Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

The first passenger I took in the Mini was Peter. I was greatly in his debt in the matter of transport. Now I could pay him back for all his weary pushing of the Tan-Sad. Mum never asked for a lift, and I never offered. I did invite Dad to come for a ride, but he said he’d rather wait until I’d had more practice. The vote of confidence was never really part of his repertoire as a parent.

The first two times I had come a cropper in the Mini there were no witnesses. The third time, Peter was with me and we came a cropper together.

The previous accidents hadn’t taught me much. That close shave on Hedsor Hill had made me take extra care, but I couldn’t keep away from those steep and twisty roads. We were even on the same deadly bend, only this time there was another car involved. For some mad reason, the driver behind chose to overtake, forcing me off the road in the process.

Again I just sat there shaking, but Peter with his flexible neck had recognised the driver from the back of his famous head. Michael Aspel the broadcaster — a hero of his until that exact moment. We knew he lived locally, but this was our first actual sighting.

‘Nobody does that to my brother!’ Peter said, in a wonderful outburst of fraternal love. ‘If I see him in any of the shops I’ll give him one!’ All the fearfulness instilled in him at Lord Wandsworth had been melted away at Sidcot School. In our hearts Aspel was instantly reduced to the ranks, from honorary uncle to local villain, callous roadhog and reckless menace. From then on we could hardly bear to be in the room when Mum listened to Family Favourites .

Peter had to help me wrench the steering wheel round before we could get on the move again. I didn’t need to swear him to silence about Michael Aspel’s endangering of our lives. By now we had lost the reflex of sharing things with Mum and Dad, and everything was a secret unless proved otherwise.

The first day I turned up at school in the Mini I more or less provoked a riot. My schoolmates surrounded the car and begged to be given rides. My status slumped a bit when I had to transfer from car to Tan-Sad, but my image was certainly boosted overall. If only the school’s porterage scheme had extended to carrying me around on school premises, up and down stairs, in and out of lessons, in my nice new Mini! I could have attracted attention, when there was something I didn’t understand, by discreetly sounding the horn.

Of course more than anything I wanted to give Patrick a ride in the Mini, to share the privileges that went with my disadvantages. Ideally it would have been at a weekend, when with any luck the bond between twins would be weaker. But at some point just before I got my test, near the end of the summer term, the Savages had broken off relations with me — both of them. I don’t know who had said what, but one day they just walked past me, and from then on we were classmates only, not friends at all. They didn’t push me around any more. Other hands gripped the controls of the Tan-Sad, though there was no hiatus in my transport schedule. The Savages had selected their own replacements. There seemed no anger involved, just a cool shedding of closeness.

The obvious explanation was that Paul had told Patrick about my interest in him being more than amicable. That would explain why the wrong twin blushed on the day of rupture. As he passed me Paul and not Patrick showed the signs of beta-adrenergic stimulation. Adrenalin was binding to receptors on the surface of his responsive cells for once, triggering the enzyme adenylyl cyclase to raise levels of cyclic adenosine monophosphate (AMP). His face was blatant with secrets.

Looking back I almost think myself pathetic for not insisting on some sort of reckoning. I had done nothing wrong. My love was discreet — how could it be anything else? I had no chance of forcing my affections on him or on anyone.

I should have had my say, my day in court. Except that drama needs a stage, and I had none. How could I have made the estranged twins lean over the Tan-Sad to be arraigned, to have a grievance thrown in their faces? I never even looked into Patrick’s eyes again. I felt as if I had been clean bowled in a game of Howzat when I wasn’t even playing — worse, that I was out lbw. I had never understood how you could be dismissed for something that would have happened, when it hadn’t.

Dad had always been convinced that I made the world dance to my tune, but the incompleteness of this theory was beginning to become obvious. I had a tune, all right, and could hear it myself most of the time, but I couldn’t make it audible to anyone else, let alone persuade them to dance to it.

To raise a differential blush

After breaking up with the twins I was at rather a loose end in matters of the heart. The new hands on the Tan-Sad were attached to bodies, of course, but there could be no question of my transferring my affections to the newcomers (who took quite a while to achieve the teamwork which had come so naturally to the Savages). It had suited me to be obsessed with Patrick Savage, and there was no obvious substitute. Free adults routinely fall in love with married men, creating obstacles to their own fulfilment. I couldn’t exactly reproduce that state of satisfying frustration, but I had come close by developing a crush on one of a pair of twins. It was a sort of insurance policy against anything actually happening. As long as I had devised an insoluble tangle I didn’t need to think about whether there was any risk.

On some level I think I knew I was partly making it up, even at the time. The twins were almost always together — they were like the sets of toys advertised in catalogues, with the footnote not available separately . Perhaps the saddest words young eyes of the period could fall upon.

Patrick and Paul were effectively a couple already, one which resisted the formation of another. I was a fifth wheel from the start. Still, there had been a real fascination in finding one human being bewitching, utterly distinctive even from the back or at a distance, and his twin warmly neutral, even though they were genetically and environmentally so close to identical, and I was one of the very select group that could see through the similarity to the difference. It was quite an achievement, while it lasted, the ability to create embarrassment on one face and leave the other unaffected, to raise a differential blush.

My crush on Patrick Savage wasn’t a very realistic romantic proposition — or else it was profoundly realistic, if deep down I didn’t want things to go anywhere, if I wanted to stay secure in the magic circle of hopeless wishes.

If as the Tibetan Book of the Dead informs us, we choose the womb, then twins also choose each other. Perhaps Patrick and Paul were husband and wife in a previous life, and couldn’t bear to be parted in the next. Except of course that rebirth isn’t a reward but a chore. It’s like getting an essay back with Must try harder written on it. Or else Don’t try so hard , which is a much harder instruction to obey.

Every Friday I would go to the garage at the end of the village and buy a pound’s worth of petrol. That would set me up for the weekend, and give me five return trips to school. It’s strange that I didn’t mourn the bewitching Broyan, who was of course rendered surplus to requirements by the arrival of the Mini. Peter and I had managed to lay our hands on some Gunmetal Blue of our own in the end, and drove Mum mad painting absolutely everything with it. Plastic kits, to which it wasn’t suited. Doorstops. Any old thing. Mum was mystified by the attraction this smelly stuff had for us.

I don’t even remember my last ride in his taxi, nor our farewells to each other. I’d drunk deep of his being in the weeks when I was taking driving lessons in the evenings but was still being driven to school by him, knowing that I was between stages of life, with the Broyan era drawing to an end. Then in the end I missed him as little as I had missed my budgie Charlie after I had given him away. It was time to go separate ways, but I would never forget the meaty smell of him, or his characteristic gestures — the way, for instance, he would move his neck convulsively, as if he was choking, while actually sliding out his dentures so as to cement them more firmly in place. Pink glue from a little tube. Really, my love for the man was slightly mental. What was the most personal thing he had ever said? ‘Oh, so you had a birfday, did ya? Meant to get a card …’ That was our high-water mark.