Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

I was being asked a lot of questions, or else being asked the same question many times, in slightly different forms. In the course of my engagement with the vichara , the self-enquiry, I’d decided that if you were a non-dualist, resisting the division of reality into This and That, body and soul, real and unreal, then it followed that you couldn’t answer any questions that were put to you, which always rested on assumptions of that kind. I’d read in a book the suggestion that when confronted with a false set of alternatives, you should reply simply ‘Mu’, meaning ‘Your question cannot be meaningfully answered, since it is the product of a misconception. Please examine your premises afresh.’

So when Mum said, ‘Is it your bag or not, John? We need to know,’ I giggled and answered ‘Mu.’

The giggle was there because when anyone of my generation, however estranged from the groovy, asked if something was your bag, it meant ‘Do you like it?’ Is Acid Rock your bag? Is Buddenbrooks your bag? Is the vichara your bag? From my point of view the vichara was the bag in which all other bags could be stored without taking up any room.

The vichara — the only question. Who am I? (Who is it that asks this?) I understood now why I had gone to see The Who in Slough and not some other group. I needed to devote myself to the question of The Who.

And when Dad said, ‘It’s a simple enough question, John. Don’t be mulish. For the last time, is it your bag?’ — the giggle was no longer a temptation but the answer was still Mu. With another annoying giggle because saying Mu got me called Mulish.

At some stage Mum asked me what I wanted for supper, as if this was an ordinary day, which it obviously wasn’t. She put the question in an exasperated voice, admittedly, but that wasn’t such a rare event. And perhaps this time I didn’t answer ‘Mu’, because she said, ‘Better not have eggs again, John, you know how binding they are.’ Om Mane Padme Om. Om Mane Padme Om-pa-pah. I kept losing the thread of my threadlessness, my immersion in blissful absence. I wished Mum and Dad would let me be. I wish they’d let me Be.

‘If it’s your bag, John, then what’s in it is also yours, isn’t it?’ Mu — Mu — Mu. ‘That’s only logical.’ Exactly. Logic based on false premises can only generate nonsense.

Everything happened that day in stages which didn’t quite follow on from what had gone before. They were like reels from different films. I wondered idly if Bhagavan had ever used that analogy. Or they were like different versions of the same scene, not properly edited for continuity.

At some stage Audrey came back from a friend’s birthday party. A twelfth birthday, I expect. We heard her being dropped off in the drive, saying her goodbyes and thank-yous as nicely as Mum could wish. As she let herself in, Mum and Dad greeted her with ‘Nice party, dear?’ Anyone could tell that they weren’t really interested, they were only marking time. They were waiting for her to go to her room, so that they could carry on whatever business was being transacted where I was.

Reels that don’t match

Audrey didn’t go to her room just yet. She went into the kitchen, and then she came to have a little chat with me. Meanwhile Mum and Dad busied themselves nonsensically. Mum started picking up magazines and putting them away in the rack where they lived. The moment she had finished, Dad started searching through it, as if suddenly he couldn’t live without reading a particular article. Mum made one of her many noises of exasperation and went over to fiddle with the telephone. It vexed her that the cord was always getting snarled up — she thought that Dad gave the receiver a half-turn when he answered the phone, and another half-turn in the same direction when he returned it to its cradle. She blamed him for charging the cord with kinks, even if she could never catch him at it. She knew full well that at her mother’s house the flex wouldn’t dare to stray from its spiral.

I roused myself a little and agreed to participate in the illusion of time, out of politeness to Audrey, but strictly on a trial basis. She was wearing a purple party dress, and had been allowed to put on nail polish. Her movements were smooth and assured. Quite a little pile of books, placed on her head, would have stayed there safely in balance.

I hardly recognised her. I had missed a few stages. Of course I hadn’t been paying much attention, to her or to anyone else at that address. In any case girls between about eleven and sixteen always resemble films like the one I seemed to be in, made up of reels that don’t match. The genre switches from fairy tale to love story, and sometimes to horror movie. A world of princes and ponies can suddenly be filled with screaming banshees.

I remembered that in the past she had hated party games, and asked if there had been any.

‘A few specially horrible ones,’ she said over her shoulder as she went to the kitchen.

‘None that involved kissing, I hope?’ She made an odd stylised sound, which I took a few seconds to understand without benefit of visual clues. I imagine she was miming a retch, with or without the embellishment of a finger pointing down her throat, though the whole display was as far removed from what it represented, human emesis, as something in classical Japanese drama.

Actually she sounded less disgusted than she would have done the previous year. She was going through the motions a little bit. It wouldn’t be all that long before the kissing games were the only ones that interested her. I imagined she would play them as ruthlessly as she did all the others.

‘Sally’s mum made her invite all the boys from our class,’ she said, ‘but only three of them came.’ I could hear the clatter of a plate. ‘The really pathetic ones.’

Audrey was reading from her own little script while Mum and Dad took a reluctant break from their interrogation of me. The noises from the kitchen continued as she went about some mysterious domestic business. There was the sound of her pushing a chair against the kitchen counter so she could reach something from a high cupboard. Then I heard a familiar scrape as she pulled a particular tray out from beside the fridge, where it lived.

When she came into the sitting room, she was carrying a tray of treats for me. She had taken her party trophy, a slice of chocolate cake, and cut it into cubes, pushing a cocktail stick into each cube. It must have been the little box of cocktail sticks which was kept in the high cupbard. She set down the tray in front of me, where it rested snugly across the side-pieces of the wheelchair. All this was done with the grace of a hostess rather than the conflicted sweetness of a sister. She was growing up.

She was playing a part, of course, but so were Mum and Dad, and at the moment I preferred Audrey’s.

As she came out of the kitchen with her tray of cubed cake, I saw her in a new light, despite the Mayan darkness of that afternoon. As she moved through the sitting room to the wheelchair, threading her way through the distortions of family life in her party dress, bearing her tray of John-adapted cake, I began to think for the first time that perhaps she had known, better than any of us, what she was doing when she chose the womb. Perhaps she would pick her way through everything that was wrong and out of kilter with the family. The gala purple nail-polish lent her gestures a self-conscious overtone — a finishing-school or ladies’-academy touch. She looked like the serene housewife in a television advert serving canapés to her guests. Her hands were going before her into adulthood. They were leading the way. Their movements were taking on the sophistication of things practised in front of the mirror, time after time, until they were effortless.