The Opposite Bastard

by Simon Packham

  “Oh, my Lord, you actually mean it, don’t you?”

  Philip Sidney (yes, that really is his name) swept up to me in Blackwell’s during First Week. “You have a weakness here and here,” he said, pointing at my chin and the top of my forehead.

  Well, I’m a woman, aren’t I? When someone’s talking about my physical imperfections, I’m listening. Secretly, I was quite pleased he’d only managed to come up with two. “Have I?”

  He nodded and looked me up and down, like a farmer sizing up a prize heifer. “Would you like me to help you put them right?”

  “Not really. But you can do if you like.”

  I wasn’t sure if he was taking the piss. Oxford is heaving with the finest young piss-takers in the country. “I’m Philip Sidney, as in…Here’s my card. Come and see me in my rooms tomorrow night. I have an exciting proposition to put to you.”

  So here I am. He’s pretty much Mummy’s idea of the perfect young gentleman. “Good breeding will out,” as she never tires of saying, and, quite frankly, it doesn’t do any harm that he’s the spitting image of a young Daniel Day-Lewis. The question is, how long before I can ask him down to the Old Rectory without looking a complete bunny boiler?

  He reaches under the bed for an ashtray. “I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse, Anna.”

  I thought I just had. But apparently there’s more. Maybe he’s going to pop the question. He wouldn’t be the first bloke to resort to such desperate measures in an attempt to get into my knickers. Half the boys in Hampshire have tried that one. “What’s that then, Philip?”

  He takes the first drag of his non-post-coital roll-up. “I want you to be my Ophelia.”

  Now I know he’s taking the piss. The only time I’ve ever been on stage was the sixth-form production of Grease. “You are joking, I suppose?”

  “I never joke about my work.”

  That I do believe. He won’t even tell me what he’s reading because he claims he only came to Oxford to further his directing career. “But why me?”

  “Well, you’re hopelessly inexperienced, pretty in a gauche sort of way, and I’m always up for a challenge.”

  “You certainly know how to flatter a girl.”

  “Sorry, Anna, I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “How did you mean it then?”

  “There’s something about you that’s very special, unique even. No preconceptions, I like that, I like it a lot. All you need is a good director. Ask anyone who saw the first rehearsal of The Elephant Man. Piers was absolutely shite until I got my hands on him.”

  “I’ll have to think about it.”

  “That’s great,” he says, plunging a hand into his jogging bottoms and readjusting himself. “I don’t like to say this, but it must be fate. And it’ll give us some time to get to know each other. I always end up sleeping with my leading ladies, you know.”

  I’m not one for short skirts and naked belly buttons; otherwise he couldn’t fail to notice that my whole body is turning crimson. “We’ll have to see about that, won’t we?”

  I’m just promising myself a celebratory Snickers when he comes out with something that throws me completely. “Oh, Anna, there’s just one more thing.”

  “I thought you said you understood.”

  He has this rather yucky habit of chewing his knuckles. “It’s not that, it’s just a little something I think you might be able to help me with.”

  I suddenly get this awful feeling that he’s a drug dealer or something. Mummy hates (non-prescription) drugs almost as much as car boot sales and political correctness. “Oh, yes?”

  “There’s a disabled guy in your college, Michael, Michael Owen.”

  I can’t tell you what a relief that is. There I was worrying that Philip was some kind of drugs baronet, when all along he’s just a big softy who wants to do his bit for those less fortunate than himself. “I met Michael the other day,” I say, deciding not to mention I’d treated him like the Elephant Man. “He seemed very…nice.” Actually, I think he’s probably a bit of a geek, but I decide not to mention that either.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Philip shrugs.

  “Then why did you – ?”

  “That’s my Hamlet,” he whispers.

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “You bet I am. We couldn’t even get the local rag to review Elephant. But a quadriplegic Hamlet! The broadsheets will be crapping themselves. I mean, yeah OK, I hate all that celebrity casting shit, but this could be so good for me.”

  “So what do you want me to – ?”

