For a moment I had been grazed by happiness. Even so, I was happy that Peter had escaped his Colditz Castle and would be treated tenderly in a new school. I myself had learned something about ‘reality’. When the building-blocks of the world, those things we consider facts, seem to be most firmly chamfered and grouted one against another, then – exactly then – is when the wall will shiver and turn to liquid. I just had to be aware that when every obstacle had disappeared from view, Mum and Dad would invent new ones. With the path cleared in front of them and brilliantly lit, they would stay exactly where they were, pretending it hadn’t happened and there was nothing they could do about it, except to put the car in reverse and drive glumly home.
That I had been accepted as a pupil of a normal school to which I hadn’t even applied was a miracle. It was a full miracle, despite the fact that it hadn’t happened. Mum and Dad wouldn’t let it happen, and miracles don’t insist. That isn’t the etiquette.
The divine invitation is written on creamy card so thick no human hand can fold it – that is so. Its embossing stands so proud it casts a shadow. Also true. But nothing whatever happens unless you RSVP. Divine intervention isn’t a unilateral business. Miracles are consensual. I vowed that next time one was offered I would not cringe with the rest of my tribe. I would claim my place in the summer sun, under that tree.
Sidcot School turned out to be as good a school for Peter as it might have been for me. There was a lot of care about the place. Mum went to visit once and didn’t announce herself to Peter. She crept along the walls until she could see him talking to another boy. He had a cup of coffee in his hand and was standing very straight. The two boys were talking man to man. Then Mum showed herself and Peter turned back into an awkward little boy again.
The only trouble he got into at that school was when he was caught making wax copies of keys. He wanted the power to slip through the fabric of an institution, even one where he was happy – simply to melt away. He wanted to have the power of locking doors between himself and misery, in case misery came back to get him.
He was punished in an adult Quaker way, without anger, by the simple withdrawing of privileges. He accepted this punishment, also in an adult way, without complaint, with understanding. Dad was never prouder of him than in that manly acceptance of chastisement. I wish Dad had been a little less keen on self-suppression in his children, but then he was busy suppressing himself at the time, so at least he was being consistent.
It wasn’t long before Dad got a job, though it wasn’t a great success. His employer was Centrum Intercoms, and he was supposed to be a salesman. He just wasn’t pushy enough, and in any case he didn’t really believe in the product. It was the wrong sort of product, for one thing. Communication wasn’t really Dad’s thing, in fact it was close to being the opposite of his thing.
There has never been anyone with so little of the salesman’s temperament. The more he praised a product to a potential customer, the more he despised it in his heart, and over time the contempt seeped back into his patter. There was a pile of paperwork to be done, until one day he simply walked away from the job. He came home exultant, and Peter and I giving him a great welcome. I imagine Mum’s feelings were more mixed. The less earning power Dad had, the greater the place Granny could claim for herself in our lives.
Shooting the rapids
The most constant thing in my life at Vulcan, apart from lessons, was the saga after lights-out. By now it was very markedly eroticised. Gunfights and cattle-rustling had been eclipsed by a sexual free-for-all. Over time I had developed my own way of describing things. I knew the word ‘penis’ but wasn’t sure if the other boys did, so I said ‘John Thomas’ instead, which was how the nurses in CRX had referred to those parts. I still used the words ‘taily’ and ‘scallywag’ in my head most of the time, but was trying to out-grow them. I certainly wouldn’t use them in these surroundings. I knew and liked the word ‘vagina’ but felt it would tend to make the proceedings a bit clinical, when the whole point was to be outrageously dirty.
I was a sort of orchestral conductor, drawing out the filthy music in everyone’s head, the dorm itself my instrument. I gloried in my powers. I could send my audience to sleep dreaming of hot steaming home-cooked food, or I could get the room so keyed up it was as if the whole humming chafing collective was going to break loose and shoot the rapids.
