Pilcrow (6 page)

Some of the rules of the house were suspended in my interest. If I retrieved a crumb of snot and rolled it between my fingers, Mum would pretend not to notice. Talk about making your own
entertainment
! The privilege of my situation, in which boredom lay so close to over-excitement that there was hardly any space between, was that snot qualified as a toy. The home word for such a crumb was Figgieman. In the days before I was bed-bound, Mum would say, ‘I can see a Great Big Figgieman!’ in a tone of ominous triumph. When my life thinned out, she just looked the other way and let me get on with it. She took pity on my dirty little ways, even when I
accumulated
a whole gallery of waxy snowballs. When they dried out I would flick them at the wall when nobody was looking, or else amalgamate them into one revolting whopper with a little supplementary spit.

My tongue was a rich source of games. I would tickle the roof of my mouth with its tip. It didn’t quite make me burst out laughing, but it brought laughter to mind. Anybody who says that tickling yourself is impossible, and that the sensation depends on someone else doing it, hasn’t tried tickling of this type. It’s not perfect but it works, and that made it a precious game for me then.

Then I stuck my tongue out and started rotating it very slowly at full extension, feeling the wet trail I left on my chin or my cheeks or the groove above my lips as it slowly evaporated. I learned to touch my nose with my tongue, gradually improving its flexibility. I
discovered
for myself that the tongue is a muscle, by straining it. Then it was back to eye work for a while. When the speaking muscle had recovered, I would combine the eye-rollings and the tongue sweep, sometimes synchronising the movements, sometimes making them contrary, even contrapuntal. When Mum came into the room and
surprised
me while I was engrossed in my little theatre of grimaces, she was shocked. She thought I was having a seizure. A fit, on top of all her troubles. Even then I understood that they were her troubles.

Mum was my jailer, but she was also the Entertainments Officer, even the Escapes Officer. It was her responsibility to see that I didn’t break the rules of my confinement, but also to fill my time with any amusement small enough to be smuggled between its bars. On top of which she was necessarily my fellow prisoner, though there was no one to organise entertainments for her.

Once she brought the local bobby to pay me a visit. He was
wonderful
in his uniform. She left us alone, after warning him not to sit on the bed. He said I’d been in the wars, hadn’t I? I said that I had – in fact I was still in the wars.

He said to keep my chin up and called me ‘sonny’. He let me hold his whistle. I blew down it for all I was worth, without asking
permission
in case he said no. Mum came running – her heart was in her mouth, she said. But then her mouth was where her heart mostly lived.

In my spare time I invented a game I called Teeth. All my time was spare. This was the opposite of the eye and tongue games, and more sophisticated. Teeth was metaphysical. It involved keeping still a body part that wasn’t actually under the ban on movement. I suppose I was asserting a sort of freedom by adding a voluntary freezing to the one that was imposed from outside. I put my teeth together lightly, not grinding them but just letting the tips rest on each other, and let them grow together in my mind and become huge. My teeth turned into a sort of cave, and I could disappear inside it, clenched inside myself. Escaping to the interior, knowing that nobody in the family home would ever know what had happened to me. Once again Mum was worried by my frozen state, and even called the doctor in. There seemed to be nothing, in the narrow range of activities that was left to me, that couldn’t be interpreted as a symptom. Any behaviour on my part might be the prelude to a crisis.

I spent a lot of time looking at the yellow roses on the wall. They were a comfort and a temptation. By crossing my eyes I could make one flower coincide with its identical neighbour, and so produce the optical illusion of space opening up. I knew I was supposed to keep absolutely still, but squirming didn’t count. When I was only inches away from the wall and the yellow roses, I would cross my eyes so that the wall seemed to recede, leaving the flowers floating. Then I would slowly, naughtily, reach out a finger, and come up short, prevented from entering the space that my mind could see and yearn for.

