Cedilla (108 page)

I had never been able to generate a very solid presence for myself on those premises, but now, left alone after the other students had gone, I felt so tenuous as to be positively allegorical, like the ancient servant forgotten in the great house at the end of
The
Cherry Orchard
. If I did represent the passing of an old order, though, it would have been
nice to know where exactly I had once fitted so snugly, what heyday I had so unwisely outlived. I felt like the shadow of a shadow, a ghost in hibernation. I almost looked forward to being exorcised. I would go quietly.

Downing didn’t become deserted in vacation time, just because the students had gone away. In due course it played host to a conference of doctors. This was a godsend, and not just because the college catering system started up again for their benefit, so that I could be sneaked in, the staff turning a blind eye as usual. One waiter who had always made a bit of a pet of me even started calling me Doctor.

The medics and I had some amusing times together. I’d been reading my Martindale, so it wasn’t hard for me to bustle my way into their conversations with some informed nonsense, asking for instance, ‘Are you up to date about the enhancing relationship between benzodiazepenes and simple analgesics?’

I also saw something of the hazards of the profession. One delegate offered me some Pethidine as casually as if he was talking about a packet of crisps rather than a synthetic narcotic analgesic. There was something sexual about the way he slid the tube of Pethidine out of his pocket and waggled it in front of me, murmuring, ‘If you like I can let you have these when I leave.’

He also told me that Proladone was ‘really nice’, as if he was talking about a girl he’d just met, and not another heavyweight drug. He was obviously an addict, in the part of that trajectory where despair is still muffled by numbness and masked by nervous excitement.

Another delegate, rather handsome in a hangdog way, came to my room for coffee and sat on the bed, a promising situation until he started moaning that he’d ruined his life. ‘I’ve got a sharp tongue,’ he said, ‘I can’t help myself. I drive everyone away. My woman has left me and I have no friends. I have periodic incontinence of the anal sphincter and no one to love.’

I had nothing to offer him but the coffee I had promised, except for a nice yellow Valium to hold him together on a temporary basis. It was a treat to give drugs to a medic and fascinating to witness doctors
at play. I saw at first hand that their lives were at least as disordered as anyone else’s. I’ve never met a physician who could heal himself (as opposed to medicate himself). I don’t think such a creature exists, which is why my medical interests can only ever be a sideline for me, not the main thrust of the journey.

I took it upon myself to inform as many of the medics as I could buttonhole over the week of the conference that it was no part of a doctor’s job to tell the patient whether or not he was feeling pain. I preached this sermon on a text of my own, The Epistle to the Epiphyses, Chap. 1 verse 1. It had been simply insulting to be told that I couldn’t be experiencing pain where there was no movement.

It wasn’t easy for the medics to change gear from treating me as a pseudo-colleague to listening to the informed complaints of an ancient patient, but most of them seemed to manage it. There’s an outside chance that I made a difference to their professional practice further along the line.

On the last night of the conference one of the delegates, a Dr Love (originally from Canada), even proposed a toast to me in Hall. He warned the others against me very charmingly, saying, ‘If this little sod turns up in your area, for God’s sake don’t let him on to your list. He knows far too much! It’s not healthy. If they were all like him, the jig would be up for the lot of us.’

It was July before I heard anything much from Cambridge Social Services. Then I was told where I would be living, in Mayflower House. I liked the sound of that. The
Mayflower
took pilgrims to a new world. When would I be moving in? When the flat was ‘ready’.

My application to be a parasite had been accepted, but parasites can’t dictate terms. Nothing I did could qualify as ‘dropping out’ because I hadn’t been sufficiently ‘in’ to start with. My destiny seemed to be a sort of evaporation, one long exercise (a vast amplification of my sessions in the bathroom on Kenny staircase) in the loss of latent heat. Hadn’t I arrived at Cambridge with a good head of spiritual steam, even a bumptious sense of my own purpose? I was now entirely cold and dried up, shivering and desiccated.

