Cedilla (65 page)

Downing was mainly a slow-working factory for turning out engineers and medics. Unforeseen side-effects of the manufacturing process seemed to be drunken shouting late at night, wild laughter and a certain amount of scuffling.

Some mornings I would see half-skeletons left out in the courtyard, suggestively posed. A little later their owners, red-eyed and stumbling – the present owners, rather than the original inhabitants – would retrieve the bones from these tableaux of post-mortem dissipation.

A good joke never grows old. I soon got used to the sight of skeletal arms waved in my line of sight by giggling students crouched below the level of my window.

On her second visit the bedmaker must have been looking about her in a more relaxed fashion than before, because she got an eyeful of something even more outlandish than me. There was a tropical millipede, a nice brownish colour and about a foot long, on the windowsill. In a plastic box, mind you, not roaming free. It had cost me £1 in Maidenhead. What with the millipede and the stereo, Maidenhead had yielded quite a trove of bargains.

Actually the reason she hadn’t seen it the first time was that I had stowed it in a drawer beforehand. Just being tactful, like Bluebeard not wanting to mention the wives on a first date, knowing there would likely be complications later, and wanting to get off on a good foot. Or two feet. But no more than that.

When my millipede curled up it looked very much like a Catherine wheel, though I didn’t like to see it in that position too often, curling up in such creatures being an indicator of stress. This particular morning, though, it was feeding very happily. Millipedes do very well on rotten fruit.

My bedmaker stared at it. ‘What on earth is that Nasty Thing?’ I tried to explain the beauties of the creature, but I could make no headway. There’s something about segmented arthropod bodies, legs that dance in squadrons, that seems to upset people. Coördination which would produce wild applause in a chorus line and enthusiastic cheering at a sports ground – there’s something called a Mexican
wave, where people raise their arms in raucous sequence – just gives people the horrors in an inoffensive giant insect.

There was only one thing my bedmaker wanted to know about this beautiful creature: whether she was expected to clean out its box. I reassured her. I myself was the millipede’s bedder. She could relax.

There were no signs of relaxation as yet, but it was early days. At least she was dividing her alarm between two objects, now that she had seen the millipede, so logically she must be feeling more at ease with me. We were on our way.

I knew my millipede was bisexual and hoped it would breed, not realising that you need two of them for that – any two, but you do need two. So my knowledge was curled up round a core of ignorance. Any passing biologist (and there must have been a few such at Downing) could have put me right.

The millipede had a name, but somehow I’ve forgotten it, and The Nasty Thing is all that remains.

Over the railings outside the back entrance of my staircase was a building on the Downing Site labelled Department of Parapsychology, which I thought was a wonderful omen and a testimony to the open-mindedness of the university – until I realised I had been misreading
Parasitology
. Also an honourable discipline, of course.

When I arrived with Mum and Dad on that first day I had been issued with a key to the door of A6, something that presented practical problems from the start. Where was I to keep it, for one thing? Pockets and I don’t get on, never have and never will. Something in a pocket is as far out of my reach as a jar on a high shelf.

I asked my bedmaker for help. By now she had a name. She hadn’t volunteered it, but I had extracted it like an expert dentist while her attention was elsewhere.

I had it all planned. I let her surprise me at my typewriter, tapping cheerfully away. I called out, ‘I love typing, don’t you? Ten tiny tendrils tapping in tempo! I’m just writing to my mother about you, only – so embarrassing! – your name has slipped my mind. I swear, I’d forget my hips if they weren’t screwed on!’

She gave a little gasp and then it came out. She was Mrs Beddoes. The reluctant stump was held safe in my pliers. And it hadn’t hurt a bit. ‘Beddoes by name and bedder by nature,’ she said. Mrs Beddoes
the bedder, next card along from Mr Carve the Butcher in the Happy Families pack.

Her fear of me was still great and it was important to be delicate in my approaches. If I could I would tempt her into making the first move, as if I was coaxing a squirrel down from its branch.

