Cedilla (76 page)

It was all terribly disappointing. The moment the glassy-eyed cœlacanth was in my fishing-net I realised I’d have had more fun with a goldfish in a plastic bag from the fair.

I shouldn’t have been expecting a
little
book, just because it was about a system of extreme abbreviation, and anyway my love of such things should have been exhausted a long time ago, when I was in CRX and Mum gave me the World’s Smallest Bible and a tiny Webster’s Dictionary. More to the point, Percebois’s system was about as sensible a way of representing the sounds of words as pictures of birds’ feet. No wonder it hadn’t caught on! I was reduced to my least favourite position, of agreeing with what everyone has always thought. That’s guaranteed to put my teeth on edge.

My status as Downing’s first disabled student wasn’t clear-cut. It turned out that there was another already, a blind student called Kevin who was reading Law. I would see him around the college, laden with textbooks in Braille. He was very popular, both in his own right and because he had somehow landed a job writing record reviews for the
Melody Maker
. LPs arrived for him by every post, and he was generous in passing them on. I wondered darkly whether he had a phone in his room. He seemed very favoured – and of course he
hadn’t needed to have a rail fitted in the college bathroom he used. He represented a modest institutional investment. Unlike some people. Mentioning no names.

The college had assigned me a room that was accessible, give or take, to someone with my poor mobility, but had overlooked the need to make a similar arrangement for my pigeon-hole, where mail would be distributed. The alphabetical run was maintained, with the result that
Cromer, J.
’s pigeon-hole was set at a height which Cromer, J. would never be able to reach. I considered protesting, in the hope of being granted a more convenient slot roughly two feet off the floor, but I was learning to ration my appeals for special treatment. Wheedling was apt to blow up in my face, and the honeyed tongue was beginning to receive caustic answers.

It would have been futile in any case, since I couldn’t get into the Porter’s Lodge unaided. When I needed to use their phone, I took the porters on a trip back in time, to the etymological roots of their calling. If they had been able to vote on the phone-in-John’s-room question, they would have been solidly behind me, for the sake of equal rights and their backs. As for mail, they delivered it direct to my room.

The UL staff would only convey books to the bottom of the steps outside the front entrance, or a few paces further, to the door of the Mini. The personnel at Heffers, the university’s foremost bookshop, would come much closer to home. They matched the efforts of the college porters. In an attempt to fight off the challenge of rival businesses such as Bowes & Bowes and (who knows?) even W. H. Smith, Heffers would deliver books to undergraduates at no charge. What an enlightened gimmick! The books came to my door.

If I had only had a phone in my room the whole book-buying transaction could have been accomplished without labour on my part, and I would have become an early example of the stay-at-home shopper. Even allowing for bookshop visits to place my order, it was a lot better than nothing.

I’m happier with hardbacks than soft covers, which isn’t snobbery but pure practicality. With a paperback the only way you can avoid breaking the spine is to cradle it with your outstretched fingers. My fingers won’t reach that far, so it’s a matter of either balancing
the book on the backs of my hands or going ahead and breaking the book’s back, flattening it against the table-top. There’s no room for sentiment when it comes to something as important as reading. Tender-hearted book-lovers wince when they see me in action, and I don’t care.

The first book I asked about that wasn’t on a course reading list was
Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self-Knowledge
. After some inner wrestling I had finally surrendered ‘my’ copy, the Bourne End Library’s copy, back to Mrs Pavey, though she would have been happy to go on renewing it indefinitely. Holding on to it would be wrong – a small civic crime, like wearing the life-belt that has been used to drag you out of the Slough of Despond on a permanent basis, though it is clearly marked
Property of Slough Borough Council
.

Heffers told me that the hardback was long out of print, but there was a paperback available. My heart sank at the news, though it’s no secret that bibliophilia is only fetishism of self-righteous form, and a sly perversion of the longing for knowledge. Book-collecting magnifies the differences between copies of the same work until they are overwhelming, when it’s the essential sameness of every copy which allows a book to make its impact.

A book is a book is a book. After lecturing myself in these terms, I ordered the paperback, which was priced at 18/6. While I waited for it to arrive, I tried to convince myself that it would connect me to my guru in exactly the same way the library copy had. In fact it would have the advantage of being fresh, free of associations – a new beginning for an established devotion. Looking at it in gardening terms, my devotion would be re-potted, with room to grow.

