Free Pilcrow by Adam Mars-Jones Page A

avoided. Dislikes being alone. Makes mountains out of molehills. A poor listener – has little interest in problems of others . That’s more like it. That’s the Mum I knew.
    She wasn’t obsessed with ailments in the sense of being a hypochondriac – or rather, the element of hypochondria in her wasn’t to do with illness, exactly. It took the form of superstitiousness, which is really only a hypochondria of the spirit. Superstitiousness is entirely self-defeating. In Mum’s case, it did the opposite of what it was supposed to. It sealed in the dread it was devised to seal out.
    So for instance she had the wooden outline of a magpie on the kitchen window-sill. It was her insurance policy against bad luck. If she ever saw a single magpie – ‘for sorrow’ – she could interpret it as really being a pair with the one on the window-sill. Two for joy. The old formula, tipping your hat to Mr Magpie. That’s superstition for you.
    Of course it’s not mathematically possible to see two magpies as often as you see one, so the odds are stacked against joy. The wooden magpie was there so that she could cheat. She could tip her hat to joy, not sorrow, when there was just the one magpie in the garden. She managed not to notice that her little stratagem had installed a sorrow-bearing magpie right inside the house. If the wooden cut-out could count as a magpie for a second, then it was a magpie always. Despite her best efforts, sorrow was the resident emotion, joy the visitor that caught her unprepared. It came close to frightening her with the clap of its wings.

Incabloc
     
    That Christmas, Jim’s lovely hairy hands held my attention even more than the baubles on the tree, but even at that age I knew you couldn’t just say, ‘I like your hands. Your hands are nice.’ It wasn’t a possible thing. He was wearing a watch, though, so I asked him what time it was.
    In its way this was a trick question. Jim said, ‘It’s five twenty-five,’ and then I knew he wasn’t as important as my dad. My dad always said, ‘I make it five twenty-five.’ That was his power. He made the time, and Jim only told it. But I said I liked Jim’s watch, so he wouldn’t feel bad – and after all the watch was near the hairy hands. I didn’t so much covet the watch as envy it for its closeness to the hairy hands. Then Jim Shaeffer said, ‘It’s yours, pal. Happy Christmas!’
    Mum looked shocked, and said something about it not being possible – it was just too much. Of course she was right, but I saw my chance and said, ‘I have a birthday in two days’ time! It could be a birthday present.’ Why shouldn’t the unfortunate timing of my birth work in my favour for once, enriching the harvest of presents? Instead of bilking me out of them in the usual way, when people made one gift do double duty.
    So Jim said, ‘Happy Birthday then!’ I held my breath. I couldn’t imagine I would get away with it. Miraculously, Mum didn’t scold me for my greed and the generous impulse was allowed to stand, even if she was quietly embarrassed by it. I still have that watch somewhere , though it doesn’t run properly. Incabloc. But I do wonder what he would have given me if I’d said straight out that I liked his hands.
    There was something wrong about that Christmas which I dimly noticed even at the time. There were too many presents, for one thing, which should have rung a warning bell, if not a full-change Treble Bob Major. Normally Mum was very definite about the risk of children being spoiled. In that she was a mother of her time.
    It was long afterwards that I realised Mum was taking the brakes off the giving for a reason. Not because she was playing a part in front of someone she wanted to impress, or too shy to over-rule a guest. The hectic giving had a simpler cause. I had lost a lot of weight and seemed to be more or less fading away. Mum thought I was dying and wouldn’t see another Christmas. She relaxed the rules so as to make it