Underlying crackle of dialectic
Hoff the Downing Casanova came to see me from time to time while he was living out of college, though we were never as intimate as when we lived on the same staircase. At some stage his cottage-loaf-made-of-wire hairstyle had been replaced by something modestly trendy, allowed to grow out without savage brushing but kept reasonably short, in a sort of home counties Afro.
For Hoff exclusively I would make coffee by the filter method, using Kenya Peaberry beans that had been ground before my eyes at the King Street coffee shop. Luckily in those glory days all my other visitors stuck to their preference, turning up their noses at the suspect brew I made in a glass vessel by a laborious technical process, boiling the kettle (filled with fresh-drawn water, of course) and then waiting two minutes for the temperature to be right. For this diehard group the filter method perverted the true taste of coffee, the powdered or granular joys of Nescafé. As far as these purists were concerned, unless it had been prepared for the jar using high-pressure industrial sprays, properly dehydrated or freeze-dried at the very moment that the flavour reached its peak, it hardly counted as coffee at all. My small-scale operation, with its plastic funnel and paper filter struck them as insultingly amateurish. Who was I to set myself up against Messrs Nestlé?
Considering the expense of Kenya Peaberry, this was handy. Of course it’s when life seems to be collaborating merrily with you, supporting all your little schemes, that you have to watch out. Luckily the sensation is very fleeting.
Once, very disconcertingly, Hoff said he wished I was a girl. Or rather he wished he had met a girl he got on with as easily as he did with me. My mind in a body he fancied – but then why would we be discussing his several protocols? ‘Girls are fantastic, girls are wonderful,’ he told me, ‘they shoot their stars across the sky and then they fizzle out. I’d never get tired of you, John.’
A mad thing to say, but touching too. And to a limited extent I could agree. My chats with Hoff were the closest I got in my Cambridge years to the university experience as promised and advertised. There was a nice Socratic feel to our conversations, an underlying crackle of dialectic, even if the subject was the sexual availability of young women. Getting into their knickers, to be perfectly frank.
Things might have worked less well if I had found Hoff the slightest bit attractive, but I didn’t. I wasn’t put off by the name-tapes on his socks or even the way he called ten thousand unborn cod, compressed into a tin, by the name of ‘lunch’. That wave-length simply wasn’t there.
On his last visit, at the very end of term, he brought me a present. It was an extremely thoughtful gift, positively disorienting in its attunement to my needs. I’m not used to people reading my mind, but if they can do it on special occasions, why not on a regular basis?
It was a simple enough piece of electrical equipment, an array of plug sockets, five of them side by side, on a short extension lead. It meant I could have all my devices on at the same time – record player, Anglepoise, electric typewriter, even my prematurely senile lava lamp – without the labour of juggling with an adaptor (itself a luxury) which would only accommodate two plugs at a time.
I don’t frequent electrical stores any more than I do shoe shops, but I was pretty sure that this wasn’t an item on sale to the public. It was a rather fancy piece of technology in those days. I went into raptures of entirely sincere appreciation, and managed not to mention two little details.
One was the timing. Hoff was passing on this highly desirable gadget only when he himself had no further use for it. He was leaving it with me rather than take it with him when he went down.
The other was the provenance. There was a strip of Dymotape stuck on the white plastic of the array’s body.
Dymotape, sublime Dymotape! Dymotape was a lettering system which printed raised characters on a long roll of self-adhesive tape. It came as a sort of ray-gun (or so it seemed to minds formed in the ’50s), with a wheel mounted on the top with which you selected the next letter, rather than ANNIHILATE or ANTI-GRAVITY, before squeezing the trigger to advance your message by a single space. The clever thing about it was that the plastic tape turned white under pressure, so that the raised letters stood out blanched and clear against the coloured ground. A final extra-strength squeeze on the trigger caused a blade to clip off the strip, while also nicking the underside so that it was easy to peel off the protective layer and expose the adhesive. I knew the pleasures of the machine only by watching, since it was no better suited to my handling than any other ray-gun (a ray-gun made to fit my grip would actually look alien), but even at second hand they were considerable.
The strip of Dymotape said PROPERTY OF THE CAVENDISH LABORATORY. By this time I knew Hoff well enough to be sure this name-tape was no joke, though Mrs Beddoes would never have suspected that this was stolen property, now that the riddle of the dictator’s socks had been cleared up. There’s no one so gullible as someone who’s been fooled once already, as long as you don’t pull the same trick twice.
University security was rudimentary in those days, and libraries suffered a steady leakage of their treasures. I imagine Hoff had crossed paths at some stage with a shopping-trolley filled with oscilloscopes, and had spotted and snaffled this humble device so well adapted to his needs (and in due course to mine).
