Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

It was too much to expect, after all the imaginative effort she had expended, that she would realise these things stop being beautiful the moment they are killed, dried and fixed behind glass. I gritted my teeth and tried to persuade myself that in the natural course of things this lovely creature would have long died and been broken down into nothingness by now, and that it was permissible to appreciate it as being a storage system for Jean’s emotional impulses, a bulb lit up by her feeling for me.

I had never been able to generate a very solid presence for myself on those premises, but now, left alone after the other students had gone, I felt so tenuous as to be positively allegorical, like the ancient servant forgotten in the great house at the end of The Cherry Orchard . If I did represent the passing of an old order, though, it would have been nice to know where exactly I had once fitted so snugly, what heyday I had so unwisely outlived. I felt like the shadow of a shadow, a ghost in hibernation. I almost looked forward to being exorcised. I would go quietly.

Downing didn’t become deserted in vacation time, just because the students had gone away. In due course it played host to a conference of doctors. This was a godsend, and not just because the college catering system started up again for their benefit, so that I could be sneaked in, the staff turning a blind eye as usual. One waiter who had always made a bit of a pet of me even started calling me Doctor.

The medics and I had some amusing times together. I’d been reading my Martindale, so it wasn’t hard for me to bustle my way into their conversations with some informed nonsense, asking for instance, ‘Are you up to date about the enhancing relationship between benzodiazepenes and simple analgesics?’

I also saw something of the hazards of the profession. One delegate offered me some Pethidine as casually as if he was talking about a packet of crisps rather than a synthetic narcotic analgesic. There was something sexual about the way he slid the tube of Pethidine out of his pocket and waggled it in front of me, murmuring, ‘If you like I can let you have these when I leave.’

The little sod knows too much

He also told me that Proladone was ‘really nice’, as if he was talking about a girl he’d just met, and not another heavyweight drug. He was obviously an addict, in the part of that trajectory where despair is still muffled by numbness and masked by nervous excitement.

Another delegate, rather handsome in a hangdog way, came to my room for coffee and sat on the bed, a promising situation until he started moaning that he’d ruined his life. ‘I’ve got a sharp tongue,’ he said, ‘I can’t help myself. I drive everyone away. My woman has left me and I have no friends. I have periodic incontinence of the anal sphincter and no one to love.’

I had nothing to offer him but the coffee I had promised, except for a nice yellow Valium to hold him together on a temporary basis. It was a treat to give drugs to a medic and fascinating to witness doctors at play. I saw at first hand that their lives were at least as disordered as anyone else’s. I’ve never met a physician who could heal himself (as opposed to medicate himself). I don’t think such a creature exists, which is why my medical interests can only ever be a sideline for me, not the main thrust of the journey.

I took it upon myself to inform as many of the medics as I could buttonhole over the week of the conference that it was no part of a doctor’s job to tell the patient whether or not he was feeling pain. I preached this sermon on a text of my own, The Epistle to the Epiphyses, Chap. 1 verse 1. It had been simply insulting to be told that I couldn’t be experiencing pain where there was no movement.

It wasn’t easy for the medics to change gear from treating me as a pseudo-colleague to listening to the informed complaints of an ancient patient, but most of them seemed to manage it. There’s an outside chance that I made a difference to their professional practice further along the line.

On the last night of the conference one of the delegates, a Dr Love (originally from Canada), even proposed a toast to me in Hall. He warned the others against me very charmingly, saying, ‘If this little sod turns up in your area, for God’s sake don’t let him on to your list. He knows far too much! It’s not healthy. If they were all like him, the jig would be up for the lot of us.’

It was July before I heard anything much from Cambridge Social Services. Then I was told where I would be living, in Mayflower House. I liked the sound of that. The Mayflower took pilgrims to a new world. When would I be moving in? When the flat was ‘ready’.

My application to be a parasite had been accepted, but parasites can’t dictate terms. Nothing I did could qualify as ‘dropping out’ because I hadn’t been sufficiently ‘in’ to start with. My destiny seemed to be a sort of evaporation, one long exercise (a vast amplification of my sessions in the bathroom on Kenny staircase) in the loss of latent heat. Hadn’t I arrived at Cambridge with a good head of spiritual steam, even a bumptious sense of my own purpose? I was now entirely cold and dried up, shivering and desiccated.

I had assumed I would be riding the Vichara Express, in the luggage compartment (but then the body is always and only luggage), but this was the stopping train at best, if it wasn’t actually old rolling stock abandoned in an overgrown siding. The sense of forward motion, so precious and so hard to come by, was now too faint to be detected. Only when the metaphysical speedometer was patiently tapped and then scrutinised with the eye of faith was it possible to see that the needle wasn’t stuck at zero.

Evaporation is a gradual process. When had mine started? I had felt quite monstrously present during my Cambridge years, clogging the pavements in the wheelchair, waiting hopefully to be helped through a door or up a staircase, but perhaps that wasn’t the impression I made on other people. Possibly even before I started to withdraw from community life, buffeted by traumas familial and academic, the shrinkage had begun. Edith Piaf towered above me now, and I had enough regrets for the two of us.

The lessons of my university life seemed to have been overwhelmingly negative. What had I learned at Cambridge? I’d learned that a hand once placed on the handle of the wheelchair was hard to dislodge. That a bag slung over that handle, nominally mine, could be filled with things that had nothing to do with me. That a fussy manner could cloak a sensitive soul or a hard one. That once people had entered my room I couldn’t actually throw them out. And once someone had lifted me up in his arms, it wasn’t up to me whether we reached the bottom of the stairs in the conventional manner.

In my three years as an undergraduate I had made any number of acquaintances, but friendship was a different matter. I could lay the blame on the world at large, and say that nobody wanted to venture beyond the outskirts of intimacy in my particular case, but that’s too easy. It lets me off the hook, when the truth is that I had mixed feelings about friendship myself. Of course the original plan was for me to be a beacon of enlightenment for my guru, and to fill my entire generation with his truth, but somehow that idea got lost along the way. A strong connection with other people would have been a decent consolation prize. But my experience of life from day to day over those three years made me think twice about trusting people’s good intentions.

To claw back some control over my environment I had learned to take charge in psychological terms. I would requisition favours without granting any of the rights in return, having found that they were disproportionately hard to retract. In the free social setting which I had worked so hard to enter I had walled myself away from my fellows, whose freedom often seemed to be at my expense.