Cedilla (15 page)

As a newly acknowledged normal schoolboy, I came into my birthright of laziness. Schoolboys aren’t the most hygiene-minded of creatures. Along with the commode I was the proud possessor of a National Health bum-wiper, an elegant accessory in sculptural terms, a curve of perspex which looked vaguely like a snorkel. I was shown how to use it, but it was a bit of a business and I was happy enough with things as they were.

Mum and Dad, reluctant wipers, weren’t so happy. This was an area where they were united for once in wanting me to grow up, though normally Mum fought to hold on to her privileges. Meanwhile I dragged my heels. Re-learning something is very different from learning it the first time. There’s no glamour, is there? I knew I could do it, I’d done it well enough before I was ill, so there wasn’t a lot of incentive. I’d get round to it sooner or later. In terms of potty-training I was in a state of arrested development, in no great hurry to manage things on my own. This was a time when my personality was made up of plates of artificial maturity and babyishness which were always shearing unstably past each other. This too made me a normal schoolboy.

It was the swimming teacher at Burnham, Mr Marshall, who opened my eyes. He didn’t scold, he couldn’t have been nicer, but I got the message loud and clear. There was no actual provision for disabled swimming, no extra help assigned. Somebody was going to be neglected, either me or the rest of the class, and for once it was going
to be the others. Mr Marshall devoted almost all of his time to me, giving everyone else the dregs of his attention. I’m surprised nobody decided to drown out of pique.

My swimming lesson was really hydrotherapy rather than actual instruction, gentle supported movement in water. It would have taken all the buoyancy aids on hand to counteract the heaviness of my bones (I would have looked like a little Michelin Man, the advertising homunculus composed of tyres) if Mr Marshall had withdrawn his helping hand.

He even dressed and undressed me, and that’s how they came to light, the shameful stains that go by the jaunty name of skid-marks. Skid-marks, yes, if you must – but I hadn’t been the one at the wheel. So much for Mum’s high standards. So much for once-a-nurse-always-a-nurse.

I was struck by a thunderbolt of shame, there in the changing-room. I was about to explain that I didn’t wipe myself, but I stopped myself in time. There’s only so much of an alibi you can claim when your bum is the guilty party. Admitting that someone else did the dirty work at home would make me seem even less of a grown-up than doing the job, badly, myself.

So belatedly I got to grips with the instrument provided by a grateful Government. It wasn’t a picnic – the bum-wiper was a bit of a bugger to use. There was a slit in the perspex into which I was supposed to tuck a length of toilet paper. Then in theory I would pass the snorkel back between my legs, where my arms don’t reach, and dab away hopefully at my mucky bottom. With a little paper-folding (though origami was never really my sport) it was even possible to make several wipes with a single length of bog roll. I should make clear that by ‘single length’ I don’t mean a single rectangle between perforations. I’m not a magician! I needed six – four at a pinch.

The whole system was pretty unsatisfactory and first results not impressive. How to put it? The sensitivity of my anal region was more highly developed than the agility of the hands which wielded the tool. I felt sore afterwards but even so I wasn’t sure of being clean. If you don’t know for a fact that you’re clean, then you can only suspect you’re dirty.

Gradually I acquired a competence and then an expertise. Even
before my performance on the instrument improved, I began to see the virtue of the independence I had so stoutly resisted.

It was wonderful, a fundamental liberty. I had been given the title deeds to my anal zone at last. From now on I didn’t have to delegate the upkeep. I had the freehold, full ownership and full responsibility.

In illustrations of fairy stories the wandering hero, such as Dick Whittington, is always shown with his possessions wrapped up in a hanky (always spotted red and white, for some reason) tied to a stick across his shoulder, striding confidently into the future. I’ve never felt quite like that, but in my mental image the stick is my perspex bum-wiper, and of course the knotted hanky contains a supply of lavatory paper. O for a commode on the open road, and a star to steer her by!

Any fantasy of being the owner-occupier of this body, though, kept running into snags and obstacles. I was still reliant on third parties for a lot of the fetching and carrying, the basic maintenance on fixtures and fittings.

For the first year at Burnham I travelled to school by taxi. The cost was borne by the Department of Education, and the driver was always the same. My personal chauffeur, and my personal porter as well, since he lifted me in and out of the taxi. He hardly spoke, and he had the radio on in the cab all the time. I doted on him. His name was Broyan –
Brian
, obviously, but Broyan was what he said and how I thought of him. Anything working-class was far more interesting than the tedious world of the middle class. I was enchanted by the little I got to know about Broyan, his hobbies, his phobias, and I passed my enthusiasm on to Peter. We were quite the little cult, obsessively worshipping what we decided represented the wonder of the absolutely ordinary, the real. Broyan hated portion-control butter. ‘I like a bit of butter,’ he would say, ‘but I can’t stand those little
bitty
bits. It makes me go all shivery just to look at them.’ It was the idea of touching the foil that set off the horrors. He had to get his wife (his wife Joanne) to open them and keep the wrappers out of sight. The idea of Broyan going all shivery made me all shivery too.

