joke of it. She didn’t have any equivalent of Dad’s oddly slippery character armour. I wonder if Molly called in the evening, when I was actually in the pub down the road from Trees, when Mum might be able to hear me laugh, or the drone of my pontificating on the breeze. Molly had only made the call in the hope of making mischief – she wasn’t to know that the mischief had already been done. You might say it had been done before I made Mum’s acquaintance.

  These were not good times for her. Sooner or later it was inevitable that word of my banishment or apostasy would reach the sewing circle, and then the joy must have gone out of Mum’s needlework.

  It’s not something I particularly want to think about. I was lucky in the Washbournes, luckier yet in Eileen. The conspiratorial late-night atmosphere of our chats seemed to put Slippery Elm in the category of bootleg liquor, moonshine whisky, though it tasted much like oatmeal.

  Some people like to sniff glue, apparently. I’d rather drink it. Ten grains of the powdered bark will make a thick potion with an ounce of water. Ulmus fulva, as I didn’t then know to call it, of the family Ulmaceæ. Also known as the Red Elm, the Moose Elm, the Indian Elm, its virtues well known to the American aborigines, who used it as the basis of a healing salve. Demulcent, emollient, expectorant, diuretic, nutritive, astringent, anti-tussive and vulnerary, it is altogether a boon to the herbalist or freelance practitioner, not to mention the tireless self-medicator and respite-home rebel, returning back to base half-cut. It is tolerated by the stomach when all other foods fail, provides unfailing respite for a digestion in disarray.

  The knife of advertising

  After my stay in the Cheshire Home I didn’t write an article for the News of the World. Instead I wrote to the magazine of the parent organisation, delightfully called the Cheshire Smile. Perhaps my letter was too literary, too steeped in the imagery of the Alice books. I told them that while I was staying in the Home I felt I’d fallen down the rabbit-hole and ended up in a topsy-turvy world where only the Director’s door had a lock and everyone was told what was best for them, by people who had no idea. Perhaps I came across as one of life’s belittlers, someone whose only contribution is negative, but writing sunny letters of complaint isn’t the easiest trick to bring off. They didn’t print my letter, and I only got a standard acknowledgement, so from that point of view it was the Busy Bee News from hospital days all over again. I should really have kept on at them. Persistence pays off in these things. Rejection doesn’t stand a chance in the long run.

  Back at Downing after my respite at Gerrards Cross I was starting my last term as a student. Certain things had to be faced. I arranged an appointment with the department of the university which gave advice about careers, the Appointments Board (but universally known as the Disappointments Board), and had a good meeting with someone called Bill Kirkman. A delightful chap, obviously very taken with me. He kept saying that it was obvious I’d be ‘quite excellent’ at something, if we could only work out between us what it might be. Somewhere in the cosmos there was a jigsaw puzzle missing a piece of exactly my quite excellent shape – but not necessarily in the Cambridge area.

  Bill Kirkman had obviously sat on his glasses at some stage and bent the stems out of true, because he couldn’t make them sit on his face properly – one side or the other was always sticking up at an angle, however often he adjusted them. He asked me if I thought the UKAEA might be my thing. I gave it a lot of tho
ught, tilting my head this way and that as if I was trying to make sense of the world through my own pair of lop-sided glasses.

  There’s no denying the glamour of a set of initials. Perhaps UKAEA was some sort of cousin organisation to AMORC, the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis. I said it to myself: You-Kay-A. It sounded like the name of a Maori god. I said that I thought this might indeed be my thing, though in fairness it did rather depend what the UKAEA actually was.

  ‘It’s actually the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority.’

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I don’t think the UKAEA is going to be my thing after all.’ The isotopes of glamour can have a short half-life.

  His second suggestion seemed more promising. A firm called J. Walter Thompson was always interested in snapping up Cambridge graduates. I managed to get quite excited about that. ‘Do you think they’ll want me?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t see why not. Do you want me to set up an interview?’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’ I had heard of J. Walter Thompson as a giant in the advertising game, but until I had phoned Malcolm Washbourne I hadn’t realised quite what big boys ‘JWT’ were in his world.

  He was impressed despite himself, even while he warned me frantically against his whole line of business. I had no inherent interest in advertising, and Malcolm had warned me against it any number of times as a living death of the spirit – but sometimes when the inner and the outer voices coincide, it becomes a sacred duty to disregard them. Perhaps there would be a little niche for me in this baffling industry. Perhaps I would clinch the coveted Margaret Erskine Dream-Cloud account.

  I would dance with the devil. I would give J. Walter Beelzebub a whirl.

  On the morning of the interview, all the same, I found I wasn’t looking forward to it. I popped a Fortral or two into my mouth before attending, thinking this would make it more bearable. Always a risky assumption.

  The interview was held in some sort of meeting room in the Blue Boar, the town’s GHQ of meat-eating on Trinity Street. The first thing I was told was that I should ignore the camera – but I’d never seen one like it before. It was an enormous piece of apparatus, hardly smaller than what they had used when they filmed The Pumpkin Eater in Bourne End with Peter Finch, years before. They explained that it was the newest thing, a great breakthrough, and it was called a video camera. Soon they would be used in every interview, enabling employers to make entirely objective assessments of the candidates on offer.

  I managed to ignore the camera, but only by dint of staring at the lady who was doing the interview. She was American, had a pointy nose and wore a smart suit – but she had a hair-band in her hair. I hadn’t seen a grown woman wear such a thing before, but perhaps she’d seen it advertised and thought it looked smart.

