Cedilla (90 page)

The man at my table took a huge gulp of his beer and frowned. ‘Haven’t seen you on the river… perhaps you’re not a wet-bob?’ To this day I don’t know the meaning and derivation of
wet-bob
. It may have been a specialised Cambridge word, but not one that was used in my little circles. ‘With your build you’d make a decent cox.’ My jaw has a certain amount of mobility, though dentists are always complaining, and I’m sure it dropped. It must have. He called out, ‘Benny! Come here! I’ve found us a cox!’

Benny turned out to be the helpless payer at the bar. He wore his hair in a centre parting. Choose this style and you are more or less insisting that spectators assess your degree of facial symmetry. Barely one face in a thousand is regular enough to pass such a test – this wasn’t one of the privileged few. As he came over, he was bellowing, ‘Two and tenpence a pint, Wop! Not a bad price!’ He was still thinking in shillings and pence, after more than a year of decimal currency. Perhaps the new system would always elude this group.

Benny slammed his glass down onto the table with even more force than his friend had, following it with a packet of cigarettes. The general level of noise was becoming hard to bear. He thrust his face into mine. ‘Is this your cox, Wop? I’m not sure he’s got the lungs for it. Give us a sample, why don’t you? Sing out
STROKE
…
STROKE
! …
STROKE
!!’ I begin to detect a whisper of sense under all the bellowing. In rowing, wasn’t the cox the compact lightweight person who sat at the end of the boat and shouted? So I was clearly in no possible sense a cox.

I didn’t sing out as directed. I made my position clear. Actually I was having a quiet drink. For all the notice they took I needn’t have gone to the trouble of speaking aloud. The one called Benny took from his pocket a stopwatch on a loop of dirty string and hung it around my neck. ‘Now you’ve got the tools of the trade at least. But you need to work on the voice projection or no one will hear a bloody word you’re saying.’

Then it was the other’s turn to speak. ‘Perhaps we should introduce you to your eight. But first, what’s your name? John? Very good, but we’ll mostly call you Cox. This is Benny – Benny the Dick. Christened Benedict, hence Benny the Dictator.’ He put on an ingratiating ecclesiastical singsong. ‘
Benedicite benedicatur, Benny’s a benevolent
dictator.
’

This was a baffling change of gears. Might they be a gang of rogue classicists on the razzle? ‘And I’m Thomas da Silva, known as Wop on account of my dago name, at your service. Delighted.’ I wasn’t delighted but dismayed. They weren’t at my service, in fact I seemed to be at theirs.

‘Have you explained the rules to your man, Wop?’

‘No Benny, I thought you’d like to do that.’

‘Fine.’ He took a cigarette from the packet on the table, but instead of smoking it he tucked it horizontally under his nose, holding it in place by curling his lip upwards in a way that suggested hours of practice. Then he started to rattle off information at amazing speed. The restrictions placed on his vocal apparatus by the prehensile-lip trick made him sound like what Dad would have called a silly ass, giving the noun a long vowel as service protocol demanded.

‘The King Street Run. Classic university tradition. Bit of fun. Separates boys from girls, boys from men, sheep from goats, your top Wop from the regular dagoes. Basic idea: eight pubs, eight pints. Easy as pissing off a log. Refinement: time limit. Eight pubs, eight pints – in an hour. Rate of one pint every seven minutes and thirty seconds. I know – sounds easy. Reward: special tie, respect of peers
and inferiors. Complication: eight separate pubs, so journey time to be factored in. Seven journeys of, say, two minutes each – fourteen minutes in all. Leaving in fact … forty-six for drinking proper. Eights into forty-six: no idea. Five and a bit, maybe. Hence importance of stopwatch. Your department.’ Effortlessly he overrode my protests, my footling squawks.

‘Further complication: peeing forbidden during event. Penalty: letter P embroidered on trophy tie. Humiliation. One chap went to the other extreme, peed almost continuously, tie almost invisible beneath embroidered Ps, comic effect. Great success. Sort of trick only works once.’ I suppose he was doing a compound
Monty Python
impersonation, combining every mad major and silly-walks minister from that programme. With my lack of up-to-date television awareness I thought of the
Pickwick Papers
.

As I watched Benedict’s little act, my own upper lip curled spontaneously upwards. It’s possible I looked mildly demented. Then he gave a sharp upward nod which dislodged the cigarette. He caught it smoothly in his mouth and lit it.

‘Don’t worry, we’re only doing a practice run today. Peeing permitted.’ I was glad of that, since the half-pint of Abbot had run swiftly through my system and was now anxious to move on.

