Cedilla (92 page)

This was one more betrayal, of course. Leaving me in the hands of the enemy was as bad as abducting me in the first place, but I was fully compensated by the joy of being alone, however uncomfortable, ashamed and malodorous. The landlord might never be the president of my fan club, but he was certain to be better company than the polyglot hearties who had just absconded.

Even so, Thomas as he left reminded me sharply of Julian Robinson from Vulcan. There was no physical resemblance, and loyal Julian would never have walked out on anyone. But Thomas walked out with a tottering stiffness, as if he didn’t trust what might happen if he allowed his knees to bend. It looked for all the world as if he was wearing calipers.

Left on my own in the squalor of the Zebra’s toilet, I cheered myself up with memories of Julian. We had ended up as good friends in the school, to the point where we had pet names for each other. Despite my childish gloating over the superiority of my chemistry set (Fun With Gilbert) over his (Lotts for Tiny Tots), the human chemistry between us was good. Julian and John became Tooley and Tonny. We were sublimely innocent of the overtone of
tool
.

I don’t know why we didn’t go into the toilet cubicles, which were
distinctly roomy, being designed to accommodate a wheelchair plus a person, but we didn’t. Perhaps we relied on the sliding doors in the toilet block, which weren’t lockable, to give our explorations the tension they lacked. Julian would lean against the wheelchair for balance and unzip himself, plonking his prize member onto the armrest like a fishmonger slapping a plump trout on the scales. I would squeeze it and prod it for a few minutes in the interests of science and then say, ‘Now put it away. I’ve seen plenty.’ Unresentfully Julian would return his parts to privacy.

Then we would discuss how best to leave the toilet block without arousing suspicion. This seemed to be a friendship rooted in fantasy, and our solution was a rather far-fetched one. We decided that the best alibi for our risky intimacy would be to stage a fight in the corridor. I’d say, ‘Look here, I’d better knock you over when we’re in the hall.’ And he’d say, ‘Good idea.’ So I would steer the Wrigley so as to graze him, and he would cannon into the wall, shouting with outrage. Then I would cruise away at high speed, leaving him to shake his fist in my wake. I’d steam off as if I couldn’t care less what happened to him. This routine became slick with much practice – you go that way and I’ll go this – but I don’t see that it can ever have fooled anyone. Nothing could be fishier, in fact, than these aggressive displays of indifference.

I was left, though, with a certain fondness for the atmosphere of urinals, which came in handy in the public lavatory of the Zebra pub. It can’t have been long before the landlord came back. Self-pity had yet to become entrenched. He was carrying cloths and towels, and a hose, which he attached to a tap in the basin. He had his sleeves rolled up. He was wearing Wellington boots and an apron. Seeing that I was alone, he let out a disgusted sigh, but set to work on cleaning up as best he could. Sensibly he started with the wheelchair, whose wheels had been well sprayed by Thomas da Silva’s own hose of second-hand beer. It wasn’t as vile as it might have been. The vomit was really only beer, though tainted by digestion. Still, a little of that gastric-juice smell goes a long way.

I hoped he would come to me quickly, before I started sliding down the wall and had to scream for help.

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ he said wearily, ‘if this only happened once a
year, say. But these days hardly a month goes by without something like this. When I took on this place I was told all this drinking-club rubbish was dying out, but I’ve seen no sign. Aren’t you all supposed to be smoking pot? Shouldn’t you be on a demo?’ It was soothing to be addressed in generational terms, to be treated as a standard aberration.

At last it was my turn. He dried the wheelchair off roughly and sat me in it. I thought he might be tempted to use the hose on me too, in the manner of riot police, but he changed over to cloths and warm water.

‘I have to admit you’re a novelty, though …’ he said. There was a curious intimacy to those moments, intensified by the lack of eye contact. ‘I thought I’d seen most of the gimmicks. There’s a pack of toffs who do the Run on pints of champagne. The Pitt Club, they’re called. Champagne makes a bit of a change from beer when it’s puked up … but not as much as you’d think. Tell me, do you think this sort of thing happens a lot in, say, Ely? Do you think it happens at all? It’s just I’ve had my eye on a pub there. Perhaps now’s the time … Those lads aren’t your friends, you know.’