  “The kid’s playing hard to get. Talk to him. Make him change his mind. I need that man to be my prince.”

  This has got to be a wind-up. “Have you actually seen him? I mean, the poor guy can hardly move. He’s not going to be much of an actor, is he?”

  “I think you’d better leave the artistic decisions to someone who knows what he’s talking about.”

  “I don’t know…”

  He takes my hand and looks me straight in the eyes. “Get Michael on board, and we can take things as slowly as you like. I’ll even take you to that Lieder concert at Balliol.”

  “Yes, but how? If the guy doesn’t want to do it, surely that’s up to him.”

  “Flattery, of course, how do women ever get anything? I doubt if many blokes in wheelchairs have babes like you calling on them.”

  “Supposing it doesn’t work?”

  “Of course it will. I’ll pop round to your rooms in the morning to tell you what to say. Don’t worry, gorgeous, you’ll be fine. I mean, I don’t want to be cruel or anything, but I imagine his social life is almost as non-existent as that sad fuck’s who wipes his arse for him.”

  ∨ The Opposite Bastard ∧

  3

  A Pestilent Congregation of Vapours

  The Actor

  We’re only in the second week of the ‘Mickey Mouse’ term but already I’m waking up in the early hours and fretting over the inevitability of my encounter with the grim reaper. I’ve been experiencing these moments of claustrophobic panic for as long as I can remember. (I suppose for as long as I’ve known about death.) They used to surface about once a year, but here at Gloucester College they’re as regular as my bowel movements. It feels like being buried alive.

  Don’t you hate similes? I’ve never seen the point of saying that something is like something else. The trouble is, after two weeks with Ironside, I can’t see the point in anything. In Be Your Own Psychotherapist in One Weekend, which I purchased shortly after SOWINS (She of Whom I Never Speak) gave me my marching orders, you are instructed to ‘meditate daily’ on the reality of your own death. This is supposed to give your life meaning, but for me it does precisely the opposite. I’ve tried to face up to it by rehearsing the moment of my death; relaxing into it like a classic free kick from outside the box that bends around the wall and leaves the goalkeeper stranded. It doesn’t work, though. It’s about as futile as one of those fire drills where you amble out to the car park, knowing full well that you’d run like buggery if it was the real thing.

  No one could blame me for being a bit down. I’m an artist, for God’s sake. The whole business of being here, the tiresome repetition, the sheer bloody shittiness of keeping a cocky quadriplegic on the road, is almost as depressing as children’s theatre. There’s no need for the ghastly avuncularity, of course, nor scribbling countless autographs on bits of bog paper, but then again, at least you don’t have to wash the kids’ arses when you’re giving your Reverend Timms in The Adventures of Postman Pat.

  One of the other ‘rules for life’ in Be Your Own Psychotherapist in One Weekend is: “We are all responsible for our own orgasms.” Perhaps my mental health is better than I thought. I have taken virtually sole responsibility for my orgasms for the last nine years, three months and fourteen days – ever since SOWINS suggested I might like to find alternative accommodation.

  I lie in the dark, wondering when it’s all going to end
, bracing myself for his alarm clock and the start of another God-awful day.

  The Quadriplegic

  Everyone has their favourite crip joke. I like the one about what to get a quadriplegic for his birthday. It’s funny because it’s so true – blah blah blah. The punchline, “Well, I’m not having another fucking hat,” underlines an authentic modern dilemma: What do you get for the gommo who has everything? In Mum’s case it’s usually a totally unimaginative household item, like the ‘useful’ digital clock-thermometer that sits by my bedside. Some kids get their first car, but hey, my eighteenth birthday present not only tells me it’s 7.23 a.m.; it also reveals that the temperature is an unseasonably chilly 8 degrees C. In seven minutes’ time its ear-piercing alarm will traumatize the woodworms and send De Niro stumbling from his bed. Crips and movie stars have a lot in common: they both spend 80 per cent of the time hanging around, and they can’t even go for a piss without a chaperon.

