Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

Didn’t have the hips for the job

In the meantime, their slogan echoed in my head for the rest of the day. The trouble with such ear-catching formulations is that they’re so vulnerable to rewording. After Two Four Six Eight my mind kept supplying starker conclusions for the couplet.

Cheery Chants Won’t Change Your Fate.

Join and Feel the Force of Hate .

Not to mention: John Will Never Find a Mate .

The red-faced young woman who had taken my address at the Societies Fair tracked me down in my Kenny lair a few days later. She was tiny and elfin, with masses of red hair and many scarves. She wore glasses with octagonal lenses, which were fashionable at the time. I dare say she was modelling her style on Janis Joplin, as so many women did in those days, except that she didn’t have the hips for the job, and somehow I doubted that she’d ever drunk anything stronger than Earl Grey. She did have a lot of vitality, though. She lit up my room like a little auburn bonfire.

‘Oh, hello,’ she said, as if we’d bumped into each other on the street. ‘Good to see you again. I was just wondering — would you like to be part of a Day of Action for disabled people?’

Would I? I didn’t know. What would it involve? I played for time, saying, ‘I really don’t know — some of my best friends were disabled, of course.’ This wasn’t even true, not since the day I had left Vulcan School and started to sink slowly into the mainstream.

She said, ‘You might enjoy it. We’re planning a consciousness-raising event, though actually it may turn into a zap.’

‘Very good. What is a zap?’

‘You really don’t know? Oh, man … a zap is a piece of direct action intended to open people’s eyes and bring about radical change.’

‘Can you give me an example?’

‘Easy. You know the drinks containers there used to be deposits on, so that you could return them and get a refund? Big business wants you to throw away your bottles and buy new ones. So consciousness-raising would be getting everyone to realise that this is wasteful and stupid, and zapping would be dumping, let’s say, a million bottles outside the headquarters of Coca-Cola.’

‘I see.’ The idea of being dumped outside an uncaring institution had a certain appeal. Perhaps this dynamic waif would chain me to the railings outside Downing and set in motion some very overdue radical change. ‘Can you give me some more details?’

‘We plan to do a comprehensive survey of facilities in Cambridge — shop, restaurants, pubs. To see whether disabled people are fairly treated. Whether they can get into those places, for a start.’

I was impressed. It was the first time in Cambridge I’d had any inkling of social consciousness along these lines. ‘And when is it, this day of action?’ I asked.

‘Well, let’s see,’ she said. ‘When are you free?’

That was her way of letting me know another important detail: between us, we were the Day of Action. There was no one else, but I didn’t think that was necessarily a bad thing. It made choosing our Day relatively easy and unbureaucratic. We settled on the next Saturday. She thought a busy day in the shops and the streets made the point about the exclusion of people like me more vividly, and I’d always had trouble solving the problem of the Cambridge Saturday.

Her name was Rebecca. She said she was reading Sociology, and perhaps this was her fieldwork, but that didn’t put me off. I was raring to go, impatient to be excluded from shops I had no interest in entering.

Our first port of call on the Day of Action was W. H. Smith’s in Market Hill. Rebecca wanted to buy a clipboard, to lend a more formal edge to our inspections, but it made sense to treat the shop as our first official port of call. Someone held the door open for us, and Rebecca did her best to get me inside, but the task was beyond her. There wasn’t really a step, more of a ridge, but she was too little and too light to nudge me over. ‘Looks as if we’ve got our first failure to record,’ she said. ‘Wait here.’ What else was I going to do?

By the time Rebecca came back with her clipboard, an assistant from the shop had come over to me. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, and Rebecca answered for me. ‘This young man can’t get into your shop.’

‘Well, that’s easily taken care of, miss. I’ll give him a hand.’

‘And what’s supposed to happen if he doesn’t have a friend with him? How’s he supposed to get help when he’s stranded outside the shop?’

‘I don’t know, miss. He could shout, or ask someone passing by to alert a member of staff.’

‘And how is that supposed to make him feel, when he has to go to such trouble even to get inside?’

How was it supposed to make me feel, come to that, being used as an object lesson in this way? I felt a warm and nasty glow. Shouldn’t I being doing some of the talking? But Rebecca was in full spate. ‘Do you want this young man’s custom or not?’

‘We want it, I expect, up to a point. What is it he wants to buy?’

‘Nothing at the moment, thank you. But I’ve bought one of your sturdy and economical clipboards, and I’m writing down what you say about your disabled customers.’

‘Are you from a newspaper?’

‘No. Why? Do you only care about disadvantaged members of the public when a reporter takes an interest?’

‘Not at all,’ said the assistant, beginning to get angry at last. ‘When this young man wants to make purchase — which isn’t today, apparently — he can rely on our most devoted attention. Thank you!’

‘Thank you !’ barked Rebecca, grabbing the handle of the wheelchair and giving me rather a jolt as we set off to our next targeted business. ‘What a lackey! What a running dog! The sooner everyone like that gets stood up in front of a wall the better for the rest of us!’ She seemed to be in a high good humour, all the same, and looking forward to the next ideological scrap on my behalf.

As we went from place to place we started to vary our approach. Sometimes I would get up out of the wheelchair, with her help, and try to totter in to premises that resisted me with every blue line on the architect’s plans. We got a lot more attention after Rebecca started to mention that she was writing a piece for Broadsheet . It wasn’t much of a lie — it was as hard in those days to get an article rejected by a student newspaper as a poem. If she had ever written such a thing up it would certainly have appeared.

I tried to get a look at Rebecca’s face whenever she was in my line of sight, which was usually at times when she was using me as a reproach to a heartless world of business. I had decided that my first interpretation of her facial redness (the demon drink) had been prejudiced and wrong. Some redheads do have rather brickish complexions, of course, but I was working on a different theory. My diagnostic nose twitched and my pencil burned to label a vial of pillules.

Cashmere tufts of ideology

After a few more skirmishes with lackeys and running dogs I was beginning to get hungry. I wondered which restaurant or café we were going to patronise and upbraid. It seemed fairer, somehow, to be pointing out the defects of establishments we actually wanted to attend, though embarrassment would run much higher in a place that offered atmosphere as much as food and drink.

There was also a budgetary element involved. We couldn’t afford the Blue Boar. In fact we settled for the Corner House on King Street. Rebecca seemed much less committed to the struggle than she had been in the shops that morning, which was partly explained when she said that there was nothing on the menu she could eat, since she was a vegan.