At last I had my chance to explain. ‘I know they’re not my friends. That’s what I’ve been trying to say the whole time. I’ve never met them before.’

He frowned as he went about his work. ‘I see.’ I found the deliberate tempo of his actions soothing. Most people who get that close to me are flustered and fidgety. All his movements had the buffered ease of a strong arm pulling pints. ‘And because you’ve never met them before you obviously can’t give me any of their names.’

He assumed I was subscribing to the Colditz code of old-style undergraduates in trouble in the town, who would volunteer only name, college and tutor’s phone number, however gruelling the interrogation. Everyone knew that the police had little authority over university affairs, and couldn’t even enter the colleges without permission. ‘I hoped you weren’t going to be so loyal. Loyal and stupid. What’s your college, sir?’

‘Downing.’

‘But the missing gentlemen aren’t from there?’

‘Not that I know of. Never saw them before.’

He shrugged but didn’t press the point. Nor did he make any comment about an idiosyncrasy of the way I dressed in those days. Having my laundry done and taking regular baths made the basics of hygiene simple in certain respects. I economised on others, because of the great awkwardness of dressing and undressing unaided. I solved the problem of vests by not wearing vests. I solved the problem of underpants by not wearing underpants. I solved the problem of socks by not wearing socks – since I walk relatively little, my shoes don’t have much chance to rub. I had pared my costume down to shirt, trousers and shoes. In winter I didn’t go out much.

‘Did they shout out “
Dead ants!
” every now and then? And then lie flat on the floor?’

‘No, that’s about the only thing they didn’t do. What would that mean?’

‘Fitzwilliam. Never mind.’ His manner had a cosy gloom to it, as if he was an undertaker from a family firm. ‘Look, I haven’t any clothes for you to change into. You’re about three times too small. Best I can do is wipe you up, then stuff some toilet paper into your trousers to keep you dry.’

‘That seems more than fair, landlord.’

‘Don’t call me that. Arthur Burgess. Call me Arthur. Is that enough toilet paper?’

‘Yes, thank you. Arthur. I think it is. By the way, I don’t want anything to do with that stopwatch’ – whose case he had wiped, whose string he had rinsed – ‘please keep it.’ What did I want with a stopwatch? As Hindus know, we’re in the depths of the Dark Age, the Kali Yuga, set to last 432,000 years. Time is going quite slowly enough.

Arthur hesitated, until I added, ‘Perhaps they’ll come back for it. Perhaps that’s how you’ll nab ’em.’

Arthur Burgess put no pressure on me for my tutor’s phone number. Unfortunately there was no one else I could call for help. The Mini was a good distance away, and I wasn’t in a strong position to ask favours from someone who had already cleaned me up.

I had made no special effort to remember the number, but after my childhood tutor Miss Collins restricted my access to books I had come to rely more and more on memory, just in case I had to manage without books again. By my Cambridge days, it required an act of will for me to forget a phone number. I was half hoping Graëme would be out, though I had no idea what I’d do if he was.

He was in. There are probably better times to be told that you need to retrieve a soiled student from a pub urinal than when you have just finished dressing for a formal college dinner, but the timing was not of my choice. It wasn’t long after 7.30, though to me it felt like midnight.

Graëme turned up wearing evening dress, though the trousers had a hint of a flare and the lapels of the jacket were broad and edged with velvet. Fashion was involved, in some tentative professorial way. I could almost hear Mrs Beamish cooing, ‘Even academics can make a bit of an effort, you know, darling!’ as she lured him (without benefit of a credit note) into The Peacock, the dandy-magnet cradled inside Cambridge’s own little department store, Josh Tosh, foreshortened Harrods of the Fens.

By mutual instinct, Arthur Burgess and I retreated from first-name terms the moment Graëme made his appearance. The situation was unsavoury enough without being overlaid by an element of collusion or practical joke. As he wheeled me out of the Zebra, I called out politely, ‘Thank you, landlord,’ as if the whole evening had gone as planned. A refreshing half-pint in my local. Arthur for his part greeted Graëme with the words, ‘A student of the old school, sir. Won’t peach on his fellow sinners,’ in the tone of voice of someone offering professional condolences.