I watched his smoking style admiringly. Benedict caught my eye, smiled, and then ran the lighted tip of his cigarette, with agonising slowness, across the palm of his hand, just where it met the bottom of his fingers. He never stopped smiling. Then he winked at me.

Thomas da Silva leant towards me and breathed admiringly, ‘Benny has the hardest calluses on the river. Isn’t he remarkable?’ No doubt, but this was not a party trick I coveted.

‘To be frank,’ Benedict went on, ‘we’ve done a certain amount of practice in private before this dummy run. Don’t expect too much from us. We’re not after a record time.’ He lifted the stopwatch from my chest and took a look at it. ‘
Tempus fuckit
, men! Time to go!’ He left the watch where it was, though, around my neck. He seemed to have forgotten it.

Thomas da Silva had finished his pint and now pointed a finger at mine, which of course I hadn’t touched. ‘Have you finished with that, old man?’ I nodded and he picked it up. ‘You’re sure?’ He drank it in one long gulp while Benny looked on admiringly. ‘Our secret weapon,’ he said proudly.

‘Don’t forget your stopwatch,’ I said. ‘How do you mean?’ he said. Then they were off.

We were off, rather. Of course they hadn’t forgotten the stopwatch. They hadn’t left anything behind. They were taking the stopwatch (and me) with them. I barely managed to grab the crutch and the cane.

‘You chose the cox, Wop,’ said Benedict. ‘You can drive him.’

Thomas da Silva wasn’t in a fit state to drive anything. He was young and strong and clueless, ‘unsafe at any speed’ as a famous book title of the time put it. He was topping up his bloodstream with alcohol faster than a dozen livers plumbed in parallel could have hoped to clear it. He pulled the wheelchair roughly free of the pub’s furniture and charged the door with it.

From behind me came a muffled cry of ‘Oi! What the hell are you doing?’ Kerry was registering a protest. But what could he do – leave his post at the bar to give chase? Make a citizen’s arrest of the whole bladdered squad? A citizen’s arrest had already taken place on those premises, and I was the party apprehended.

Pushing a wheelchair isn’t much of a knack – say I, who have never done it – but it does require two things that Thomas was past managing. One: coördination. Two: attentiveness to the mental state of the passenger. Within seconds of propelling me on to the street, he gave the wheelchair a wild turn and came within an inch of ramming my car with my ankylosed feet. Mine! My car! My car as well as my feet.

Though there were footplates on the chair for once, my feet projected beyond them, and my own bodywork would have sustained as much damage as the Mini’s panels. I shouted out ‘That’s my car!’, but already Thomas was bouncing me at speed down King Street. He pressed down on the handles, with the result that the small front wheels reared up, and I reared up with them. Not for the first time, I thought of Luke Squires’s wheelchair at Vulcan, and the great advantages of having the small wheels at the back. From Thomas da Silva’s
point of view, our progress may only have been a disorderly trot. From mine it was a boneshaking slalom.

When we came to the next pub – I never saw its name – Thomas da Silva would have used me as a battering ram on the door if I hadn’t screamed to alert him. He seemed to think that every pub door in Cambridge, however solidly built and firmly closed, was actually one of those hinged-slat arrangements you see in saloons in Westerns. He was in a Wild West of the mind, striding towards the high noon of alcoholic meltdown, but it was my feet that would have bitten the dust if he had gone through with his original plan. My hips had been operated on, but my knees still had no play in them, so my feet led the whole demented parade. They had no choice. There was nowhere I could stow them out of harm’s reach. It wasn’t much of a help that I had managed to grab the crutch and the cane. There was no point in me using them to guard my feet. In the event of an impact they would simply be rammed into my upper body.

Luckily the rest of the disordered group caught up with us, and Benedict opened the pub door courteously enough to admit the wheelchair. Of the group he was the one who still seemed on speaking terms with his wits. I decided it was him I must cajole and address if I had any hope of release.

The air in the new pub was sour. Emptying the ashtrays was clearly a chore that was left till after closing time. It was more crowded, and our erratic group ended up being crushed in a corner. I cringed as Thomas pushed me across the space, cheerfully calling out, ‘Mind your backs!’ The tables didn’t sit true, so that when Benedict plonked a fresh round of monstrous pints in front of me, beer slopped over and dripped onto my lap. There would only have been a few drops if I had been able to get out of the way, but I had to sit there while the rest of the little puddle followed at its leisure. Even a fair-minded person glancing at my trouser-front would assume I had lost control of my bladder.

I tried a sidelong whisper at the member of the group who seemed marginally the most trustworthy. ‘
Benedict …?
’

‘Yes, Mr Cox.’