I had assumed I would be riding the Vichara Express, in the luggage compartment (but then the body is always and only luggage),
but this was the stopping train at best, if it wasn’t actually old rolling stock abandoned in an overgrown siding. The sense of forward motion, so precious and so hard to come by, was now too faint to be detected. Only when the metaphysical speedometer was patiently tapped and then scrutinised with the eye of faith was it possible to see that the needle wasn’t stuck at zero.

Evaporation is a gradual process. When had mine started? I had felt quite monstrously present during my Cambridge years, clogging the pavements in the wheelchair, waiting hopefully to be helped through a door or up a staircase, but perhaps that wasn’t the impression I made on other people. Possibly even before I started to withdraw from community life, buffeted by traumas familial and academic, the shrinkage had begun. Edith Piaf towered above me now, and I had enough regrets for the two of us.

The lessons of my university life seemed to have been overwhelmingly negative. What had I learned at Cambridge? I’d learned that a hand once placed on the handle of the wheelchair was hard to dislodge. That a bag slung over that handle, nominally mine, could be filled with things that had nothing to do with me. That a fussy manner could cloak a sensitive soul or a hard one. That once people had entered my room I couldn’t actually throw them out. And once someone had lifted me up in his arms, it wasn’t up to me whether we reached the bottom of the stairs in the conventional manner.

In my three years as an undergraduate I had made any number of acquaintances, but friendship was a different matter. I could lay the blame on the world at large, and say that nobody wanted to venture beyond the outskirts of intimacy in my particular case, but that’s too easy. It lets me off the hook, when the truth is that I had mixed feelings about friendship myself. Of course the original plan was for me to be a beacon of enlightenment for my guru, and to fill my entire generation with his truth, but somehow that idea got lost along the way. A strong connection with other people would have been a decent consolation prize. But my experience of life from day to day over those three years made me think twice about trusting people’s good intentions.

To claw back some control over my environment I had learned to take charge in psychological terms. I would requisition favours without
granting any of the rights in return, having found that they were disproportionately hard to retract. In the free social setting which I had worked so hard to enter I had walled myself away from my fellows, whose freedom often seemed to be at my expense.

Emotionally I closed myself off. I didn’t actively seek out situations in which I might be hurt. Why would I do such a thing? Why would I give away chances to hurt me as if they were tickets in a raffle?

There were certainly people I knew in those years who could be trusted. Alan Linton was one, who kept in touch after he left Cambridge at the end of my first year. Yet even then I responded to his letters in a rather tepid way, writing just often enough to go through the motions. Eventually he wrote saying he had the feeling that he was keeping our friendship going single-handed. He went on to say that it was quite all right if I had lost interest, such things happened, friendship had its rhythms and its seasons, but I wrote back saying no, no, it was always good to hear from him, which was great hypocrisy on my part. I let Alan dangle. I did nothing to extend the life of our friendship but wouldn’t take the active responsibility of ending it. I let him strangle himself on his own goodwill. I didn’t even have the good manners to behave badly, and I may have left him with a feeling of guilt rather than the proper annoyance. A few years ago I saw his name listed in Yellow Pages as a homœopath based in Saffron Walden. The alternative medicine he had resisted so fiercely when he first encountered it ended by wooing him away from his first, his conventional love. And perhaps the part I played in his life wasn’t entirely ignoble, thanks to those early exchanges, conversations in which I was largely showing off.

Hoff the Downing Casanova came to see me from time to time while he was living out of college, though we were never as intimate as when we lived on the same staircase. At some stage his cottage-loaf-made-of-wire hairstyle had been replaced by something modestly trendy, allowed to grow out without savage brushing but kept reasonably short, in a sort of home counties Afro.