No one else ever played ladies’ parts, but I often doubled up. One night we realised we were a villain short. It was decided that Terry would play that, though he was usually Rip, till he said he’d get muddled if Rip had a fight with the villain. I volunteered to be Rip and the lady. Then one night I was not only Rip and Mum/Miss Willis but also a bar floozie with big bosoms. One scenario started with Rip making love to the floozie (me making love to myself in two vocal registers). Then the villain – Terry – was going to come along and punch Rip on the nose and fight him and knock him out. To start with I was going to scream as the floozie (quietly so no matron would hear) because the villain was scaring me, but then he would seize me in his strong villain arms and I would be overwhelmed by passion. Our love-making would have to be quick. We knew that we were destined to be parted. Perhaps the posse was thundering towards us even as we kissed. Opposite sides of the fence, a love that could never be, and yet this violent throbbing moment was perfect in every way, a memory to take with us for the rest of our lives.
I had to find the right voice for each character. As the action became more complicated it became necessary to sketch it out ahead of time. Before the scene began I had to give the dorm a certain amount of briefing, bossy little impresario that I was.
‘Give me plenty of time to get going on the love scene,’ I told Terry, ‘before you come in and start making trouble … I’ve got some really juicy ideas for tonight. Then in the show-down – punching noises, everybody, plenty of “what the –?” and ‘I’ll larn ya!”’ Punching noises I wasn’t good at. Roger Stott was the expert at those. ‘Okay, pardners, let’s roll.’
Love was my speciality, though. For me, the sexiest of all words was darling. I experimented with its pronunciation, shifting the stress between the syllables, alternating dárling and darlíng. ‘Oh darlíng, I luff you – yes, darlíng, touch me in every place, oh, oh, oh I wish you had more fingers on ze hand and more hands on ze body. Now take your John Thomas and push it deep into my crack … and when it’s in there, please take one of your fingers – any one – and slide it into my botty and I’ll push my finger into your botty also, oh dárling, I am in so much love I could die like this …’
The holiday in Looe with Dorrie had left a legacy, undoubtedly. In our cowboy stories the formula ‘This town ain’t big enough for the both of us’ had pretty much been made obsolete by ‘When I see a hole like that in your bum, it makes me want to stick my finger up it – know what I mean, boys?’
Sometimes for variety I told a ghost story instead. I improvised freely, and though my plots didn’t always hang together I could certainly brew a spooky mood. One night, just when I was saying, ‘And then SUDDENLY –!!’ with no real idea of what the sudden thing might be, there was a terrific twang and a strong smell of burning. Something skittered across the floor, and a number of boys cried out in fear.
We called a matron, who turned the lights on. There was a mark on the floor which looked as if it was caused by scorching. By daylight we could see more clearly what had happened. Raeburn had left one of the Wrigleys on the re-charger. The fuse had blown and then somehow bounced across the floor. By then, though, my supernatural authority was unassailable. Facts couldn’t dent it.
Amnesia was killing Paul
One of the boys was so scared he said he wouldn’t sleep another night in that haunted dorm. It was Stevie Templeton, known as Half-Pint. The nick-name wasn’t really to do with his height (relatively few people at Vulcan were standard in size or shape). It was because his father ran a pub. So Stevie was moved to another dorm, and Julian was moved in.
I don’t know if there was anything fishy about this dream come true. Julian didn’t claim in so many words to have arranged the whole thing with HQ, by booby-trapping the fuse of the charger, pressing the remote-control button when he heard (through a hidden microphone) that my story had reached a suitable stage, but he certainly took credit for the transfer.
I felt a little guilty about having driven Stevie from the dorm, if that was what I had done. He was an athetoid spastic, unable to control his movements, and Julian was much quieter company. No question about it, there was a certain amount of relief.
It wasn’t just the charger. None of the wiring was reliable. At Vulcan we were always having our own power cuts, on top of the general ones. Once one happened in the middle of the night. People went on sleeping. What else would they do? Why bother to wake up, just to find that the lights aren’t working?
