Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

Adopted by a family of logarithms

It sometimes happened that a physically slight young woman, not perhaps weighing much more than I did, put herself forward. Then the most likely consequence was a sort of secondary hitching, with my shrimp of a St Joan rallying male troops on my behalf. This transaction, what with that one-in-ten gender ratio, would take barely a moment. Perhaps I was indirectly responsible for forging romantic connections. Perhaps there are grandchildren at this moment stifling their yawns as they hear the old tale.

If I needed to be conveyed up steps, then I wouldn’t announce the fact until my victim had lifted the chair out of the car. Once that had been managed, it was a very difficult position for my victim to refuse the second-stage request. The same is true of all confidence tricks. One Yes begets another until the No reflex is bound and gagged.

Then I would ask to be lifted out of the car and into the chair. Then I had to have my books, and then I needed to be taken to where my lecture was being given. If my victim was a fellow student, then all too often he was on a tight schedule, and not likely to be going to my lecture of choice. In that case I’d hitch a lift off somebody else, which was relatively easy since I was at least on the pavement. I had hoisted my sails, at least, and could reasonably hope for a personified wind to fill them for the last stage of my journey.

It all worked reasonably well. Still, the amount of mental strain involved was considerable, the continuous effort to impose myself on others by raw force of charm. All this before I could even begin to study! By the time the first lecture of the day began, I felt I had been through a whole alphabet of effort, from A to Z (passing æ somewhere along the way), while my fellow students had barely made it as far as B. I began to feel eroded and worn down. It’s not that I’m shy. Anyone who has been brought up without privacy has seen his shyness wither away for lack of nourishment. But my energy wasn’t unlimited.

I was gradually discovering Cromer’s Paradox of Disabled Life. This is it: greater independence means greater dependence. So easily stated, so hard to live with.

To elaborate a little: if your needs are being looked after institutionally then you don’t have to ask for help. Just ring the bell or wait for the nurse to come round. But if you’re managing by yourself, without being able to do everything for yourself, then you have to ask for help many times a day. The determination not to be defined by your needs leads directly to your having to spell them out the whole time. And so: greater independence means greater dependence. QE (alas) D.

I made myself persevere with the technique of hitch-lifting despite exhaustion. Otherwise I was afraid I would gradually become a recluse, and soon even going to lectures would be beyond me. Then the authorities would conclude that mainstream education for the disabled was a noble gesture but an educational sham, without giving a thought to the extra difficulties that had been put in my path. I wasn’t going to let that happen.

It didn’t take me long to realise that there were students of Modern Languages in my year who were virtually bilingual. They would mention casually that they had dreams, if you please, in Spanish or German. If I had a dream in a foreign language it was only likely to involve my shouting ‘ Hilfe! ¡Socorro! ’ while being crushed by a giant toppling dictionary. It turned out that these prodigies had spent their childhoods (in some cases) or at least large stretches of their school holidays in Germany or Spain. And at that point my patience and sympathy rapidly became exhausted. As far as I was concerned, that wasn’t studying a language. That was legitimised cheating, a flagrant abuse of the system, though no one seemed to see it but me. I mean, would we really go on admiring a mathematical prodigy after it emerged that he had been adopted by a family of logarithms?

To sprain your smile

I went hitch-lifting even when I didn’t have lectures to go to. I gritted my teeth and made myself go to the Whim for a cup of coffee that tasted of nothing but scalded milk. I tried to make hitch-lifting into second nature, so that I wouldn’t feel any erosive effect from all this wheedling. I’d park the car somewhere, ask a passer-by to get the chair out, thank them with brisk warmth as if I wanted to be rid of them, spot someone else walking along who looked as though they might be going where I was going, and chime in with ‘Ex cuse me … Could you possibly give me a push as far as …?’

I learned the value in such sentences of the middle-class elaborations, the pattern of stress on the first word and the genteel adverb. I tried to convey that I was quite surprised to find myself in need of help, but there it was, it’d be a funny old world if we didn’t all of us need a favour now and then. And so on and so on. People were kind, and still it was all so tiring, so very tiring.

In the daily operation of hitch-lifting, in the town rather than the university precincts, my most willing helpers were definitely good-looking boys out with their girlfriends. Nothing was too much trouble for them. They would set me down properly and make sure everything was at the right level. If we were in a pub they were likely to stand me a drink and to say, ‘If you want anything, I’m right here.’ A lot of this must have been for the benefit of the girlfriends, but not all — and only relatively new girlfriends would be in the market for such indirect buttering-up. Established partners wouldn’t be so easily fooled, if fooling was what this was about. I think it was a very natural overflow of contentment, sexual satisfaction spilling outwards as it rarely does even in the young.

Cambridge was a large town compared to Bourne End. The streets were often crowded and so were the pavements. Bicycles were everywhere. Bicycles were the elementary particles of the Cambridge universe, but I had last reacted with one on an experimental basis in hospital at Taplow, and I couldn’t get excited about them now.

I could park the Mini more or less anywhere, though I tried not to obstruct the passage of traffic. The wheelchair had its own tendency to produce clots, little embolisms in the pedestrian circulation. A surprising number of able-bodied walkers — I’d put it as high as one in a hundred — seemed bewitched by the chair, unable to step aside from its progress. This seemed to happen as often when I was being pushed as when I was punting myself along in the intervals between porters.

It seemed to be some malfunction of the decision-making apparatus, with the option of going left being cancelled out by the option of going right. There was nothing to choose between them, and the alternatives produced paralysis. The wheelchair didn’t have headlights, of course, and these pedestrians weren’t rabbits, but the situations were parallel. At least once a day I would find myself confronted by someone, almost invariably male, blushing and mumbling, stalled in front of my vehicle, wishing the ground would open up and swallow him. Sometimes I wished for that to happen too, though I’d smile and say, ‘After you.’

Hypnosis is hard work, it drains the system, and charm is hypnosis without the handy short cut of a trance. People can’t be made to do things against their will, but they can be led into a state where they don’t think in terms of what they want. But now I also came to see that charm is like a muscle or a gland. It took effort to clench someone’s attention in mine, or to secrete the social juices that made people play along, and at the end of a day my face would simply ache from the effort of geniality.

Is it possible to sprain your smile? If so, then I did it sometime in the second week of that first term.