A Postillion Struck by Lightning (30 page)

I accepted immediately; already telling my aunt the lie about the play. And I still didn't know.

His flat was a rather poky room with a kitchenette in a high block over a tobacconist and sweet shop in Hope Street. It smelled of ether and stale cigarettes and was pretty untidy, for which he apologised, pulling hurriedly at the unmade bed and taking some dirty plates and a bottle into the sink. There were books everywhere, a typewriter, old shirts, and a gas fire which plopped when he lit it. On the wall there were pictures of Rothesay Castle and two men wrestling. He opened a thick book
filled with diagrams of bandaging; people were swathed in them, heads, hips, legs, wrists, arms and everything else. It was very comprehensive.

Chattering happily, he pulled a large cardboard box from under the bed and spilled rolls and rolls of blue-wrapped bandages of every size all over the floor. These, he said, were just the trick to turn me into a splendid mummy and if I would just remove my jacket and shirt and vest and sit down in that chair there he would turn me into Boris Karloff in the flick of a fly's eyelid.

I dutifully, rather shyly, did as he suggested while he started to unroll yards and yards of filmy gauzes. It was not very long before I was straight-jacketed in strips of thin cotton bandage from the top of my head to my waist, arms securely folded, in the correct position of mummies, across my chest, a small slit left for each eye so that I could hazily see through a vague fringe of white blur, a small hole left for my nostrils so that I could breathe. Otherwise I was trussed like a fowl. Taking down the oval mirror from the mantelpiece he showed me the effect which I found impressive, uncomfortable, and very restricting. I could merely manage a vague motion with my head, which didn't show, and roll my slitty eyes. I could neither see properly, nor even hear for that matter, and I was totally mute.

As he turned from replacing the mirror, and as I stood to indicate that he might now unwrap me as soon as possible, I could see that he was speaking, but only a blurred mumble came to my bandaged ears and it was with some rising degree of alarm that I found myself clutched firmly in his arms and dumped on my back in the middle of the brass bed. I tried to struggle and yell out, at least to sit up, but I was totally rigid and the only sound I made was smothered in yards and yards of thick white gauze. Putting his beige face very close to my ear Mr Dodd said that it seemed a pity not to finish the job and make me a full mummy from head to foot, that would complete the Effect.

My shoes and socks were wrenched off and thrown under the bed, then my trousers, and to my silent screams of protest, he ripped off my underpants and I was stark naked before his eager, now red-faced, gaze.

Swiftly and with the expert precision of a born embalmer, he rolled me about the bed in a flurry of bandage. I was wrapped like a parcel, rolled this way and that, on my back, on my side, every which way until I was reeling with giddiness and terror.
I was wound tightly into a cocoon as a spider rolls a grasshopper. Helpless, inert, more a dummy even than a mummy, I lay rigid as Mr Dodd, his mouth stuck with safety pins, tucked in the loose ends; when this was done, and with great strength he manoeuvred me off the bed, stiff as a telegraph pole, and set me upright on cotton feet to see my reflection in the mirror of his wardrobe door. Peering desperately through the eye slits I could see that he had made a complete and thorough job. Boris Karloff wasn't half as convincing.

Unable to stand by myself I was forced to lean against the serge shoulder of my host whose face was bathed in pleasure. Surely my heart could not beat so quickly with terror and I should still live. It had leapt from my chest and now pumped and throbbed in my throat. It stopped entirely when my horrified eyes saw, pathetically thrusting through the swaddling rags, my genitals, naked and as pink and vulnerable as a sugar mouse.

Mr Dodd placed his mouth to my ear again and said that he thought he had made a very good job of things and hoped I was pleased too, and without waiting for any kind of reaction, which I would not have been able to make in any case, he swung me, like an immense skittle, into an arc of 180 degrees, so that the whole filthy little room whirled round my head, and I was back down on Mr Dodd's bed; and in Mr Dodd's hand, inches from my eyes, was a pair of scissors. I tried to faint. I heard him say that in Real Life They Cut That Off—and lay supine waiting for Death. Gently his hands caressed my helpless body, kindly he whispered that he had no intention of doing such a cruel thing for how else, otherwise, would a boy like me be able to masturbate? He said that he knew that all boys enjoyed masturbating and that he was much too good to deprive me of the rights. My mind had become a mass of solid jelly. Nothing flickered there apart from deadly terror, shame, and grief at my wickedness. I couldn't rationalise. I closed my eyes and said three or four “Hail Mary's”.

If I prayed surely, this time, God would hear? The anxious, firm, slippery fingers caressing and annointing me splintered my whole being into a billion jagged fragments. I was only aware that if they didn't stop something terrible and horrifying would happen.

Which it did. And I knew.

The unwrapping, which followed, was a slow, forlorn, deadly affair. The wretched stuff peeled off me in long swooping swathes, littering the grubby bed and the floor around it. I had been blubbing, snivelling in a silly useless sort of way like a girl, and Mr Dodd was worried and apologetic and kept reminding me over and over again that it was all all right because he was a Medical Student and understood these things.

Dressing hurriedly, stumbling with teary cheeks and snotty nose, falling into pants and trousers, lacing up shoes, yanking up socks and fumbling with my tie, I was unable to speak or even look at the bobbing figure scrabbling about among its merchandise. He handed me a comb and I raked it through my disordered hair; he said that he would see me safely home.

