Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

I had turned down all Dad’s offers to buy me a subscription to the Telegraph , but I sometimes read the paper just the same, if he left it lying around. It’s really only my hands which are satisfied with a tabloid. Sometimes I want a broader view than I can comfortably hold. Mum would occasionally fold the paper into a tight little packet for my benefit. One day I read a review of a novel that set whole peals of bells ringing. It was called The Ring by Richard Chopping, and it was a story of love between men. Hateful, horrifying love between men. Now that I think about it, the book’s title, even its author’s name — Dick Chopping! — show signs of campy spoofing, but I wasn’t attuned to that then. The Telegraph review was full of a mesmerised disgust, and I immediately knew this was a book that would change my life. It was ‘savagely frank’. I must read it immediately.

I induced Mum to order this sulphurous book from Mrs Pavey’s library, to pick it up when it arrived in stock, and to deliver it to the family home in the basket of her bicycle. Better for so radioactive a volume to be transported in a lead box. I worried that the cover of the book would betray its contents. That would be no way to repay Mrs Pavey for all her thoughtfulness, tracking filth all over her nice clean library.

When Mum gave me the book, I saw that it had no dust jacket, just a plastic sheath over the hard cover, and I wondered if there was censorship involved. Then again, Mrs Pavey might not even have set eyes on the book. Mum told me that she had been having one of her bad days. Her bad days tended to come along in little groups, festivals of migraine.

I quarantined myself from the public spaces of the house and read The Ring in my bedroom. If Peter was around then I hardly noticed him. It was a wonderful experience. I don’t mean necessarily that it was a wonderful book, but it was a wonderful thing for me to read at the time. I needed a hero, and the central figure of the book gave me one. Boyde Ashlar, ‘thirty-four, handsome and not untalented’. A name to savour. He was my James Bond, I suppose. I’d read some Bond books when the craze was at its height, and I’d got something out of them, a sort of second-hand worldliness (which is what adolescents crave, after all), but Boyde Ashlar instantly superseded him. He gave me second-hand romanticism and second-hand self-hatred as well, more than Bond could ever do. What do I remember from the book? Not very much. The hero lived with his hideous bloated mother in separate parts of the same house, communicating by way of a speaking-tube.

I remember one very exciting phrase, about Boyde Ashlar after an unfruitful night out ‘returning to his onanistic bed’. I seem to remember that he had a less manly, chattier friend. If ever Boyde caught sight of an attractive man, this friend would say, ‘You’ve gone all cock-eyed, dear.’

Boyde Ashlar gave young men the eye at flower shows — so why shouldn’t I? Given licence by a fictional character, my eye contact grew in daring and intensity. I had a few nice looks back, and that was all the encouragement I needed.

There were some wonderful descriptions in The Ring , of things far removed from the central situation. The author seemed disgusted by human beings, shuddering at ageing flesh and self-delusion, but he seemed rather in love with nature at its ugliest, or what most people would see as its ugliest. There were quotations from a book about toads and their parasites, for instance, which Boyde was reading. And there was a marvellous description of snails mating. I made the mistake of reading a bit of that to Dad and then he became horribly interested in the book, asking, ‘That’s absolutely terrific ! Is it all like that?’.

There’s a theory that people with secrets secretly want to be found out. I can’t disprove it on the basis of The Ring , since I hadn’t been able to resist drawing attention to the very thing I wanted kept hidden. I went into reverse, though, the moment my secret was in serious danger of being discovered. I recovered as quickly as I could, and gave the book as grudging an assessment as could square with the fact that I was continuing to read it. ‘It started off all right,’ I said, trying to sound as authoritative as any reviewer, ‘but it’s getting to be a bit of a bore. The snails are more fun than the people, really.’

This wasn’t the best line to take if I wanted to put Dad off the scent. ‘They often are,’ he said. ‘When you’ve finished with it, pass it on, will you? And I’ll give it a go.’

Which was unthinkable, but I was helpless. I couldn’t hide it from him. I had no privacy, either at school or at home. Anyone could get access to my things more easily than I could. I looked miserably at the label that was pasted in every library book in those days, with the message If infectious disease should break out in your house do not return this book, but at once inform the Librarian. Borrowers infringing this regulation, or knowingly permitting the book to be exposed to infection are liable to a penalty of £5. In the case of The Ring I felt it was the other way about. The book was exposing the household to every germ I spent so much time and energy hiding. And now it was going to shop me to Dad, to expose me as someone whose secret love was not for snails.

Everything spins like a plate on a stick

Finally Mum put me out of my misery by saying, all very casually, ‘Do you want me to return that book to the library for you? I could tell Dad someone else had reserved it.’ It was a marvellous bit of mind-reading on her part. I wondered, though, if she had noticed, despite not being the scientific type, that my sheets and pyjamas needed changing more often when The Ring was in the house. While Boyde Ashlar was on the premises.

‘Yes, perhaps that would be best,’ I managed to say at last. ‘It’s really not very good.’ Be forgiving, Boyde Ashlar, of the little betrayals of weaker people.

Mum gave a little sniff. ‘I read a little bit myself,’ she said. Really! Did no one in the family give a thought to my need for privacy? ‘It was about a man getting into the altogether and looking at himself in the mirror. Rather silly, I thought.’ She must have been very careful about her furtive reading. I always left the book in a precise and particular alignment on my bedside table, and it never seemed to be out of place when I came back.

It wasn’t a special precaution for Mum to wear gloves when she took the book back to Mrs Pavey — she always wore gloves when handling library books. Because you never know. A lot of women wore gloves in those days, and this particular mania of hygiene didn’t make her conspicuous on her bicycle.

In this way I missed my chance to find out what happened to the thirty-four-year-old hero, handsome and not untalented, of a savagely frank novel of 1967, though I have to say the omens were not good. Boyde Ashlar spent a lot of the book hating himself and his frivolous life, while unable to break free of his obsession with Tex, the masseur at the Turkish Baths, and his involvement with Roddy, a lout with a tattoo of a snake covering almost the entirety of his lithe young body …

After reading The Ring , playing with myself at night before falling asleep (mental masturbation aided by the pressure of the sheet, mindful to keep my breathing even if Peter was around) became a quite different experience. I was no longer alone. Just knowing that Boyde was probably bringing himself off at the same time as me was a comfort. I knew perfectly well he was only made up, but that didn’t diminish him.

I felt that every song, every book and every film — even a school essay — has life in it. It gets some sort of charge when it is written or created, and the charge is renewed by every reader, writer and hearer. Everything spins like a plate on a stick, and every tiny encounter prolongs the spinning.