Certifiably insane remedy
Mrs Pavey was a martyr to migraines. Sometimes the pain was so bad that coming to work was out of the question, but more often she struggled in. She always wore a silk scarf — it was part of how she dressed for work — but when the torture inside her head got too much for her, she would blindfold herself with the scarf and lie down behind the counter. Regular users came to know the signs, and would process their own returns and borrowings, tucking the slips into the cardboard pockets and stamping the issue page, taking care not to make too much noise with the stamping machine. I suppose newcomers to the library must have found it strange that the person in charge was lying concealed behind the issue desk, moaning faintly at the slightest sound, but this was really only a tableau expanding on the sign on the desk: Silence Is Requested.
Mrs Pavey treated her migraine with a standard remedy of the day. It was an incredibly exotic, certifiably insane remedy, but in those lax days it was readily available. It was called Cafergot Q. A chocolate-flavoured, caffeine-enhanced chewable ergotamine. They looked like sweets, and Mrs Pavey gobbled them down as if that’s what they were. When she went to Bourne End surgery for a repeat prescription, our rather flinty GP Flanny (Dr Flanagan) couldn’t believe how much she’d got through. Two months’ worth in ten days. She didn’t make a fuss, since after all in those days a chocolate-flavoured, caffeine-enhanced chewable ergotamine was all part of the pharmacological sweetshop, no more than a quirky flavour of Spangles, latently hallucinogenic. She simply said, ‘It’s a wonder your fingers haven’t fallen off.’
Mrs Pavey was a sweet woman, melancholy-seeming even when her brain wasn’t held in its vice of pain. Her skin was oddly creamy and her blue eyes had a lot of grey in them. She lived with her elderly mother, and I never heard a Mr Pavey spoken of.
Sometimes after she had done a particularly inspired bit of truffle-hunting on my behalf, running down some esoteric oddity in the stacks, I would pay her a visit in the library to express my thanks. She would shy away from my gratitude, dismissing it almost, as if she was only doing her job. Which was true, but if everyone did it at that level then ‘job’ would be a holy word.
One Saturday in the library I came across a book on shorthand, and immediately decided I must master it. I loved the way shorthand looked. It seemed to be an entirely alien language, yet it was still English under the surface of squiggles. When I started to study it seriously I was disappointed to learn that the shapes of related consonants — p and b, say — were the same, the only difference being thickness of line. Perversely I wanted every sound to be represented by a different shape, which would have turned Pitman into mere hieroglyphics and made huge demands on the memory.
I could never make the pens work anyway.
Campy spoofing
I transferred my allegiances from Pitman to Gregg, a rival system which did at least use differences of size, if not shape. I got hold of a magazine from the library which promised to teach you eighty new short forms a week. I enjoyed the element of esoteric knowledge, writing words that not one in a thousand people would be able to reconstitute — I suppose it was Yod Hé Vau Hé all over again. I didn’t really see shorthand as a means of communication, more a cipher with considerable ornamental merits. There was nothing ‘short’ about it. Everything took a lot longer than if I’d used the uncryptic full-length forms.
It was always against the odds that I could hide an actual object, so my interest was drawn to metaphysical hiding, in other words to secrets. It mattered relatively little that they were secrets everyone knew already, under the heavy disguise of shorthand, or had no interest in, like the arcana (major, minor and downright silly) of the Tarot.
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.’