Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

She gave me a smile which changed in mid-flight, becoming gravely enchanting, an expression with two distinct phases like a two-stage rocket — as if an air hostess had suddenly thought of Grace Kelly. She was growing up more or less as I watched.

My mouth was dry. My lips were sticky as I tried to mumble the chunks of cake. Audrey fetched me a glass of water and then, great refinement of refreshment, a damp flannel. She wiped my mouth with it.

Lemon juice in her eye

I don’t mean to idealise Audrey’s performance too much. She knew perfectly well that Mum didn’t want her around, though she can’t have had much clue about the interrogation that was taking place (I certainly didn’t). Audrey was giving comfort to the accused in a way that was guaranteed to cause irritation.

Mum said, ‘Audrey, your room is like a pigsty. You promised me you’d tidy it up the moment you got in from your party, remember? Now’s the time.’ Audrey said, ‘Yes, Mum,’ very demurely, but she gave me a wink. I think it was a wink — she hadn’t quite got the knack as yet, not quite in control of the facial machinery, so it was a rather wild spasm and she looked as if she’d got some lemon juice in her eye.

My habit was to hoard my various tablets in term-time so I had plenty when I went home. Alertness seemed a waste of time at that address. To be compos mentis was a mug’s game, or so I thought, and exposes you to all sorts of nonsense. Well, yes, but the same is true of a medicated doze.

Audrey went upstairs to her room at last. She put a record on the record-player and played it eleven times in a row. It was David Bowie’s maddeningly catchy and childlike ‘Starman’. She was playing it louder than she was allowed, but I fancy she had a canny sense of the disruption in the household, and what it enabled her to get away with.

Or she may simply have been trying to blot us all out, or even sending a message to the starman in the song, who was supposed to be waiting in the sky after all, to say that she needed immediate rescue. The last record she had played so many times on the trot had been ‘When You Wish upon a Star’. Or perhaps ‘Would You Like to Swing on a Star?’ I see now that the star theme was a constant.

The interrogation began again. The bust-up of summer 1972 was about what all proper family rows are about — sex and drugs. In that respect it was exemplary. And still Mum and Dad got completely the wrong end of the stick. They could have got the wrong end of a marble. They were going by what they had found in my Greek tapestry shoulder-bag, with its discreet embroidered lambda, hanging invitingly from the handles of the wheelchair, not what they would have learned if they’d talked to me.

They thought I was on dope, simply because they had found a couple of roaches in the tapestry shoulder-bag. Pitiful stubs of joints long gone. Fossils — antiques. They should have been in the Fitzwilliam Museum, properly docketed: Marijuana leavings of the Unknown Student, early 1970s. Private collection . My collection, though, was no longer private.

Mum and Dad wanted to know how long I’d been using reefers. The demon weed, wrecker of young lives, bringer to its knees of the undergraduate brain. Cannabis sativa , a plant I respect for its hardiness, but not one that has ever done much for my consciousness.

They didn’t actually bother to ask if the joints had anything to do with me. Even a policeman would have done that, just for form’s sake. Mum and Dad jumped to conclusions instead. They jumped to their own confusions.

They really were the leavings of the Unknown Student, if he (conceivably she) was even a student. How much control did I have over the Greek tapestry shoulder-bag, really? It was anything but a private preserve. Friends thought nothing of using it as a communal asset, a shared pocket, even a portable dustbin. What were their reasons? Laziness, disorganisation, reluctance to spoil the line of their trousers by putting things in pockets of their own. So there was nothing unusual about people slipping their joints into my bag for safe-keeping, or their roaches for eventual disposal (which of course they never got round to).

If I had no control over what went inside the bag, the same was true of what went on it. Members of CHAPs who lost their nerve in mixed company, for instance, would slyly pin their more confronta-tional badges to its unprotesting weave. After a while it was almost armour-plated with revolutionary slogans, GAY IS GOOD, SAPPHO WAS A RIGHT-ON WOMAN and, more mysteriously, THE ENGLISH THINK LIBERTY IS A SHOP ON REGENT STREET.

I hadn’t much enjoyed my bag becoming a dumping-ground for the flotsam of the counter-culture. I particularly resented the one that said HOW DARE YOU ASSUME I’M HETEROSEXUAL? being transferred from the denim of my colleagues to the faintly stinky wool of my bag. In common with the world at large, no one in the CHAPs revolutionary echelon assumed I was sexual in any way whatever. That was one issue of exclusion that was never going to be freely discussed and worked through in our little independent forum on Glisson Road. No one ever asked about my erotic past, or imagined that I might run to such a thing as a present, perhaps even a future.

The pin fastenings on the backs of the badges were well beyond my powers to undo. When I arrived home for the summer it was a priority to have them removed, but Peter, the obvious choice of helper, had already left on his travels. I had to draft Audrey in for the job, though I wondered what she made of the slogans. She didn’t need telling that this was something to be kept quiet. That didn’t worry her — she liked a secret, did Audrey.

Looking back, of course, I would have done well to ask her to sanitise the contents of the bag as well, but I hadn’t realised there was anything in the bag that might cause embarrassment. I had forgotten my lack of privacy, on two fronts. It didn’t occur to me that Mum and Dad would search through my reticule with their prehensile digits, screeching and tut-tutting as they went, like moralising spider-monkeys.

‘Are you on drugs, John?’

Mu. ‘Just tell us. We want to help.’

Mind your own Mu.

‘Are you on drugs?’

Well, of course I was on drugs. Ask a silly question! The only question was what kind. I had steered clear of hallucinogens since my trip to the Salley gardens, and I wouldn’t have considered indulging without Peter there to lean on. But I was self-medicating as if there was no tomorrow. I was self-medicating because there was a tomorrow, and I wanted to take a short cut, avoiding today, even if tomorrow turned out to be no better. There was always the day after tomorrow, and the day after that.

The black dot marks the tree line

I had learned my lesson from Write Off Tuesday, to the point where I was able to write off whole clumps of days, and all without a drop of liquor passing my lips. Everything that was entering my system was legitimate and prescribed, but those are judgements which are subject to revision, and in any case, legitimate and prescribed can be very different from sane and sensible.

When Flanny first took charge of me she put me on mefenamic acid, trade name Ponstan. It’s a member of the aspirin family — call it the family’s rich eccentric uncle. She also tried me on Doloxene, which is the trade name for dextropropoxyphene. That was all very well for a while, but then I was in the market for something stronger. So she moved me up to Fortral (pentazocine), which has been a controlled drug for ages now but wasn’t then. In that innocent time there was no warning black dot against such things in MIMS , meaning ‘restricted’. It had an unblemished reputation. It was freely prescribed, and no one ever said it wasn’t good at its job.