Pilcrow (58 page)

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.

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: 

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 have 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.

I enjoyed the privilege more than the content of the comics. My favourite publication was still
Judy
, my favourite serial (and character) ‘Backstroke Babs’. It didn’t excite adverse comment at Vulcan that a thirteen-year-old boy should read a girls’ comic, or if it did, the
objection
was soon neutralised by the sheer excellence of the story, when I was gracious enough to let
Judy
pass from my exclusive possession. It beat the boys’ comics hollow. The plot was well-constructed, the
situations
not too repetitious and the psychology a cut above the
competition
. This was a proper story. It showed real people and their sneaky nasty plans.

Even at home in Bourne End,
Judy
had a readership. Peter wasn’t expected to be much of a tough lad, and he was attending a Quaker school, but there would still have been social consequences if he had read
Judy
on the premises. Even at Trees he continued to swear
allegiance
to the
Dandy
. Yet while I was devouring a new issue of
Judy
(leaving ‘Backstroke Babs’ till last, naturally), and he was turning the pages of the Dandy hot off its presses, it was perfectly plain that his heart wasn’t in it. It was all he could do not to ask what was
happening
to Babs in the latest instalment. Finally I would let him read it for himself, while I cast a patronising eye over the antics in the
Dandy
.

On dry land Backstroke Babs used a wheelchair, but in the
swimming
pool she was in her element. She was her school’s strongest swimmer, always turning the tide in competitions and thwarting the plans of those who envied her talents and her popularity, her utter niceness. It’s a little strange that I don’t remember the exact nature of Babs’s disability, considering my unsought connoisseurship in this area of life. Was she paraplegic? She’d have had to be a bloody good swimmer all right, to churn her way past the able-bodied,
disregarding
the way her legs let her down in the pool. Even if it was polio the set-up was remarkably unlikely. So perhaps I realised that this was consoling fantasy – better not to examine it too closely.

I didn’t lose face in the school after my ‘accident’ in the Vulcan grounds, though I amply deserved to. No one was rude enough to point out that since the tiller had to be lifted off before I could
dismount
from the E&J, the tableau in the woods could hardly be
anything
but a planned event.

Nor was ‘suicide’ a possibility. How, exactly, was I supposed to have climbed out of the wheelchair in my self-destructive despair? I had to have help.

Julian Robinson was the obvious candidate. He was very happy to remove the tiller and help me clamber out of the machine. For once I blessed the rigidity his callipers gave. He held me up and we tottered a few feet together, until I could get a grip of the branches and make my controlled fall. We had agreed beforehand that he wouldn’t help me with rolling down the slope unless I really got stuck. Realism was important. It was a matter of pride. The last little bit of effort makes all the difference between slap-dash work and something you can be proud of.

Julian didn’t ask why I wanted to give the impression that I had come to grief in the woods. He was bound by his temperament to join any conspiracy that offered itself. He wasn’t fussy.