My levels of disposable energy had greatly diminished, though there was nothing obscure about how this had come about. For reasons of economy I had dropped first breakfast and then dinner from my schedule. Lunch became my only real meal, and that is not a regime on which the body thrives. I lost weight, and gained a certain perverse satisfaction from being in full charge of my appetite, if of nothing else.
To fill the metabolic crannies
Wealth is relative, wealth is subjective, and I felt poor. In strict monetary terms I was better off than I had been at the start of my university life, but my predicament was much more intractable. My only guarantor was Granny, and she wasn’t reliable in that rôle. She enjoyed having beneficiaries but soon got bored of dependents and was likely to punish them.
There was a recession going on, even if it was only in my head. I was no longer pushing the boat out. I was pulling the boat in. No more fancy cigarettes from Bacon’s to beguile my guests, and no more snacks to fill the metabolic crannies left empty by the catering in Hall.
In better times I had provided a finger buffet — slivers of Ry-King crispbread spread with cashew-nut butter from the Health Food Shop in Rose Crescent. This was hugely popular. I got through so much Ry-King that I could send off the required number of coupons for the clear-top plastic holder for their product which the manufacturers dangled as a temptation in front of eager consumers. It gave me pleasure to arrange the crisp rectangles in their tailor-made vivarium, and even got me thinking that I should collect the coupons for another and relaunch my menagerie with a new millipede to revolt Jean Beddoes — Son of Nasty Thing. Son and daughter in one.
A sizeable whack of my income in this period went on cashew-nut butter, which has never been cheap, but I considered it an expense well justified. I imagined that every savoury nutritious bite I provided was making converts to vegetarianism, lessening the demand for animal slaughter, when I was only pandering to the outrageous calorific demands of active healthy bodies.
I clung to the totem of ‘proper coffee’, despite the expense, preferring to limit my intake than permit a return to granule or powder. Real coffee was a currency I could use to repay those who came to share their lecture notes.
One of my helpers had hair of a strange dark blond and lips so absurdly full even an angel would want to bite them. He turned out to be half-Spanish, and so I ventured into his mother’s tongue if only to brush up my accent. That sort of brushing-up always feels rather fierce, less like grooming of any sort than scrubbing rust off metal using bristles of wire.
I enjoyed it, and was pleased when this young man mentioned a Spanish-language film that was playing at the weekend and had become some sort of underground hit. El Topo, ‘The Mole’ — could an underground film possibly have a better title? The director was Mexican, so the delivery of the dialogue wouldn’t be what we were used to, but we thought we could survive for a couple of hours without the ‘Castilian lisp’.
Strange film. It turned out to be an existential Western or something of the sort, perhaps an allegory, with lashings of startling imagery. Pretentious? Of course. I tried to keep my eyes away from the bottom of the screen so as to take in the dialogue without help, but I couldn’t altogether manage. In any case, El Topo can boast one of the great subtitles of all times — ‘When you came within 250 yards of my boundary fence, my rabbits started dying.’ That has to rank with the all-time greats. I’m thinking of the neighbour saying, ‘Look what eating nettles has done for her’ after the maid has started to levitate in Theorem, or the hero of Hour of the Wolf saying, as he (literally) walks up the wall, ‘Don’t mind me, it’s only my jealousy.’ The acknowledged classics, the ones on everybody’s list.
I sat tight while the film meandered luridly on. Of course I noticed that there was a lot of symbolic deformity involved, and that there was a strong element of brutality meted out to the wrongly shaped or oddly sized. I took it in my stride. I’m all for hostility against the disabled coming into the open. Let it show itself. It’s not me that’s going to be shocked by it. I signed up for normal life, and I don’t expect to be feather-bedded. I didn’t find it all that hard to disconnect from my everyday responses, and to take pleasure in this welter of punitive glory.
My escort, though, wasn’t just trying to blot out the subtitles but the whole of the screen. I could feel the misery pouring out of him. He winced and gave a little moan at the cruelty of each fresh tableau. In the darkness his lips were being chewed without outside assistance. Cruelly he raked the plump tissues with his teeth. I don’t know why he took it quite so personally — did he think I’d suspect him of dragging me to see this film specifically to cause me pain? Paranoia was mother’s milk in those days, but it was hard to believe that anyone had supped so deep. Perhaps it made things worse for him that (in a spirit of gratitude) I had paid for the tickets. The Spanish side of him had shrivelled away to nothing, and he was Englishness itself in his experience of social pain. The English feel embarrassment the way other peoples experience anger or desire.
So in a spirit of charity I groped him, leaning precariously over to interfere with his person. Anything to take his mind off his discomfort. More than discomfort — agony, really. Now if he wanted to cling to his paranoia he would have to suspect me of dragging him to see this film specifically so that I could knead his private parts. I confronted taboo with taboo, then we were quits. I’d rather take advantage, however feebly, than be lumbered with the rôle of injured party. It’s not natural casting.
It lets you cry
I began to think I had been slow to notice the way that invisibility could work in my favour. Spectators chose not to notice the most outrageous groping liberties being taken, when the groper was me. So after that, I started to become more reckless. It was hardly likely there would be any drastic consequences. What were the authorities going to do — send me down, rusticate me? It was much too late for disciplinary measures. And if I didn’t know where I would be living in a few short months’ time, then the authorities would have to hew out my place of exile first, before they could send me there.
It was already established that I had a certain amount of hypnotic talent, a personality magnet or minor force-field which could work wonders when properly aligned. The hypothesis was confirmed on a daily basis. I had a way with young males particularly. By this time I had found that I could use a little tug on a metaphysical sleeve to get a young man moving in the desired direction. Sometimes there would be no resistance at all, sometimes just a little, but no one was ever moved to say, ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ It’s a spell, of an elementary sort. Most people can work small enchantments, it’s just that they don’t know it, or they have more direct ways of getting what they want.
My method worked best with emotionally withdrawn ex-public-schoolboys ill at ease with their bodies, hungering for touch but powerfully estranged from it. There was no shortage of such in the Cambridge of the time — in fact this was a thumbnail sketch of the bulk of the student body. Changing my subject of study brought me in contact with a new crop of such young men. The English Faculty turned out to be a brimming reservoir of the susceptible, as far as I was concerned. Public schools were very much over-represented in the group, though not the household names, more the minor ones. Places with a little bit of history but not too much, a handful of eminent old boys to point to, rather than a lengthy roll-call of cabinet ministers, laureates galore.