My drug use could slide in a single dose from the medical to the slyly recreational. In terms of pain I had my good days and my bad days. That summer I preferred the bad days. On my bad days I could gobble down the hundreds and thousands of nothingness with a clear conscience.
A great advantage of the wheelchair was that it masked many of the effects. If my movements were poorly coördinated, who would ever know? Not everyone expected prodigies of mental alertness from me either. At home with Mum and Dad, ritual exchanges were the norm. I could fit in perfectly well while being, to be blunt about it, off my head half the time.
So much for drugs. There was also a sex-scandal component to the family bust-up of summer ’72, and again it had its origins in the tapestry shoulder-bag. That bag grassed me up pretty thoroughly. It provided the authorities with evidence of more than one kind. There were any number of occasions in which my CHAPs acquaintances could have availed themselves of the convenient storage I innocently provided. Josh Tosh had entrances on more than one street, and could be used as a short cut. This short cut would inevitably turn into a long one, since we would end up dawdling by the perfume counter to try out fragrances from sample spray bottles. If I tried to hurry the party up, I too would receive squirts of clashing fragrances, asked which I liked best. There was sometimes a certain amount of rummaging in my bag, which meant that I was being used as a sort of mule in a narcissistic, mercifully small-scale shoplifting operation, smuggling an expensive bottle of Eau Sauvage or some such elixir past the gates of the shop and into the street.
A stray copy of Nigel
There was no cologne forgotten in the Greek tapestry shoulderbag, but it turned out to contain, along with the ancient roaches, a magazine. It was a picture magazine, and the pictures were of young men arranged in dreamy poses on piles of cushions, wearing socks and not a lot else. Looking sultry, if thumb-sucking strikes you as a maddening come-on. Some CHAPs fellow or other, some friend of a friend of a friend, had slipped this tentative smut into the community pocket and forgotten to retrieve it. So there I was, delivered into my parents’ hysteria by a stray copy of Nigel. Or was it Rupert?
I can remember only too well. It was Jeremy. Mum brandished it at me often enough, waving it in my face as if she was a street-hawker trying to get me to buy the bloody thing rather than a mother losing her always elusive sense of proportion. ‘Where did you get this? Who else knows about it? Who sold you the drugs? Who sold you this filth?’
I wasn’t going to admit to them that the magazine wasn’t mine. I refused to be ashamed. Of course it was stupid that Mum and Dad would think I had a secret life based round those insipid images. If I was going to overcome all the practical obstacles in the way of getting hold of a dirty magazine, I’d want something properly vile for my trouble. And someone who looked as if he’d been shaving for more than a week. Mum and Dad were both angry and upset, but through the chinks in the oblivion I had so patiently contrived for myself I could detect a complicating emotion. In some way Mum was partly blaming him for the rotten way I was turning out.
Once again the Inquisition was on the wrong track. If Mum and Dad had wanted a sex scandal, they could have had one, and it would have been a little bit spicier than a few pictures of dreary ephebes languid on the pillows. I’d broken the law in a public toilet on the A505 outside Royston, on the way home from Cambridge. It wasn’t a private place, and still I had dared to have carnal congress with another man. No one had interrupted us, so my exhibitionistic streak was mildly frustrated. I wanted to shout out to the shocked air of Trees, Abbotsbrook Estate, Bourne End, ‘It only lasted a few minutes and it happened in a public bog, but it was bloody beautiful!’ Knowing that the words ‘bog’ and ‘bloody’ would have as much impact as the deed itself.
The man who was my first real sexual partner said something wonderful to me. It wasn’t wonderful in a conventional way. He didn’t say, for instance, ‘People fear you and turn away from you, yes, and they are right to do so, since love flows in implacable streams from your eyes and loins alike. Your gaze and your desire pierce the fogs of matter. You must forgive people for feeling inadequate to such splendour.’ What he said was a thousand times better. He said, ‘If anyone comes in, I’m helping you out, okay, mate?’ Mate! We mated and he called me mate. He certainly was helping me out, though no one disturbed us so I couldn’t pass this revelation on. He was helping me out and no mistake. Afterwards he helped me to wash my hands. I let him, though I didn’t feel the need of any cleaning up. I didn’t feel soiled. I felt elevated, charged up. This too I would have liked to pass on to Mum and Dad, not in a spirit of boasting, but humbly wishing to share.
About the time that even the most ardent fan of androgynous pop might have been becoming sick of ‘Starman’, Maya took a surprising turn. The scene that I was absorbing through drifts of medicated meditation suddenly shifted in a way that made me sit up and take notice.
My dud of a mantra froze in mid-repetition. It had never been a really effective transcendental tool since India — it had developed a slow puncture, but now it just went phut. Prissie Washbourne was shouting through the French windows, ‘Laura? Dennis? Is John all right? I’d like to see him, please.’ She wasn’t shouting out of rudeness, but because the music from Audrey’s room was so loud.
Mum went to the windows to block any possible view into the room, and called out sharply through the French windows, ‘He’s fine,’ adding in an undertone, ‘Though I can’t see that it’s any of your business.’ Perhaps it occurred to her that Prissie might have heard this comment, despite the lowering of her voice. She sang out more sweetly, ‘Prissie dear, why don’t you come to tea tomorrow? Or at the weekend?’ Upstairs, Audrey must have realised that something out of the ordinary was happening. She took the needle off the record at last, and the sudden silence made the adults self-conscious.
Prissie carried it off well, though. Her voice was firm as she said, ‘I’d like to see John now, Laura. I’d like to know what has happened to him. In fact I think I’ll just sit here on the lawn until I’m satisfied he’s all right.’ At this point Dad cantered to the French windows and roared, ‘Go away! You’re not wanted here!’ through the gap. Then he slammed the windows and locked them.
He and Mum bundled me out of the room, charging into my bedroom with the wheelchair, then hauling me roughly out of it and laying me on the bed. They seemed possessed. The arrival of an external threat intensified the sinister impression of teamwork. It didn’t seem right that they were working so smoothly together. It was unprecedented. The soothing deadlock of their marriage had been violently broken, and the combination of drug scandal, sexual delinquency and an interfering neighbour had turned them into pantomime villains.
They actually hissed ‘We’ll deal with you later’, before they rushed back to the sitting room. If the railway track had been any nearer I dare say they would have tied me to it. Perhaps they were saving that for later. I could hear them opening up the French windows again to shout at Prissie. Then the needle returned to its groove upstairs and David Bowie took up his invocations of the starman in the sky all over again.
As I lay on the bed I tried to grasp what was happening, working from first principles. For Prissie to intervene so forcefully she must have grounds for worry. So how long had it been since I had left the house? Prissie wasn’t the hysterical type, and she wasn’t used to seeing me every day. This pointed to a long absence from the world. Had I been indoors being harangued for days on end, while I wrapped myself in the shawl of my drug use and the tatters of my mantra, trying ineffectively to concentrate on the blooming pangs of an amaryllida-ceous plant?