When I gazed at the yellow roses and let them float freely while the background colour of the wallpaper fell away I was scratching
primitively
towards transcendence, towards an understanding of the
unreality
of what surrounds us. The experience was at that stage desolating, and I turned against it. One day I tore the wallpaper away from the wall, at the edge of a seam. After that it wasn’t possible to superimpose two flowers and open up a space that wasn’t there, since the torn and curling strip broke the illusion. I knew I was being naughty when I tore the paper: I waited for punishment but none came. It gave no pleasure that illness kept me safe from disgrace. I had the evidence of my crime permanently close, and that was
punishment
enough. For the time being it put paid to any mystical inklings.

It may have been partly for the protection of the wallpaper that one day the bed was moved away from the wall, like the ones in a
hospital
, so that I could be attended to from both sides. This was a
milestone
of more significance for the carers than the patient, and not just because it made their tasks easier. It defined me actively as an invalid, rather than someone who happened to be ill without an end in sight.

In the meantime, the long meantime, even Peterkin wasn’t allowed on the bed, small as he was, light as he was. He would inevitably jump up and down, and cause me pain without meaning to. Until I was sentenced to bed rest he might just as well have been a made-up creature. I had tyrannised the poor soul, with no thought of his
having
a life outside the parts I made him play. The age gap, seventeen months, was just right to set him on a track of slavish devotion to the first-born, and to delay the time that he learned to know better. Only when I was immobilised and Peter was out of my power did I begin to absorb the fact of his separateness. Before then he had only been a small (and reversible) step up from imaginary, as far as I was
concerned
.

He had been another person all along, potentially a sidekick rather than a rival, an asset not a liability, but in my infant egotism I hadn’t thought of that. Luckily he hadn’t lost his desire to please me, and would bring in treasures from the garden that was now his exclusive domain.

I hadn’t noticed him enough to feel threatened before I was ill, and we weren’t in direct competition even now. The prisoner in his bed, having his meals brought in on trays, cajoled into eating each modest mouthful, and the toddler in the high chair left to feed himself, could hardly resent each other. There was none of the enforced sharing that brands brotherhood on the older party. It’s the appropriated toy that does the damage. The loved object forges a bitter bond, when it turns up missing an ear. The favourite comic is the culprit, defaced with an alien crayon. It’s the blocked path to the breast, usurper smugly at suck. None of this applied to us as brothers. Fashions in motherhood played a part in the area last mentioned. By the time Peter came along, Mum had been persuaded that bottle was best. The nipple remained my symbolic possession even when I’d been weaned from it.

Peter would come to see me but keep on the other side of the room, as if any closer approach would be too stimulating for me. He would wave at me rather solemnly, from the far side of the crevasse which divides the sick from the well. Some days he would steal up to me with his hand clenched, and then open it to reveal one of his toy
soldiers
, which he would slip between the sheets with me where Mum wouldn’t see, before trotting off to explore his wider world. He was leaving one of his troops with me as a sort of hostage, a kindness which almost made me forget my stubborn lack of interest in games of conflict. Normally the only soldiers I liked were the ones to be dipped in my egg.

I wish I could claim that illness sheltered me from the blizzard of attachments, so that I freely recognised Peter’s claims to equality, but it isn’t so. Later on I would have to invent techniques to hold onto my dominance, but for the time being Mum belonged to me without question. I was her priority. Silence on my part could bring Mum to my side at least as quickly as Peter’s cries could draw her to his.

Sometimes Mum read to me, poems and stories. All my time was bed-time and every story was a bed-time story. More than once she read me a poem about a little girl who didn’t eat properly. She grew thinner and thinner until she was as thin as a piece of paper. Mum read it in the ominous tones suitable for a cautionary tale:

Perhaps this was her way of blackmailing my appetite, on days when I was sated by half a boiled egg, or a quarter, or a single teaspoonful, days when I was disenchanted even with magic bananas.

