Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Soon after flicker-book night in the Blue Dorm, Roger Stott told me he was being moved out. ‘They say it’s temporary, just for a week,’ he said. He was rather cast down by it, as if he was being punished for something done wrong. I asked who was being moved in. Luke Squires, that’s who, and he wasn’t even an AB.

Luke Squires was mildly spastic and in the year above us. I’d seen him around — he certainly stood out. There was something about the way he handled his wheelchair that was absolutely distinctive. It seemed to glide him from place to place, and to arrive perfectly smoothly wherever he wanted to be.

Anything that could be done in a wheelchair Luke could do outstandingly well. He was something of a sports star at Vulcan, equally gifted at basketball (a certainty for the school team at the Stoke Mandeville games) and wheelchair shinty, a game which seemed entirely unburdened with rules. Normally it’s paraplegics who have the wheelchair sports pretty much sewn up, having the strong working arms needed to generate speed and power.

The Vulcan team enjoyed challenging the staff, whom they thrashed on a regular basis, as they did any able-bodied team rash enough to borrow wheelchairs and accept a challenge. The home team’s familiarity with the chairs gave them a huge advantage. All this sporting activity had no great appeal to me personally, I mean as a spectator, but at least it wasn’t absurdly contrived, as some sports events at the school were. Watching one boy attempting what was called archery, when in fact someone else was holding the bow and he had to be pulled bodily backwards in his wheelchair to draw it, it was hard to see where exactly the element of sport lay. It would have made as much sense to catapult him forward, using the tension stored up in the bow, as it did to pretend he was firing it. It might also have been more fun.

It was hard to believe that Luke’s lower body wasn’t under the same control as his upper, but of course it wasn’t so. When he got up from the wheelchair he could hardly stand. He wasn’t athetoid — his spasms weren’t dramatic — but his movements were greatly impaired.

In a gulch of the badlands

I had a pow-wow with Julian about how I should behave in Luke’s presence. I could hardly stop leading the night’s radio play of erotic adventures, but I’d surely get into trouble if I carried on in the usual way.

‘I can tell you one thing,’ said the boy agent QM, ‘— I don’t think much of La Willis’s tactics. She’s being very obvious. You can’t just parachute a spy into enemy territory without papers or any sort of cover story.’

Julian was spy-mad, but that didn’t mean he was wrong in this case. It was very clear that a spy was what Luke Squires was. He was trusted by Miss Willis, and he was being sent to discover just what boyish-high-spirits were getting up to, amid the excited murmuring after lights-out. I just didn’t know what to do. Acting normally would mean putting on a pornographic vaudeville in which Miss Willis herself, lightly transposed to a brothel in a gulch of the badlands (what was a gulch? what were badlands?), did a star turn.

For once Julian couldn’t advise me. ‘I can’t get through to HQ,’ he solemnly told me. ‘I think the signal’s being jammed. Of course there’s always a possibility that Squires is a double agent anyway.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Let’s just say he might not be as reliable as the Willis seems to think. I’ve heard of a few interesting messages being intercepted from the lift-shaft.’

Hold on! Hadn’t I made that up, the stuff about the message drop in the lift? As so often with Julian Robinson, I began to lose track of the distinction, arbitrary anyway, between fantasy and the other thing.

Julian told me that in the absence of guidance from HQ he accepted full responsibility for whatever I decided to do — but I couldn’t help feeling that this came to the same thing as his washing his hands of me. He also warned me that if contact was re-established by lights-out, HQ would be listening in to the show for once. Normally the privacy of the dorm after bed-time was respected, and the tape-recorder in my head was de-activated. I’d insisted on HQ’s word of honour about that. Tonight, though, was too significant an occasion for the privilege of privacy from surveillance to stand.

I made one last attempt to disentangle myself from Julian’s fantasies. I didn’t know who was a spy in what sense (and for who?), what was a game and what might not be.

‘Julian,’ I said, ‘what happens to the tapes in my head? When they’re full up, and HQ needs to listen to them?’

‘They get changed while you’re asleep.’

‘Then there’s another agent in the dorm, isn’t there? You’re not the senior operative at all!’

‘Yes I am!’ he said. ‘There’s only me! I change them myself.’ Then I knew that I had him. Pride had gone before a fall, as Miss Reid of CRX had so often promised. We both knew that once Julian’s callipers were off he wasn’t going anywhere.

It was strange, even so. Under torture — and QM had alluded darkly to that possibility — I would have said that there wasn’t a tape-recorder in my head and never had been. But I still half believed in the gun in my walking stick.

By the time the lights were turned out that night, I had decided on my plan. Defiance. It would be business as usual in the honky-tonks of the Old West. Business as usual, plus over-time.

I pushed the storyline recklessly in new directions. I started off playing the serving wench who timed her cake-baking to allow for a quick fling in the pantry with the stable lad, making sure that the romping was properly finished before the mistress of the house returned or the cakes caught fire. Of course, we weren’t fools about narrative. To keep the tension going, the mistress had to return some days while we were still in the act. I also played the part of the mistress, the technical challenge adding considerably to my sense of unreal delight. I marched in and caught us red-handed, and I acted all strict, as though I was Miss Willis herself. Normally the other boys in the dorm would have been in hysterics about that, but with Luke listening in they kept mum. No one would even help me out with sound effects. I had to do all the sex groaning myself.

Sump of dirty dreams

I smacked her/my bottom, almost in silence because of my deficient smacking skills, but making up for it with enthusiastic ‘Take that!’s and ‘How dare you!’s. I pleaded with myself and begged for mercy, and said I would do anything not to get the sack. Then at some stage I (as Miss Willis) spotted the bulge in the stable boy’s trousers and scolded the wench, saying the worst fault to be found in a working girl was selfishness and the inability to share lovely things. Did she think it was really fair for a poor working lad to be fiddling around with a callow girl who hardly knew one end of a man from another? If she was going to behave in this manner behind my (Miss Willis’s) back, it would be well for her indeed if she were to take a few lessons from an older woman and at least have the common decency to learn how to share, and to do a good job into the bargain. Heaven knows where I got all this fine and juicy stuff. The collective unconscious is a sump of dirty dreams, and I just lowered my little bucket into it.

The greater mystery, I suppose, is that all the time I thought we were being secret and absolutely disgusting (not realising that the Kama Sutra was way ahead of us) I had never thought to include any element of my own fantasies into the performance. In an all-boy school, the filth I produced was rigorously heterosexual, and now that I felt I had exhausted those possibilities, I broke ground in a new area. Far from feeling my way towards what actually aroused me, I moved further in the other direction.