‘Who are you? I mean, who are you, as a group?’

‘We’re Write Off Tuesday.’

‘And Write Off Tuesday is what?’

‘All the splendid intellectual specimens you see around you. A total of eight.’

‘Aren’t you seven?’

‘Really? Then we’ve lost one. Explains why there keeps on being one pint left over. Not that Wop minds. He’ll always tidy up. He’s good that way. Tidy boy.’

‘Yes, but who are you all? What is the nature of your group?’

‘Well, we were recently described, by the Master of Peterhouse no less, as a right-wing think-tank …’ I knew just enough about politics to understand that this was quite an accolade. In any assessment of academic figures at the time the Master of Peterhouse would rank as an exemplary figure, a reactionary’s reactionary. Then Benedict seemed to reconsider, almost going cross-eyed from the effort of dredging up the memory, and corrected himself: ‘Hold on. Not a think-tank … a right-wing
drink-
tank.’

‘And what does it mean, to “write off” a day of the week?’

‘You skip it altogether. You make sure it leaves no trace on the memory. Don’t you agree that Tuesday is an inherently boring day?’

I thought I had found a flaw in his argument, and asked as gently as I could, ‘You do know today is Monday?’

‘Yes. Another culpably drab day.’

‘So you’re writing off Monday?’

‘No, my dear Cox, you’ve missed the point completely. Try to pay attention. It’s all to do with preparation. Preparation is the key. To write off Tuesday effectively you have to start the day before. If Monday is properly squashed Tuesday doesn’t even begin.’

‘I see.’ By this time Thomas da Silva had moved off, perhaps to visit the Gents – a place I myself needed to visit – so I was able to concentrate hypnotically on Benedict. ‘Would you mind moving that ashtray away from me? The smell makes me feel rather sick.’ It seemed to make sense to impose my will on him in small matters before brokering my separation from the group, just as a conjuror will make coins disappear before tackling doves or elephants.

‘Of course, old fellow, old boy, old man, cox of the good ship Write Off Tuesday.’ The hypnotic experiment was successful as far as it went, but it didn’t go far. Yes, Benedict moved the ashtray away from me, then the next moment he took a cigarette from his packet, lit it up and moved the ashtray smoothly back into range, without giving it a thought.

It was time to change up a gear, in terms of the hypnotic mechanism. ‘Would you be kind enough to take me for a pee? I can’t manage on my own.’

‘Can’t you? What a pisser that must be! Very bad luck. Of course I’ll lend a hand.’ I tried to hold his eyes steady by fixing them with mine, but they kept slipping sideways. I felt as if I was losing my touch. He made no move to get up. Then, just as I was getting a grip on his eyes with mine, Thomas came back from the Gents. He shouted out, ‘Cox! What time for this leg?’ I told him I had no idea and he laughed wildly, saying, ‘You’re a write-off as timekeeper, Cox, which makes you perfect for the job!’ He grabbed the handles of the wheelchair. We seemed to be off again. I hissed at Benedict, ‘Can’t you push me? Thomas isn’t exactly in charge of his faculties.’

‘Of course he’s not! That’s the whole point. Haven’t you been listening? Wop, are you going to be especially careful with our cox here?’

‘Of course I am.’

Of course he was not. As we left the pub, Thomas da Silva was shouting, ‘Those ties are as good as ours. In the bag! Hardly a challenge for drinkers of our stature.’

Benedict sounded a marginally adult, cautionary note.

‘Men, we must avoid at all costs pre-incubatory gallinumeration.’

‘Yes, Benny, we know,’ replied Thomas da Silva. ‘
Hatching cunts
… I beg your pardon,
Counting chickens before they’re hatched
.’

‘Exactly so.’ The rogue-classicists theory was gaining ground in my mind.

As we turned towards the next pub, Thomas manœuvred the wheelchair – I assume by accident – so that one wheel was in the road while the other remained on the pavement. Then he started to push me at great speed in that precarious position, with the wheelchair straddling the kerb. If the footplates hadn’t been on, thanks to Kerry, my feet would have been receiving the savage scraping in their place.
As it was, there was a tremendous noise of metal in agony, and I’m sure there was a fine display of sparks for the benefit of the people behind.

I closed my eyes and tried to recite
Om Mane Padme Om
in my deepest interior spaces. It seemed such a long time since I had sounded the mini’s horn in that mantric rhythm to summon Kerry Bashford. My rickety old mantra was supposed to act as a brake on my engagement with spurious reality, or at least a clutch to disconnect me from the apparent impulses of the world. Now it was acting as an accelerator if anything, intensifying my mundane feelings of anxiety and alarm. Om-Mane-Padme-Om,
OM-MANE-PADME-OM … OM-MANE-OH MY
GOD!
… What happens if Thomas notices the way the wheelchair is tilted and tries to put things right without stopping? I’ll be pitched out of the wheelchair, that’s what, old Uncle Tom Mantra and all.

