Pilcrow (40 page)

Between us we lowered our sights. Using all my fingers was not a possibility. She and the machine were made for each other. It didn’t respond to my advances in the same way. Since I had no movement in my left elbow, it was my left thumb and index finger which had the best access to the keyboard. In that position the smaller fingers were angled away from the keyboard.

On the other hand I could move my right elbow, so it made sense to exploit this splendid power, letting the fourth and fifth fingers take charge of the right-hand sector of the typewriter. I became a dogged and very happy four-finger typist, tapping out reams of drivel. It’s just that the four fingers I used were a motley bunch of digits, not crack troops like Mrs Rhodes deployed, with their scarlet shields, but ragged volunteers. Yokels with pitchforks, really.

For a while I could keep change at bay by sheer force of will. I could refuse to move to Ward Three and I could hypnotise Turpentine into coöperating. But then it turned out I couldn’t stay in Ward One. None of us could.

CRX was being struck by an administrative earthquake. We would all be moving, the girls and I. We wouldn’t be going far, though. We would only be moving from Ward One to Ward Two, and everything else would stay the same. I wasn’t drastically upset. It didn’t seem too much of an upheaval. Perhaps there weren’t enough Still’s patients any more to justify two whole wards. Now Ward One was going to become a maternity ward.

It wasn’t as if we had many possessions, and we weren’t expected to shift them ourselves. People cling to their routines, of course, whether they choose them or not. We would be exchanging one configuration of bed and wall and window for another, unfamiliar but essentially the same, and that was that.

Except that the move got mixed up with other things. Sarah told me that when the nurses were changing Ivy’s knickers, there was
yellow
sticky stuff in them, which meant her periods were starting. This held terror for me. I didn’t want my periods to come. My taily had been developing its own ideas about what to do, and I was frightened that sticky stuff would come out of it, maybe blood. Nearly
everything 
else about me seemed to be abnormal, so I couldn’t take
anything
for granted. The most surprising thing, really, would be for me to follow the standard pattern.

I asked Sister Heel if I would be allowed to stay on Ward Two, or if this was all a trick to move me to a men’s ward. She could normally be relied on to tell the truth, but she hardly seemed to hear me. She told me she had been a nurse for a long time. She thought this would be a good time to retire. Her voice was unusually soft, as if she was already retiring in instalments. It felt as if she was washing her hands of me.

Then when we were safely established in Ward Two I learned
something
about the move that made it much more serious. Ward One was being turned into a maternity ward, yes, fine. People had babies, I knew that. People had babies all the time. Mum was going to have a baby too – that I knew. She’d told me about it, I had it in the back of my mind. She wanted to have a little girl. Perhaps it would happen this time. I didn’t see anything wrong in that. A baby girl might make her happy. I didn’t have strong objections.

It was putting all the information together that made things unbearable. All the little propositions combined into a terrible
theorem
. Mum was going to go into Ward One to have her new baby.

There was something primal about my revulsion, no question of that. It made my skin crawl, the idea that Mum would be full of baby and so near. Couldn’t she go and have her stupid baby somewhere else?

There was also an intense social discomfort. The different rules of home and hospital meant that there was a dividing line between them on my mental maps. What linguists call an isogloss, a contour
representing
changes in language. On one side of this line was ‘toilet’, ‘close’ and jeering at the posh. On the other was ‘lavatory’, ‘stuffy’ and sneering at everything common. It was awkward enough when the two worlds were a few miles apart, but in a little while there were going to be only yards between them. The isogloss would slice right through CRX, the isogloss would hang above me like a curtain of ice, quivering in every breeze, as if it was going to fall on me and slice me in two. The ice curtain was horribly permeable to sound. If the
hospital
was quiet Mum would be able to hear me saying ‘toilet’ to the little ruffians I shared the ward with, and Wendy would be able to hear me talking posh to her ladyship. I’d catch it coming and going. I’d be mocked and chastised by all parties. It made me feel sick just thinking about it.

The obvious thing to say would be that I was jealous of the baby that was coming. That wasn’t how it felt. I wished the baby well. I wished the baby well away. It certainly didn’t occur to me that tailies must have been busy in pockets, one taily in particular. If I was
blotting
out an intolerable truth for the sake of my sanity, I did a good job.