To give a deep sheen to metal objects Broyan recommended something called ‘gunmetal blue’. I thought that sounded wonderful, and so did Peter.

Broyan and his wife sometimes went dancing at weekends. He
was getting used to the new style of dancing that was being done in Bourne End, so different from what he was used to. ‘Nobody does proper steps, mind,’ he explained. ‘Everybody just shakes.’ He demonstrated in his seat, writhing crazily. ‘They just go roop-ti-toop-ti-toop.’
Roop-ti-toop-ti-toop
. I couldn’t wait to pass that on.

If Broyan wasn’t really much of a talker, at least he whistled along with songs on the radio, not pushing his lips forward but producing the sound between his teeth in a way that seemed wonderfully earthy. I tried to do the same, practising around the house while Mum rolled her eyes and sighed.

My feeling for Broyan wasn’t really a romantic thing. I suppose he was the first person that had ever been served up to me on a plate, day after day, in conditions of neutral intimacy. My heart was involved elsewhere, heavily mortgaged. It was yoked to a double star. Paul Savage was a lovely person in his own right, a charmer and a tease. He was also a decoy. It was
Patrick
who was my infatuation. I was head over heels.
Patrick
was in italics permanently. Nothing he did or said could be neutral or unstressed. There were no roman characters anywhere in my infatuated font.

Did either of them know? I think they knew. I mean, they didn’t
know
. But they knew. They weren’t looking it right in the face, but they weren’t in the dark either.

And talking of looking things in the face, that was a strange thing … I noticed that I could make
Patrick
blush, but not Paul.
Patrick
’s conscious brain might not have been in on it, but his sympathetic nervous system knew all about my feelings. The facial vein supplying the small blood vessels in the face is very susceptible to beta-adrenergic stimulation. Adolescence is the heyday of blushing, and localised blood volume tells no lies. Every blush is a confession of some little shame, written in the heart’s blood.

It was Paul who liked to crack his knuckles. The habit had a ghastly fascination for me, once I understood that it wasn’t painful. Imagine having so much confidence in your bones that you would meddle with their safe socketing like that! But
Patrick
must have thought it was a
tactless habit to indulge in front of me. He would blush and start to send Paul agitated glances if he saw one hand getting ready to yank at the fingers of the other. Paul would usually get the message, which was a shame. I’d always rather see uninhibited behaviour than something that has been tidied up for my benefit. According to principles that are pure guesswork anyway.

The same thing happened in the larger world of the school. There was a craze, for instance, for boys to stand in doorways pressing their arms outwards and upwards against the frame for a whole minute. Then when they stepped forwards and let their shoulders relax, their arms would rise to the horizontal of their own accord. Their faces wore stupid grins as their bodies were caught out, adjusting to one set of pressures and lagging behind when the situation changed.

If I was around they would tend to stop the game, as if I would rather not see them enjoy it. But why so? Their bodies were no sort of reproach to mine. Why wouldn’t I like to see them wandering the corridors of the school with their arms spread out wide, like a band of gormless probationary angels?

It was normally
Patrick
who pushed the Tan-Sad, and Paul who was at the front, and consequently in my line of sight. I had the impression that this state of affairs was engineered by Paul, to keep the object of my interest out of sight, but if so he wasn’t too hot on psychology. In matters of the heart there is nothing more persuasive than the evidence of things unseen. With
Patrick
out of sight I could tune my ears to his breathing and even to his imagined heartbeat, and use my specialised knowledge of breathing techniques to inhale his smell through a single discriminating nostril.

Within the limits of unfulfilled desire I could get away with a lot. I could persuade
Patrick
Savage to come with me to the library for private chats, unattended by Paul. School libraries are traditionally unstaffed and deserted, and therefore fertile grounds for sexual experiment, even if (as at Burnham) the library wasn’t some gracious suite of wood-panelled chambers but something more like a sliproom, the scanty shelves filled with dog-eared paperbacks and public-library surplus. In privacy, nevertheless,
Patrick
and I would sit together and play games.

We played some exhilarating cricket matches in that library. For
me the sound of the game will always be supremely evocative, the lazy air of summer, the sound of a distant mower or nearby bee, the muffled clatter of metal on a laminated table-top. By cricket I mean the handy distillation of it called Howzat, in which the distracting physical side of the game is stripped away. Howzat was essentially a dice game, even though the dice were non-standard shapes. One looked like a primitive garden roller, though its cross-section was a hexagon rather than a circle, the six faces labelled
NO BALL, LBW
and so on.
Patrick
was a useful cricketer, though Paul was the star, but in this tinned version of the game (the pieces came in a little tin, with a leaflet) I outplayed him on a regular basis.

I would ask
him
to show me his fidelity ring. These were craze objects of the time – compound rings of silver wire, easily tarnished, which fell apart (when taken off the finger) into half-a-dozen linked subsidiary rings, mysteriously and irregularly kinked.

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?’