Then when the book finally arrived, announced by a knock on the door of A6, it was the hardback after all! Still the first edition, a full fifteen years after publication, and in theory long exhausted and out of print. I made the trip to Heffers and cross-examined the staff about this miraculous mistake, but they weren’t helpful, simply saying that there must have been a leftover copy at the warehouse. The word ‘warehouse’ indicated a place of decisions beyond the possibility of
appeal, like ‘Providence’ or ‘the Government’. They hardly noticed that I was thrilled rather than bitterly complaining. My bliss knocked them off kilter.

I was deeply moved by this godsend, this gurusend. There was no rational explanation for the appearance of the book – but nothing is impossible for the guru. It was a time when I was feeling only tenuously attached to the reality I had tried to find in India. This gesture of continued good faith from the non-dualist cosmos was all the more welcome and sustaining. If it was a miracle, it was a miracle well spent. And only twenty-five shillings.

My new copy even had the same tender blurb on the dust-jacket that had drawn Mum’s eye in Bourne End Library, about the practice not entailing tortuous exercises or the tying of the body in knots. Words not holy in themselves but perfectly chosen as bait for the holy fishing-rod, making me fall for my guru hook, line and sinker.

Now I had a familiar book in my room. I also had my framed picture of Maharshi, but when Mrs Beddoes tidied it away out of sight I didn’t protest. No picture of the Maharshi shows him as anything but benign, his smile a constant while his body ages, and yet sometimes I found it hard to meet his eyes.

My vow of gardening chastity had been overridden by the generosity of the Bot, and now I was making some experiments with an old friend. I bought a bulb from Sanders Seed Merchants in Regent Street, which I placed on a saucerful of sand in my window. This was an experiment on a person as well as on a plant – a practical joke. The idea was irresistible, once it had occurred to me, and this new improved whoopee cushion (the original had fizzled frustratingly under my tutor’s bum during the bed-rest years) would not misfire.

No doubt in their native climes such things have a modest seasonality, but under the conditions even of humble windowsill Creation (let there be light! let there be heat! let there be water!) they can’t wait to grow. Soon I could see a fine stout prong rising from the centre of the bulb. It was a naughty-looking thing which did my thin social life nothing but good. Passers-by would comment on the living phallic symbol growing on my windowsill. There were even people who knocked on the door to see the plant rather than me.

One of them was a botanist called Barry, who begged me to let him
know when it flowered. He was a rather ugly squat student, always bleating about having no girlfriend. He had worse odds to contend with than the famous ten-to-one ratio of student genders. Even if the disproportion between the sexes was corrected – even if it was reversed – he could have relied on finding himself alone. From the way he kept himself, or rather neglected himself, it was surprising that anyone talked to him at all. Bad breath and body odour were his calling cards. He lived within his noxiousness as innocently as the stinkhorn mushroom. Sooner or later a friend, while such things still existed, would have to nerve himself to break the news.

The sinister inflorescence in my window grew and swelled by the day. I had let Barry in on the secret that the flower when it arrived would give off a really disgusting smell. Barry was more than a bit whiffy himself, of course, but if you were in the same room with Barry and
S. guttatum
in full inflorescence, it wouldn’t be him you noticed. Whiffy Barry wasn’t in the same class.

Barry was mad keen to see the thing in flower so that he could give his considered opinion as a botanist. That was just what I wanted myself. I told Barry he would be the first to know when it flowered, and I tried to predict when the great event would finally happen, but these things are hard to get right. I was really only beginning to under stand the species.

Mrs Beddoes had started to take a tentative motherly interest in my welfare and happiness, so I knew my little scheme was working when she relapsed into her squirrel state of being. It was almost as bad as it had been at the beginning of term. She didn’t know where to look, all over again, while I stayed put in bed. This
Eichhörnchen
was anything but
flinkes
, doleful for all her twitching.

I waited her out, with a gleeful interior chuckle. Surely she wouldn’t be able to keep her peace much longer? She was being ridiculously patient. Then at last it came out, so very hesitantly. ‘Now, Mr Cromer,’ she said, ‘I don’t mind looking after you, hoovering your room, even making you the odd cup of tea. I hope you don’t think I’m making difficulties – but I do …’

She clenched and unclenched her fists in desperation, steeling herself to produce words that went against her samurai code.