Paul Dandridge, a year senior to me, slept on in his dorm like everyone else. The difference was that he started to die the moment the power went off. He was the severe polio case who did ‘frog-breathing’ during the day. He literally swallowed air – with a distinctly froggy expression – instead of breathing as other people did. At night, of course, he couldn’t swallow air the way he could during the day. When he fell asleep his breathing would stop, so at night he was connected to a respirator.
The respirator made no sound when the power went off. Just the opposite. Its hum and swish died away. The dorm was quieter than it had ever been since Paul arrived. Paul just stopped breathing – or rather, he didn’t start. It was all very peaceful. Then Abadi Mukherjee, in the next bed, woke up.
Not only did he wake up, he understood immediately what was happening. Only a few seconds had passed without power, but already amnesia was killing Paul in his bed. He was dying of forgetting to breathe. Nothing had replaced the mechanical wheeze of the respirator that had stopped, not Paul’s day-time gulping, let alone the smooth rise and fall of a normal boy’s sleeping chest. Abadi had very little time to reverse this trend of dying.
In a way, though, it wasn’t all that dramatic. He didn’t need to give Paul the kiss of life or anything. All he had to do was wake him up, so that he could be reminded to breathe. Abadi didn’t even need to get out of bed to do it. His polio was much less severe than Paul’s, but he couldn’t simply spring out of bed. Just as well he didn’t need to. All he had to do was shout, for Paul to live.
After that night they became inseparable. From being friends among other friends they became a consecrated couple. What could be more natural? Even if Paul Dandridge was poor and from the East End of London, and Abadi Mukherjee was very rich. His parents, they who ran the Appa Corporation in Bombay, paid full fees for him. In effect Abadi became Paul’s primary carer, despite being so very far from AB status himself, and it was a job he did very well.
All this was completely marvellous, and I did rather resent it. Although Abadi was a year above me, we had always had wonderful chats, particularly on scientific themes. Abadi took sugar in his tea, for instance, while I didn’t, and he had the idea that there is a moment when you withdraw the spoon after stirring when the tea eddies faster than ever. He wouldn’t be persuaded that this was a violation of natural law, acceleration in the absence of propulsion. We had a lot of fun wrangling over that.
Averages and statistics were also fertile grounds for debate. I told him that if a single person was immortal, that would be enough to raise the life expectancy of the whole human race to infinity. This is perfectly true (nought and infinity always make sums wonky and mystical), though he wouldn’t have it. But now he didn’t have time for me and my quibbles. His bond with Paul was all the go.
If I had my nose put out of joint by the intensity of the new bond between Paul and Abadi, it was only partly because I was cheated of a few satisfying quibbles. On a more general level the whole thing seemed so very unfair. Ideal friendship on a base of mutual self-sacrifice was just what I’d always longed for, and had looked for specifically in my experience of Vulcan School, and now somebody else had got it instead of me. There was even the element of class contrast for which I had always hankered, though Granny would hardly have recognised Abadi, heir of merchant princes, as an upper person.
I was always trying to imagine how I could behave on a large unselfish scale despite my un-coöperative body, and now Abadi had had heroic action served up to him on a plate. It had been so easy for him. Wake up, and shout. I was considerably more disabled than Abadi, but even I could have done that. It was as if I had been cheated. How hard was it to notice that a respirator had gone quiet, anyway? Paul’s respirator wasn’t a full-body one, the famous iron lung, fully enclosing the patient. It was something called a cuirass respirator, and it was powered by a modified vacuum cleaner. All Abadi had done was notice when a vacuum cleaner stopped roaring in his ear. I managed to forget, for the greater purpose of drumming up a grievance, how deeply I slept myself.
It was as if someone had snaffled all the soft centres from the existential chocolate box, and I began to feel very sorry for myself. I was useless. I couldn’t have a simple spy camera installed in my head without getting my knees hurt.
I was coming down with a particularly virulent strain of self-pity, a common condition in early adolescence. Who really cared about me? Who would miss me if I just disappeared? And why did I have to do history when I was no good at it?
I wasn’t even going to be made a prefect. In books about schools you could be a prefect as long as you were good at lessons and loyal to the spirit of school. At Vulcan you could only be a prefect if you were an AB, or at least a lot more able-bodied than me. It was so unfair. It was unfair to umpteen decimal places.
