Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

I imagine that standard invigilators survey the room with an impartial sternness. My personal invigilator would tend to give me encouraging smiles, which I didn’t enjoy. I was afraid that this goodwill might escalate into actual patronage, that he might fetch me a cup of coffee and a sticky bun to keep me going, and then slide across specimen answers to the questions or correct my grammar.

Towards the end of that summer term Alan Linton brought me a present. He kept telling me that discovering homœopathy had changed his life and given him a direction. He was in my debt. I was rather prickly about friendship at that period, not wanting people to get too close in case I ended up relying on them, and if Alan hadn’t been safely leaving Cambridge I dare say I would have bristled.

He delivered his present to A6 after Hall one evening. It was a piece of cake. ‘It’s a funny cake,’ he said, making his eyebrows shoot up and down à la Groucho Marx, twitching, ‘if you get my drift. Very funny indeed.’ Meaning that it was made with marijuana. I felt very alienated by the general drug culture of the time, but this was an irresistible offer. I turned down joints with the excuse that I only smoked Spanish cigarettes (and not just any Spanish cigarette either), feeling that Cannabis sativa was rather dragged down by its association with Nicotiana tabacum . Now I could have a transgressive nibble on the sly, and no one would be any the wiser.

‘And this is to go with it,’ Alan said, reverently producing a record from a plastic bag. It was his treasured copy of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks . If albums were as good as their titles, it was already my favourite record. He made clear that the dope cake was a gift, but the record was only a loan. He must have realised that an album was a difficult object for me to manage — tape cassettes, reliable and easy to handle, would soon replace them, and I for one couldn’t wait — so he put it on my stereo, perched on top of the spindle, ready to go.

He also left me something called a Dust Bug, a perspex lath with a sort of toothbrush and a miniature plush roller mounted on it, which was supposed to sit on a little rod, held in place on the surround of my turntable with a little rubber sucker, but I decided not to bother with that.

I set up the turntable with the arm that steadies records on the spindle over to the right, so that when the side had been played the needle would return to the beginning. I knew that marijuana distorted the sense of time, and I wanted to make sure that the music would last for the whole of the experience.

It made sense to eat the cake before I sat down. I was pleased to see that it was moist. I broke it into pieces which would sit snugly on the fork. I closed my eyes while I chewed the cake, savouring the slightly dusty flavour, trying to decide where spice ended and cannabis began. I got the stereo under way and was settled in the Parker-Knoll by the time the second track started. The album was famously profound and poetic. Now I would make up my own mind.

It blue my mind

By the time the needle reached the end of the side I had remembered that I was likely, in the course of the coming intoxication, to become atrociously hungry. That much I had learned about the effects of the drug. It would make me into a monster of appetite, and all I had to appease the monster was a Mars bar tucked away in a desk drawer. I should really have been keeping it in a fridge anyway, as a homage to the Mars bars of my childhood, but there were no fridges for students then. I decided not to wait until the eating mania struck before I fetched it. I should make the trip while I was still Mr Jekyll, more or less in charge of my faculties, before Mr Hyde took over and started bellowing for ratatouille.

Even as Mr Jekyll I had trouble foraging for the hidden snack. The Mars bar felt oddly springy in my hand, like something made of an elastic syrup, or as if there were a thousand Mars bars in a loose association, so that I picked up just the first one, and there was an appreciable delay before the others caught up with it — and then of course there’s always a straggler.

Finally I was back in the Parker-Knoll in the relaxed position. I had pulled up my drawbridge and was alone on the ramparts with the phenomenon of tender howling (against jazzy strings) that was Astral Weeks . I already knew this was the record I had been waiting for all my life. It blue my mind. It blew through my mind. It blew my mind.

I didn’t know how many times the needle had traversed this amazing music. I had no idea what time it was anywhere on earth. I only knew it was time to eat the Mars bar.

If I’d given it more thought, I would have cut the bar into chunks or slices and used a fork. As things stood, with my arm extended to its maximum and my teeth angled forward (it certainly felt as if my teeth were angled forward) I could just about nibble the front quarter-inch of the Mars bar. I got the giggles, remembering something that I’d heard a girl asking rather coquettishly in the Whim on Trinity Street — ‘Why do Mars bars have veins?’ I suddenly saw that this was a question that needed to be asked.

A Mars bar does indeed have veins, chocolate tubes breaking the surface of the bar, as if caramel was circulating through them, supplying the nougat core with vital nutrients and access to unthinkable sensations. The whole ridiculously penile confection was alive. It was a soft hard-on. It was Cadbury’s Flake that had the fast reputation, and its adverts always portrayed Flake-eaters as oral nymphomaniacs, but the Mars bar was every bit as concupiscent. It was shameless, and it knew what it wanted.

What a tease it was! But two could play at that game. By now I’d eaten as much as I could reach of the bar. It would have to wait for its consummation. I decided to put the rest of it down while I worked out how to convey it to my mouth. My coördination must have been affected by the action of the drug, because I immediately managed to nudge it off the arm of the Parker-Knoll and onto the floor. It annoyed me that I had been so clumsy, but there seemed no point in mounting a rescue expedition just then. The Mars bar wasn’t going anywhere.

Now my thoughts were tending in a different direction. It was time to masturbate. It wasn’t really my idea, and it certainly wasn’t Van Morrison’s. I felt it was the Mars bar’s idea. Those five inches of chewy sweetness had put ideas in my head.

With a little effort I retrieved my own organ from my flies. In the position I was in I could just about flick my fingers against the glans. My mind wandered, though, and I kept losing the thread of arousal. Then suddenly I was ejaculating, without the usual run-up, and with the pleasure oddly scattered and silvery. It was the anagram of an orgasm. A morgaso , perhaps, or (stroke of genius, this, I thought) Om ragas ! I suddenly wished I had one of Dad’s crossword puzzles within reach. In this state, surely, I would be unstoppable — though of course, since I’d added extra letters in my anagrams, I was only on my normal dismal form.

I sat there for a few seconds, then decided that I shouldn’t put off the cleaning-up operation any longer. I wriggled to make contact with the lever of the Parker-Knoll. Nothing happened. It wouldn’t budge. That’s when I realised that the drawbridge had malfunctioned and I was trapped in my plushly upholstered castle. The Mars bar on the floor wasn’t going anywhere, and nor was I.

I began to get cold, particularly in the groin area, where I was slick with genetic information, the signed confession of my self-abuse. I tried to doze. It was hopeless. The Dream-Cloud was out of reach. Van Morrison burbled lyrically on, unperturbed by my desperate situation. He kept on singing at me that he was beside me (‘and I’m — beside — you —’) with the most extraordinary intensity, but that was no real consolation. I was beside myself. My fear, of course, was that I’d still be marooned in the Parker-Knoll, pubes crackling with my own dried seed, Mars bar skulking on the carpet like a bowel movement, when Mrs Beddoes arrived to do her morning rounds.