Something in my character stopped the poem from working on me as Mum must have hoped. At first when she recited the poem and added at the end, ‘You wouldn’t want that to happen to you, now
would
you?’ I was terrified by the thought. But as the days inched by, the fascination of the idea grew on me in secret. Then when Mum said, ‘You wouldn’t want …’ at the end of the reading, I whispered ‘Oh no!’ but I was secretly infatuated. The idea of dwindling to
nothing
held a strong attraction for me, which I now see as the magnetic pull of austerity in a previous life.

There was one story that made us both weep: Paul Gallico’s
Snowflake
. There was plenty of food for Hindu thought in that story of transformation and essence, if I’d noticed, but I took my cue from Mum and wept. How sad and how beautiful it was, the story of the little Snowflake and her pear-shaped water drop of a husband, her progress from snow bank to river to millstream to estuary to the sea. And however much the Snowflake was jostled or scalded, she was aware of a backdrop of love. When Mum reached the end of the story, her voice vibrated in a way I had never heard before.

Here the story reached out and held hands with the poem about the girl who dwindled to nothing. The idea of simply evaporating from life was exquisitely beautiful. Its tingle gripped me from head to toe. We were both of us melting in sympathy with the fated life cycle of H
₂
O. As Snowflake’s life ended the Sun said to her, ‘You have done well, little Snowflake. Come home to me now.’ We felt the hairs on the back of our necks standing on end, the very shiver of divinity. Without any idea of what was going on, we were visited by four of the eight physical signs of the presence of God. Horripilation (specifically
nirvikalpa samadhi
, the horripilation that precedes enlightenment), trembling, tears, faltering of the voice. The other signs of divine
presence
being perspiration, changing of body colour, inability to move (even the limbs), holy devastation. I really appreciate having a
technical
vocabulary for religious states. It’s one of the great advantages that Hinduism has. When you think about it, there are sodding great holes in the Christian descriptions. Even Paul Gallico, if he had
witnessed
the glory-babble of Pentecost or St Teresa hovering in the chapel on jump-jets of grace, would have struggled to put it across without a precise vocabulary to hand.

I pestered Mum to get other books by Paul Gallico from the library, and she came back with
The Snow Goose
. I hated it, perhaps because it was about war. It was also full of dialect, oddly written out, along the lines of ‘We was roustin’ on the beach between Dunkirk an’ Lapanny, like a lot o’ bloomin’ pigeons on Victoria Hembankment, waitin’ for Jerry to pot us. ’E potted us good too. ’E was be’ind us an’ flankin’ us an’ above us. ’E give us shrapnel and ’e give us H.E., an’ ’e peppers us from the bloomin’ hatmosphere with Jittersmiths.’ Mum couldn’t seem to extract the desired accent from this orgy of
apostrophes
, and we both felt that it wasn’t proper writing somehow.

We went back to
Snowflake
any number of times, and it always affected us the same way. Mum and I had a strange taste of that
sublime
state in which the ego melts, to return as a shadow if it returns at all. On the basis of that one little book, Paul Gallico is a great magus and swami, and that’s flat. The image of death as a merging resonates so deeply. People understand that the drop merges with the ocean, but they sometimes forget that the ocean also merges with the drop.

Mum would sometimes leave
Snowflake
or another book with me when she’d finished reading. I would take it under the bedclothes, understanding that this was a more precious hostage even than Peter’s toy soldier. A boy who was only allowed to move his head and his hands wouldn’t long resist the lure of print.

My favourite book at that time didn’t have words at all. It was a book of
What I Want to Be When I Grow Up
. It had pictures of various professional uniforms and styles of dress, each with a cut-out circle where the head should be. Mum had mounted a picture of my face at the back of the book, so that I could see myself looking proudly up through a porthole cut in all the pages of rôles and careers. She must have done that before I was ill. I was always excited by the obvious uniforms, soldier sailor policeman, but I was more deeply drawn to the curative, investigative or spiritual professions: doctor, scientist, priest.