It felt as if there was almost nothing in my life I could control, and now everything was bearing down on me. I was counted precocious by the modest standards of CRX, but I hadn’t read Edgar Allan Poe at this stage. If I had, I might have found my nightmare well expressed in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. The walls gliding towards me, ready to crush me in my bed or push me into an abyss. The isogloss playing the part of the pendulum with its wicked blade, swishing in wider and wider arcs as it approached my bound body. Swishing one way with a whisper of ‘Nugget’. Swishing back with a murmur of ‘Noo-gah’.

I tried to explain to Sarah but for once she didn’t get it. She
couldn’t
imagine not wanting Muzzie near her, and wasn’t a baby the best news in the world? It’s reading too much into the past to suggest that this was the first time I wondered if she was keeping up with me mentally the way she had always done before.

When Mum was actually in the hospital waiting for the baby to come I was almost hysterical. Liquorice Allsorts were my only
comfort
. A nurse came to say that Mum was coming to say hello. I
couldn’t
bear it. I tried to scramble off the bed to intercept her. Whatever my joints felt about it, I wanted to totter down the corridor to head her off before she got to Ward Two. The nurse told me to lie down and be patient. Everything was fine and my mum was on her way.

Then she came in, with the glow that pregnancy can give, eerily amplified in her case so that she seemed unnaturally calm and loving. Not herself at all. The nurse said, ‘Doesn’t your mum look well?’ Yes she did, but it didn’t suit her. It wasn’t her. The baby had put
something
strange inside her.

She asked me how I was and she called me ‘darling’ – Gran’s word, but with its briskness replaced by something tender. ‘How do you like your mum coming to stay in your hospital? Isn’t it great fun?’

I couldn’t speak. To speak in full hearing of both Mum and the cruel girls on the ward, to choose between pretending to be common and remembering to be posh, was not something I could do. All I could think of to do was to cough and mumble, ‘Sore throat,’ while Mum and the nurse looked at each other at a loss. No wonder they were baffled. I’m baffled myself when I look back. I was a boy whose body was distorted by an illness that would never go away, I was
living
in a hospital, and here I was transparently faking a trivial ailment. One thing I had no experience of was pretending to be ill. Funny that I made such a fuss.

When the baby was born I did my best to prevent the disastrous convergence of the two worlds that I tried to belong to, by saying that Mum would be tired out and it would be better if I went to see her in my old ward rather than have her come to my new one. Luckily
childbirth
was still treated in those days as an illness in itself, and new mothers were discouraged from putting their feet to the floor for some time after the birth. Then they really did feel ill and weak when they finally got up. So bed rest came to my rescue for once. That was the only time it did me any good.

I brought with me the game of Flying Hats I’d won in a
competition
in the hospital. I don’t even remember what the competition was, and the game wasn’t really what I had my eye on in the matter of prizes. I wanted the loom that was also on offer. Looms were felt to be beneficial at CRX, in some way therapeutic, and I would have liked to have a go on one, but this particular model was unwieldy. It needed two hands to work it. It was described as ‘easy to operate’, but it was only easy to operate if you used both your hands. It required
considerable
motor skills to work it, which made it a completely perverse prize in this context. Presumably someone had one to spare and was getting rid of it, in a nice way.

It wasn’t nearly as good as the special loom Wendy Keach had, whose shuttle you could flip over one-handed, but she wasn’t about to let me have a go on that. In the end I settled for the Flying Hats. There’s a picture of Lord David Astor bending down to give me my prize. He owned the
Observer
newspaper. He didn’t like Cliveden very much, I don’t think. He certainly didn’t spend much time there.

Mum and I played Flying Hats as best we could, though I was still as much of a Dropper as I had been when Miss Reid gave me that name, after having to pick up so many pens and pencils. Mum wasn’t supposed to move more than the minimum, so if we dropped hats a nurse had to retrieve them. It’s not a very thrilling game at the best of times. At the end of it, though, Mum hugged me, in the
barely-touching
way she’d mastered by then, and said, ‘We do have fun, don’t we, John?’ It was so out of character it gave me the shivers. Everyone kept on and on about how she glowed, but what if I didn’t like the new light in her eyes?