Peek Frean Peek Frean
On top of which I had been let down by the pen-friend I had been assigned, so that I could polish my German while she improved her English. We had only just started our correspondence, and her English was very formal. She sent her warmest compliments to my esteemed parents, for some unknown reason. Still, I thought we had a lot going for us as pen-friends. She was called Waltraut Bzdok. I imagine her family was originally Czech or Polish. I absolutely loved the name. In my bed-rest years I had hated the way words when you repeated them lost all meaning. The words on the biscuit tin just dissolved with repetition, as surely as if they had been bodily dunked in tea. Peek Frean Peek Frean. Waltraut Bzdok was different. She was immune to the Peek Frean effect. However often you said her name to yourself, it retained its gritty integrity. Cross-braced by all those sturdy consonants, it ran no risk of dissolving. That name was like a piece of heavy engineering, scoring highly on both tensile and compressive strength. It was impervious.
We were getting on so well I decided to send her a present to seal our friendship. I bought some shampoo from the village shop. Then the postmaster spoiled everything by saying I wasn’t allowed to put something in the post that might leak.
We had a hideous sort of conversation, which went like this:
POSTMASTER: ‘What is the nature of your package?’
JOHN (sings out happily): ‘I’m sending some shampoo to my pen-friend in Germany. She’s called Waltraut. Waltraut Bzdok. I think her family may have come from Czechoslovakia originally.’
POSTMASTER: ‘International postal regulations prohibit the despatch of items other than those certified leak-proof. They endanger legitimate packages.’
JOHN (doubtfully): ‘Perhaps I could wrap them up better? Pad them somehow? With tissue paper?’
POSTMASTER: ‘Send bath cubes. Girls like bath cubes. Even German girls must like bath cubes.’
I couldn’t out-run his decision, even though Mum always said that if you were a lady bath cubes made you go itchy between the legs. I bought some anyway, once my finances had recovered from the extravagance of buying shampoo I couldn’t send.
The postmaster must have been right about what girls liked, because Waltraut was thrilled. She wrote a letter saying that when she opened the parcel she thought that she would ha
ve been dreaming. I should tell her everything about myself. To begin, where was I studying at school?
I took a lot of trouble over the letter I wrote. I found out that the German for ‘disabled’ was behindert. I can’t say I liked the look of the word – the associations of being hindered and behindhand were too raw, somehow, in an unfamiliar language. I persisted with it, though, and told Waltraut among many other chatty things that I was studying at a Schule für Behinderte Jungen. And of course I needn’t have worried about niceties of language. Pen-friends aren’t bothered by little things like that. The message got across perfectly, and she didn’t write back.
So I made my decision. One afternoon I took the Everest & Jennings out into the woods. I would lie down and fade away into the forest din. I left the wheelchair and managed a controlled fall, holding on to branches while I lowered myself to the ground. Then I rolled away from the chair into some leaves. That was actually hard work, even with the help of a slope. There I waited to die, or be discovered by a passing woodsman who would bring me up as his own. I wouldn’t be missed – and I certainly wouldn’t miss any of that lot.
In another part of my mind, I knew perfectly well that I would be missed. The dorm after lights-out would be hushed, if not out of respect then out of an inability to manage without me. Nobody else knew how to cook up such treats of story-telling. Nobody else had the nerve to tackle ladies’ parts, or the virtuosity to play both sides of a fight or a love scene. Did they think fingers got up botties in the heat of the moment all by themselves? They’d soon discover otherwise. There was an art to it.
After about two hours, I heard voices calling my name, gradually coming closer. When I heard a familiar voice shouting, ‘Oh my good Lord!’ I decided to live after all. I closed my eyes. It was Biggie, bustling fit to burst. The doctor was called – he gravely prescribed bed rest. Bed rest my old friend, but with a difference. There was a big pile of DC comics like Superman and Eerie that I could read while my schoolmates studied.
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