ADAM MARS-JONES

  Caret

  { novel }

  Dedicated with love to

  K the keen-thinking

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Open the doors of orthography a crack

  Sledges pulled by scandalised huskies

  In the land of asymmetrical spoons

  Ripe for the snaffling

  The flavour of a gypsy encampment

  Micturition syncope is real

  The rigours of perching

  A whiff from the pit

  Any number of nutritious skirmishes

  I’ve not had the rhino virus

  Thixotropic isn’t a word

  Keep those insoluble polysaccharides coming

  Closer to you than your jugular vein

  Delivered of an obese torpedo

  I could write FRESH in letters a yard high

  Elven financial instrument

  I storm the vestibule

  Safe passage of baked goods

  A boom preceded by its echo

  As worn by Father Brown

  An organism that differs from itself

  Flexing its nonseptate filaments

  Dragging their C-value down

  The rapidly spreading bloodstain

  Retrospective annihilation of the moment

  The presence of metaphysical toxins

  I could strangle a Mandie

  The Mini let out a low shuddering cry

  Little bundle of thwarted instructions

  A shrug on a grand scale

  The student and the incontinent tramp

  Wheelchair manhandle with cup-of-tea-and-biscuit finish

  Held safe in the tiger jaws

  To chew an Energen roll for God

  A holy sandal-mender with sciatica

  The lips of this pestering ferret

  The greedy pulsing berry

  Focussed ignorance is a precious yeast

  Don’t let the Pythiums bite

  Common sense is an infinite litter

  I may have missed out an ancillary Pedley

  Blissful dismounting from the treadmill

  Just ask for BURLIES

  Encashment must always have the edge

  To fluster an opal

  Foreknowledge of the brouhaha

  Pessimism, garrulity, sarcasm

  Seedy Maigret overtones

  One of us will have ginger twins

  The geode and the cauliflower

  Lavatory, Laboratory, Lavoratory

  My scouts in the next room

  My toes were curling frantically upwards

  Better marquetry than closetry

  The forest is full of ears

  She was all over mousetraps

  The smallest fart

  Cats are clearly scopæsthetic

  Tins of intellectual caviar

  The Scarlet Pimpernel of flagellant ambushers

  Was Goethe a Shoe Fetishist?

  Gold dust seeping through my blood

  Cromer’s Law

  Maya has a ladder in her stocking

  Campaign for Real Apologies

  The vast human unity offstage

  Tweeters with delusions of grandeur

  I call it wankerage

  It’s an ill wind that blow job any good

  The Return of the Culotte

  Krishna would have managed

  Easier to explain with dogs

  A bulb of scrotum

  A Chameleon on the rampage

  The nail file of Damocles

  There are two men in my life

  Admire the extra-strength parenthesis

  Libertines of the underclass

  The workings of Sod’s Law

  He hunted down the regicides

  Riding the tide of synovial fluid

  Golden age of civic delinquency

  A low-cut gown beneath the plumber’s overalls

  A Parisian garsong of the most lubricious stripe

  The way it is with elderly Velcro

  A carnival of torques and stresses

  Voicing the implied solidus

  I can smell the sauerkraut

  You’d have burned a hole in my forehead

  Adding Braille italics to the font of talk

  The official cigarette of Gay Liberation

  As intimate as a suffragette

  The longed-for dilatancy

  A replacement bubble for the spirit level

  Zephyrs in the pay of Alberto VO5

  Technically he was a strange man

  Please will you be my crack

  Exactly the sort of fuss he hates

  Young people’s dental health in pre-Wilhelmine Germany

  The curtain of molecules

  The end of my rough-diamond phase

  A surprisingly bitter argument about geraniums

  I’m not the only vandal in the building

  You’d be the second to know

  My version of 1970s milkman vernacular

  Wear and tear on the frenulum

  A magical uncosy entity such as a psammead

  The way it strokes the eye

  The very antipodes of tickety-boo

  His C-value was plummeting

  A Marc Bolan perm

  Tureens have had their day

  Take on the Grim Reaper in a tug of war

  To connect directly with the flywheel of history

  Big Ben Was Wrong

  The password is ‘tureen’

  Piss-whatever-it-was-called

  Better than no kiss at all

  The northern white cedar springs to mind

  Tiffs with divinity

  Suburban adultery hound slinking around Olympus

  Death has his lines off pat

  Surviving on crumbs

  We behead Scheherazade

  An easy person to avoid

  A small glass of the Bristol Cream

  Niminy-piminy junior penalty

  Lack of parallelism in the ocular axes

  Glue extra tailage on a lyrebird

  The habit of screaming is partially repressed

  A degree enriched with marrow-bone jelly

  The selfish drama of reflexive opposition

  As comforting as the smell of wet dog

  As we know ladies are demons

  The darkling pie

  A thick woven worm

  A customer had helped himself to a saveloy

  May the Best Yob Win

  The nougat of wisdom enrobed

  These toffs need to be taught a lesson

  My idiolect had gone to the dogs

  The Sidney part of the Taken Sidney

  Hunched over the lurid mushroom

  Larceny bred in the bone

  Reservoirs of trodden foulness

  Towards a European gold standard

  Pain turned inside out and pushed away

  Pedro the bloodhound, welcome

  Autoglossotomy is a wonderful word

  The hygroscopic properties of honeycomb confectionery

  Replaced as easily as a light bulb

  A dozen assorted dolts

  Every chance of a rosette

  She knocks George Herbert into a cocked hat!