I said I had to go to the toilet, partly as a way of testing this new Mum, to see if there was any trace of the old one left. The old Mum would never have let the word ‘toilet’ pass, but this new one just said absently, ‘Of course you must,’ and promised not to take her turn at the game until I had come back.

Audrey. The new baby was called Audrey. It was a girl. Good news. Lucky Mum. She was tucked away in a cot, snoozing.

Later Audrey woke up and a nurse handed her to Mum. This little baby was a stranger. I felt she had nothing to do with me – but the woman who held her was also a stranger. I felt that Laura Cromer had disappeared and been replaced with a substitute, one who could only have fooled people who didn’t really know her, like the nurses on the ward. Despite a superficial resemblance, this person had nothing in common with my mother. She had already seemed strange while the baby was inside her, but having the baby taken out had left the strangeness still there. It hadn’t brought Mum back. I felt sure that Dad would feel the same way when he saw her, but he greeted her and the new baby as if there was nothing unusual going on except having a new person in the family.

While new motherhood was still working its alarming miracles on her, Mum made a suggestion to me. She’d heard that Sister Heel was going to retire, and she knew that Heel was unmarried and lived alone. How did I feel about giving her Charlie as a retirement gift? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? My first reaction was to think, ‘What a cheek! Give away your own blooming budgie!’ But she had done that already, when she gave him to me. She couldn’t help herself. She was baby-happy, swollen with the joy that a new life brought.

Even so, the moment she said it, I knew it was the right thing to do. I’d already said good-bye to Charlie once, after all, when I first went to CRX. If the only thing I wanted for Charlie was to see him happy, then happy he certainly was, and he made his mistress Heel happy into the bargain. The truth was that I had grown out of him rather, quite apart from the fact that for all practical purposes he was Heel’s already. Handing him over for good would be a legal detail. I was only transferring title.

I still had to nerve myself a little. It was another irrevocable change, even if I was making it happen myself. My voice even cracked when I asked her whether she would like to take Charlie with her as a retirement present. Her voice almost didn’t work for a moment. She was close to tears. The dragon had long since unmasked herself and we were almost friends. Then she said that she would be honoured.

Soon after that she was logging off on her last duty, walking
quietly
out of the ward. She had warned us that she hated good-byes and would rather everyone behaved as if it was the end of a normal day. Except for the birdcage in her hand, of course. That wasn’t normal.

I wasn’t very good in those days at following people in my mind when they left the room. There seemed no end to their options – it was dizzying. Perhaps as an ex-toddler confined to one room, I was slow to learn that if you leave a space you must enter another one (the whole thing is an illusion, but the illusion is roughly consistent). It wasn’t that I had thought of other people as toys in a box to be put away. I felt like a toy in a box myself, that no one was allowed to play with. Still I found my mind could follow Sister Heel, budgie cage in hand, all the way home, right up to the moment when Charlie hopped into her mouth at last. He need never come out again.

I soon got my old Mum back. Audrey wasn’t the sort of baby to sleep through the night if she could help it. The unreal or just
unfamiliar
light began to die from Mum’s eyes.

After that, Mum had her little girl. She had what she wanted. If she still wasn’t happy, it wasn’t a matter of there being something
actually
missing from the pattern, more that she didn’t have the knack.

I hadn’t seen much of Peter for a while, but that began to change when he came to see the baby and decided it would be fun to take charge of my wheelchair. I was very happy to have a chauffeur. He found it heavy work at first, so we just pottered round the CRX grounds. He wanted to find a secret passage – he was sure it was just the place to have one. The best we could find at short notice was a manhole cover that hadn’t been put back properly, so that it lay at an angle. We decided that this must be the entrance to an underground labyrinth. It was far too heavy for Peter to lift. The Famous Five would have made a better job of uncovering a mystery.