For Hoff exclusively I would make coffee by the filter method, using
Kenya Peaberry beans that had been ground before my eyes at the King Street coffee shop. Luckily in those glory days all my other visitors stuck to their preference, turning up their noses at the suspect brew I made in a glass vessel by a laborious technical process, boiling the kettle (filled with fresh-drawn water, of course) and then waiting two minutes for the temperature to be right. For this diehard group the filter method perverted the true taste of coffee, the powdered or granular joys of Nescafé. As far as these purists were concerned, unless it had been prepared for the jar using high-pressure industrial sprays, properly dehydrated or freeze-dried at the very moment that the flavour reached its peak, it hardly counted as coffee at all. My small-scale operation, with its plastic funnel and paper filter struck them as insultingly amateurish. Who was I to set myself up against Messrs Nestlé?

Considering the expense of Kenya Peaberry, this was handy. Of course it’s when life seems to be collaborating merrily with you, supporting all your little schemes, that you have to watch out. Luckily the sensation is very fleeting.

Once, very disconcertingly, Hoff said he wished I was a girl. Or rather he wished he had met a girl he got on with as easily as he did with me. My mind in a body he fancied – but then why would we be discussing his several protocols? ‘Girls are fantastic, girls are wonderful,’ he told me, ‘they shoot their stars across the sky and then they fizzle out. I’d never get tired of you, John.’

A mad thing to say, but touching too. And to a limited extent I could agree. My chats with Hoff were the closest I got in my Cambridge years to the university experience as promised and advertised. There was a nice Socratic feel to our conversations, an underlying crackle of dialectic, even if the subject was the sexual availability of young women. Getting into their knickers, to be perfectly frank.

Things might have worked less well if I had found Hoff the slightest bit attractive, but I didn’t. I wasn’t put off by the name-tapes on his socks or even the way he called ten thousand unborn cod, compressed into a tin, by the name of ‘lunch’. That wave-length simply wasn’t there.

On his last visit, at the very end of term, he brought me a present. It was an extremely thoughtful gift, positively disorienting in its
attunement to my needs. I’m not used to people reading my mind, but if they can do it on special occasions, why not on a regular basis?

It was a simple enough piece of electrical equipment, an array of plug sockets, five of them side by side, on a short extension lead. It meant I could have all my devices on at the same time – record player, Anglepoise, electric typewriter, even my prematurely senile lava lamp – without the labour of juggling with an adaptor (itself a luxury) which would only accommodate two plugs at a time.

I don’t frequent electrical stores any more than I do shoe shops, but I was pretty sure that this wasn’t an item on sale to the public. It was a rather fancy piece of technology in those days. I went into raptures of entirely sincere appreciation, and managed not to mention two little details.

One was the timing. Hoff was passing on this highly desirable gadget only when he himself had no further use for it. He was leaving it with me rather than take it with him when he went down.

The other was the provenance. There was a strip of Dymotape stuck on the white plastic of the array’s body.

Dymotape, sublime Dymotape! Dymotape was a lettering system which printed raised characters on a long roll of self-adhesive tape. It came as a sort of ray-gun (or so it seemed to minds formed in the ’50s), with a wheel mounted on the top with which you selected the next letter, rather than
ANNIHILATE
or
ANTI-GRAVITY
, before squeezing the trigger to advance your message by a single space. The clever thing about it was that the plastic tape turned white under pressure, so that the raised letters stood out blanched and clear against the coloured ground. A final extra-strength squeeze on the trigger caused a blade to clip off the strip, while also nicking the underside so that it was easy to peel off the protective layer and expose the adhesive. I knew the pleasures of the machine only by watching, since it was no better suited to my handling than any other ray-gun (a ray-gun made to fit my grip would actually look alien), but even at second hand they were considerable.

The strip of Dymotape said
PROPERTY OF THE CAVENDISH
LABORATORY
. By this time I knew Hoff well enough to be sure this name-tape was no joke, though Mrs Beddoes would never have suspected that this was stolen property, now that the riddle of the dictator’s
socks had been cleared up. There’s no one so gullible as someone who’s been fooled once already, as long as you don’t pull the same trick twice.

University security was rudimentary in those days, and libraries suffered a steady leakage of their treasures. I imagine Hoff had crossed paths at some stage with a shopping-trolley filled with oscilloscopes, and had spotted and snaffled this humble device so well adapted to his needs (and in due course to mine).