Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

The wench’s first lesson was to hand the boy over to me (Willis) while I put him through his paces until I had him moaning with delight. The moans would have been better done by third parties, but there was no helping that. It was my first real experience of a resistant audience, and it made me lose confidence. I dispensed with the boy and made love to the wench, but my heart wasn’t in it. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing. At some stage I told the stable boy to make tea for us and took the wench to bed with me.

For once the story fizzled out. There was a silence of a fairly ghastly type, and then Luke spoke very quietly. ‘John?’ he said, and my heart sank. ‘You’re every bit as entertaining a performer as I’ve been told. But perhaps there are one or two things we should discuss.’ His manner was off-hand, except that murmurs after lights-out can never be off-hand, and everyone in the dorm knew he was a man on a mission. ‘If you have nothing better to do,’ he went on, ‘might you meet me for a few words after school tomorrow? Would it be convenient to meet by the bus?’

If the mood of the dorm had been put into words at that moment it would have been Now you’re for the high jump! , with a certain amount of satisfaction. Ungrateful beasts. And I wasn’t so sure about the high jump anyway.

The meeting-place meant that there was a high degree of secrecy involved. The bus was round a corner and easily fifty yards from the front entrance of the Castle. It was an old London Transport Leyland (Raeburn drove it, which can’t have been easy). But then Julian was always saying that there were microphones planted all over Vulcan School, to monitor our conversations. It made sense that an older boy would know where to go to avoid being overheard. And why care so much about privacy if he was only going to dish me with Miss Willis?

In all the mixed feelings about Luke’s invitation and what it might mean, I was overlooking one practical difficulty. I only realised it in the morning. The Everest & Jennings was a decent enough machine, but it wasn’t suitable for all surfaces. It certainly wouldn’t go over gravel. Not very handy, now that perhaps the most important appointment of my life, demanding absolute privacy, was due to take place on the far side of fifty gravelled yards.

Perhaps this would be the one day when the low-specification machine would simply zing along, gravel no obstacle. That was Plan A. If Plan A didn’t work, I had no Plan B. I certainly didn’t want worldly Luke, who might be wanting to talk man to man, to find me stranded like an over-sized pebble among the little pebbles of the drive.

When the Everest & Jennings ground to a halt on the gravel, grit buggering the relays in the usual way, I found I did have a Plan B after all. Plan B was to wave my arms feebly about and shout ‘I say’ in as loud a voice as I could muster. And amazingly, my cries of P. G. Wodehouse distress were heard. An AB spotted me from an upstairs window and came to help. I couldn’t believe my luck. It was Roger Stott, the motive power for my sexual assault on Julian. He had shown great despatch and discretion then, and surely he would be equal to any demand I made on him now.

Roger called out of the window and said he’d come and help. He brought a pushing chair with him, to transfer me. When I explained that I was meeting Luke out by the bus he raised his eyebrows, those George Harrison brows, but he didn’t pass comment. Rather pathetically I said, ‘It’s all rather hush-hush.’ Then he said something that was rather alarming, bearing in mind I had been impersonating Miss Willis as a prodigious insatiable harlot less than twenty-four hours previously: ‘He’s rather one of Marion’s pets, isn’t he?’ Well yes, but I clung to the thought that if all he wanted to do was denounce me there were better ways of going about it than making a rendezvous by the school bus.

The school’s ABs paid quite a price for their over-class status. They might seem effortlessly superior to us, but they were being exploited all the same in a way that wasn’t necessarily to be envied. They were a mild form of slave labour, expected to help with the running of the establishment in a way that would have been unthinkable, surely, in a mainstream school. Even so, there was an obvious difference between an AB like Roger, who would positively offer to help, and the ones who undertook their tasks grudgingly and never did favours.

Roger even offered to join me later if I wanted help getting back to the Castle, which was sweet although it may also have shown some curiosity about my meeting. Would half an hour be long enough? I had no idea, but I thought I’d better say yes. I was getting wildly excited and even a little panicky. Would Luke even come? Perhaps I’d be left alone with the pounding of my suspect heart.

In fact he arrived when I’d hardly been waiting a minute. Luke Squires was as much a good-looking boy as Roger Stott, but in a different style. He was sleek with secrets. He had fair hair, which was always tousled, but tousled just so. And if Roger was the sort of incredulously handsome teenager who can’t resist looking at himself in any reflective surface, even the back of a spoon, Luke had the ability to glide past a mirror on his enchanted wheelchair without raising his eyes to it, and still to take in all the relevant information.

Lesbian Sandwich

As he approached I noticed again how smoothly he managed that wheelchair, but this time I also noticed what made his mastery of it possible. Luke was the only boy in the school to have the large wheels at the front of his wheelchair, and not the back. Most boys had to do some delicate finessing when it came to even a little bump, but Luke just lazily glided over, the little back wheel following obediently in the slipstream of his smooth momentum. Luke didn’t wheel along, he flowed. I’d been feeling pretty good about my electric wheelchair, even if it was the most basic model, but now Luke’s grace made me feel like a bumbler all over again. Not that his chair would have done me any good, without the strong, supple, only marginally spastic arms that powered it. Of course it was his air of sexual knowledgeability that gave his simplest actions a tantric aura.

I wanted so very badly to learn from him. At this stage in life I wanted instruction in cabbala, with a bit of the Apocrypha mixed in, and I suppose that was near enough what I got.

His first words were purely shocking. ‘Good afternoon, John. I have a question for you. Don’t you think that Marion — sorry, Miss Willis — looks exactly like an iceberg of blubber? Whipped blubber, to be exact. Like whipped cream, you know.’ I was shocked, but also made wary. If this was one of Marion’s pets, then he must be laying a trap for me. For once there might be an actual tape-recorder in use, tucked into Luke’s smart trousers. It was best to say nothing. ‘Mind you,’ he went on, ‘I’ll say one thing for her. Fat people usually stink, you know, but the Willis is clean as a whistle. Sometimes when I’m close to her I take a good sniff while she’s looking the other way. Nothing but freshness and soap — and my nose is very sensitive.’ He flared his nostrils with quiet pride.

‘By the way,’ he went on, ‘you put on quite a show last night. That was hot stuff.’ His tone of voice suggested a cool critical verdict rather than an audience’s rapturous acclaim. It took me down a peg as well as up. ‘Do you know the word for what you were describing last night?’ I blushed with proud shame, and said, ‘I suppose you mean “smut”. Smutty talk.’

‘I mean women coupling with each other.’ Since I’d invented this activity (as I thought) I could hardly know what it was called. Women had coupled with each other in my improvisation only because the dramatic possibilities, and the men, had been milked dry.