  His head became the temple bell

  Swirled spiritual ketchup

  Margaret Rutherford does the Twist

  Malabar for the Derby

  Past form as taker of the piss and wind-up merchant

  The small change of mage and huckster down the ages

  Constricting preputial hood

  The humming of his realigned chakras

  I’ll be the First to Roast

  All England seemed to be bending

  I long to stet those hyphens

  Sandy liked hay as well as ice cream

  Writing letters to pandas about Boy Scouts

  The labels have been switched on the voting machine

  Dolphins always seem to be smiling, don’t they?

  Topping up the dog’s bowl with vodka

  All I Want for Christmas Is a Pygmy Sphygmomanometer

  The stone money of Yap springs to mind

  The gentlemen of the law warm their hands impartially

  Imagine your little Granny serving granules!

  Relied upon to deliver more death than love

  Little Bo-Peep trying to calm her panicked sheep

  Its plutocratic absorbency perhaps giving it the edge

  A Rosetta Stone with nothing whatever written on it

  Professor emeritus of bird education

  Pathos can be cranked up to quite Dickensian levels

  Their catapults don’t miss

  Fellow sufferers from an idiopathic lockjaw

  An undertone outshouts a megaphone

  A balancing dose of masculine terror

  Greater than the average mousewife’s

  In the privacy of its own mug

  Pulling apart the spring-loaded claws

  Makeshift portholes punched through the parietal bones

  Long evenings running his tongue over glued surfaces

  With Every Good Wish for a Freeze-Dried Christmas

  Hardened to the sufferings of potatoes

  Never been anywhere near the rooftops before

  Not how you impale customers on the knife of adverting

  Phyllis was failing to pull her weight socially

  A poultice of his own devising

  Not remotely worth the double amputation

  The teeth of punctuation protocol
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br />   If there is a Mrs Wogan

  Anapæstic sigh of wonder

  She couldn’t half make your ears pop

  My original pianissimo ending was the right choice

  The one that lived in Ivy’s mouth

  The grass blades became daggers and cudgels

  Stuffed festive tubes designed for no other purpose

  Because you are morbidly obese

  Something rubbery and bright yellow

  From tiara to deerstalker

  The very cream of her toes

  Herons and pelicans can come a cropper

  Just as likely to have been Brut for Men

  The Russian roulette of ethanol detection

  Growing mangel-wurzels and smoking a pipe

  His goodnight kiss scented with blood

  The details, technical or gory or both

  Ode to a red cabbage

  The dolorific calculus of Christmas

  Weedkiller in a man’s curry

  A turbine cranking out increments of joy

  Headlong into the confusion of the womb

  More along the lines of a quiche lorraine

  To squeeze the fig with a finger

  Are These the Eyes of a Fork-Bender?

  Spoons under scrutiny at Cambridge

  And the greatest of these

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  I was shocked by the confidence with which this unknown hand had inserted the missing letter – in a library book of all holy places! – with a caret. The act uneasily combined correction and desecration, disfigurement and repair. Was this a vandal or a proofreading vigilante riding the range of print in the name of maintaining order? It made a difference that the mark was in ink, and green ink at that. Indelibility bespeaks courage and commitment – it’s not for nothing that Mephistopheles declines to give sellers of their souls the option of a pencil, however nicely they ask. ‘Caret’ means only ‘it is missing’ or ‘there is a lack’. Its symbol resembles a lambda pointing the wrong way. It’s a sturdy little jemmy, able to prise open a sentence for as long as it takes for missing elements to be restored to the body of the text.

  Knife, fork and spoon, the basic equipment. ‘Eating irons’ as some people call them – as my dad called them. In terms of acquiring cutlery I didn’t do badly out of my three undergraduate years, from 1970 to 1973, at Downing College, Cambridge. If that was the point of the exercise then I did better than most. I ended up with a useful haul. It wasn’t that I was greedy, I don’t think. I didn’t want a six-piece place serving, let alone twelve-piece. I wasn’t planning dinner parties or dainty lunches in punts. Everything was for my own personal use, to borrow the formula that defendants of the period fell back on when they were caught helping themselves from a smörgåsbord piled high with illegal drugs. In my case, though, it was true. I wanted a single knife, single fork, single spoon, nothing else. One of each item, but they had to be the right ones.

