Cedilla (7 page)

Mrs Pavey also unearthed books on astral projection and the Tarot. I read the astral projection one first. Hardly surprising that I was drawn to an occult practice that promises so much. I needed no convincing that the physical body was a rubbishy contraption, hopelessly inefficient and outmoded. The book gave instructions for travel in another dimension, no ticket required.

You needed neither driving licence nor working hips. All you needed was ‘a dream of knowledge’ – a lucid dream, to wit a dream in which you knew you were dreaming. I had plenty of those. It’s just that I was accustomed to using them in a rather vulgar way. It turned out I was already an old hand at astral projection, I just didn’t project myself very far. To be exact, I projected myself just far enough away from the physical body to get astral cock into astral mouth. Autofellation. On the astral plane I turned out to be remarkably limber. In lucid dreams I became Ouroboros, mystical worm swallowing its own tail. If my tail was good enough for Luke Squires at Vulcan School it was good enough for me. It had never occurred to me before I read the book from Mrs Pavey’s library that I could use the same technique to leave the room.

Now, armed with new knowledge, I was ready for some proper exploring. I learned to drift away from the physical envelope through the escape hatch of a dream of knowledge. One night I found myself in a sort of astral maze, opening doors which just led to grey corridors full of other doors, which led to more of the same. An esoteric labyrinth from which there seemed to be no exit, a dreadful place.

Another time I made better progress. I remember leaving the body and venturing forth into the æther. The night sky received me warmly. I looked back, and I could see myself sleeping. The book said I would see a glowing cord linking the astral body and the gross bundle back in the bed, a sort of mystical umbilical, but there was no sign of anything like that. I was untethered. I was a kite without
a string. Undeterred I started off into the welcoming void, waiting to feel the astral breeze on my face, to gaze on the placid features of eternity, when suddenly I had a rush of panic. It wasn’t a feeling that seemed to belong to me but (of course) a disembodied panic. Then I had the sensation of returning, actually
twanging
back to the physical plane with great force. There was an almost audible snapping of the spiritual elastic. I woke up with a start, re-identified with the gross, inefficient, outmoded body. This wasn’t an outcome foreseen by the book I was using as my guide. I took it seriously. There had been no umbilical cord! I had gone exploring on the cliffs of the infinite without being safely attached to base camp. If I had ventured any further I might never have been able to get back.

From then on I stayed put in my sleep. The dream of knowledge seemed to be an unreliable contraption, as much an ejector seat as a gateway to mystical experience. Soon I stopped having the dreams of knowledge, as if I had closed the door on them myself. I was missing an important clue. What I was being offered was something subtler than an escape from this uncoöperative body.

The dream of knowledge, the dream in which you know you’re dreaming, is a microcosm or a metaphor. If it’s possible to be dreaming but also to know it, then it is possible in ‘waking life’ to be aware of life’s illusory nature. The technical term for illusion being Maya. The guru, the adept, the – as he’s called –
jñani
dreams as much as anyone else, but he (or she, though really neither he nor she, since gender is only another of Maya’s little notions) always knows he’s dreaming. He’s awake in his sleep, and in his waking hours he sees through the illusions of life.

I had much more joy from the other book,
The Tarot
by Mouni Sadhu. The book’s subtitle was ‘A Contemporary Course of the Quintessence of Hermetic Occultism’, which was a mystical thunderbolt in itself. I also loved the epigraph, frustratingly unassigned to a source:
Peu de science éloigne de Dieu / Beaucoup de science y ramène
. A little know ledge estranges one from God – great knowledge brings one back into the fold. The moment I read it I recognised this as my own motto. Since then I’ve seen it ascribed to both Pasteur and Francis Bacon.

My mind salivated when it read the description of the Tarot on the
first page of the Introduction as ‘a truly philosophical machine’. I read the book all the way to the end, not wanting to admit to myself that I was completely baffled and bogged down.
Privilege Teth: the Adept is
in command of the universal therapeutics. This means, that he possesses the art
of the absolute criticism (in the mental plane), the art of disinvultuation in
the astral, and the use of medical magnetism on the physical plane.
500-odd pages in that vein. It certainly wasn’t plane sailing, on any plane I knew.

