Cedilla (91 page)

‘Good point. He wouldn’t want to miss being there when we cross the finishing line. In fact … do you think we could apply for him to do the Run with us, on the actual day, and get a proper tie on half-pints? Maybe a half-sized tie. Seeing as he’s so small?’

‘Dunno. It’s always a pint for him, isn’t it? I suppose he doesn’t want to get special treatment. Give the man his dignity, Benny. Leave him some pride. Let him make his own choices.’

‘No, think about it, Wop. This is serious. You and I weigh, what, fourteen and a half stone the day of a regatta? Fifteen stone the next
day, obviously …’ These figures seemed fantastic. Is it possible for hefty but not freakish-looking youths to weigh so much, or were they joking? ‘And Cox is going to weigh no more than, what, two stone?’

‘
Two stone?
Are you sure? He has to be heavier than that!’

‘All right, three at the outside. Call it three. So for every pint we drink he can drink … a lot less. Try it the other way round. For every pints
he
drinks, we can drink, what, ten? Five, anyway. We can’t let him go on drinking pints just to keep up with us. He’s going to kill himself. He may be in a coma already.’

Then they were both shaking me and roaring ‘
COX! COX!’
There was nothing much I could do but open bleary eyes before their shaking became too painful on my shoulders. Then we were off to the final stages of the King Street Run.

Pubs that hosted the early pints of the Run might be reasonably grateful for the custom involved. Pubs towards the end of King Street, and the Run, had drawn short straws. They might value Varsity trade, but not the sort represented by Write Off Tuesday, sozzled and more than likely to puke. There were no longer a full eight pubs on King Street, so the Zebra, round the corner on Maids Causeway, had been requisitioned for the last two pints. Its publican was less than thrilled.

He intercepted us. He was a large, imposing man, wearing a V-necked pullover with a shirt and tie underneath it. The voice that emerged from his large neck was soft and deep, perfectly friendly but not to be trifled with. ‘Are you on a bender, lads? Some sort of competition? If so I don’t want your business. I don’t want your mess. I’ve seen enough sick at this address. If you throw up I’ll give you a mop, but that’s my limit.’

The assembled members of Write Off Tuesday tried to head off resistance with a synchronised display of undergraduate arrogance. They didn’t do a bad job, considering. They squared their shoulders and drew on surprising reserves of physical control. Benny said, ‘By no means, landlord.’ He indicated me. ‘Our handicapped friend here requires a pint of your best bitter. We will keep him company out of good manners, but we are hardly in any sort of competition.’ This I suppose was strictly true, if the whole appalling expedition was a rehearsal. And they weren’t in competition with me.

I wondered, after what had been said in the last pub, when it was that Benny had noticed that I was disabled. Perhaps it was a wild guess, a piece of pure bluff. It was just my luck that this new insight gained us admission to yet another pub. The landlord hesitated, then stepped aside. ‘Just one pint, mind.’

Perhaps trade was bad enough for him to fear being put on a blacklist. Certainly there were fewer than a dozen drinkers present. Unless placated, I might put the word out on the disabled grapevine that these were premises which could usefully be fire-bombed come the next Day of Action.

I clung to the idea, despite everything that had happened, that given time I would be able to impose my will on my kidnappers. All I needed was a quiet moment to get the psychic electromagnets going and work my personality magic. But the quiet moment never came.

Any sobriety the group had been able to muster on their way into the pub soon deserted them once we were inside and had been served. Thomas da Silva’s face was now by turns red and sweaty-white, at the mercy of the swilling beer inside him. Every few moments he would fill his cheeks with air and breathe out unhappily. He looked like someone with numbed lips trying to whistle. He whispered loudly to Benedict, ‘We need to have two pints here, Benny. This is only pub number seven, and we need to tot up the full eight pints. It’s the magic number. The full gallon, or no dice. No dice, no tie.’

Benedict shushed him. ‘We’ll have to play it by ear. Maybe if Cox orders the next round the landlord will oblige. I don’t know why he’s being so snot-nosed. With a shabby place like this you’d think he’d be grateful for the business.’

‘About time Cox paid his whack anyway. I don’t approve of freeloaders, do you?’