  Everyone needs to eat. This informative sentence pushes together two separate propositions, according to what is meant by ‘eat’. In one sense, ‘to eat’ means to take part in the economic structure of society and thereby to have food on your plate. More narrowly it addresses the next stage of the process, the conveying of food from plate to mouth. I won’t pretend the first stage has always been smooth sailing, but the second one has never been anything but tricky.

  Right knife, right fork, right spoon. These had to be tools I could use, and the requirements were strict. My left elbow had (and has) no movement, and the right elbow isn’t exactly spry though there’s a little play in it. My wrists don’t rotate, so there aren’t many utensils that can serve my turn in the first place. When I find them I don’t let them go. I stay loyal, I hang on like grim death. It so happened that my ownership of these items was illegal, knife-fork-spoon, and I’d like to point out that I would have acquired them respectably if that had been an option. I don’t break rules for the fun of it, or only when the assured dividend of fun is considerable. I’d rather be in the clear when I can manage it. It’s just that sometimes honesty is a luxury beyond my means.

  Peter Gladwell, the domestic bursar at Downing, in charge of the kitchens, was always complaining about how much money the college lost through pilferation of cutlery. Thousands of pounds were lost to the college over the years, and pilferation was something he was always preaching against. I never thought I’d be one of the bad boys, the light-fingered ones, but I have to put my hand up just a few token degrees of elevation and admit that I snaffled some myself. I scrumped a few plump apples from the laden branches of Downing’s catering department, branches so weighed down with fruit as to be within my reach.

  I wouldn’t have had the dexterity or the cheek to take anything away with me from a communal meal in Hall, but towards the end of my time in A6 Kenny Court it must have been obvious that I was at a low ebb. A meal tray would sometimes be sent over for my benefit, a spontaneous kindness but also an invitation to wrongdoing. Sometimes filching went on and the tray made its way back to the college kitchens a cutlery item short. On the occasion of the first crime I stage-managed a tableau of innocence, in case a steward returned to ask what had happened to the College fork which had been entrusted to me, by dropping it onto the floor. No one came to ask, and I wasn’t required to go through an I-must-have-dropped-it routine, inherently hollow since though I’m always dropping things (the notion of dropping should be expanded to mean any loss of mastery over an object’s whereabouts) it’s rare that I don’t notice. After that I realised that the reason Peter Gladwell laid so much emphasis on the seriousness of pilfering was that everyone but him thought of it as trivial.

  At the time, stealing from shops was routinely referred to as ‘liberating’ things, a usage that must have started as irony but soon lost any sort of edge. I certainly wouldn’t say that I had liberated my Downing knife-fork-spoon set, when they had liberated me, or at least liberated my mealtimes for an indefinite period.

  It’s true that if you bend backwards the spoon part of a standard spoon (the language insists on this redundancy) it can be made much more serviceable, but it isn’t something I can accomplish without help. You’d be surprised how reluctant restaurant staff are to modify the cutlery for the benefit of their diners. So much for the customer always being right!

  The Downing cutlery wasn’t exactly luxurious though it was smart enough, the design vaguely Scandinavian-modern in a way that has come to seem sixties-retro in its own right. The style is neither here nor there, it’s just that nothing else feels right in my hands. I take those eating irons with me wherever I go. I never use anything else. I eat left-handed, reversing the implements to cut food up if that’s required, slicing with the left by pushing with the shoulder. It’s the only way cutting of any sort will get done, though of course not all food needs to be cut up. Vegetarianism offers an unfair advantage in that respect, with food more likely to be bite-sized already. Then the fork in the right hand makes the deliveries.

  It has sometimes happened on æroplanes that the stewardess has brought me ‘proper cutlery’ from First Class, a lovely piece of good manners though not actually a functional improvement on my own tools. A starched napkin sometimes comes along for the ride, and this does serve a purpose, lending the Vegetarian Option a little reflected glamour.

  The Downing knife has its point of balance just where it should be, halfway along its length, not thrown out of equipoise by a weighty handle. The tines of the Downing-issue fork have quite a pronounced curve – I think that’s part of the secret. I hold a fork in my right hand, since my right shoulder has the more movement of the two, though I still can’t manage to reach my mouth with the fork horizontal. The technique I’ve learned involves accelerating on the upstroke to keep the food in place. It’s like dive-bombing, only in the opposite direction, bombing upward. It works with most foods. The Downing cutlery is lightweight, which is certainly an advantage. It’s easy to manœuvre. Crucially it’s not too long. Since my forearms are short, a long fork requires a more finicky angling effort towards the mouth, and that’s just the sort of movement my arms don’t run to.

  The Downing spoon isn’t quite so uniquely designed to suit me – most dessert spoons can be modified appropriately, if someone is good enough to increase the kink at the neck so as to improve the angle of incidence of the bowl. But it makes sense to have the full set, the integral place setting. Each item bore the engraved letters D C C – for Downing College Cambridge – at the larcenous moment, though the incriminating markings wore off after only a few years.

  Open the doors of orthography a crack