One-On-One

by Philip Spires

  “More or less.”

  “Makes sense.”

  He burst out laughing. So did she. “You’ll be giving courses in it by this time next week.” His reference to the future brought proceedings to a complete, but temporary halt. There was an immediate sense of regret.

  “So even with this in my head, and all your sheets of current work, there is still no way I or anyone else could make head or tail of the material unless we had access to your previous - and unpublished - work”

  “Correct.” His confidence was palpable.

  “So if, let’s say, for the sake of argument, I took out my spy’s micro-camera and photographed all the papers in your office, and sold them to interested parties, no-one would be any the wiser about how your systems work.”

  He nodded.

  Christine looked at him directly in the eye. He returned her gaze.

  “Why?”

  He took up the folder from the table, held it up and then let it fall. It hit the bamboo floor with a blank slap. “Why?”

  “Gravity.”

  “Precisely. Because it’s there.”

  “But you should share the results... How can anyone benefit...?”

  “Benefit? Now there’s a word... I am trying to ensure there will be a benefit. If I were to put my material in the public sphere, it would be used by those who are already powerful, those with the resources to exploit it, to bolster and enhance their existing power. It would become a force for greater division and inequality. And I want to avoid that.”

  “You avoid it by becoming all-powerful, at least economically, yourself. Is that it?”

  He was silent for a while. “That’s another story, Chris.” He was silent again. “And that’s the story that interests you, isn’t it?”

  The sun was beginning to sink. I, and possibly Christine as well, was only just beginning to realise, after several days, that Cartwright was primarily a diurnal being. He simply did not seem to operate, at least as a communicator, after sunset. “It will be dark soon,” he said gesturing towards the papers he was reassembling in the folder he had retrieved from the floor. “I want to do a couple of hours on this before I sleep. Will you want to eat anything?”

  “Maybe later.”

  “There’s some bread and things at the back. There is no cooked rice tonight, of course.”

  “No matter.”

  He stood and began to shuffle and hop along the veranda. He was heading to the kitchen at the back before going to his room, but then suddenly he stopped. Christine was watching him. His bare brown back turned slightly, as if to anticipate a next hop he did not make. Straightening instead, he turned to face her. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “You just did.”

  “You would make a good logician.”

  She laughed. She seemed utterly relaxed, uncharacteristically so.

  He continued. “Were you really not in, that night I called round?”

  Christine was still smiling. She had no idea what he was talking about. The silence that followed was full of unasked questions, any of which could have gone either way.

  “Called round where? When?”

  “You have no idea,” he mumbled. “So you were out.” He turned again to continue on his way and was about to turn the corner when Chris too rose from her chair and set off after him. Still unpractised in travelling over these uneven floors, she needed to seek permanent and resolute support from both the balcony rail with her right hand and the wall with her left, her arms outstretched, as if being crucified.

  “Tom, wait! I want to know.” She had advanced halfway towards him, her progress faster than her confidence would allow. She had to pause or she would have fallen. “Please... What, where, when?”

  His first thought, clearly, was to go back towards her and offer a helping hand. But he didn’t move. His silence was one of confusion, not malice. He could not distrust her, but neither could he believe her, no matter what she might answer. “This is silly...”

  “Tom, what’s troubling you? When on earth did you ‘call round’, as you put it?”

  His resolve returned. “To be precise, Chris, I am referring specifically to the evening of Saturday 14 November 1970. It was a sad, wet, autumn evening, not particularly cold, but chilly by half eleven at night.”

  She advanced a couple more steps towards him. “Do you seriously expect me to remember what I was doing on a particular evening over forty years ago?”

  “I can remember what I was doing. It has rather stuck in the memory.”

  “Well, good for you!” They were standing at the corner of the house. The sunlight was creating contrasts of vermillion and black, the wall’s bamboo poles casting shadows as stripes. Their patch was in rapidly darkening shade. The sea appeared to be calmer than either of them. Cartwright offered no more and Christine grew suddenly impatient. “Is this another code, another shorthand symbol whose meaning I have to imagine?”

  He shook his head.

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “You weren’t there.” He was about to turn. The kitchen stove and sink beckoned, just a half a dozen determined hops away.

  “Where, for God’s sake?” She was genuinely angry. Her tone stopped him dead. She dare not move. Her leg was shaking, but from fatigue, not anger.

  “In Oxford, Chris, outside your college.”

  “Tom, I have no idea what you are talking about...”

  “Chris, I came to visit you. I’d not seen you for six weeks. I’d been going crazy. I was trying to do some college work that morning. I can remember poring over that week’s notes on functions, but I was getting nowhere. I was unhappy, yes, but more importantly I was insecure, even frightened. I had not been away from home before. I had not been separated from some form of support for two or three years. At college I was suddenly alone for the first time, and I couldn’t cope. I’d convinced myself I could feel that pain again, the pain of the tumour again, gnawing away at the knee that wasn’t even there. I remember looking at my neck in the bathroom mirror. I was looking for the swellings in the lymph glands I had convinced myself I could feel. I had expected to wake up that morning with a rattle of fluid in my lungs, a rattle that would quickly turn to the growl that would kill me.”