  She started off making kneading gestures with her hands, as if there was a ball of dough on her lap, and her voice was soft and crooning. ‘Our goal is to get our audience to relax … we massage them … we let them know that they’re in safe hands … they can let down their guard …’

  Shamanistically delving

  It seemed to me while she was saying all this that her nose was getting longer (by several inches) and even more pointed. I tried to decide whether this was to do with the hallucinogenic effects of pentazocine, or if I was shamanistically delving into her inmost soul and putting together a portrait, a Photofit like the ones on the news, of the culpable demon of lies I found at her core. These are probably just two ways of looking at the same thing. It stood to reason, though, that if I got this job my shamanistic talents would be fully engaged. They’d be working overtime.

  Then the lady said, ‘When consumers are thoroughly at their ease, completely relaxed … that’s when we Plunge in the Knife of Advertising!’ She thrust her hand forward in a completely savage gesture, and I won’t even begin to describe her facial contortions while she did it. It was the most vicious display imaginable, and I gave a little scream.

  That wasn’t technically the end of the interview, but after that there was really nothing to be said. Why did I want the job? I didn’t. What did I have to offer the company that would set me apart from the other applicants? Well, let me see – I was on the phone.

  Somewhere in the archives of J. Walter Thompson there may exist video footage of the Knife of Advertising being plunged into the psychic flesh of an innocent bystander. I hope my scream on the soundtrack seeps into a thousand executive nightmares.

  So I declined Maya’s invitation to help change the fuel rods on nuclear reactors or to perforate consumers with lies about the things they were supposed to buy. My contemporaries grappled with similar choices, though I imagine they had a wider range of possibilities open to them.

  The good people of the Disappointments Board disappointed every body impartially, of course, but I rather felt that they had saved up something special for me. A bumper setback. Ridiculous of course for me to expect third parties to find me a place in life. The vichara is not to be delegated.

  It was fascinating to see that people went on asserting the values of the counter-culture right up to the moment they betrayed it. I have known students who talked about the underground press, the whole-food co-operative and those blasted kibbutzim right up to the day of their final interview with Unilever, and then suddenly started invoking the need to grow up and make a contribution to the economy. Youthful ideals being all very well and nothing to be ashamed of, but there being a real world out there which had to be dealt with sooner or later.

  The disconcerting thing was not how abrupt the transition was but how smooth, not how much people had changed but how little. They behaved like actors who find, after auditioning for Marat/Sade, that they have been cast in The Admirable Crichton, but are too polite to make a fuss. Barely a shrug of the shoulders, and on with the show.

  Of course change in nature can also be abrupt. The continuity between the caterpillar and the butterfly is anything but obvious. Sometimes the larva is physically bigger than the mature butterfly. Pupation, though, is a correspondingly laborious process. In these human cases pupation took no more than a moment, and the wings of the imago when they unfurled from the tie-dyed chrysalis bore pinstripes of grey.

  I couldn’t reasonably hope to develop wings of my own. I’d have settled for claws – anything to help me maintain my grip on my little world. At this point I was dangling desperately, a tree-shrew hanging on by its tail to the slender twig of what it knows. A cedilla clinging for dear life to the letter c without which it can’t exist. I didn’t feel as if I was writing the book of my life, I didn’t even think I was reading it. I felt like an insect crawling across its pages, who would be squashed flat when the volume was shut.

  I felt as necessary to the world at large as dandruff. I still had dandruff, and I knew how little I’d miss it if it went.

  Of course what I was feeling wasn’t unique. The heir to the throne had experienced something similar in outline three years previously, as his own graduation approached. His anguish didn’t paint the air, so why should mine? We live in a democracy, after all.

  Our experiences were similar in outline, very different in colour. For Prince Charles his years at Cambridge were a freer time than any he had known, or was likely to know again. Cambridge had been a sort of respite home for him. With his degree under his belt, he was back where he started, as Muggins Windsor, heir to the throne. It’s well known that the great self-enquiry, the vichara, is particularly hard for those who have been strongly cast in a rôle by ‘life’. In that respect I had all the advantages.

  I slightly regretted not having overlapped at university with the Prince, though I came across quite a few people who had met him. It would have been lovely to get him to carry me to the lavatory, or up and down stairs. I’m sure I wouldn’t have had to remind him that his motto was Ich Dien. I serve … We live in a democracy, after all.

  It was a great thing, or so I told myself, to be able to study for my Finals without any impulse to pani
c, knowing that the results wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference to my future. There was a further lining (tin, perhaps, or pewter) to the dark clouds hanging over my future, namely: the answer to the question ‘What will I be doing for a living?’ had been answered. I would be doing nothing, supported by a State which understood that my value was not to be measured by narrow criteria. And this suggested the obvious answer to another question, ‘Where will I be living?’ I would be living in accommodation arranged for me by local government. There would be some paperwork to be managed, but there was a system in place to support me.

  The local authorities didn’t quite see it that way. Which local authority, anyway? Where did I belong? Depending on which way you looked at it, I belonged either with the other Cromers or with the other graduates of my year. Having a choice of two possible home addresses turned out to be a fancy way of being of no fixed abode, of loitering without the faintest intent. I applied to Cambridge, but the choice wasn’t mine to make, apparently.

  There was much correspondence on this subject. It was almost flattering. Two authorities were competing not to take responsibility for me. It certainly made me feel important.

  I got hold of a copy of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act and tried to find potential leverage in that text. The most cheering thing about the whole document was that it was authorised by ‘the Lords Spiritual and Temporal’. With spiritual authorities in my corner, it seemed clear that there would be a happy outcome.

  I followed some of the bureaucratic tussle as if it was a tennis match in extreme slow motion. My case was bounced back and forth. Cambridge felt that I should be housed near my family (and far from Cambridge). Well played! Surely that was an ace?