Pilcrow (67 page)

Though my carnal rendezvous with Luke Squires was hardly a high point of my life at Vulcan, I reconciled myself to the venue, at least. Julian Robinson and I had several encounters there in my last year at the school. Julian had the great advantage over Luke that he didn’t use a wheelchair. There was no evidence left outside the cubicle to betray us, and the level of risk became acceptable to me.

Julian had shed his secret-agent fantasies by now. There was no
disguising
of our objective any more, yet our explorations had very little flair. All that would happen in that cubicle was that Julian would unzip himself and present me with his cock, almost thwacking it down on the side bar of my wheelchair. Here at last was another penis for me to examine. I played little arpeggios on it, marvelling at the texture, so hard and so soft at the same time. This was all very
satisfactory
– my penis was clearly standard issue, give or take. After
prodding
and poking at Julian’s for a while, though, I’d learned all I could from it. Its academic interest out-weighed its potential for pleasure. Any actual sexual act would have been very hard to stage-manage, with Julian’s callipers locking his knees in place and my wheelchair getting in the way, and so little room to manœuvre.

By mutual consent, Julian’s parts were tucked back in his jeans. Then we would debate how best to leave the toilet block without arousing suspicion. The departure of fantasy didn’t announce the advent of realism. We agreed that the best alibi for our risky intimacy would be to stage a fight in the corridor. So once we were out in the open I would steer the Wrigley so as to graze him, and he would
cannon
into the wall and shake his fist at me while I cruised at high speed back into innocent company. This routine became slick with much practice – you go that way and I’ll go this – but I don’t see how it can ever have fooled anyone. Nothing in fact could be fishier than these shows of hostility.

There were lots of possible reasons for the way both sets of liaison, with Luke and with Julian, fizzled out. The toilet block wasn’t an ideal setting, but then nor was the Blue Dorm when Julian was
trying
to write his letter, and I was impersonating a perverse puppet who bossed people around and made them laugh. Nor was the music room, when Luke and I had played ‘
Plaisir d’amour
’ as a duet for lovers with a piano for our pimp and our alibi. Looking back, I have to acknowledge what those two scenes shared, a sort of blatancy that made me feel safe as well as excited. Perhaps anyone brought up
without
privacy is likely to turn into a voyeur or an exhibitionist or both.

I also had a growing preference when it came to the objects of my affection. Although Ben Nevin had left and my feelings about Raeburn were more mixed than they had once been, I had pretty much decided that boys weren’t what I wanted. I wanted a man, and I had my eyes on Mr Kirby the physics teacher. He had the right smell.

I had watched dogs smelling each other, and admired their
unembarrassability
. I longed to smell people, though not their bottoms particularly. Mr Kirby gave me a golden opportunity once. He was doing an experiment which needed careful watching, and while he was absorbed in the task I had a good old sniff. The lab window was very near and I didn’t dare lean over for too long. When I had returned to the vertical there was still no one visible through the
window
, and I thought I had got away with it.

At lunch-time that day, though, a boy called Philip Battersby came up and asked me if I thought Mr Kirby had a nice bottom. I said I hadn’t the least idea. He said, ‘Well you were certainly getting a good look at it in the lab this morning.’ I didn’t know what to say, and Philip made the most of this rare event. What would he have said if he had realised I was sniffing rather than peering? Mr Kirby smelled of Quink and cinnamon.

Mr Kirby had a side-line in astronomy. Patrick Moore of
The Sky
At
Night
came to deliver a talk with slides, and jolly good it was too. I remember that at one point he stamped on the floor twice, and then told us how far the universe had expanded in that second between his stamps. We were a good audience. Everyone went ‘
Ooohh …
!
’ absolutely sincerely.

There was a little reception given for him after the talk. I’d read some of his space novels for boys and badly wanted to chat with him, but Patrick was only interested in Luke, who was laying on the charm and praising the space novels. Which I’d told him about in the first place. I didn’t get a look in, and nor did anyone else. On his way out Patrick Moore told Miss Willis that Luke had real promise as a
novelist
and she absolutely beamed. Little parcels arrived for Luke for some time after that, books, cards and bits of meteorite. Perhaps it was then that I began to get tired of the relentlessness of Luke’s
overtures
to the world at large. Luke Squires, novelist or con-man in the making.