  All I can hear is the hum of my electronic bed, turning me back and forth like a sausage in a frying pan. (It’s to stop me getting bedsores, by the way.) In the old days, Mum used to get up every three hours to do it by hand. Sometimes she’d sleep through her alarm, and I’d be left to rot in the dark until the lazy mare got her act together. They say that carers often end up hating their chronically demanding carees. But you’ve got to understand, it cuts both ways.

  The Actor

  “Right, Michael, let’s get this show on the road.” It’s rather like being in the chorus of Evita; you have to switch off and do the whole thing on automatic pilot, otherwise the reality is just too soul-destroying. “Hands off cocks, on with socks!” I say, throwing open his curtains and glancing down at the bright young things picking their spots in the quadrangle. The small talk helps too. Especially because without his microphone (I don’t replace the recharged battery until later) he’s in no position to answer back. “And how is Michael this morning?”

  I shouldn’t be doing this in my condition (chronically torqued pelvis); it’s like humping a sack of potatoes. No man should ever have to cope with this level of humiliation, but somehow I contrive to muddle through. With his electronic bed set to Upright, I wrestle him out of his winceyette pyjamas and into a shirt and jumper. I often wondered how I’d get on with looking after a baby. If this is what it’s like, I was definitely right to tell She of Whom I Never Speak that I thought we should wait until my career took off.

  There’s an art to this next bit which, I have to confess, gives me a bit of a buzz when I get it right. I attach a condom-like device, with a plastic bottle on the end, to his superfluous member, and apply a gentlish karate chop to his lower abdomen. “Sorree, let’s try that again, shall we?” If executed correctly (and, hey presto, I usually get there in the end) it can empty the bladder most successfully. “For this relief, much thanks, eh, Michael?”

  After all that foolishness about Hamlet (and the more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to believe that it was just a cruel practical joke) I can’t resist the Shakespearean allusion. It’s not one of my best quips because, of course, Michael can’t actually feel anything. However, his mother assures me that the karate-chop method is infinitely preferable to a catheter, which brings with it a high risk of infection and kidney trouble. “Winter draws on, eh, Michael?”

  His baggy underpants, which have to incorporate a spaghetti junction of plumbing for his surgical devices, remind me of the sort of things my nan used to hang out on washing day. Once I’ve got those on, the tracksuit trousers are a doddle. But why he insists on these state-of-the-art trainers when old ladies’ slippers would make things so much easier, I can’t imagine. “Good, that’s phase one out of the way.”

  I might as well be talking to myself. I am constantly staggered by the gracelessness of contemporary youth. Michael’s dumb ingratitude just about takes the biscuit. He’s supposed to be some kind of genius, so why does he just lie there with that blank look on his face? What’s going on in that head of his? Not a lot, if you ask me.

  The Quadriplegic

  In the school holidays I got sent on crip trips – something to do with Mum’s church. I’d be packed off with a coachload of random window-lickers to places I didn’t want to go.

  One time I found myself next to a slap-headed sixteen-year-old called Steve: “I thought we were going to Disneyland. All I ever wanted was to go to Disneyland, Euro Disney even. All the other sick kids get to go to Disneyland, but oh no, I get fucking terminal cancer and they send me off to Brighton.”

  In those days I didn’t have all the gizmos I’ve got now. It was only when they discovered my IQ that I became attractive to sponsors. Back then, if I wanted to go anywhere, some poor sod had to push me. In the middle of a supremely boring tour of the Royal Pavilion (Britain’s sixth most popular tourist attraction) Steve decided it was time for us to hit the town. It’s a crap job looking after a coachload of spackers, and the last thing you expect is that one of them’s going to make a break for freedom, so it was hardly surprising that Pastor Reg and the happy smilers didn’t notice when Steve hijacked my spaz-chariot and started pushing me towards Churchill Square.

  We sat outside W.H.Smith taking the piss out of the Plymouth Brethren. After Steve had helped me sample my first – and last – cigarette, we embarked on a hazardous shoplifting expedition. I say hazardous, because back then it was practically impossible to get anywhere in a wheelchair. These days they let us guys in everywhere. Practically half the spaces in Safeway’s car park have pictures of spaz-chariots on them. I expect you’ve noticed how they’re always empty.

