Cedilla (17 page)

I quarantined myself from the public spaces of the house and read
The Ring
in my bedroom. If Peter was around then I hardly noticed him. It was a wonderful experience. I don’t mean necessarily that it was a wonderful book, but it was a wonderful thing for me to read at the time. I needed a hero, and the central figure of the book gave me one. Boyde Ashlar, ‘thirty-four, handsome and not untalented’. A name to savour. He was my James Bond, I suppose. I’d read some Bond books when the craze was at its height, and I’d got something out of them, a sort of second-hand worldliness (which is what adolescents crave, after all), but Boyde Ashlar instantly superseded him. He gave me second-hand romanticism and second-hand self-hatred as well, more than Bond could ever do. What do I remember from the book? Not very much. The hero lived with his hideous bloated mother in separate parts of the same house, communicating by way of a speaking-tube.

I remember one very exciting phrase, about Boyde Ashlar after an unfruitful night out ‘returning to his onanistic bed’. I seem to remember that he had a less manly, chattier friend. If ever Boyde caught sight of an attractive man, this friend would say, ‘You’ve gone all cock-eyed, dear.’

Boyde Ashlar gave young men the eye at flower shows – so why shouldn’t I? Given licence by a fictional character, my eye contact grew in daring and intensity. I had a few nice looks back, and that was all the encouragement I needed.

There were some wonderful descriptions in
The Ring
, of things far removed from the central situation. The author seemed disgusted by human beings, shuddering at ageing flesh and self-delusion, but he seemed rather in love with nature at its ugliest, or what most people would see as its ugliest. There were quotations from a book about toads and their parasites, for instance, which Boyde was reading. And there was a marvellous description of snails mating. I made the
mistake of reading a bit of that to Dad and then he became horribly interested in the book, asking, ‘That’s absolutely
terrific
! Is it all like that?’.

There’s a theory that people with secrets secretly want to be found out. I can’t disprove it on the basis of
The Ring
, since I hadn’t been able to resist drawing attention to the very thing I wanted kept hidden. I went into reverse, though, the moment my secret was in serious danger of being discovered. I recovered as quickly as I could, and gave the book as grudging an assessment as could square with the fact that I was continuing to read it. ‘It started off all right,’ I said, trying to sound as authoritative as any reviewer, ‘but it’s getting to be a bit of a bore. The snails are more fun than the people, really.’

This wasn’t the best line to take if I wanted to put Dad off the scent. ‘They often are,’ he said. ‘When you’ve finished with it, pass it on, will you? And I’ll give it a go.’

Which was unthinkable, but I was helpless. I couldn’t hide it from him. I had no privacy, either at school or at home. Anyone could get access to my things more easily than I could. I looked miserably at the label that was pasted in every library book in those days, with the message
If infectious disease should break out in your house do not return this
book, but at once inform the Librarian. Borrowers infringing this regulation,
or knowingly permitting the book to be exposed to infection are liable to a
penalty of £5.
In the case of
The Ring
I felt it was the other way about. The book was exposing the household to every germ I spent so much time and energy hiding. And now it was going to shop me to Dad, to expose me as someone whose secret love was not for snails.

Finally Mum put me out of my misery by saying, all very casually, ‘Do you want me to return that book to the library for you? I could tell Dad someone else had reserved it.’ It was a marvellous bit of mind-reading on her part. I wondered, though, if she had noticed, despite not being the scientific type, that my sheets and pyjamas needed changing more often when
The Ring
was in the house. While Boyde Ashlar was on the premises.

‘Yes, perhaps that would be best,’ I managed to say at last. ‘It’s
really not very good.’ Be forgiving, Boyde Ashlar, of the little betrayals of weaker people.

Mum gave a little sniff. ‘I read a little bit myself,’ she said. Really! Did no one in the family give a thought to my need for privacy? ‘It was about a man getting into the altogether and looking at himself in the mirror. Rather silly, I thought.’ She must have been very careful about her furtive reading. I always left the book in a precise and particular alignment on my bedside table, and it never seemed to be out of place when I came back.