  “So what happened? Why can you remember the day, even the date, so precisely?” She asked her questions, but also prevented any answer by holding up her hand. “I felt very much the same until three or four years had passed. I expected to wake up dead each morning, if you see what I mean...” She paused. She wanted to laugh, but did not. “I also expected it to come back and kill me. But for me, every day became a new challenge, and still is.”

  He seemed to relax, just a little. “Well on Saturday 14 November 1970, I left my room feeling rather sorry for myself. I went to the university library to try and concentrate, to try to do some studying. I’d got a cold. My nose was running. I’d got a cough. I had swollen glands.”

  “You should have gone to the doctor.”

  “I’d done that on the Friday. Frankly, I was terrified. I can remember sitting in the waiting room, thumbing a calculus text, doing my utmost to stay calm and just getting more nervous. All I could hear were the words I anticipated the doctor saying: ‘I think you may have a touch of pleurisy, lad. I’m going to recommend you go in to hospital for a couple of days until it’s cleared up’. And that would have been a death sentence. I tried to send my mind elsewhere.”

  “And what did the doctor say?”

  “He said, ‘You’ve got a cold. Take honey and lemon with a Beecham’s in it.’”

  “And what about your mind? Where did it wander to?”

  “It went to Oxford, to be precise. It was all I could think of. I had to see you. We had gone through the illness together. We ne
eded one another... Or should I say, I needed you. A doctor couldn’t cure me, but you could. You could ‘kiss it better’, if you like. At least that’s what was going through my mind. I didn’t want sex. I just wanted to be with you. I hadn’t seen you for two months. And it was your birthday.”

  “It was indeed. And still is. Every year.”

  “So I left the library, still carrying my notes and books in a duffel bag. Both of us were still wearing those temporary prostheses, the ones with the frames, the sprung knee and the rubber bobble on the bottom. And you’ll remember, I’d become quite proficient with it. I could make good time. I actually walked to Piccadilly Station, and took a train to Oxford. I blew most of my cash for the following week on the ticket.”

  “Even with our student discount...” Christine was laughing. But she wasn’t laughing at him, or even with him. Some people do this when they are truly fearful.

  “I had to change at Birmingham. I knew it would be a bit tight. I struggled a bit with the stairs. I actually slipped a couple of times. There was no shortage of helping hands, of course. They did help, but they all wanted to do that little bit more, all of which slowed me down. And then I realised I’d got to the wrong platform. New Street, of course, had rebuilding work going on and the signs were all over the place. It was that day I resolved to learn how to hop on one leg, because it was obviously going to be quicker than lugging that piece of scrap metal around. You’ll remember it was actually harder coming down stairs than going up. The thing wouldn’t bend if you used it as a pivot, but if you put it down first, you overbalanced as it pulled you with it.” He paused, either expecting Christine to anticipate what might follow, or inspecting whether she really was being straight with him. Her expression remained simply, naively blank. “Well, I missed the train, and the next one was delayed, which is why I arrived in Oxford so late, around nine.”

  “And the station is on the edge of town. You had no money left. You had to walk.”

  “And I got lost. How was I to know your college was not in the centre of town?”

  “There were maps in 1970, I believe.”

  “Well whatever I did in those days was impetuous, even stupid... I got to your college around eleven.”

  “And you couldn’t get in.”

  “Indeed. I had a real stand-up, nose-to-nose argument with the old codger in the office at the main gate. Initially he took pity on me - one leg and all that - but then he got stroppy, saying it was more than his job was worth to let me in after closing time. He offered to pay for a taxi to get rid of me, but I didn’t want to leave without seeing you. Then he pushed me out of the office. I was ballistic. I remember shouting. I called him every name under the sun. He was livid. He chased me down the street with a rounders bat.”

  “A rounders bat...? You can be that specific?”

  “It was a women’s college. He actually tried to hit me with it.”

  “I had no idea you came to Oxford...”

  “So you were in?” She didn’t respond. “I was back out in the street at half eleven on a wet Saturday night, with no money in my pocket and nowhere to go.”

  “You couldn’t get any money...?”

  “Christine, it was 1970 and I was a student. We didn’t have credit cards. There were no cash points and people with eighty quid in their bank account didn’t get cheque guarantee cards. I hadn’t left home with the intention of going to Oxford. I had enough cash to travel and no more. I just had to see you.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I decided to break in. I knew your room number, because you’d sent me that postcard when you arrived, along with one of those pre-printed change of address stickers that W H Smith used to sell in packets.”

  “What do you mean by ‘break in’?”

  “I went down the street a bit, thirty yards or so, in the dark patch between two street lamps, and climbed over the fence.”