‘… I do draw the line. I have to put my foot down somewhere …
Now I know it’s not your fault, but try to appreciate it from my point of view, Mr Cromer.’
Appreciate
came out as
appreesherate
.

I let her struggle on, while I put my face through as many convincing emotional permutations as I could muster. It was all working splendidly, and I had to give her as much rope as I possibly could. Meanwhile I shuffled my legs out from under the duvet and hooked them under the wheelchair seat. With the help of the McKee pins I could pivot myself up into a sitting position on the bed and lever myself, awkwardly but unaided, into the chair.

At this stage in the pantomime it was vital that she didn’t come to help me. I sidled discreetly over to the window side of the room. It would be exaggerating to say that I kept her talking. She couldn’t stop, knowing that sooner or later she would have to come to the point. Finally she had exhausted the family medical encyclopædia. ‘The thing is, Mr Cromer’ – one last gasp and she came out with it – ‘I do draw the line … at my gentlemen wetting the bed.’

‘I see, Mrs Beddoes. Your gentlemen must not wet the bed. And you think I have committed this crime against the Holy Ghost, for which there can be no forgiveness. Is that your last word?’

‘I’m afraid it is.’ She bristled a bit, and I loved her for that. ‘It’s no crime, and I don’t see what it has to do with the Holy Ghost, but I shouldn’t have to put up with it.’

‘And what is the solution to our problem? A rubber sheet? Plastic nappies?’

‘I don’t …’ She ran out of words altogether.

‘How about if I went down on my knees and begged for forgiveness?’

‘Don’t do that, Mr Cromer. You of all people …’

‘The terrible thing is, Mrs Beddoes, I honestly don’t remember wetting the bed. Do you think I’m going out of my mind?’

‘I really couldn’t say, Mr Crow-maire. Ungraduate gentlemen are full of surprises. Still, I wouldn’t say you’re the type.’

I wanted to take pity on her, but the game had to be played out in full. ‘Anyway, Mrs Beddoes, you’ll be taking this further – you have
no choice in the matter, I quite understand that. But perhaps you’d better inspect the bed and show me where the wetness is.’

She prodded the Dream-Cloud, gingerly at first and then more thoroughly when she found it blameless. She sniffed. Then she went down a layer, still sniffing and snuffing, to levels of bedlinen which I didn’t actually use – as if I might be caught short, yet somehow burrow down to relieve myself.

She was baffled. ‘There doesn’t seem to be any wetness.’

‘Perhaps it’s dried up already.’

‘I suppose.’ She wasn’t convinced.

‘What a mystery. While we think about it, perhaps you wouldn’t mind opening the window and letting in a breath of fresh air.’

‘I’m with you there, Mr Crow-maire,’ she said. ‘The smell is making me feel quite sick!’ Mrs Beddoes drew back the curtains and went to open the window catch. At that point she reeled back. ‘Lord Gracious, Mr Crow-maire,’ she gasped. ‘It’s even worse over here!’

I assumed my best Sherlock Holmes manner, and pounced. ‘Precisely!’ I announced. ‘And there you have it, Mrs Beddoes.’

‘Have what, Mr Cromer?’ Perhaps she had been too hasty in dismissing the possibility of mental breakdown – that’s what I read on her face.

‘The answer to the entire mystery, of course!’

Somehow I persuaded her to go over to the bed, to sniff and feel that it was both dry and clean. ‘Use your eyes and your nose, Mrs Beddoes! Examine the evidence!’ I almost said,
Mrs Hudson
, as if I was explaining my theories of deduction to a baffled Baker Street housekeeper. ‘I insist that you give my personal hygiene a clean bill of health!’

She came back, frowning, to the window side of the room. ‘Well …’ was all she could manage to say.

‘Once you have eliminated the all-too-likely, Mrs Beddoes,’ I said, triumphantly indicating the unprepossessing flower, ‘whatever remains, however preposterous, must be the truth. May I present
Sauro
matum guttatum
, also known as the Voodoo Lily? Voodoo Lily, Mrs Beddoes, Mrs Beddoes, Voodoo Lily. This flower is responsible for the sinister smell, the smell like a neglected jakes.’