That was it. I could endure no longer. My small No was suddenly too big to be contained. They’d been going too far from the moment they had entered the Cambridge Arms, but now they were beyond the pale in absolute terms. I pitched my voice at a level that a cox would only need on a windy river with a flight of jet planes roaring overhead, and I bellowed, ‘Shut up this instant!
I NEED TO PEE!!
Right now!
’

‘All right, little man, no need to shout,’ said da Silva. ‘You’re quite right, though, we should attend to our cox.
Our cox!!
’ Finally there it
was, out in the open, the double meaning that had been hovering over the conversation for so long. He fought off an attack of the giggles. ‘I could do with a bit of a slash myself.’

As he was clearly the most unstable of the group, I tried to head him off. ‘Perhaps Benedict could oblige …?’

‘He has better things to do, my lightweight friend. He has important cigarettes to buy.’

‘I can wait.’

‘I thought you couldn’t. Isn’t that what you were just saying?’ He looked hurt. ‘Don’t you trust me?’

‘Your driving can be a bit erratic, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

‘I’ve got the hang of your buggy now. I’m sure of it.’

I broadcast a general appeal. ‘Anybody care to give me a hand to the Gents?’ But Thomas da Silva had already grasped the handles, and we were off. The door to the Gents swung freely, or else it would have been agonising when he used my feet to push it open. I started panicking the moment I saw the wet floor of the Gents. A slippery floor is a death-trap in my book, much more so when I’m landed with an assistant who can hardly stand up himself.

‘Do you mind if I go first?’ he said. ‘It turns out the need is rather urgent.’ He unzipped his trousers without waiting for an answer. I gritted my teeth somehow as a fierce bolt of liquid escaped him, bouncing noisily against the porcelain of the urinal. ‘I know, I know … not a good lookout for a tie with no Ps on it. But I expect it’ll be all right on the night.’

The pressure of the urine-stream was so intense that like any other substantial fall of water it created a drifting veil of moisture, a fine mist which stung my eyes but cooled the backs of my hands. For a second I was transported back to the sea front at Bognor Regis, on a walk from Mr Johnson’s Home, safe in the care of people who knew what they were doing.

I was so frantic to urinate myself that I had something close to an out-of-the-body experience. I felt I could see myself from above thrashing miserably about in the wheelchair, flailing my arms through
their limited arc like a defective clockwork toy, a drummer whose sticks have been taken away. My mundane bladder was churning, and suddenly my astral body leapt upwards. Normally this can only happen in unconsciousness, with the arrival of a dream of knowledge, but I soared above the body on pure jets of desperation.

Then Thomas da Silva finished his business and it was my turn. He came round to the front of the wheelchair, stooped and grabbed me. It’s not a good lifting position. It squashes me, it’s bad for the lifter’s back, there’s nothing to be said in its favour. I never allowed it in normal life, but then I had been not allowing things for almost an hour now without making the slightest impact on what is alleged to be reality. More frightening than being lifted in this way was the prospect of being dumped back in a chair that could easily roll backwards. There was some hope of a safe splashdown if I could at least get him to put the brakes on.

‘Put the Brakes On, Please! …
BRAKES! … BRAKES
!!’ I bellowed. I tried to pattern my intonation on the nurses at CRX, whose capitals and exclamation marks were palpable in their delivery.

Thomas da Silva didn’t understand, or at least paid no attention. He lifted me roughly, agonisingly, by my armpits and yanked me towards him. There was a moment when his balance faltered, and the wheelchair (with the brakes disengaged) slid sharply backwards away from me. I had a limited choice: either to lean backwards, on the off-chance that the wheelchair, sentimental about our long association, would wait for me, or forward, into the grip of a tottering unmindful drunk. I leant forward with my full two or three stone (which at this stage of my life even Maya assessed at four-and-a-half), and Thomas fell backwards.

This was both a lucky and an unlucky fall, depending on who you were. If you were Thomas da Silva, unlucky, since he fell on his back (unable to break his fall with hands that were fully occupied with me), with his head unpleasantly close to the trough of the urinal. Lucky if you were me, since I landed on top of him. Otherwise I could have been badly injured or even killed. It wouldn’t have taken much to break my neck.

Landing on top of Thomas da Silva’s stomach was like doing a belly-flop onto that fantasy item of the time, a water-bed. The pressurised
liquid with which my landing-cushion was filled was beer, of course, and not water, but the same hydrostatic laws applied. We were both winded for the moment, so there was no interference from breathing. The liquid was driven out to the edges of the organism, then surged back rebounding.