I spoke soothingly, knowing that tone of voice was more important than my choice of words. ‘I wish,’ I said, ‘I could find some way of keeping track of my room key. Perhaps a piece of string would do the trick.’ This was the equivalent of the peanut on the back of my hand, tempting the flighty creature to come close.

Mrs Beddoes frowned and produced a length of string from the pocket of her pinny. Then she came up to me of her own accord, close enough to attach it to my trousers. Her hand held the string, but in another way it was me who reeled her in.

First we tied one end to the key and the other to a belt-loop. I could retrieve the key reasonably easily by pulling on the string, but I couldn’t always tuck it away again, so the whole arrangement was a bit of a business. Eventually I realised that it was simpler to have the key on its string round my neck, even if it sometimes got tangled up with my clothes. By then Mrs Beddoes was almost tame, though still a long way from eating out of my hand. Progress enough for one day.

She had gone on bringing me cups of tea, and I had gone on not drinking them. Finally she broached the subject. ‘Aren’t you going to have your tea, Mr Cromer?’ she asked. ‘I should have asked how you take it – perhaps you need sugar? If it’s cold I can make you another. It’s no trouble.’

Here we were at the heart of the matter, the charity case refusing to be patronised. ‘Now see here, Mrs Beddoes, why do you bring me tea?’

‘I thought you could do with a cuppa.’

‘But you don’t bring tea to anyone else, do you?’

‘Well, no.’

‘Perhaps you feel sorry for me.’

‘Not really, Mr Cromer. It’s the others I feel sorry for.’

That stopped me in my tracks. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, you’re the only one who is ever awake. The only one who doesn’t groan when I knock on the door. And after all, they’re missing the best part of the day, aren’t they?’

After that the scales fell from my eyes, and I started taking Mrs Beddoes’ cups of tea at face value, as a real privilege and quite a contribution to what was (as she said), or became, the best part of the day.

A door to close behind me and a key to lock it with. These were things I had never had until I was an undergraduate. They seemed fairytale privileges. Space and privacy were not things that had gone together in my history. My most intense previous experience of control over my surroundings was possession of the ornamental Chinese box given me by Ben Nevin at Vulcan. A precious enclosure, but not large enough to accommodate so much as a pack of playing cards or, more importantly, a full tube of depilatory cream.

Now I had room for whole vats of Immac, if I had wanted, and could have kept them safe from pilferers. The Immac, incidentally, had done its work, and more than its work. I was making no efforts to suppress the sprouting of my beard, but it was chemically damaged and never grew quite right. There were irregular patches where nothing much happened. Unfortunately they were more on one side than the other, perhaps because I laid the stuff on thick where I could reach most easily. I didn’t try to shave what I had, all the same. I had enough on my plate without razor chores. My growth, however substandard, didn’t draw attention to itself in a whole university town full of scrappy facial hair.

Possession of a key transformed my status. It conferred so many privileges: the knowledge that no one could enter the room in my absence (except, theoretically, the Head Porter, who had a master key). Control of any admission while I was in. Privacy and security, necessary elements of the much-touted ‘peace of mind’.

All this amounted to a huge step forward. My key practically defined me as an adult – far more than my beard did. Children, invalids, prisoners, the mad. None of these gets the key to his room. Thanks to the smiling authorities of Downing College, Cambridge, I was gathered in from my life on the margins. I was not only mature and well
but free to roam, and certified sane into the bargain. I was in control of my own life. I was my own doorkeeper. I had the key to freedom.

It took me a couple of weeks to realise that I didn’t like it. That is, I enjoyed not having inferior status, but I didn’t like locking my door, or even closing it. I hadn’t come to a university to shut myself away. It was at home that I sometimes wanted to do that. It was at Trees, Bourne End, that a key to the bedroom would have come in very handy from time to time. At Trees I could have become a recluse very happily between meals, ignoring Mum’s anxious knocks, thinking my own thoughts and steadily filling a whole array of urine bottles like a penniless little Howard Hughes, while my beard grew long on the one side only.