Metaphysical oilskins
Stealing things was always described in those days as ‘liberating’ them, as long as the thieves were young and subscribed to a revolutionary agenda of some sort, but for once the word applied. Not having to struggle with plugs was indeed a little liberation.
It was entirely in character that Hoff should offer me a present only after getting plenty of use out of it himself, and also that he shouldn’t remove the incriminating tape in order to convince me that money had been laid out on my behalf. Yet even when any generosity had been so scrupulously scrubbed from the gesture, a residue remained. By Hoff’s sacred code of miserliness, passing on the socket-array at all was a sort of mad spending-spree, a morbid splurge of emotional extravagance all the more unsettling because its economic basis couldn’t be mathematically established. Consequently my thanks were heartfelt.
Hoff and I ‘exchanged addresses’, which is a more satisfactory exercise when you have one to give out. Hoff’s was ‘c/o The Dean of International Students’ at Harvard. He had won something called a Harkness Award to study there – a place where British plugs wouldn’t go in the wall.
It seems clear that my various inadequacies in friendship were no more than the social aspect of a spiritual crisis. As Maharshi often pointed out, and had first ventriloquised for my benefit through the pages of the guru Paul Gallico’s Snow Flake, the drop merges with the ocean, but the ocean also merges with the drop. I had tried to play my part in this merging, but my grasp on the fluid dynamics of the invisible was fatally faulty. The ocean of other people seemed to take the form of a vast waxed mackintosh, a set of metaphysical oilskins even, from whose slick sleeves this yearning drop was doomed to drip.
There was one fact I failed to consider in my pig-headed misery – that disappointment is a form of grace. What is disappointed is always the ego, cheated of its applause. Every breakthrough for the Self is greeted by the ego’s tears. When Self-realisation makes its entrance, then the jig is up with the ego, as the ego knows only too well. The ego looks forward to enlightenment the way turkeys look forward to December 25th (in Christian countries, and putting the question of nut roast to one side). And yet there is yearning underneath the dread, since despite all its fears the ego longs to be dissolved.
In those days of Cambridge summertime the grace of disappointment was poured down on me unstintingly, grace ubiquitous and grace abounding. If I wasn’t at my wits’ end, I was close to it. I phoned Graëme Beamish at his home, hoping he would somehow arrange for me to stay in mine – in A6 Kenny, where my Cambridge roots were if I had any. I needed just those few more days in residence, to bridge the gap until Mayflower House wa
s ready to receive me. Otherwise I was afraid it was a gap which I would fall into, never to be seen or heard from again.
When Graëme answered the phone, there was no trace of his stuffy academic manner. Was this a delayed effect of his sabbatical? If so, it had brought about a miracle cure. He gave plain answers to plain questions. If he had appeared to me in this version from the start I would have known where I stood with him at every point. We need not have struggled to find a wave-length. Unfortunately the reason for the transformation was that he had washed his hands of me.
He listened as I started an outline of the predicament I was in and then said, ‘John, I must interrupt. I’m not your moral tutor. You’re no longer an undergraduate. New rules apply. Do you make this appeal as a friend?’
‘Well … yes, Dr Beamish,’ I said, suddenly stricken. ‘As a friend.’
‘I have some friends among my ex-tutees, but I can’t honestly say you qualify as one of them. I have found you very difficult to deal with. Impossible to satisfy. It can’t be such a good idea to make it so hard for people to help you. That was your choice, though, and friendship didn’t come into it. I hope you find some way out of your difficulties, but I’m not the one to help you. Goodbye, John.’
At least I knew now how he explained himself to himself. I was difficult to deal with! I made it hard for people to help me!
I seemed to have very little talent as an exploiter of disability. I couldn’t seem to live up to its full potential as a way of manipulating people. Almost anyone else, apparently, would have made a better job of it. I lacked talent.
In some separate, safely seething part of my brain I planned a Day of Action – Day of Inaction – when everyone who had ever told me how to live my life was strapped into the wheelchair, glued to the crutch and the cane, and given as much time as they needed to show me exactly where I was going wrong.
The college reluctantly agreed to look after my stuff – a modest hoard by most standards but still far beyond my power to move or muster. It all went into store in some Downing cellar or outbuilding until I had somewhere to put it: the Parker-Knoll, the record player, the lava lamp, my frying pan, records and books. I would have liked them to chuck the lava lamp away, to be honest, but I could hardly ask them to sort through my things as well as store them. It was a relief to feel my belongings were in safe hands. Well, safe-ish. I never saw that copy of Kiss Kiss again.