I wasn’t going to miss the star-gazing evening Mr Kirby had arranged, even if the only star I was interested in was Mr Kirby
himself
. On a star-gazing evening the lights would be turned off in the classrooms, and over much of the rest of the school, to allow our night sight to develop. It was easy to slip away even for those with compromised mobility. There was an awful lot of lurking relative to the amount of actual astronomy. The few times I tried to join in with the proper, star-gazing part of the evening I couldn’t see a darned thing.

I had a rechargeable torch, rather a treasure when such things were very new. It may even have come from Ellisdons. They were nickel cadmium batteries, really very primitive. Their working life was not long. After a few weeks I had to keep charging it continuously, and even then it gave the dimmest possible glow.

I went into one of the classrooms and perched by the door in the Wrigley, beckoning Mr Kirby with my dim torch. I was a little
glow-worm
of desire, signalling with my feeble beam, to a physics teacher who was perhaps attuned to other wave-lengths of light, or wasn’t going to risk burning the wings of his flammable career. Come-hither looks don’t work well from a wheelchair, even to those with their night sight at its clearest, their antennæ fully unfurled. All you can do is waggle your eyebrows. Mr Kirby came a bit closer, but wouldn’t commit himself. Then he faded into the further darkness.

All the same, I was determined not to return to the dorm, no
matter
what happened. I wouldn’t willingly submit to curfew while my desires were in flood. I wheeled disconsolately into the new wing, ending up in the sixth-form common room. I wasn’t entitled to be there, since I wasn’t in the sixth form, though I could be invited in by someone who was, like Paul or Abadi. A certain amount of smoking went on. Now it was deserted.

I knew that before long I would be hearing my name called in
exasperated
tones. I had to give myself some sort of alibi, to explain
without
disgrace why at a late hour I was nowhere near my allotted sleeping-place. In the common room I simply stood up and fell back into a deep chair I couldn’t get out of. That was alibi enough and to spare. No one would question the likelihood of my miscalculating in this way, though for years I had known at a glance – it was a survival skill – whether a given step, door or chair was Johnable. I closed my eyes and waited in weary disgust for the search party. Instead I heard the whispering spokes of a distinctive wheelchair as it pulled in neatly next to the upholstered dungeon into which I had flung myself.

Luke Squires had found me, and in a position which I suppose cried out to be exploited. He lifted himself out of his chair and onto his knees. If I couldn’t get up from the chair, I could do no more than squirm while he infiltrated my Velcro. I said, ‘Go away!’ but it came out as an ineffectual mutter rather than the howl of outrage I intended. ‘Fat chance!’ he said. He gloated, very much in the manner of a villain in a penny dreadful. He gave a stage laugh and crooned, ‘Now I have you in my power!’ and stroked the bottom of his face, where the villain’s beard would be.

Oh well, I thought, why deny him his fun? Let him get on with it. At least something was happening. There ensued an oral act. Luke said afterwards, ‘You’re always good value, John. You can’t have wanked for a fortnight. I love the way the stuff banks up. I’ve never been able to wait longer than a week, but it’s worth it when you finally do it.’

I hadn’t actually been abstaining at all – but it was a ridiculous conversation to be having with the debaucher who’d just set my clock back to zero anyway. And that was the end of my sexual life at that special school for ordinarily delinquent boys, who couldn’t get into half as much trouble as they wanted to.

I was erotically stale-mated, with no adult taking the slightest bit of interest in me. Jimmy Kettle would be ashamed of me – 10
himself
would disown me, for my lack of daring and imagination. My
feebleness
in tracking down the lyric quarry. I was also disappointed in Luke Squires. I could hardly pretend that I was his lyric quarry either, if that phrase meant anything at all. I was just a sort of human lolly for use in emergencies.

Jimmy Kettle was as full as ever of drive and determination (even if one of his strongest ambitions was still to fell himself with the
savage
axe blows of liquor). He told me that I was the only adult apart from him among the pupils of Vulcan, and that this could mean only one thing. I would go crazy if I stuck around. His opinion counted with me. Of all the fantasists at that address, Jimmy was far the most realistic.

He was writing a play of his own now, though he wouldn’t let
anyone
look at it. His pseudonym for the purpose was James Delaney. When he was satisfied with the play he would send a copy to 10, which wasn’t intended as any kind of career move. It was pure
homage
.

Jimmy was realistic about his prospects as a first-time playwright. He told me that a first play, however brilliant, might have to wait six months, or even a year, for a Broadway production. He was setting his sights on the West End, where the field was less crowded and the waiting time shorter.