The other door to the room at Trees, the one which gave wheelchair access to the great outdoors, would always be left open wide, unless there was a blizzard or Mum tried to sneak up and spy on me from that vantage point. Even when automatic doors
à la
Starship
Enterprise
, with their soothing whoosh, become standard, I’ll be sentimental about the peerless charm of an open door. An open door offers me my only real chance of catching someone by surprise. Leaving the door open being also my best way to arrange to be surprised myself.

In any case for me the difference between a closed door and a locked one isn’t as great as all that. It’s almost a technicality. I went through a brief phase of leaving my door unlocked, though I tried to remember to take the key with me when I went out, in case Mrs Beddoes or some other authorised person innocently locked the door on my behalf. Then one day I came back to find a stranger dozing in the Parker-Knoll. It was the junkie who regularly fixed up in the lavatories. He didn’t make trouble, just shambled off on command like a dog in disgrace, but after that I took security more seriously.

Back in Bourne End the floor of the room I shared with Peter was bare lino. In A6 Kenny I did at last have carpet. The college authorities were less worried about the problem of my tracking mud across internal spaces than Mum – perhaps it came under the heading, from their point of view, of fair wear and tear. For Mum, wear and tear
could never be fair, since everything was part of a conspiracy to make her look slovenly in her mother’s eyes. Wear and tear was always unfair.

When I took a closer look at the carpet, I saw that every possible insult that could be offered to a floor covering had already been visited on it and been (more or less) wiped, hoovered and scrubbed away, darkening the overall tone of the textile.

I was a little embarrassed about being cleaned for. It was partly that I didn’t want a servant – if I was condemned to having a servant I wanted one who would be more useful to me. I tried to show Mrs Beddoes that most forms of clearing up merely made things inaccessible to me. As far as I was concerned, tidying up was only hiding with a whiff of self-righteousness. Books, for instance, needed to stay on the front section of the desk if they were to remain within my reach. She nodded uncertainly, and after that she mostly left my things where I wanted them.

What I really needed, if I had to have help of some sort, was help with washing. Dressing I could manage, and laundry wasn’t too much of a problem – there was a service which collected and made deliveries. Bathing was much harder work than washing clothes. I would have been delighted if there had been a similar service operating – to send this body off for laundering and get it back neatly folded and smelling fresh.

The toilet arrangements were satisfactory – in fact, since (naturally enough) the other students tended to avoid the cubicle with my commode parked in it, it was very much the cleanest of the three, the best of a bad bunch.

Bathing was a different matter. In the bathroom of A staircase, Kenny Court, I had to run a bath and transfer myself from the wheelchair to a hoist supported by a rail on the ceiling. It was reasonably manageable. I would lay two ‘canvas’ (actually synthetic) straps crosswise on the seat of the wheelchair before sitting down on it. Each strap had a ring on the end, which had to be slipped over the hoist’s hook. These technical descriptions are hopeless! Better to imagine the picture on the front of a standard christening card. Now substitute me for the baby in the sling of cloth, and an engine attached to the ceiling (dangling a hook) for the stork.

I would rise in my cradle into the cold air of the bathroom, negotiate myself into the right position and lower myself into the water, pulling on the appropriate strings to turn the motor on and off. Green for Go and red for Stop. Even when I was in the water I had to stay in the harness of the hoist. I would conjure some suds from the soap onto a flannel, then perch the flannel on the end of my stick and poke at the outlying parts of this body, but I was relying more on the power of hot water to magic away dirt than anything else. The bare bones of this routine were familiar from life at Trees, where the bathroom ceiling was also fitted with a rail, but I was used to having help or at least company.

I’m not usually much of a wallower in baths. Experiences at the hands of a sadistic physiotherapist employed at CRX had more or less broken any link for me between bodies of water and peace of mind, though I’d felt safe enough in the pool at Burnham, surrounded by my fellows. My ‘shamming’ in the bath at Trees was never very prolonged, even though I was surrounded by family. It was a sort of trance state, all the same, so much so that I wonder if a spore of language, the word
shaman
, hadn’t been what originally drifted into Dad’s mind. Despite his own best efforts, Dad was rather good at inklings. He preferred not to tune into other people’s awareness, but sometimes he couldn’t help himself.