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In a cartoon my two escorts would have perched on my shoulders, one with a halo on his head, the other with horns, arguing the case variously for risk-taking and the straight-and-narrow. In reality Lorca and Ashlar were both on the horny side, and they spoke with a single
voice. Ashlar even had a little shoulder-perching devil-angel of his own, the effeminate friend always ready to murmur, ‘You’ve gone all cock-eyed, dear.’ Everything conspired to push me towards bravery and the outrageous.

Only a few months after I passed my test I took the Mini down a side alley in Marlow. It was the louchest place I could find, though I had only the dimmest notion of what I was looking for. I knew that there should be light but not too much of it, preferably coming from the side. There should be a suggestion of neglect or dereliction but also of waiting for something. The picture would be completed by a figure in shadow with a cigarette. Smoke swallowed and then breathed out. Weight being shifted from leg to leg with a sound that only woodland creatures, and I myself, could hear.

The lane was promising. And there he was – a figure under the trees at the end, exaggeratedly at his ease. There seems to be a deep instinct that tells us if an unreadable figure, a figure in silhouette, is smiling. The man came up to the car without hesitation, all business, almost before I had parked, and opened the door. He got in. The Mini’s suspension lurched, and so did my heart. Would it manage to keep beating, during what must follow?

For all the encouragement my demons had given me, of course, they left me in the lurch when I needed them most. Boyde and Federico had scarpered. Cowards! After all their bold talk.

The stranger parked himself on the seat next to me. Where else was he going to go? In a Mini intimacy is the only option. His cologne was strong, the smell of his cigarette was stronger. He was chewing gum as well as smoking. I could smell that too.

At first I didn’t look at him directly, but I thought that I’d made rather a brilliant catch. He reached over with his hand and gave my hair a ruffle, which was exciting if perhaps a little too much an uncle’s action, a liberty but also a dead end. The ruffling hand passed my field of vision on its return journey. The skin tone was darker than mine. There were follicles. There was dark hair on the dark wrist. My heart was going like mad, now that I had achieved what had taken so long to bring about. I had brought something uncontrollable into my life, something swarthy, to sit beside me in the car and turn life upside down. When I shifted awkwardly round to return the smile in the
passenger seat, I found it belonged to Granny’s pet waiter from the Compleat Angler.

The brain is a standardised organ. My brain was like the Mini I was sitting in, marginally adapted to my circumstances but little different from every other brain. It went on producing the standard responses. That evening my brain supplied me with the most foolish possible thought.
Perhaps he doesn’t recognise me
. The staff in my mental press office could come up with no better bulletin than that to paper over the cracks. They should be fired. They should all be fired, and they could forget about references.

Of course he recognised me.
Of course
he recognised me! He might not remember my name, but he knew me all right. I didn’t drive into the dining room at the Compleat Angler at the wheel of the Mini, but that didn’t mean I was in disguise now. He had known who I was long before I recognised him, and the ruffling of my hair had been indulgent but the opposite of the touch I wanted.

He’d only got into the car for a chance to talk about old times, the splendours and miseries of the waiting life. I felt I could tell him a thing or two about that – the waiting life. ‘I see all sorts at the Angler, believe me,’ he said, ‘and your grandmother is absolutely special. A one-of-a-kind sort of lady. ¿When will she come to see me again? ¿To make her little road across the plate?’ His Spanishness was beginning to grate on me, and it was mortifying that I couldn’t command enough vocab to communicate usefully. ‘¡When you next speak to your fantastic grandmother, you must ask her to come to the restaurant again soon so we can play our games and have some fun!’

Up to that point it had never occurred to me that waiters could feel anything but contempt for those they served. It was actually rather unbearable that everything turned out to revolve around Granny, in Marlow and the wider world. She’d paid for the car, and perhaps if I asked her nicely she’d pay for her special waiter to come home with me, to be nice to me the way Mr Thatcher’s lady friend was nice to him. I didn’t want that.

