Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Sitting on the bed wasn’t done. Granny didn’t do it because it suited her sense of formality to sit elegantly on a chair facing me. After the failure of simulated horse-play Mum only did it very rarely, and when she did she was careful not to rest her full weight on it. She would perch on the very edge instead, with her legs braced, so that she almost hovered.

Dad wasn’t so careful. To some extent he thought I was putting it on. Well, he did and he didn’t. I could hear him saying to Mum that I had everyone running around me in small circles, and when were they going to stop letting me have my own way about everything? It didn’t help that he had lost his own invalid privileges from the time I became ill. Mum would no longer make him tempting little dishes when he was under the weather. I monopolised the nurse in her, so that there was no one left over to fuss over him. I hogged her help-meet side. It didn’t help that with her rather perverse sense of family drama, Mum sometimes used me against him in their marital quarrels.

One awful morning, after a row which had culminated in Dad throwing the marmalade pot at her (the crock and the preserve it contained hit the wall with a double impact I could hear and interpret very easily), she came in and coached me with reproaches to make on her behalf. It wasn’t a job I wanted, it wasn’t a game I was eager to play, but I couldn’t stand against her for long. I put up a small fight, and then I was parroting to my father, ‘I’m really quite cross with you, Daddy. You mustn’t make my mummy cry.’

Disgraceful. Shirley Temple stuff, really, to which I wasn’t suited, and to which Dad responded, quite rightly, with a look of disgust. His wife was hysterical and his son was a malingering ventriloquist’s dummy.

Even then he didn’t turn against me. Another day I was looking at my old What I Want To Be book, and went through doctor, scientist, priest as usual, but this time on impulse I added actor. Mum was busy pouring cold water on this fourth crazed ambition when Dad pitched in to back me up.

‘I say let the lad be an actor if that’s what he wants.’

‘Oh Dennis, please !’ she said. ‘As if things aren’t difficult enough already. Can’t you act responsibly for a change? Surely you can see he worships you? Now I’ll never get the idea out of his head.’ I think Dad and I were both taken aback by the idea of me worshipping him, but certainly I was full of adoration in that moment when he stood up against her and defended me. ‘Be realistic, Dennis … what part could he possibly play?’

‘Well,’ said Dad, ‘he could be an old lady sitting in an upright wing chair in the corner.’

‘But what sort of part is that?’ she pleaded.

‘Oh, I would say it’s quite a good one!’ he shot back. ‘For one thing, he could direct operations, like a general in a battle. He gets it straight from his Great-aunt Molly, of course. Anyway, it’s really only a slight twist on what he’s doing now. There would be nothing for him to learn. Being thoroughly selfish is what he knows best, and I must admit he does it quite superbly. Even better than your mother, m’dear.’

I was beginning to see the less enjoyable side of being championed by my father.

‘The only snag is that he couldn’t sit in a wing chair because his hips don’t bend, but I dare say that’ll all be sorted out by the time he’s grown up.’ He may only have been using me as a weapon to get back at Mum, as she had used me to make him feel guilty about throwing the marmalade, but at least my father was holding a possibility open, while everyone else was busy shutting up shop on any bearable future I might possibly have.

So when he sat down on the bed one cold night there may have been a hint of hostility in the heaviness of his movements. In any case I had learned to over-ride the reflex of tensing up in such situations, which only brought the pain-spasm on, and to relax whether I felt like it or not. There was no real ill will driving his body weight down onto the bed. Nothing bad need have come of it.

It’s just that he sat down on the hot-water bottle, and it burst. It was an old item, which had come through the War (I expect) and was at the very end of its useful life. People of a less thrifty generation would have replaced it long since. It was entitled to fatigue, to perishing. Still, if only Collie Boy had sat down so squarely on the whoopee cushion lying in wait for her! Surely then it would have sung its vulgar song.

Dad leapt to his feet as if he was scalded, though of course it was me he was worried about. The water wasn’t close to boiling, I doubt if it was even very hot. He yanked the bedclothes off me and threw the leaking hot-water bottle into the corner. Then he must have started to lean over me, reaching for me with his hands, signalling his intentions. His course of emergency action was to scoop up the entire disaster area, the boy in his steaming pyjamas, and carry it to Mum for her to sort out. That’s when I must have said what so wounded him, to discourage him from bringing so much movement and excitement to a body that had been insulated from events for such a long time. I said, ‘Please fetch my mother.’

It was the formality of the request that was so wounding, the implication that he might not know instinctively who my mother was, and apparently I made it with a hideous sort of grin on my face. As if he was nothing to me. So Mum was duly fetched to sort things out, to soothe me, to peel the pyjamas gently from me, to dry me, to change the sheets and bedclothes without disturbing me too much, so that the whole alarming incident ended as a sort of accidental bed-bath. Very little water had reached the mattress. It really wasn’t serious.

Except for what I said to Dad, and the nasty grin I wore while I said it. Dad’s great love was biology on a small scale, dealing with miniature organisms that revealed themselves under the microscope. He wasn’t much of a mammal man. I don’t imagine he had read Darwin on facial expression in the animal kingdom (which would certainly have been a set text if he had gone to university as planned), and he interpreted my grin as a sardonic rejection of him and his attempts to remedy the small disaster he had caused.

What he saw on my face was a changeling expression, something looking out of a child’s face that was not the child. Of course the primate grin can express a number of things, submission sometimes, aggression when the lips are lifted defiantly off the teeth. In my case the rictus had a simple cause, physical pain, as my brain filled up with signals from spinal joints inflamed and in spasm. I suppose I had the option of screaming, which might have been more reassuring to Dad (though that could go either way), but filling my lungs to scream would have jarred my back more and made the pain worse, so all I could think to do was grin and bear it. Unwittingly I offered him a grinning fox mask of pain.

I’m reconstructing my part in all this. I have no memories of that evening, I who memorised so much. You’d think that after so much inactivity my mind would seize on something as dramatic as a scald. Life was visiting my sick-bed with a vengeance. But I think the events of that evening didn’t stay with me for exactly the same reason. My idea of a major event had been re-calibrated since the days of my mobility. By now it was a big thing if two wet leaves of different colours, one red, one yellow, happened to be plastered against the window, just like that, one two, by a gust of rain, while I was watching in the mirror. Like the paw-prints of some window-walking animal.

It was headline news if Dad hung up his trousers in the bedroom upstairs without taking the change out of his pockets, so that coins rained down on the floorboards. After years of becoming accustomed to the rhythms of the day-to-day, fragments of gossip about people I hardly knew, scrupulously neutral lessons, excitement banished, a real event flashing its teeth and barrelling towards me from the cloud of plankton would simply burst the fine mesh of my attention. There is a fuse-box in the brain, and under the impact of such charged events I think a traumatised filament blew in mine, saving the rest of the organism from shock.