My luck was about to change. Thomas took a slow rasping intake of breath, then his insides gave up its struggle to contain what in his folly he had taken in. He gave a groan, and the groan became torrential.

Obviously the jet of vomit didn’t reach the wheelchair, far across the room, and slam it against the opposite wall. That was only the picture in my mind. Now I was experiencing something that was as far from my circumscribed reality as a water-bed. I was riding a roller-coaster. I didn’t like it. I wanted to get off. Though Thomas politely turned his head away from me, I was perched on a set of abdominal muscles which were being trodden on by a huge internal foot, and the violence of the ejection, its muzzle velocity so to speak, was awe-inspiring. From my skewed point of view he was a geyser rather than a human being, a personified hydrant of swill.

I thought it would never stop, and then it did. He was sobbing with the effort of it. Otherwise there was silence, apart from the drip of cisterns refilling. My arms were hurting. I can’t lie flat on my front, the joints don’t permit it.

Up to this point the evening had been a disaster in every way, but now it became something worse. A disgrace. I urinated on Thomas da Silva. There was no element of retaliation involved. I wasn’t saying,
You soil me, I soil you
. I just couldn’t hold it in. For so long I had been engaged in a battle of wills with my bladder, while no one helped or listened. Now this body had its triumph and my bladder won. Thomas’s vomit had sprayed far and wide, but he had been considerate enough to turn his head away from me. My released urine had nowhere to go but downwards, though capillary action ensured that the cloth of my trousers absorbed its fair share.

And to think I had been worried that the beer-drips on my trousers in the Cambridge Arms would make people think I had pissed myself!

Thomas didn’t move while my bladder added the finishing touches
to the tableau of degradation. It seemed highly likely that he had passed out. My mantra flowed more cleanly in my head now that the tempo of events had slowed.

The landlord came wearily into the toilet where the two of us were wallowing in the failure of our bodies to contain themselves. He asked, between his teeth, ‘
Gentlemen, may I have the telephone numbers
of your tutors?
’ Then he said, ‘I thought I’d seen everything there was to see in these four fucking walls. But I was wrong about that, wasn’t I, gentlemen?’ The expletive was painful to listen to, since it seemed unhabitual.

He picked me up from the stinking cushion that was Thomas da Silva and propped me competently against a wall. Unfortunately he didn’t hand me my crutch and cane, which would have made me feel less helpless. Was it really likely that I would make a dash for it, if my utensils were left within reach?

The landlord looked from Thomas to me, directing his remarks in my direction, where they might have some effect. ‘If you find you have somehow forgotten those telephone numbers, gentlemen, I’m sure your colleges will be happy to supply them.’ He looked like a man who had come to a decision. To retire from the publican’s dismal trade, perhaps, to sell at a loss or simply walk away. He looked like a basset-hound with a secret sorrow. His breathing was the very respiration of exasperated reproach. Then he stood up and walked out of the urinal. He left us to think about our shortcomings as human beings, though Thomas wasn’t doing much thinking. It wasn’t his style.

The landlord had done me a service by picking me up off the floor, but I was in a very awkward position. Leaning against a wall without crutch or cane I was as helpless as a beetle on its back. In fact I had time to think, as urine seeped downwards from my crotch, that even after his traumatic metamorphosis Gregor Samsa could have run rings round me.

It seemed that the other members of Write Off Tuesday, prudently treacherous, had disappeared. They weren’t far behind Thomas in terms of drunkenness, but some profound wastrels’ instinct must have
enabled them to leave the premises while his vomit was still actually airborne. Benny had seemed to be the conscience of the group, but not every group has a conscience.

To my astonishment Thomas opened his eyes and got to his feet. I could have sworn he was in a coma. He didn’t look at me, propped up against the wall as I was like a rank-smelling broom. He didn’t look around him at all. His eyes were entirely blank, but there was a lurking awareness in there somewhere, and a furtive purpose. I swear that he
shook
the worst of the mess off himself, the ejecta and excreta. Like a dog, more or less, except that he bounced feebly on the balls of his feet to start the dislodging process. Perhaps rough tweed, the material of his sports jacket, is especially prized for this resistance to defilement. Then he lurched with grim concentration towards the door and left.