Arthur had thoughtfully overlapped some bar-towels over my legs and lower body, to hide the damp patches. Thanks to these I had an almost festive aspect as we trundled back down King Street. They were brightly coloured, in red and green. We might have been doing something for charity – we might have been sponsored by the brewery. In November rather than April, I might have been a Guy in effigy being pushed to Parker’s Piece for burning, particularly since loose strips of toilet tissue were escaping from my waistband, touch paper waiting for a match.

From behind me, as he pushed, Graëme Beamish was saying, ‘I’m disappointed that you’re taking this attitude, John.’

My free will had still not been returned to me. I seemed to be stuck with other people’s scripts, this new one an especially dull affair of the solidarity of miscreants.

I came close to biting my tongue. ‘What attitude is that, Dr Beamish?’

‘This Bridge-on-the-River-Kwai not-telling-tales attitude. It’s rather old-fashioned, isn’t it? Rather …
square.
’

I was longing to tell tales for once. What did I care if Thomas da Silva and Benedict Whoever were thrown in the river, or put in the pillory and pelted with fruit? But I was unable to retreat from the uncompromising stance that had been foisted on me. I had missed my moment, and now I was stuck with being loyal to the disloyal. My arms still ached from my brief sojourn on Thomas da Silva’s belly.

In my frustration at being taken for a martyr, I started rolling my eyes and sticking my tongue out, in a way I would never have done if Beamish and I could see each other’s faces. For all I know he was doing the same thing himself, in annoyance at the disruption of his evening, which would have added an extra fillip to the entertainment value of our progress down King Street. It’s not considered polite for wheelchair-users to install wing mirrors, attached by stems to the armrests, so that they can monitor the expressions of those who push them, but really I don’t see why.

My mantra had lost all its stabilising power. It was like a piece of chewing gum so long masticated it had turned into a spent blob in my mouth. No point in thinking of that. Instead I took a symbolic revenge on Beamish for his lack of understanding by visualising the bottom of his kitchen cabinets, seen on my only visit to his lovely home in Barton. I have my own point of view, and can witness any number of flaws that are hidden from the taller world. It’s one of the little privileges of wheelchair travel, to be underlooking at the overlooked. The paintwork under those cabinets was pockled and peeling.
Steam from a thousand boilings of the kettle had left it looking shabby and leprous. Shame on you, Beamish.

It’s well known that the disabled are compensated for their losses, in the currency of another sense. The blind have particularly acute hearing – though, oddly, as experiments have proved, they hear less well in the dark. As for me, I have a photographic memory for the undersides of kitchen cabinets.

When we were back at the Mini, once he had helped me in and loaded the wheelchair in the boot, Dr Beamish disappeared in his turn. His duties were over. He could get to his college dinner only a little late, with a story to tell if he cared to, ready to worship the little divinities of his academic cosmos, the sherry god and the claret god, madeira god and port god.

I felt the stigma of my incontinence very keenly, despite being a victim of circumstance. A disabled person can’t have a moment of weakness in that department without it becoming a permanent part of the picture. It’s a character flaw in waiting. If I’d been able to, I would simply have disposed of the evidence and thrown the soiled items away, but trousers were not things I owned in mad profusion.

It wasn’t so very long since I had dared to defuse Mrs Beddoes’s fears about my leaky self by turning them into a joke. The game with the Voodoo Lily didn’t seem quite so funny any more. Perhaps I had been tempting fate, giving Maya a poke in the ribs.

In fact Mrs Beddoes took my emergency laundry in her stride, returning the bar towels (those flags of my disgrace) neatly folded, along with my trousers clean and fresh.

One comfort was that my relationship with my tutor was so poor that nothing could damage it. When I had paid that visit to his home in Barton, and the secrets of his kitchen’s undersurfaces were laid bare to me, we had been on better terms. This was statutory university hospitality, and a group of us had been invited. I had been hoping for a spot of sherry myself. As holy water to the baby’s head, so sherry to the undergraduate throat. It is the sacramentally required liquid. What hope for the christening when the font is full of Lucozade?

It wasn’t Lucozade that Dr Beamish had provided for his moral tutees but something just as inappropriate. Tinned beer. That’s no
poculum sacrum
! That doesn’t begin to qualify as a holy tipple.