Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

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 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.