  “With a false leg?”

  “With a false leg. And I slipped.”

  “And?”

  He paused again, still assessing just how much he was telling her against how much he was merely confirming what she already knew. “I slipped when climbing the fence, Chris. You have no recollection?”

  It was precisely at that moment that some association began to click in her memory. I could see it happening. Christine’s expression changed from one of confident knowledge filled with interest to one of question mingled with growing, emptied-stomach horror. “Was it you? On the fence...”

  “I slipped. Nothing to write home about, but I impaled myself on the fence.”

  She was mumbling. “Railings with big spikes on top...”

  “That’s the one. I shinned up all right, but getting over the top with only one leg to offer purchase was a bit tough. I slipped and the spike went right through my leg.”

  “The false one...”

  “The false one...”

  “We were both still wearing the temporary ones, weren’t we? ...the ones with the open frames and the rubber foot on the end...”

  “That’s the one. The rubber foot on the end that used to catch on kerbs, or get stuck in cracks in the pavement...”

  “Yes, I remember many times thinking I’d left the thing behind as I tried to take the next step. I used to fall over all the time because I couldn’t swing it over an obstruction.”

  “And it would leg you up.”

  “...as we used to say...”

  “Well it also used to catch on fences as you tried to climb over. The spike went right through the shin part of the leg, missing the frame completely. It went in one side of my trousers and out the other, so I was completely impaled. I also fell as the foot caught on the way over, so I was dangling down the street side of the fence, suspended by the cross member of the leg which jammed up against the spike. I finished upside down, with my back to the fence. I couldn’t swivel round because the tapes that secured the leg went round my waist and prevented my body from twisting. I could lift myself up the fence a little by pulling through my arms, but of course I couldn’t lift the leg in any way, even when I had all my weight supported via my hands holding on to the uprights. Neither could I use a hand to unhitch the trousers, because I needed both hands to support my weight, and when hanging, I couldn’t reach. I was trying to undo the securing tapes from my waist when the old codger from the gate house came running along the pavement screaming his head off.”

  “In other words, you were trying to take your trousers off while hanging upside down.” Christine was trying her best not to laugh.

  “I remember screaming for help. No doubt he thought I was writhing in agony because I had a piece of fence through my leg.”

  “He could have got you down, surely.”

  “Perhaps, he could, but let’s say that he didn’t wait around to assess the situation. He clearly assumed there was injury, pain, blood, gore and probably work involved, so he issued an expletive and immediately shot off back where he came from. I can remember shouting your name repeatedly as he turned and sped away. I assumed he would contact you inside and then I might be supplied with a step ladder, which is the only thing I needed to get myself off the fence.”

  “You shouted my name...”

  “Of course I did. I assumed you were inside. Your postcard had told me precisely where your rooms were.”

  Christine was confused. “You knew?”

  “Of course. Don’t you remember? We used to do it all the time in those days... People used to buy postcards of the concrete blocks they stayed in on holiday, so that they could work out the exact location of their room and thus place a biro cross on the picture? And on the back it would say, ‘Having a nice time. Weather sunny. Food strange. Our room is the one under the cross. Wish you were here.’ But your postcard from college - the one you sent me during your first week in re
sidence, it was a holiday postcard like that. The picture was the front view of the college, and you had put a big cross on the window just to the right of the entrance and the message said, ‘This is my room’. They had put you there so you didn’t have to negotiate stairs. This was Oxford, of course, and there were no lifts...”

  “Cynic.”

  “And on the back of the card you’d stuck the W H Smith change of address label. There might even have been a little kiss under your name.”

  “I bet.”

  “So I had gone to the fence in front of that particular window and tried to climb over. When I got stuck, I reckoned that if I called your name loud enough you would hear and come out to save me.”

  “So what happened?”

  Cartwright shrugged and laughed. “The old codger went back to his office and called an ambulance and the police. They were there in less than ten minutes.”

  “He thought you were bleeding to death.”

  “He never bothered to check. I saw him go inside the building when he left his office. I thought he was going to get you, but he came out alone. And then the fuzz arrived. The ambulance came along just seconds later, making a hell of a din for a while. I presumed you must have heard the sirens. They were still running for a minute or so after the ambulance pulled up.”

  “You can remember all these details...?”

  Cartwright turned to face her. “This proved to be one of the most momentous days of my life. It quite literally changed everything.”

  Christine did not break the silence that followed. There was no need for prompt. He surely would finish the story.

  “The police were busy talking to the gatekeeper, but the ambulance men came straight to me. It didn’t take them long, of course, to realise I was stuck, rather than injured. It gave them quite a shock, perhaps a bigger shock than if I’d had blood gushing like a fountain.”

  “And you were still shouting your head off?”

  “The words, if I recall, were ‘Christine, Christine Gardiner and help’, repeated in different combinations.”

  “And they got you down.”