Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

He himself wasn’t married. ‘My needs are met by a very special lady, John,’ he explained. ‘Known her for years. We get on very well. Of course I have to pay, but that doesn’t worry me. Just think about it for a moment. People end up having to pay for their sexual business one way or another. No exceptions. Those that get married pay most of all. And it’s good to have things settled — I don’t like going to different ladies. I keep to the same one. She knows me, y’know. Once you’re a regular, her charges are very reasonable. She likes to have things settled too, y’see. Monica says she’s fond of me, and I believe her. We have a nice chat and a cup of tea afterwards. We’ve become good friends. She tells me she wants to take me out to a meal one day, when she’s not quite so busy. I can tell you, I’m really looking forward to that!’

Mr Thatcher looked at me rather wistfully. ‘We could always meet up after we’ve both got better and left hospital. We could visit the lady I’ve been telling you about. If you were with me, and I recommended you, I dare say you’d get a discount. Especially if you’ve never done it before.’ Of course I’d ‘done it’, just not in the way Mr Thatcher meant — I’d had assignations in school lavatories and music rooms, I’d been pounced on in armchairs and fellated, without my permission though not exactly against my will.

He searched my eyes for any flicker of interest, saying, ‘You shouldn’t worry too much about the money side of it, John. In fact, why don’t you take it as a present from me?’

He really liked the idea of having me as his little pal, but I was getting a bit fed up with people offering me special rates on their prostitutes. What was it that made people think, ‘He looks a bit down in the mouth — let’s treat him to a working girl’? First Jimmy at the Vulcan School and now Mr Thatcher. I have to say that Jimmy’s Minouche, with her cute scrunched-up face, sounded more fun than Mr Thatcher’s Monica with her cups of tea and busy schedule. If a similar offer was made a third time I’d get quite shirty, particularly if the downward trend continued, towards the shabbiest drabs and doxies of Slough. Did I really look so helpless? If I’d wanted what they wanted I wouldn’t be shy about it, but it so happened that I wanted something different.

Plutocrat in embryo

Still, the ice had been broken between us, Mr Thatcher and me. I particularly enjoyed our conversations on the subject of money. He said he’d got a tidy sum put aside, but was cagy about how much exactly. Still, when I asked if he could raise £1,000 he looked pretty smug and said he thought he could manage that. I was impressed. I had managed to amass £72 10s 5d over the years, and I liked money very much indeed. That’s why I kept it in the Guardian Bank, which had its offices in Jersey. I was a plutocrat in embryo. It was a canny decision to put my funds there, because the Guardian Bank, avoiding U.K. tax, paid 8 % per annum. I kept my assets out of the taxman’s reach. My money wasn’t just saved, it was sheltered, safe from the storms of the business world. It wasn’t just in a bank, it was in a haven .

Then the news broke on the radio that the Guardian Bank Ltd had been taken into receivership. It was reported the next day in the Telegraph , which is where Dad read about it.

I lay in the bed on Ward Three of CRX and considered my newly acquired poverty.

Was the roof over my head about to fall in? No.

Would my food now be stopped? No.

Would I stop getting medicines and nursing? No.

Why, I was even sipping beer that I didn’t have to pay for.

Along the corridor I could hear the echoes of Dr Ansell’s voice, and I knew she’d be at my bedside in a moment, checking whether I was doing my exercises. She would ask if I was enjoying my Mackesons. I was and I wasn’t, but life was good and warm, and I felt as though I was being cradled in an enormous tender hand.

Mum, though, visited in tears because of what had happened to the Guardian Bank. She was literally wringing her hands as she asked, ‘What are we going to do about your money now ?’

I replied that I wasn’t going to do anything. Then Dad came in, stiffly formal, dressed for work. Any whiff of crisis made their incompatibility glaring. They didn’t seem anything like husband and wife — more like an unhinged widow and the military policeman detailed to inform her of her loss. While Mum went on falling apart, Dad brandished a stiff upper lip that could have knocked down walls. He advised me to take it on the chin, saying he hoped this setback wouldn’t deter me from a future in the world of finance. He even said something about him and Mum helping out if the receiver was unable to recover my money.

I’m sure I was supposed to erupt in tears of joy. I was committing one more crime against the laws of family temperament. Mum wanted more drama and Dad wanted me to hide my shattered feelings behind a mask of indifference. I offended them both in different ways by not really being bothered. I cheated them of any sort of display, either hysteria or stoicism. It didn’t sit well with either of them that I took things so much in my stride. Meanwhile the love of money dropped off me like an old scab.

Before he left, CRX kept its promise to Mr Thatcher by giving him the jar with his gallstones in it, and he kept his promise by letting me have a look. It was an ordinary jar with a screw-top, the sort of thing Mum kept in her spice-rack. His gallstones turned out to be more or less in the middle of the range of styles and colours. There were five or six of them, yellow in colour, slightly streaked and glossy. They looked like old-fashioned boiled sweets that had been sucked but not chewed, mint humbugs, perhaps. I wondered what they would taste like, but we weren’t sufficiently on intimate terms, he and I, for me to ask if I could pop one in my mouth.

Of course Mr Thatcher was only serving a short sentence at CRX, while I was an old lag. The way things were going, I would be lucky not to become a lifer. Before he left he asked for my address and telephone number, and I gave them with a little reluctance. I didn’t want any discounts on suburban courtesans. Perhaps Monica in her turn would be shown the fossilised confectionery cooked up by his misbehaving insides. I hoped Mr Thatcher would have the sensitivity to show her after the act, rather than before.

The law was changing that year, to allow the desires of people like me some legitimate expression. If I selected my partners with great care (screening out under-21s and members of the armed services and Merchant Navy, and one at a time, please), making sure everything happened in private, I could have a sexual life all of my own, within the law. Oh, as long as I waited three years or so without jumping the gun.

I had heard mention among the nurses of a Mr Peever, who had been in the hospital and was ‘queer as a coot’. They had to watch him in the toilets. They had to watch me in the toilets, too, in case I fell down, but I realised this was different. He had been loitering with intent — tottering with intent, really — more or less from the moment he could stand up after his surgery. Sister Wright, who smoked eighty Consulate a day, sniggered and said ‘Who’d go with him ?’ Well, I would. And wouldn’t anyone rather ‘go with him’ than kiss her mentholated mouth?

I started to pray to Mr Peever in my head, Please, Mr Peever come back to hospital and I’ll go with you. Please, Mr Peever . I asked as discreetly as I could when he’d been in the hospital and they said about six months previous. And will he be coming back soon? Of course they looked at me as if I was mad. I’d come back to CRX myself after an absence, but of course I was a special case. I had a season ticket, I was a hospital yo-yo. Mr Peever never did come back, or not while I was there. Meantime I broadcast on all frequencies to Mr Peever, Mr Peever, please, Mr Peever . I wore a track in my mind with my prayers. We can be flitty together, Mr Peever, just the two of us. Apart from anything else, his name was so perfect, an unimprovable compound of pervert and peeper . It seemed unfair for God to make such a creature and then withhold him from me. It was a big day when I could finally go to the lavatory under my own steam. That was the proper chapel for my prayers.