Even so I was bewitched, partly by the author’s name, and would say it over and over again under my breath.
Mouni Sadhu Mouni Sadhu
. It became a sort of mantra, but it worked the wrong way round, stirring up my thoughts instead of dissipating them. I’m rather embarrassed by the book now, but at the time it nourished me with dark hints and cryptic formulas. I had to crawl through a thicket of obscurities before I could emerge from the gloom and see daylight for the first time.

Gardening for Adventure
was partly responsible. Thanks to R. H. Menage I now saw the vegetable kingdom as a place of instructive freakishness, paradox and transgression. His book was a sort of botanical Apocrypha, even a Kabbala. Plants set traps to hunt meat, they fanned themselves when they got hot (
Desmodium
), they brewed deep inside their own tissues the liquors of enlightenment (
Lophophora wil
lamsii
). It turned out that nature didn’t bother much with the Laws of Nature, as we so confidently formulated them on her behalf. And that was the part of nature I felt part of, mercury-nature, pumice-nature, platypus-nature, where a metal could be a liquid, a stone could float and a mammal lay eggs.

Of course I was romanticising my own status dreadfully. The apparent exotica belong to exactly the same order of things as iron-nature, limestone-nature, cow-nature. There’s nothing wildly abnormal about mercury or pumice or platypus, they just don’t seem to fit the standard categories, lazy preconceptions. There’s mercury in thermometers, pumice in many bathrooms, and platypuses … well, in the zoo or on television. Even in Tasmania I suppose you don’t exactly fall over
them, but you might see one if you were swimming in a stream there, and actually if it was a male he might give you a nasty dig with his venom-spur – and serve you right for thinking it was your stream and not his. It’s entirely normal for platypuses to be the way they are, that’s the point. There’s nothing unnatural about lactating through the pores, without benefit of nipples, and having the milk run down abdominal grooves for your young to lick up, it’s just not the human style of motherhood. Still, we’d rather treat ourselves to a shudder of wonder than make a little more room in our pigeon-holes.

At the time I was attuned to a cruder logic. Since I was debarred from so many ordinary activities, it seemed to follow that I would have a special affinity for the esoteric. That would balance the cosmic accounts nicely. My bailiwick would be the occult and the perverse.

I thought Mouni Sadhu might have written another simpler book, and pestered Mrs Pavey through Mum until she came up with a much smaller volume called
In Days of Great Peace
, which was more like an autobiography and didn’t really engage me. I read about Mouni Sadhu’s visit to a spiritual leader in Southern India called Maharshi, whose face expressed endless friendship and understanding, how Mouni Sadhu dissolved into tears which washed away the stains of multiple incarnations and so on, and I thought ‘how nice for him’ without going any deeper.

I must have read the sentence, ‘He walked with difficulty, as his joints and knees were affected by acute rheumatism’, and yet felt no particular quickening of interest. What else was I looking for, if not a guru with arthritis? The fit was incredibly close, yet I missed it. It was as if I was being protected by a sort of lightning conductor, from premature contact with energy of a high order. I put the book aside unaffected, at least on the surface. In this way a leading player in my life gave notice of his existence with a discreet off-stage cough, waiting in the wings, years before he made his entrance proper.

People value what they pay for. The things they get for free, such as a national health service, tend to be under-appreciated. I wasn’t going to make that mistake. Morale is important. I was deeply in debt to a
system which was the envy of the world, and I didn’t want anyone to imagine they had inserted a metal hip into an ingrate. As soon as I decently could, as soon as there was a chance of being believed, I had been saying how pleased I was with the operation. Despite everything I passed congratulations on to the surgeon who had done the work at Wexham Park – Mr Arden – saying how marvellous it was to have a hip that worked, a hip that didn’t just sit there. Modern medical science was wonderful, just wonderful. I was a new person, with my new hip! Hip hip hurray!

But maybe one
Hip hurray!
was celebration enough. When a little time had gone by, I started mentioning that of course the other hip, the one that hadn’t been replaced, had never been as bad as the one that had. Which was true, but all the same I was working up to something in my naïvely devious way. It was rather a waste of money – of people’s taxes, when you came right down to it – to operate on the other hip, when really I was fine now.