I made a supreme effort and said nothing. I tried to nail my tongue
into a corner of my mouth, to stop myself from prattling. I wanted to be excused for a moment from my life’s long charm offensive. I wanted this man to reach over across to me without being wooed, teased or hypnotised. I hadn’t concentrated on the inside of my mouth so fiercely since the game of Teeth, way back in my early days of immobility, when I imagined living inside my own mouth, wandering through the stalagmites and stalactites set in the smooth pink rock. I was determined not to blurt out some winning wheedle.

I gave him the Cow Eyes, more for form’s sake than anything else, just in case there was a chance of turning the encounter in a new direction. The silence in the car began to seem oppressive. Then he shifted and said rather sourly, ‘You know, I had your number from the word go, from the first time you ate at my table. Absolutely had your number. And all I can say is – good luck!’

Silence had failed and speech must have its turn. ‘What is your name?’ I asked, wanting to make him stay. ‘
¿Cómo se llama Usted?
’ I’d have asked him whether he didn’t prefer black-tobacco Ducados to bland blond English smokes, but I couldn’t muster the vocabulary.

‘My name is whatever you like,’ he said, between chews on the gum and drags on the cigarette. ‘Waiter –You There – Gar
song
– Boy.’ Granny didn’t know his name, but for some reason that was all right. I was the one who had to stand in for the hotel’s whole patronising clientele. Granny was fun and I wasn’t. Against such judgements there is no appeal. On the whole I’d have preferred it if he’d just wished me fucked by an octopus. The amiable old multiple-violation-by-gastropod routine.

He took out his chewing gum and pressed it against the dashboard with his thumb. Then he was out of the car, joined a few moments later by another man, who materialised out of the shadows of the louchest lane in Marlow.

It was a setback, undoubtedly. No questing hero minds the odd failure. It’s just that there are many reasons for a sexy waiter to climb into your Mini in a dark lane, reasons good and bad. He may want to kiss you, he may want to rob you and murder you, he may want to listen to your garbled rendering of homoerotic Spanish poetry. Any or all of the above – just so long as he doesn’t want to talk about your grandmother. That’s too much to bear. That’s the pink limit.

I left his chewing gum where it was. I could have reached it with a little trouble, but it seemed somehow a meaningful memento. It was impregnated with the cigarette he had been smoking while he chewed, and added a sharp smell to the Mini’s interior for some time. It became the crusty relic of an ancient frisson. I let it fossilise.

The idea that a disabled boy might go to a normal school such as Burnham had seemed to be my own discovery, almost my own invention. I had hewn it out of the living rock. The idea that a disabled young man might go to a normal university was an idea that I hadn’t dared to propose to myself. Eckstein got there first. He had contacts at Cambridge University, but what on earth made him think I might make a suitable candidate? My essay on Lorca, that’s what, feverish adolescent outpouring perfumed with smoke from María Paz Binns’s sinister black cigarettes, the devil’s gaspers.

Eckstein even came to Bourne End to see Mum and Dad, so as to discuss the idea of my applying to university. This was a huge honour, and I did my best to respond appropriately, showing off horribly on the piano that Peter no longer even pretended to play, giving my all in pared-down versions of unkillable tunes, ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ and ‘A Walk in the Black Forest’. He brought along a jar of cheese and marmalade, all mixed up, a russet and ochre paste, which he vowed was delicious. I tried some and liked it, but Mum set her mind firmly against it. It seemed to prey on her mind, as if this was some sinister Teutonic depth-charge lurking in her fridge, and she threw it away as soon as she decently could, claiming it had gone off. As far as she was concerned, it had been off from the word go.

It worried me that my A-level results might not be good enough, but Eckstein reassured me in the only way he knew, by making me feel I knew nothing about it. ‘If Eckstein recommends you, that counts for something. I don’t say they will take you, but they will give you an interview.’ From what he was saying, a set of A-level papers barely scratched the surface of the applicant’s abilities. A Cambridge interview was a sort of academic X-ray, which would examine the very bones of my mind and pronounce them sturdy or unsound.