Dormant in the academic dark
My property had a home, even if I didn’t. A couple of times in the past I had been treated as paraphernalia myself, on a par with luggage or furniture. I had travelled free of charge by train to hear The Who do their stuff, and I had been toted up Arunachala for a consultation with the Cow Goddess. I wasn’t lucky this third time, otherwise I’d have been stowed below ground for a few days with no harm done, a little human mushroom dormant in the academic dark, waiting for the moment to fling its billion spores into the future.
I would have to ‘manage on my own’ for three days. For three nights. What did the council think I had been doing for the last three years? Living off the fat of the land?
I still had the Greek tapestry bag which had let out all the secrets and illusions, Pandora’s bag with its embroidered lambda. I put in it the absolute necessities of life, pee bottle, photograph of Ramana Maharshi, wash bag. Breath mints, to make a better impression if I had to crank down the car window (it would take about ten minutes, so I’d have plenty of time to pop in a mint) in answer to a policeman’s polite tap on the glass.
I had three fifty-pence coins and a pair of two-pence pieces – a grand total of £1.54.
I parked the car somewhere quiet and inconspicuous. A side road off Victoria Avenue. I draped the Dream-Cloud round me as best I could and dozed off, exhausted by the stressful efforts of the day. It was July, but I was uncomfortable and by this stage considerably under weight. I kept waking up in the night freezing cold, and I would have to turn on the engine so as to reap the benefit of the heater. The windows were steamed with my recirculating breath. All in all, it was like waking up inside the lung of someone recently dead.
Running the engine without moving an inch burned valuable petrol, but after a few minutes at least the inside of the Mini felt more welcoming, an environment marginally able to support life.
Minis aren’t luxurious vehicles – they’re not intended for longterm occupancy. Mr Issigonis, despite Granny’s admiring comments, couldn’t do everything. I ached from the restrictions of posture, and it’s not as if I have a wide range of viable positions at my disposal in the first place. It would be just my luck to come through years of enforced immobility with the tissue more or less intact, and then to get bedsores from a few nights of sleeping rough. Normal life is abrasive. I don’t want a cocoon but I need a cushion. I can only stand so much of what is called ‘normal wear and tear’.
While I waited for the engine to warm up I would tune the radio to the World Service for a bit of company, some bulletins on fresh developments in the Kali Yuga. The car was very untidy, which is what happens when you give lifts to students, those tireless subcontractors of entropy. There were scattered sweet papers and crushed cigarette packets more or less everywhere. There was a sweet smell hinting at an abandoned apple core, but after a while the smell of urine from my pee bottle put that upstart aroma in its place.
Solitude in a cold car at night promotes introspection. I considered my progress. My life had opened up, as I had so much desired it to do, and then in just a few years it had contracted again, to what seemed to be, at this exact moment, some sort of vanishing point. I hadn’t expected a degree to give me the freedom of the city, let alone the world, but there must be some advantage to having one. Nevertheless the dimensions of my living accommodation, newly graduated as I was after gaining as much education as world-famous Cambridge University was willing to dispense, had a volume amounting to something between 127 and 134 cubic feet. Call it 130. Learning to drive had always been part of my plan, and I had made it happen with help from the late John Griffiths, and despite everything my fellow road users, notably Michael Aspel (not late whatever the cost) could throw at me. It had never been part of the plan for the car to become, in this eternal interim, my only home.
Here it was
There was no bottom to the vessel of disappointment, no end to its pouring out. The fountain of disillusionment has an infinite cubic capacity, and there is no slaking the thirst for an anti-climax. I was bathed and sluiced down by living streams of negation, the metaphysical liquids freely gushing from their transfinite tank, disappointment that can never run dry, a cataract of revealed futility.
Disappointment is a form of grace, and I was blessed beyond all expectation. I was no more than a stray eyelash which the unobserving world would never know it had shed, unmissed ciliary casualty, cedilla without a c to hang from. In some way this must have been what I wanted. I had made it clear from the start that it was important for me to confront the world on equal terms. Nothing else would satisfy me. I had waited a long time for the day when there would be no safety-nets, and here it was.
About the Author
Adam Mars-Jones has published two books of stories (Lantern Lecture and Monopolies of Loss), two novels (The Waters of Thirst and Pilcrow) and a collection of essays (Blind Bitter Happiness). His story ‘Summer Lightning’ has been hailed by the website Yarns Without Threads as a landmark of naturist short fiction (as opposed to short naturist fiction).
By the Same Author
LANTERN LECTURE
MONOPOLIES OF LOSS
THE WATERS OF THIRST
BLIND BITTER HAPPINESS
PILCROW
Copyright
First published in 2011
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2011
All rights reserved
© Adam Mars-Jones, 20
11
The right of Adam Mars-Jones to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–27229–7
Cedilla Page 88