It wasn’t a special precaution for Mum to wear gloves when she took the book back to Mrs Pavey – she always wore gloves when handling library books. Because you never know. A lot of women wore gloves in those days, and this particular mania of hygiene didn’t make her conspicuous on her bicycle.

In this way I missed my chance to find out what happened to the thirty-four-year-old hero, handsome and not untalented, of a savagely frank novel of 1967, though I have to say the omens were not good. Boyde Ashlar spent a lot of the book hating himself and his frivolous life, while unable to break free of his obsession with Tex, the masseur at the Turkish Baths, and his involvement with Roddy, a lout with a tattoo of a snake covering almost the entirety of his lithe young body …

After reading
The Ring
, playing with myself at night before falling asleep (mental masturbation aided by the pressure of the sheet, mindful to keep my breathing even if Peter was around) became a quite different experience. I was no longer alone. Just knowing that Boyde was probably bringing himself off at the same time as me was a comfort. I knew perfectly well he was only made up, but that didn’t diminish him.

I felt that every song, every book and every film – even a school essay – has life in it. It gets some sort of charge when it is written or created, and the charge is renewed by every reader, writer and hearer. Everything spins like a plate on a stick, and every tiny encounter prolongs the spinning.

I used to refuse to leave the cinema while the credits were still running. I’d complain when people walked into my field of vision on their way out that I was trying to watch the film. Dad would say,
‘The film’s over, Chicken, time to go home,’ but I’d sit tight and so would Peter, out of solidarity. ‘Somebody’s taken a lot of trouble to write all these names down for us,’ I would say, while Dad sighed in the dark. ‘If it was your name, wouldn’t you want people to read it, even if you’d just made the sandwiches? And besides, there may be an extra bit of the film at the very end which is just to reward the patient ones.’ Though actually there never was.

If there are levels of reality below us, then it follows that there are levels above, superior to us as we are superior to characters in books, but not themselves absolute. Nothing that possesses characteristics is perfectly real, not even the guru. The guru himself is in some sense unreal – but he doesn’t need to be absolutely real to get the job done. When an elephant dreams about a tiger and wakes up in alarm, the tiger wasn’t real, was it? But the elephant has been awoken, and that is a real thing.

I was still far short of wakefulness myself at this time, and more preöccupied with lower realities like Boyde Ashlar than higher ones. You could even say that I’d left Boyde Ashlar in the lurch by not finishing
The Ring
. I had neglected to give the spinning plate the full charge of attention to which it was entitled. I told myself that I would borrow the book from Mrs Pavey again after Dad had forgotten all about it, so as to find out what happened in the end, but I never got round to it.

Eckstein’s manner didn’t soften as my German improved. Instead he opened up a campaign on another flank by pressuring me to learn another language. He kept me back after one German lesson to make his case. ‘You are taking things easy at a time when your brain is still able to absorb new things without difficulty. Absurd! Take advantage of this – it will not come again. You should learn Spanish. Starting
immediately
.

‘Here – I’ll start you off. I’m about to teach you something you will never forget. My own learning of Spanish was very rapid. My tutor gave me a copy of
Don Quijote de la Mancha
by Cervantes and told me to get on with it. I had to reach degree level from nothing in eight
months, and I did. If you decided to learn Spanish, you could get to A-level in a year, very easily. Don’t bother with the O-level. It’s just a distraction.

‘When you leave this room in three minutes’ time you will know more of the language than I did when I was thrown in at the deep end with Miguel de Cervantes and his knight.’ He walked over to the blackboard, took a piece of chalk and carefully wrote something on the blackboard. It was:

¡ Que te joda un pulpo!

Then he stepped back from the board and said, ‘You start with the advantage of knowing this charming sentence, which I discovered relatively late in my own progress. When I did, I vowed that it would be the first thing I taught any pupil, if I was lucky or unlucky enough to acquire one. It means,’ he said with a deep hissing sigh, ‘“
May you
be fucked by an octopus
”.’