His recommended strategy was to apply early. It made sense to allow extra time for the university to prepare properly for my needs (preferably not by coaching undergraduates in the art of cushioning
the wheelchair’s falls downstairs). I thought back on the time at Trees before Granny’s chequebook made the extension happen – if it had taken years for my own home to begin to be tailored to my measure, then it made sense to give a mere institution as much notice as possible. Eckstein also pointed out with his usual tact, which was none, that with my disordered educational history I had some catching up to do. I shouldn’t expect to go up until 1970, when I would be a little older than my university equals.

I still wasn’t entirely sold on the idea – the idea of Cambridge, that is. I liked the idea of university. Setting my sights on Cambridge was too much like living Dad’s life as he would have wanted it to be. Under the trivial difference of disability, wouldn’t the other students be rather like me? There would be a sprinkling of toffs and some working-class boys on best behaviour, but there would be an awful lot of the inhibited middle class, from whom little could be learned. There would also be women, but I can’t say I gave them much thought. I hadn’t yet had my fill of young male company.

Perhaps there were other places than Cambridge that would have me, even without Eckstein’s recommendation. There was a cabalistic instrument called an UCCA form to be filled in. The letters stood for Universities’ Combined Clearing Apparatus or something of the sort. I describe it as cabalistic because there were strict rules about how to list your choices, not all of them printed on the form. There were rules behind the rules, and perhaps you were supposed to know them from birth. I believe in previous lives, but I don’t think mine were lived at graduate level. When the system was explained to me, with all the things that couldn’t be said or could only be said in a particular way, I began to think of Great Britain as one big application form bristling with invisible rubrics, needing to be actually filled out only by those who had been refused in advance.

By then I had found my other place, the university I preferred in my mind to Cambridge. Keele. Keele was new, Keele was modern. It was ‘red brick’ (it was even in Staffordshire, where they actually made red bricks), and had only been given the status of university a few
years before. Fine by me. It made sense that Keele would suit me better. The syllabus there was progressive, requiring students to study both arts and sciences instead of narrowing themselves in the traditional way. I could almost feel my brain expanding at the prospect. Keele was also likely to place fewer stumbling-blocks in the path of a wheelchair than a labyrinth of ancient learning like Cambridge. Admittedly Burnham had failed to provide anything in the way of lifts, despite being new and modern, but the principle wasn’t discredited by a single disappointment.

My motoring map told me that Keele was comfortably further away from Bourne End than Cambridge, and this intensified its advantage. Dad was always talking about the excellence of nature’s way of doing things, that birds pushed their chicks out of the nest at the earliest opportunity, but it was clear that in this case I would have to push myself out, against the furious resistance of the mother bird. I told myself that at red-brick Keele I would meet true companions, mates, working-class fellows with brick-dust on their brawny arms. This sort of dream seems stupid right up to the moment when it is fulfilled. Didn’t E. M. Forster himself crave union with an English policeman? Okay, he got an Egyptian tram-driver instead, but he seems to have made the best of it.

I also had the idea that Dad wouldn’t be jealous if I went to Keele, since it would hardly count as a university in his eyes. Perhaps jealousy wasn’t even a factor in the equation. It was never easy to predict what would catch Dad on the raw and what he wouldn’t even register.

I wanted to put Keele as my first choice, Cambridge as my second, but that was ruled out of court. Cambridge had to come first, or not at all, though in theory the admissions authorities of Cambridge were airy about the irrelevance of other examination boards’ assessments of students, saying more or less
If we wanted A-grades, we could take our
pick of the best – but really, it takes something more than the ability to pass
exams to make the sort of student we’re interested in
.

They could see right through the shallowness of status and ranking. You, on the other hand, were required to pay the proper homage. It was legitimate to put Cambridge second if you put Oxford first, and vice versa, as long as you didn’t mind the bureaucratic equivalent
of a bloody nose. Nothing good would come of such an act of provocation. It was within the rules – even the rules behind the rules – but it was completely stupid. So the sentence ‘I want to go to Keele and find proletarian love, but failing that, I suppose I’ll risk complicating Dad’s emotional state by plumping for Cambridge’, when translated into the language of UCCA, became
1. Cambridge, 2. Keele
. How much was lost in translation? Just about everything. It was as inadequate as my first stab at Lorca’s poem.