Above a certain dosage I might get a sort of nomadic paræsthesia, with tingles and patches of numbness lazily playing over my body. To tell the truth I rather enjoyed that. It was like having slowly rolling goosebumps, and goosebumps are only a mild case of horripilation, which is one of the signs testifying to the presence of God. Mandrax offered no more than a simulation, but I enjoyed the experience anyway, this synthetic merry-go-round of skin sensation, a slow swirling where my body met the world. Emotionally it detached me from a world that was only posing as real. Since the body is no more than a screen, it makes sense to project onto it something you enjoy.
But don’t just shuffle down to the local fleapit without checking what’s on! It shocked me that young people would smoke, sniff or inject anything they could get their hands on, taking untested substances into their bodies with total abandon. I found the general drug culture of the time very alienating because it was so different from my own. Didn’t they have any standards, any finesse? Even in terms of transgression I preferred the drama of the subverted prescription to the flat illegality of hashish. And I always liked the reliability of standard strengths and dosages. None of the uncertainty you get with your street muck.
When I was preparing for my appointment with Dr Bailey I decided I would take no chances. I didn’t write down Mandrax as such on my list of requirements. I didn’t even use its generic name of Methaqualone. This was a time for heavier disguise. By now I knew my way around the Monthly Index of Medical Specialities, the MIMS, pretty well. It’s pretty much a GP’s Bible. I’d seen it on Flanny’s shelves, and noticed how well-thumbed it always was, though of course it’s not for sale to the general public. Gamekeepers do like to keep ahead of poachers, don’t they? But it’s better sport if both groups are well-informed.
A nurse at Addenbrookes had given me an old copy, and sometimes I’d scrounge one from my GP when I needed to check dosages. There could be no better way of keeping tabs on the profession with which this body has linked my destiny, and I didn’t need to be madly up to date. The rate of change wasn’t so very frantic then, and I could keep pace with the professionals without too much trouble.
Ever since CRX, where Ansell had laid aside her tenderness to reel off technical terms to her colleagues, I had coveted the medical manner. Knowledge isn’t power, whatever people say. Knowledge is power’s poor relation, at best. It’s the consolation, if not the booby prize. Still, it was all I could aim at. I might never become a doctor, but I could reasonably hope to sound like one. I could mimic the preoccupied expression, the technical drone.
I knew from my studies of MIMS that Boots the Chemist had its own private version of the drug, in two fractionally different formulations called Melsedin and Melsed, so I plumped for one of those instead.
Melsedin and Melsed. They haunted me, that pair of near-identicals. I knew from experience that it was perfectly possible to be in love with just one of a pair of twins, feeling no more than warm indifference to the other — and people seemed to have strong preferences as between Pepsi and Coca-Cola, though to the outsider’s eye and palate it’s all just treacly carbonated water. Melsed or Melsedin? I tossed a coin.
It seemed to me, as I looked at my little slip of paper, that the Mandrax, even wearing its carnival mask as Melsedin, looked a little suspect, so I added Dexedrine in first place on the list. Dexedrine I cared less about but still enjoyed. I had moved on since the days of involuntary binges on amphetamine-tinged hundreds and thousands. I could say no, and I could do without perfectly easily. I was confident in my willpower. I was struggling to do without sugar at the time, no easy thing for vegetarians, who tend to have a weakness for sweet things.
Torpid heat-bumps
Dr Bailey might baulk at either the Dexedrine or the disguised Mandrax, but he was unlikely to withhold them both. Finally, as a gesture towards clean living, I put down ‘Redoxon 1000 mg’ — a gram of effervescent Vitamin C, a good all-round tonic for the system. Now there were two guilty faces in the line-up of medication, one undisguised and the other masquerading, along with a radiant innocent included to raise the general tone of the group.
In person Dr Bailey seemed more like a handler of animals than a human doctor. He was very burly, ripe for the wrestling of steers. He can’t literally have worn a butcher’s apron, though that’s how I picture him. There was an oar hung up on the wall in his surgery, trophy of a university past. When he learned I was at Cambridge he asked which college, and then ‘How’s their rowing?’ He seemed shocked that I had no idea. As far as he was concerned, there was no excuse for not knowing about torpid heat-bumps, times and regattas. All that nonsense — he did go on.
Then Dr Bailey saw my little manifest of pharmaceuticals and his face went long. He was troubled by what he saw. Finally he laid his pencil against one of the items on my list and said, ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing? Someone with your low body weight needs to be extra-careful about dosages.’
The 1970s was the golden age of prescribing, as far as I’m concerned. It was all downhill after that. Dr Bailey was like the man in the Australian beer advert, who blames the bottle of sweet sherry (the ladies’ choice) for the collapse of his truck’s axles, after he has loaded it to the gunwales with crates of lager. Dr Bailey was an Australian at heart. The toy truck of this body was due to be fully loaded with Mandrax, but that didn’t worry him. It was going to be supercharged with Dexedrine, which would set the engine pounding, but that too was fine. He worried that I might be overdoing it with the Vitamin C. It turned out that it was the only innocent in the line-up who had no alibi. A whole gram of Redoxon? Was that wise?
I promised I would be careful. Scout’s honour.
The summer passed in tingling and numbness. The summer passed. Peter was off on his travels, and the Washbournes were on a Greek island. I imagined them in adjacent deck-chairs, him reading about Buddhism, her engrossed in a Regency romance, highly compatible in their own syncopated way. On my own I felt shadowy and fraudulent. I seemed only to be able to meditate with an audience.
I remember at one point Audrey poking me quite hard with a ruler, just to get a reaction. I didn’t give her the satisfaction, and she went away. I was expecting her to return with something else from her pencil-case, the compasses perhaps. I thought I would probably react to them.
Insects and other small deer had made no inroads into my flesh. Not only did I chew my food without prompting, I put it in my mouth myself. It seemed foolish to imagine that I was travelling so far inwards, à la Maharshi, that my surroundings had become a matter of indifference to me. I was just Mandied up.
She must have found some other distraction, because she didn’t come back. Mum never acquired the knack of withholding a reaction, so she was probably Audrey’s next port of call. There was a sort of hysterical escalation to their confrontations, which would only end when Mum said, ‘You leave me no choice,’ picking up the phone and asking the operator to connect her with the Remand Home.
Then Audrey would go down on her knees pleading not to be sent away, and after a proper interval Mum would think better of it and put the phone down. It was always very melodramatic. Obviously Mum didn’t mean it (children don’t vanish into the disciplinary system quite so smoothly, and anyway isn’t eleven a little young?), and I don’t think that Audrey believed for one moment that she did. It was more that the charade of an ultimatum allowed her to back down without loss of face. It was only after exhaustive exploration of anguish and disgrace that she could find any sort of calm.