The world stood still. The Red Spot on Jupiter blinked in shock. He went on, ‘It would be more accurate to translate, “May an octopus fuck you”, but such a sentence is not idiomatic in English. It lacks the proper cadence.
Joder
means
fuck
, and is transitive, for obvious reasons.’

When Klaus Eckstein said ‘
joder
’ he used the proper Spanish sound, like a heavy ‘H’, not far from a guttural German ‘ch’. ‘No doubt your English teacher will have told you to avoid passive verbs, on the grounds that they are weaker and vaguer. This is an example of the opposite, with the passive construction being the more forceful. And there you are – I have done as I promised. I have taught you something you will never forget. From this day on, you will always have one phrase of Spanish at your disposal. If you do in fact choose to learn the language, not everything will come so easily, but the difficulties are not overwhelming. Now, I have somewhere to be even if you do not.’

I saw that those five little staccato words, those (he was right) entirely unforgettable words, remained on the board, and a wave of fear swept over me. Not entirely selfish fear – I didn’t want Eckstein to be compromised in any way, though why was I worried? His unpopularity was already exemplary. He had nothing to fear.

‘Sir –,’ I piped up, ‘shouldn’t we clean the blackboard?’

‘As I understand the situation, young Mr Cromer, you cannot do so, and I myself … cannot be bothered. No one will understand what those words mean,’ he added airily, ‘and if they do … well, who cares? I am here to provide instruction, am I not? Let them learn …’

He didn’t abandon me quite as brusquely as I feared. He pushed the Tan-Sad roughly to the stairwell, wheezing as he did so, but then summoned up enough breath to produce an enormous whistle which summoned some of the boys with which those premises were so richly supplied.

Perhaps Eckstein gambled on Spanish attracting me as a language of secrets and obscenities. Presumably the octopus featured in the unforgettable curse because with its eight arms it could quite easily explore a lady and a man at the same time, and still have fingers left over for the eating of its lunch. Eckstein instilled in me the idea that Spanish was a language of adult intimacies. German as I first experienced it was a motherly language, full of lullabies, endearments and diminutives, while Spanish was more of a lover from the start, a fount of forbidden knowledge. German was a familiar hand on the cradle. Spanish was an unknown tongue in my ear.

From then on, at the end of a lesson, Mr Eckstein might mention some virtue or peculiarity of the Spanish language, contrasting it as if casually with German. He thought German and English were both impoverished compared with Spanish in the matter of punctuation, specifically the punctuation of exclamations and questions. In English we would think it very odd if someone only bothered to indicate the end of quoted speech, and not the beginning. ¿So why not apply the same principle to questions? ¡And exclamations! ¿Why not prepare the reader for what is coming? ¡It’s silly not to!

Or he might remark that Spanish, unlike German, had two verbs meaning ‘to be’. They weren’t interchangeable.
Estar
and
ser
. One referred to the merely accidental and contingent, while the other dealt with permanent, existential characteristics. He said that there was a lot more German philosophy than Spanish, but perhaps that was because the Spanish needed less, so much being embodied in their language.
When he made these remarks in passing on the relative merits of languages, he didn’t address them to me. He never even looked at me, but I realised it was my interest he was fishing for.

He knew what he was doing with these sidelong comments. Ever since I had fallen out with Miss Collins, the tutor of my bed rest years, over the sacred symbol æ, disputed 27th letter of the alphabet, strange forms and symbols had been my chosen playground. If I had been less prudish I would have seen at once that the punctuation of the five-word curse he had chalked on the blackboard was as thrilling as its meaning. Eckstein was drawing my attention to two symbols that were right up my street.
¡If they’d been any further up my street
they’d be sticking their tongues
and so on!

I vowed from then on to import these useful symbols into my own essays and letters, in any subject, for every teacher. ¿Wasn’t it logical, as Eckstein said? ¿Why should English remain at its historical disadvantage, when help was at hand? Any page of my writing crawled with orthographical paraçites. I didn’t much mind that my attempts to Iberiçise English punctuation were invariably crossed out and çingled out for reproach. That’s always how the world treats pioneers.