We didn't speak in the train all the way to Bishopbriggs. He pointed out, as we left the train, that it was not really very late and that he would come and explain things to my aunt. In horror I said that she was ill and could not be disturbed. I led him miles across the Estate, away from where I lived, to a completely strange house where a lamp glowed through a lowered blind. He waited at the gate as I rang the bell, and just as the door opened, fortunately he turned away and was lost in the gloom. The woman who opened the door was pleasant and I apologised for making an error but she smiled and said the houses were all so alike it was no wonder. Springburn Terrace, she said, was “‘way round the back”.

For some time I lived in fear that Mr Dodd would come back or find where I lived. Once, on my way to the station, I thought I saw him hovering about near the Railway Arch. But I don't think it was … and I never saw him ever again. Neither did I ever set foot in a cinema alone for many years to come.

A few days later a letter arrived from my father to say that my mother was coming up to Glasgow within the month. She would stay with my grandmother. And had an appointment with Dr Steel at the school for the 28th. Nothing more was said. My uncle looked uncomfortable, my aunt defensive.

What could Dr Steel say to my mother that they could not, for Heaven's sake? she wondered. It seemed a waste of good money to trail all this way for nothing. She declared that she didn't know what to make of it at all. And neither did I.

Neither did the irritated Dr Steel as it turned out. Or my bewildered mother for that matter. Clearly my uncle and the headmaster did not see eye to eye on the subject of my education, and while the latter admitted, with bland candour, that I was not the brightest pupil he had ever had in his Technical School but showed distinct abilities in other subjects, the former seemed to have given me up for lost.

Steel suggested that it would be the gravest folly to remove me from the place where I had already been for two years and in which I had fought to remain against quite high odds, and that for the next year I should merely concentrate on those classes which would be the most useful to me in my later life, and at which I showed some signs, at least, of promise. I was to forget Chemistry, Physics, Maths etcetera, and if I cared, only follow the courses in English, Languages, Art, and all the varied handworks from Pottery to Bookbinding. Football, Hockey and Cricket were out and I was to be left on my honour to attend whatever classes I wished.

He wondered, mildly, why I had even been sent to a Technical School in the first place and said that at the end of the year I should be enrolled into a College of Art somewhere, for my future lay in that direction and in no other as far as he could see.

My mother's worried heart lifted; mine whipped up like a kite in a gale. Both parents agreed with the wise counsel of Dr Steel and also with the College of Art part to come later. I was transported to Heaven. And removed, very tactfully, from Bishopbriggs.

Clearly my unhappy aunt and uncle had reached the end of their patience and endurance. They wanted, understandably, to return to the calm and peace of their life as it had all been before my advent into their bewildered middle-aged existence.

Nothing was said in, as they say, so many words, but a Family Gathering was called at my grandmother's house. The long and short of it was that yet another of my mother's sisters, Aunt Hester, adopted me and took me off to live with her in a different part of the city with her husband and two
children, and I spent the last year of my school days in a very happy “family atmosphere” where I was able to play the piano whenever I wished with no fear of the people Upstairs, and read every book I could lay hands on from Trollope to Austen without ever once feeling the slightest tremor of guilt that I should be dubbing my soccer boots, oiling a cricket bat, or ploughing through the miseries of Fractions or Logarithms. It nearly went to my head.

I bought a half-belted overcoat and began to talk like Ronald Colman. I graduated from “By the Chapel in the Moonlight” to “Sheep May Safely Graze” all by ear and with the bass pedal screwed to the floor-boards. I started to smoke “Black Cat” cigarettes in the train coming home from school, learned to skate, and fell deeply in love with my elder cousin Jean.

The only reason that I learned to skate was because of her. I adored her with an unthinking passion, and bought Family Planning magazines which had chapters headed “Can Cousins Marry?” “Cousins Marrying Causes Imbecility?” When I had read all I could understand I was brave enough to mention it to her while we were skating round and round the rink at Crossmloof one evening. I have never forgotten her look of total astonishment as she pulled her steadying hand from mine and fled across the ice to a large Canadian hockey player who, covered in pads and cages and maple leaves, was her real true love.

However she agreed to accompany me to the rink from time to time, but always left me when Canada arrived for his evening match. I was sad, of course, but thought that if I was patient she would come back to me in the end. Which of course she never did. I skated miserably about the place, close to the edge, for I was not all that good on my own and her adored hand was more than just a comfort. It was a stabiliser. Together we collided round the rink with all the elegance, and overt familiarity, of mating toads. I hoped that my sad devotion would show. Which it did. In a face like a squashed muffin. I hoped that people would be moved by my nightly vigil … the mournful, brave boy sliding about on the perimeter while his beloved one, golden hair flying, kilts swirling, spun about centrally in the arms of a great, uncouth, goalkeeper. But no one took a bit of notice. And once, in desperation, when I did try to slide across to them and take her tiny hand, I landed flat on my back and skidded with a sickening crash on my half-belt overcoat into the barrier.

I gave it up after that. There is nothing like a public loss of dignity to restore a sense of proportion. I put away the skates and took up my pens and pencils. Warmer, safer, cheaper and, in the end one hoped, far less dangerous than a marriage between cousins.