  Steve managed to hump me down the escalator at British Home Stores where we set about nicking a few light fittings and a couple of hats. Despite the tough-guy exterior I think the baldness bothered him, so he’d commandeered a tartan deerstalker which looked almost as ridiculous as the one he got for me.

  The manager (a fat bastard in the first hot flush of male menopause) stopped dead in the middle of his carefully rehearsed ‘It is company policy to prosecute on every occasion’ speech as, looking up, he found himself face to face with a bald, concentration-camp thin teenager and yours truly, dashing as ever in a white fedora, with a bedside lamp on my lap. How quickly his ‘demon headmaster’ transformed itself into ‘television celebrity giving out presents in the children’s ward on Christmas day’ as he recognized the potentially fatal PR cock-up on his hands.

  “I daresay there’s no harm done. Boys will be…boys. Don’t you think, Miss Anderson? It suits you, by the way – Sherlock.”

  Wanker.

  The Actor

  “Now for the fun part, eh, Mike?” How in God’s name did people manage before the advent of the surgical hoist? It’s a life saver, I don’t mind telling you. Although I was born to act, I’ve often thought that, if Thespia hadn’t beckoned, I would have enjoyed operating one of those giant cranes. The solitude is the main selling point, but the feeling of power runs it a very close second. “Hang on to your hat.”

  At the touch of a button, his lifeless body ascends heavenwards. He dangles in mid-air until I fly him across the room like Peter Pan, and lower him into his wheelchair. “I expect you’re too young to remember It’s a Knockout.”

  Twenty years ago, I came to Oxford to visit my old school friend, Simon Butterworth. We spent about an hour with a bearded theologian from Hull, trying to find the swear words on a Rolling Stones LP. What impressed me as unspeakably sophisticated was the way he insisted on filtering our coffee into a large hand-glazed jug. As Damascene conversions go, it was right up there with oral sex and blue cheese. So, once I’ve strapped Ironside into his wheelchair, we pause for our first caffeine hit. “I think we deserve a nice cup of coffee, eh, Michael? Don’t go away now. I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

  The Quadriplegic

  I call it the Pinocchio Syndrome. In my dreams, I’m a ‘real boy’. Sorted for the weekend, I dance the night away in a state of chemically induced euphoria, throw up in the gutter, get depres
sed, write crap poetry and drive like a madman in my clapped-out Metro.

  That’s why I got into books. My tutor, Professor Brad-shaw, might think it’s because I want to waste my life on key questions like: ‘How do Sylvia Townsend-Warner’s impressions of the East-Anglian nuns of the fourteenth century compare with Chaucerian attitudes to monasticism’ but the truth is, I started getting serious about reading because I needed to know how things felt. Words are all I have. Words are my last link with my former life; the only way of holding onto feelings that are now no more than distant memories.

  I’m not talking about the big stuff. I can do fear and loathing standing on my head. I want to know things like, how does it feel when someone tickles you? What’s it like to get kicked in the balls? They say you never forget, but after ten years on four wheels, I really want to remember the thrill of taking my stabilizers off and riding my bike for the first time. And what about walking on warm sand? I’ve devoured whole libraries looking for the answers to questions like that.

  But you know what’s doing my head in right now? What about sex? I’ve been involved in some pretty extensive research on the Internet. It’s not fair; there’s this internecine struggle of the hormones raging all around me, and I can’t even have a wank. I suppose you think that’s disgusting.

  What is it they say? Love someone in spite of the wheelchair and it makes you a saint; love them because of it and it makes you a pervert; which is probably why the kids in the special unit didn’t get the birds-and-the-bees lecture. I mean, what was the point? Even the could do’s amongst us were (tacitly) adjudged to be far too gross to stand much chance of forming conventional relationships, so they packed us off to the Science Museum as a consolation prize.