Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

I was in no great hurry to go public with my own fantasies of fulfilment. I suppose I wanted a boyfriend. Calm and sensible — why not? Nicely dressed — I didn’t care one way or the other. As far as Mum went, fine by me if the shock never wore off. No dinner invitations wished for in either direction.

I didn’t want to lose my heart to a straight man if I could help it, and I certainly didn’t want a beauty, of whom in any case only one or two ever showed their faces at CHAPs meetings. I didn’t want to go down Cyrano de Bergerac’s road. I know everybody is supposed to love Cyrano de Bergerac, but I don’t. What a fraud! As far as I’m concerned, he’s just Pinocchio gone to the bad. His nose is so swollen that no one notices the effects of yet another lie, and it’s so long since he’s told the truth that he doesn’t remember what it feels like. If there was ever a talking cricket to give him sound advice, he’s long since ground it beneath his riding boot or skewered it with his sword.

Cyrano is brave, honourable and unsightly. He isn’t desirable, and this is horribly unfair because he is beautiful where it really matters, on the inside. External beauty isn’t the real thing. It’s a distraction.

With whom I shared my liver

So does he fall in love with a woman with a club foot or a boss eye? Does he even fall in love with a flawed paragon — the woman who would be lovely if her ears were a little smaller, her ankles less thick? No, he falls in love with an acknowledged beauty, the hypocrite, and of course it’s taken as read that her inside is as beautiful as her outside. Because her outside is beautiful. Cyrano doesn’t want a fairer world, he wants an unfair world that lets him in, but he blackmails the world into sobbing on his behalf. Well, my eyes are dry.

The alliance of cowards I made with George to go to CHAPs meetings had obvious advantages, but there were also some drawbacks. We were treated as a sort of couple. Once a Tony came over and said, ‘Tell me, where did you two meet?’ And I said, ‘Here — the first time either of us came to a meeting.’ The Tony almost purred, as if he couldn’t be happier about us. There was occasional mild pressure on George to offer some personal testimony, but I was exempt. Everyone could see that I had nothing to say.

In theory there was no age discrimination at CHAPs meetings, in fact there were constant tirades against its evils, but the subtle fan of wrinkles round George’s eyes and the slight thinning of his hair disqualified him from full participation in the life of the group. In the same way, the group’s goal of reaching out to the town and not just the university didn’t stop him from being patronised somewhat, as if he might need subtitles during discussions.

It suited everyone to think of the two of us as an indivisible subsection of CHAPs, a sort of internal splinter group. This was disconcerting for both of us. He wasn’t used to the full blinding spotlight of invisibility, and I wasn’t used to sharing it.

We were a couple without ever having been an item. The group invented a closeness for us, though I doubt if anyone wanted to think about how we fitted together. We were a sort of Darby and Joan couple. Or I might have been the rather withdrawn fellow, yawning and grumbling, who always seemed to tag along when one of the original Siamese twins (Was it Eng or Chang? I should really look it up) wanted to play billiards. If ever I ran into a CHAPs member in town he’d be sure to ask, ‘Where’s George?’, as if I’d unaccountably mislaid the twin with whom I shared my liver.

It helped to establish this coupled image that on our second visit George said, ‘John had tea in the yellow mug last time — can he have it again?’ So someone nicely ensconced on the sofa went bright red and surrendered the mug for my use. There was nothing special about the mug, though it wasn’t too big and the handle was a good shape for me. I could have made do with most of the others, but I didn’t want to correct George when he was going to so much trouble on my behalf.

But after that the yellow mug loomed larger and larger. It was absurd. There was any amount of chafing along the lines of ‘Use any mug but the yellow one, that’s John’s, you’d better not get on his bad side.’ Once the yellow mug couldn’t be located right away, and the place was pandæmonium. I said I didn’t mind, any mug would do. Finally it was found lurking in the sink with the rest of the washing-up. The blessèd mug was given a priority cleaning, polished with a tea towel until it squeaked. Then it was filled with tea and offered to me with a triumphant smile, as if some desperate disaster had been headed off at the last possible moment. All the people in the group seemed to compress their sense of my singularity and then stuff it into the ruddy mug. As if what made me different wasn’t John needs a wheelchair to get around , but John’s very particular about his favourite yellow mug. Bit of a prima donna, you know.

I even managed to drop the yellow mug once, though I was solicitous of the Tonys’ floor and waited until the mug was empty. Unfortunately I’m not far enough off the ground to break crockery reliably. I dare say Edith Piaf had the same problem, but her flinging talents were far beyond mine.

At our second meeting we made the acquaintance of Ken, the group’s one-man intellectual vanguard and ideologue. It was obvious from the first glance that he had been typecast in the rôle by his looks. He was squat and entirely bald, which was not then a possible avenue to attractiveness, being only voluntary among the fearsome tribe of skinheads. In Ken’s case it was beyond his control, thanks to childhood alopecia after measles. Without his glasses he might have been able to lead a normal life, but baldness plus strong glasses, strong enough to make his eyes look small, could only mean one thing — ferocious intellectualism.

It didn’t matter that he wasn’t necessarily the cleverest person in the group. A style of combative extremist theory became his lifeline, the vindication of his off-putting appearance. He spoke at length about sexual evolution, about unstoppable changes in society which would lead to heterosexuality, poverty and war becoming obsolete. We were the first wave of a new creation.

There was a certain amount of mismatch between the jaunty acronym of CHAPs and its rather hard-line name, the Cambridge Homosexual Activism Project. It was no secret that the name had been hammered out to justify a desirable set of initials. If anyone had been able to come up with a better name for the group then it would generally have been accepted, as long as the acronym could stay. I thought ‘homophilic’ might do for the H and ‘assimilation’ for the A, but hesitated to make the suggestion. Only Ken liked the austere ring of the name, and would have liked to use it in full on every occasion. There were frivolous elements in the group that sometimes seemed close to sniggering at him.

I had more or less crawled on hands and knees to my first meeting, as to a place of healing or punishment, Lourdes or Golgotha. What I had found, as I gradually realised, was closer to Mum’s sewing circle in Bourne End, although no single stitch was sewn. I suppose it was more of an unpicking circle than a sewing circle. I tell a lie — a few stitches were sewn. I had a Greek tapestry shoulder-bag which I had bought in the market, like a huge external pocket marginally easier for me to rummage through than anything actually attached to my clothes, and a member of the group sewed a discreet lambda onto that.

Thread of exasperated fondness

Our leader Ken seemed to have a nickname, though people were careful not to use it in his hearing. At first I thought it was Sarge, which didn’t seem quite right since his manner, even at its most dogmatic, was more pleading than authoritative. It turned out to be Serge, still puzzling although his earnestness might have seemed a Russian quality.