When Graëme answered the phone, there was no trace of his stuffy academic manner. Was this a delayed effect of his sabbatical? If so, it had brought about a miracle cure. He gave plain answers to plain questions. If he had appeared to me in this version from the start I would have known where I stood with him at every point. We need not have struggled to find a wave-length. Unfortunately the reason for the transformation was that he had washed his hands of me.
He listened as I started an outline of the predicament I was in and then said, ‘John, I must interrupt. I’m not your moral tutor. You’re no longer an undergraduate. New rules apply. Do you make this appeal as a friend?’
‘Well … yes, Dr Beamish,’ I said, suddenly stricken. ‘As a friend.’
‘I have some friends among my ex-tutees, but I can’t honestly say you qualify as one of them. I have found you very difficult to deal with. Impossible to satisfy. It can’t be such a good idea to make it so hard for people to help you. That was your choice, though, and friendship didn’t come into it. I hope you find some way out of your difficulties, but I’m not the one to help you. Goodbye, John.’
At least I knew now how he explained himself to himself. I was difficult to deal with! I made it hard for people to help me!
I seemed to have very little talent as an exploiter of disability. I couldn’t seem to live up to its full potential as a way of manipulating people. Almost anyone else, apparently, would have made a better job of it. I lacked talent.
In some separate, safely seething part of my brain I planned a Day of Action — Day of Inaction — when everyone who had ever told me how to live my life was strapped into the wheelchair, glued to the crutch and the cane, and given as much time as they needed to show me exactly where I was going wrong.
The college reluctantly agreed to look after my stuff — a modest hoard by most standards but still far beyond my power to move or muster. It all went into store in some Downing cellar or outbuilding until I had somewhere to put it: the Parker-Knoll, the record player, the lava lamp, my frying pan, records and books. I would have liked them to chuck the lava lamp away, to be honest, but I could hardly ask them to sort through my things as well as store them. It was a relief to feel my belongings were in safe hands. Well, safe-ish. I never saw that copy of Kiss Kiss again.
Dormant in the academic dark
My property had a home, even if I didn’t. A couple of times in the past I had been treated as paraphernalia myself, on a par with luggage or furniture. I had travelled free of charge by train to hear The Who do their stuff, and I had been toted up Arunachala for a consultation with the Cow Goddess. I wasn’t lucky this third time, otherwise I’d have been stowed below ground for a few days with no harm done, a little human mushroom dormant in the academic dark, waiting for the moment to fling its billion spores into the future.
I would have to ‘manage on my own’ for three days. For three nights. What did the council think I had been doing for the last three years? Living off the fat of the land?
I still had the Greek tapestry bag which had let out all the secrets and illusions, Pandora’s bag with its embroidered lambda. I put in it the absolute necessities of life, pee bottle, photograph of Ramana Maharshi, wash bag. Breath mints, to make a better impression if I had to crank down the car window (it would take about ten minutes, so I’d have plenty of time to pop in a mint) in answer to a policeman’s polite tap on the glass.
I had three fifty-pence coins and a pair of two-pence pieces — a grand total of £1.54.
I parked the car somewhere quiet and inconspicuous. A side road off Victoria Avenue. I draped the Dream-Cloud round me as best I could and dozed off, exhausted by the stressful efforts of the day. It was July, but I was uncomfortable and by this stage considerably under weight. I kept waking up in the night freezing cold, and I would have to turn on the engine so as to reap the benefit of the heater. The windows were steamed with my recirculating breath. All in all, it was like waking up inside the lung of someone recently dead.
Running the engine without moving an inch burned valuable petrol, but after a few minutes at least the inside of the Mini felt more welcoming, an environment marginally able to support life.
Minis aren’t luxurious vehicles — they’re not intended for longterm occupancy. Mr Issigonis, despite Granny’s admiring comments, couldn’t do everything. I ached from the restrictions of posture, and it’s not as if I have a wide range of viable positions at my disposal in the first place. It would be just my luck to come through years of enforced immobility with the tissue more or less intact, and then to get bedsores from a few nights of sleeping rough. Normal life is abrasive. I don’t want a cocoon but I need a cushion. I can only stand so much of what is called ‘normal wear and tear’.
While I waited for the engine to warm up I would tune the radio to the World Service for a bit of company, some bulletins on fresh developments in the Kali Yuga. The car was very untidy, which is what happens when you give lifts to students, those tireless subcontractors of entropy. There were scattered sweet papers and crushed cigarette packets more or less everywhere. There was a sweet smell hinting at an abandoned apple core, but after a while the smell of urine from my pee bottle put that upstart aroma in its place.
Solitude in a cold car at night promotes introspection. I considered my progress. My life had opened up, as I had so much desired it to do, and then in just a few years it had contracted again, to what seemed to be, at this exact moment, some sort of vanishing point. I hadn’t expected a degree to give me the freedom of the city, let alone the world, but there must be some advantage to having one. Nevertheless the dimensions of my living accommodation, newly graduated as I was after gaining as much education as world-famous Cambridge University was willing to dispense, had a volume amounting to something between 127 and 134 cubic feet. Call it 130. Learning to drive had always been part of my plan, and I had made it happen with help from the late John Griffiths, and despite everything my fellow road users, notably Michael Aspel (not late whatever the cost) could throw at me. It had never been part of the plan for the car to become, in this eternal interim, my only home.
Here it was
There was no bottom to the vessel of disappointment, no end to its pouring out. The fountain of disillusionment has an infinite cubic capacity, and there is no slaking the thirst for an anti-climax. I was bathed and sluiced down by living streams of negation, the metaphysical liquids freely gushing from their transfinite tank, disappointment that can never run dry, a cataract of revealed futility.
Disappointment is a form of grace, and I was blessed beyond all expectation. I was no more than a stray eyelash which the unobserving world would never know it had shed, unmissed ciliary casualty, cedilla without a c to hang from. In some way this must have been what I wanted. I had made it clear from the start that it was important for me to confront the world on equal terms. Nothing else would satisfy me. I had waited a long time for the day when there would be no safety-nets, and here it was.
About the Author
Adam Mars-Jones has published two books of stories (Lantern Lecture and Monopolies of Loss), two novels (The Waters of Thirst and