Peter got quite a taste for pushing me around, though controlling the Tan-Sad, when I came home at weekends, was much more of a challenge. It must have been about this time that some adjustments were made to Trees which made life easier for me and for everyone else. There was an L-shaped bedroom annexe, with a ramp. Even so, the extension was always a bit bleak. There was no carpet, for fear that the Tan-Sad would track in mud from outside. There was just lino. I told Mum I had seen enough lino at CRX to last me a lifetime, but she was adamant that she didn’t want to spend all her life cleaning up after me. There was a utility room, too, so Mum also benefited from the re-modelling, and a second bathroom on the ground floor, so that I didn’t have to be carried upstairs to have a bath.

As Peter grew more skilled at handling the Tan-Sad, we began to make little expeditions round Bourne End. It was rather unnerving, being stared at. At CRX I was often invisible, which wasn’t always a bad thing, and when I was out with Mum her adult aura neutralised curiosity. I don’t know whether it was worse for me, protected from noticing most of the stares thanks to the immobility of my neck, or for Peter who was spared nothing. I don’t think it was much fun for either of us.

There were compensations, of course, times when we could stare in our turn. One day we saw a dog with its head in what looked like a loudspeaker – actually a ruff to stop him scratching a healing wound or biting out stitches. We thought it must be a joke or some strange sort of advertisement. As if the dog from the record label, listening raptly to recorded sound, had finally climbed into the gramophone to find out where exactly His Master’s Voice had taken up residence. We thought it was killing.

In the open air the whole business of pushing and being pushed worked against conversation, but when we stopped for Peter to get his breath back we had some fine chats.

He had obviously been giving my situation some thought. ‘You should go to an ordinary school,’ he said. ‘– you can come to my school if you like. It’s all right. Except you’re getting too old.’

‘Yes, I’ll be too old.’ I had been dreaming of a proper school, all the same.

‘And you should be able to go to prison. If you robbed a bank you should go to prison like everyone else.’

‘They’d probably put me in the prison hospital, which isn’t at all the same thing.’ I hadn’t given the question any thought before this moment. Now I began to feel cheated of my right to do time, hard time.

‘What a swizz. But I was thinking … if you did rob a bank, the police should count to a thousand before they started chasing you. Then you’d have the same chance as everyone else.’

He was ahead of his time, really, was brother Peter. His philosophy of handicap was sophisticated in its own way. Equal rights plus a few courtesies.

With Peter’s help I was able to resume my interrupted career of mischief. One day we got into rather a lot of trouble, but after all, I was owed. There had been years when I hadn’t been in any position to get into trouble at all.

Being unsupervised and out of doors was intoxicating in itself. Fire was the specific lure, as so often – I’ve never understood why fire in the afterlife seems to be relegated to Hell, and defines it. As far I’m concerned, without fire it can’t be Heaven.

Peter made a very willing lab assistant. The special equipment for one particular set of investigations was the empty tin of a Fray Bentos steak-and-kidney pie. I didn’t approve of the pie, and had eaten only a little of the pastry, but I heartily approved of the tin. It was circular and had sloping sides. When washed up it made a very decent crucible. Peter had been hoarding candles for some time on my instructions, and now he wedged them all in the tin and lit them in rapid
succession
. Soon they started to melt together and flame became general. We had made one giant candle with multiple wicks. Then under my direction he fed more combustibles into the flames, scraps of old wax and torn-up bits of cloth, until the whole tinful was boiling and
getting
really hot.

We weren’t being irresponsible. We were conducting our
experiments
outside in the open air, the way we knew we were meant to. We were behind the shed in the garden. The tin was safely on the ground, and we weren’t touching it.

There was only one moment when the experimenter couldn’t avoid getting close to the tin, and that was the moment when he was going to pour onto the tiny inferno a tablespoonful of cold water. The
experimenter
was really me, but Peter had to do the pouring. Doing things at arm’s length isn’t practical for me. The arm isn’t a standard unit of measurement, and mine don’t really count. I would operate Peter by remote control. I gave him the timing, saying, ‘Ready … set … GO!!!’

Light blue touch paper and retire immediately. I’d given him a proper briefing. He knew that he had to pour the spoonful of water in with a single rapid motion, then run like hell.