Somehow I got a glimpse of Jimmy’s play, a single line and not even a line of dialogue, just a stage direction. I don’t remember how I managed this – it seems a bit fishy, somehow. Normally it’s easy for other people to hide things from me, so perhaps Jimmy let me see that one line on purpose.

It certainly told me a great deal about what he was doing. The stage direction read:
Night. Sound of the respirator
. Not much
ambiguity
there. Jimmy was writing about Abadi and Paul. Not only had those two found each other, and the heroic action which would
transform
both their lives, but now they had found their Homer too, the bard who would make their story live for ever in the minds of men.

I remember one more school expedition, with Alan and Marion presenting a united front for the sake of the children. It was actually rather an ambitious one, to Amsterdam. We were on a tram when Raeburn said something about us being on the Queen’s Highway. Of course I piped up and said we’re not in England so there’s no queen. ‘Oh yes there is!’ he said smartly. ‘It’s Queen Juliana, and we’re on her Highway now, so we will obey and oblige Her Majesty in any way we can!’ I thought it was rotten luck that our school holiday had to be in just about the only other European country that had a ruddy Queen.

We went on a tour of the canals by boat. Most of the boys fitted in the seats very nicely, but not John with his all-but-fixed hips. I couldn’t see a damned thing except the sky. Then Raeburn called out from the aisle on the other side, ‘Would you like to sit on my lap?’ It was a wonderful reunion with Alan, bringing back all the emotions I had felt for him at the beginning. I didn’t want the canal tour to end, so that I could go on being the Sit-Upon Boy. It was only afterwards I remembered that he didn’t have sensation below the waist, so it can’t have meant anything much to him being the Sat-Upon Man.

Contact with Miss Willis was a little more traumatic. At the end of the trip she was helping me down some steps in a wheelchair
single-handed
. Not the Wrigley, of course. For the trip I was in a pushing chair. She would balance the back wheels on each step and then lower me down to the next one.

It was a mad thing for someone of her size to undertake. Of course she slipped and down we all tumbled, Miss Willis, John Cromer and all. I could see nothing. I had broken Marion’s fall, or rather the wheelchair had. She had somehow moulded round me and the Wrigley, blocking out all light.

I was pinned under her mighty bosom. It was very soft. Her body was all forgiveness, not at all authoritarian. I became aware for the first time of her subtle perfume. I could confirm at first hand what Luke Squires had said about her freedom from pong. She smelled of soapy flannels and rubber ducks.

I was rather shaken up, but it was worse for poor Marion Gertrude. She wept with pain and shock, retrieving a hanky from her sleeve to wipe her eyes and blow her nose. I was still buoyed up by the thrill of sitting on Raeburn’s lap, and her sufferings didn’t make as much impression as they should have.

Almost Mum’s first words on my return were, ‘Well, I hope you’re going to sit down and write them a thank-you letter. They’ve gone to a lot of trouble for you, you know.’ All the same she was surprised when I picked up a piece of paper and put it in my typewriter straight away. She preferred her scoldings to be ineffectual, so that they could be repeated without limit.

‘Dear Mr Raeburn and Miss Willis,’ I wrote. ‘Thank you so much for taking me to Holland for such a wonderful holiday. I shall
remember
it for ever, especially the canal trip.’ I was going to return the
carriage
of the typewriter, and underline the last four words, but decided against it. Extreme caution was called for. My Alan fixation was Top Secret, and I had to get a message past the guards, namely Mum and Miss Willis. Mum checked over my letter – she vetted everything I wrote, there was nothing I could do to stop her – and said it was fine, sealed it and stamped it. So my love letter got past at least one of the guards …

I was ashamed to learn when I went back to Vulcan that Miss Willis had broken three ribs in the accident with me. She wasn’t really well enough to be running the school, but as she said, if she didn’t do what had to be done, who would? Seeing Marion, dishevelled and unwell, somehow holding onto the reins made me feel guilty that I had been the cause of her misfortune. For a while I thought nothing but tender thoughts about poor Marion Gertrude.

Eventually Marion’s injuries healed, but the psychological damage done by the rift with Alan was more intractable. She began to feel threatened when pupils showed too much initiative, a rare enough event in a disabled school and one which she might have set herself to welcome. That after all was the rationale of the school, to protect
disabled
boys less than their misguided families would tend to do. She didn’t repudiate her philosophy of goading into independence, but she began to show signs almost of smothering.