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.
I used to refuse to leave the cinema while the credits were still running. I’d complain when people walked into my field of vision on their way out that I was trying to watch the film. Dad would say, ‘The film’s over, Chicken, time to go home,’ but I’d sit tight and so would Peter, out of solidarity. ‘Somebody’s taken a lot of trouble to write all these names down for us,’ I would say, while Dad sighed in the dark. ‘If it was your name, wouldn’t you want people to read it, even if you’d just made the sandwiches? And besides, there may be an extra bit of the film at the very end which is just to reward the patient ones.’ Though actually there never was.
If there are levels of reality below us, then it follows that there are levels above, superior to us as we are superior to characters in books, but not themselves absolute. Nothing that possesses characteristics is perfectly real, not even the guru. The guru himself is in some sense unreal — but he doesn’t need to be absolutely real to get the job done. When an elephant dreams about a tiger and wakes up in alarm, the tiger wasn’t real, was it? But the elephant has been awoken, and that is a real thing.
I was still far short of wakefulness myself at this time, and more preöccupied with lower realities like Boyde Ashlar than higher ones. You could even say that I’d left Boyde Ashlar in the lurch by not finishing The Ring. I had neglected to give the spinning plate the full charge of attention to which it was entitled. I told myself that I would borrow the book from Mrs Pavey again after Dad had forgotten all about it, so as to find out what happened in the end, but I never got round to it.
The Red Spot on Jupiter blinks in shock
Eckstein’s manner didn’t soften as my German improved. Instead he opened up a campaign on another flank by pressuring me to learn another language. He kept me back after one German lesson to make his case. ‘You are taking things easy at a time when your brain is still able to absorb new things without difficulty. Absurd! Take advantage of this — it will not come again. You should learn Spanish. Starting immediately.
‘Here — I’ll start you off. I’m about to teach you something you will never forget. My own learning of Spanish was very rapid. My tutor gave me a copy of Don Quijote de la Mancha by Cervantes and told me to get on with it. I had to reach degree level from nothing in eight months, and I did. If you decided to learn Spanish, you could get to A-level in a year, very easily. Don’t bother with the O-level. It’s just a distraction.
‘When you leave this room in three minutes’ time you will know more of the language than I did when I was thrown in at the deep end with Miguel de Cervantes and his knight.’ He walked over to the blackboard, took a piece of chalk and carefully wrote something on the blackboard. It was:
¡ Que te joda un pulpo!
Then he stepped back from the board and said, ‘You start with the advantage of knowing this charming sentence, which I discovered relatively late in my own progress. When I did, I vowed that it would be the first thing I taught any pupil, if I was lucky or unlucky enough to acquire one. It means,’ he said with a deep hissing sigh, ‘“May you be fucked by an octopus”.’
The world stood still. The Red Spot on Jupiter blinked in shock. He went on, ‘It would be more accurate to translate, “May an octopus fuck you”, but such a sentence is not idiomatic in English. It lacks the proper cadence. Joder means fuck, and is transitive, for obvious reasons.’
When Klaus Eckstein said ‘joder’ he used the proper Spanish sound, like a heavy ‘H’, not far from a guttural German ‘ch’. ‘No doubt your English teacher will have told you to avoid passive verbs, on the grounds that they are weaker and vaguer. This is an example of the opposite, with the passive construction being the more forceful. And there you are — I have done as I promised. I have taught you something you will never forget. From this day on, you will always have one phrase of Spanish at your disposal. If you do in fact choose to learn the language, not everything will come so easily, but the difficulties are not overwhelming. Now, I have somewhere to be even if you do not.’