My nose registered at one point that we were passing the coffee shop (in fact The Coffee Shop) on King Street. The caffeinated aroma hung around like a titillating cloud. I concentrated on the traces of a drug which seemed entirely benign compared with alcohol, in whose stupefying distortions I was so hopelessly embroiled. Like many another student in those years, I had met coffee-lovers of both the jug and filter factions, devotees of both Java and exorbitant Blue Mountain. My own favourite was Kenya Peaberry. Even the name was satisfying. It had a leguminous twang. In those years the caffeine god made at least as many converts as the marijuana god.

Then we were past the coffee shop and the vivifying aroma disappeared. I had nothing to cling to but the shreds of my mantra. I couldn’t reach the armrests, to hold on to those. The stopwatch bumped painfully against my chest. At last I managed to grab it with one hand, to stop it knocking against my racing heart.

Exasperation is a rather junior emotion, a secondary impulse, but even so it is possible to feel it on a vast scale. That was what was happening with me at this point. I wasn’t a child. I was a grown-up. I was of drinking age. As it happened, I even wanted to be in a pub. But I wanted to be in the pub of my choice, the Cambridge Arms, not a
sordid den chosen by cretinous carousers. I was a consenting adult – I could even have relations with my own sex under certain conditions. I did not consent to having my day written off by dipsomaniac louts, however steeped in the classical languages. What made these clods think they could override my wishes?

The fact that they could. The fact that they had.

There were shouts behind us, and a yelping sound nearer home, which turned out to come from my own throat. We had nearly overshot the next pub on the via dolorosa of the King Street Run. At least the rest of the party mucked in to rescue the wheelchair from its unstable footing, though so many hands pressing down on the handles made it buck like a rearing horse. I couldn’t hang on to anything. I just clenched my teeth, so hard that I thought I must be shedding flakes of enamel.

I have no memories of the next pub we visited. That’s not exactly a failure of memory, more a refusal to register anything in the first place. I closed my eyes before we entered the place, and I kept them shut. This was my shot at passive resistance to the absurd caravan that had swept me up into its pilgrimage of intoxication. I couldn’t veto the proceedings, I couldn’t even register a protest vote. All I could do was abstain. Of course I wasn’t paying a special tribute to Gandhi – all my resistance is passive. All I have is my small No. No to pilchards, No to Billy Graham. No to Write Off Tuesday.

I kept my eyes closed and took no part in conversation, if the mass of cross-purpose non-sequiturs endlessly being repeated around me could count as conversation. Since no one was willing to take me to the toilet, I concentrated my mental powers on reversing the normal renal function, so that urine was driven back into the kidneys which had distilled it, and then back into the bloodstream. Better poisoned blood than soaked trouser. There was a jukebox in this pub. A vintage song was playing. ‘All Right Now’. By Free. Perhaps that was a good omen. Free
right now
. But when does Maya ever play fair?

There was the usual interminable routine of getting beers. From the muffled thud at close quarters I could deduce that once again I had been included in the round. Beer I didn’t want in a glass I couldn’t lift. Then Thomas da Silva and Benedict sat down, one on each side of me.

‘Cox? Cox?’

‘What’s his name? His actual name?’

‘Never caught it, Benny.’

‘Do you think he’s asleep?’

‘Might be faking.’

‘Why?’

‘To get out of buying a round?’

‘Don’t judge him by your own low standards, Wop. I think he’s really asleep.’

‘Maybe the poor little chap can’t hold his drink. Maybe that’s it. We should wake him up.
COX! COX!!
What a terrible thing to have to live with. Imagine not being able to hold your drink! Another thing, Benny. Have you noticed? There’s something not quite right with his legs. It’s more than just being small.’

‘Car crash?’

‘I expect so. Hurt his arms too, poor bugger.’

‘I’m not sure we should wake him. Maybe he’s better off as he is.’

‘Don’t be stupid. We have a certain responsibility here.’ This was Thomas da Silva talking – my abductor-in-chief.

‘Nothing’ll happen to him if we just leave him be. Someone will look after him.’

‘We can’t take that chance. And how will he feel if he wakes up and finds we’ve abandoned him? We don’t want to perform auto-prosopectomy thingummy … sorry, vocab all gone. It’s all Etruscan to me … Don’t want to cut off our nose to spite our face.’