Then Ansell came and sat on my bed and routed my little scheme. She said, ‘John, you do know that you’re going to have to have the other operation, don’t you?’ A doctor sitting on a bed in Men’s Surgical didn’t mean you were dying, as it had when I was on the children’s wards, but it wasn’t exactly relaxing. I was in for some sort of scolding.

I tried to bluster, but blustering doesn’t really work from a horizontal position. It helps if you can loom. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I was thinking that maybe I’m all right the way I am now.’ I was being partly truthful. There’s nothing like having a sore new hip that has to be coaxed into the slightest movement to make you fall in love with the good old fixed one. Rigid, dependable, everything a hip should be. ‘The physios have been super, and I can do such a lot more now than I ever could. I can’t help feeling that there are other patients who have much more to gain from the operation than I do.’

Ansell wasn’t fooled for a moment. ‘And I don’t suppose this is about the pain, is it? The pain that I said you wouldn’t have, and turned out to be so severe?’

I didn’t have the strength of character to deny it outright, so I just put my head on one side by a few degrees and raised my eyebrows, as if I was considering something that had never occurred to me before.

‘Next time at least you’ll know what you’re in for. And I couldn’t in all conscience encourage you to stop now. You’ve had half the pain already, but you haven’t had more than a tenth of the mobility that we can give you with two good hips.’

I gave it a good thinking-over. The new hip worked extremely well. The increase in my ability to live up to my biped pretensions was tremendous. But I wasn’t convinced that a second operation would bring about a second transformation. It seemed to suit my gait to have one hip fixed and the other mobile. Would I really be able to manage without a stick after a second operation? Somehow I couldn’t imagine a future of walking without aids of any kind, and a stick was a relatively discreet accessory. It could be tucked tidily away when it wasn’t needed. I was having a hip honeymoon now, certainly, but it wouldn’t last for ever. Sooner or later I’d just have to get on with things, but would a second operation really bring me the life I dreamed of?

I tried to visualise my walking style with two mobile hips. Perhaps my body would go bendy in the middle, if I didn’t have the muscle strength to brace myself and hold myself steady in the proper posture. Then I’d be sorry that I’d said yes to the second operation.

After all, who was the one who knew most about the management of this body? I was so sure it was me, when apparently it was the ones who walked around with all their parts well-formed and smoothly functioning. They knew more about the subject than I could ever hope to. I rehearsed my objections to Mum, who said I must take it up with Dr Ansell. Ansell just said, ‘We can’t have you going through life without being able to walk correctly!’ So overall the argument of ‘it just isn’t on’ won the day, despite not being an argument. I voiced my worry about ‘going all bendy in the middle’ and was told that although that might be the case for a few days, my muscles would soon strengthen up and I’d wonder at my silly doubts. I still wasn’t convinced and asked, ‘What if I really can’t manage? Can’t I at least try life with one hip and see how I get on? I feel so well set up …’

Dr Ansell had the grace to consult Mr Arden on this point. The message relayed back from him was that if I really didn’t get on with a mobile right hip, he could do another operation to set things permanently, ‘at any angle you want’.

Somehow I knew that the right hip wouldn’t be such a success, and I told Ansell so. ‘Don’t be silly, John,’ she said. ‘What makes you think you know better than the surgeon? You’re always saying he did a good job on the left hip.’ Once the burning spiders had gone to sleep, that is.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I just feel it in my bones.’ Then Ansell looked at me with a very strange expression, as if after all this time she still didn’t know what to make of me.

Anyway, that was me dished and dashed. In all honesty I couldn’t go against the doctor who’d done so much for me. I had to bite the bullet. One day soon I would have to go to sleep in a hospital, knowing that I would wake up feeling like a piece of playground equipment that has been methodically vandalised by people who should know better, trained health-service professionals. Grown-ups. Perhaps this time the anæsthetist would get in on the act. Let everyone have a go, the porter, the lady from the canteen, the whole bang lot. Last one on John’s hip’s a sissy.