Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

‘No.’

‘Never mind, then.’

‘And did the brutal Establishment crack down as it always does?’

‘Not really. A commission was set up which was more sympathetic to local people and established County Roads Boards instead.’

‘Power to the people,’ I said hopefully, but I think Rebecca had realised that my political consciousness didn’t run either broad or deep.

Her carob bar was more or less Rebecca’s lunch, while if I was still hungry I could always order (for instance) an ice cream — even if it was little better in the moral scheme of things than a candied pig’s trotter, or a bunch of South African grapes visibly dripping with the blood of the oppressed.

Rebecca’s exposition of dietary virtue had distracted us from the main thrust of our Saturday, but in the afternoon we got back into our stride. In fact we made so much of a splash at Joshua Taylor, Cambridge’s poshest department store (universally known as Josh Tosh), that we came rather unstuck. By now our approach had become very slick. Perhaps our lunchtime conversation had put Rebecca back in touch with the preaching intonations of her forebears (though there must be a few Welsh folk without the pulpit in their veins). Meanwhile I had acquired the knack of helplessness — and it’s definitely a knack, whatever anyone tells you. It was only in the afternoon that I got the hang of it. It felt like filling my nappies on principle, long after I’d mastered potty-training. I just looked around as if I’d never seen a door before, as if I’d been protected from the harsh truths of the entrance-way.

Meanwhile Rebecca’s journalistic credentials had escalated from Broadsheet by way of Varsity to the Cambridge Evening News . As she helped me ostentatiously into the trendy-young-man section of the shop, which had a dandyish name all its own — ‘The Peacock’, the shop’s bold response to the vibrant and trendsetting ‘Way In’ men’s department of Harrods — we caused consternation. I don’t think it was because there was nothing in the shop I could conceivably wear, bar a few scarves. Perhaps word had gone round the retailers of Cambridge city centre that a man in a wheelchair and a reporter were asking embarrassing questions.

We didn’t look like what we were, ill-assorted acquaintances enjoying an odd sort of day out under the umbrella of idealistic agitation. We looked like the advance party of a journalistic exposé, preparing the ground for the camera crew. We caused alarm, but it wasn’t too late. We could still be bought off.

A swarm of smart and rather flustered young men surged towards us. This was customer service at the highest pitch of professionalism and nervousness. By the time we left the premises, barely two minutes later, I was clutching in my hand a Joshua Taylor credit note for twenty pounds.

We had set out to make people more aware of the difficulties faced by people in wheelchairs, and ended up doing rather well out of it ourselves. Accidentally we became a protection racket. Up to the very moment the credit note was pressed into my hands, I had no idea we were in the extortion business, and nor (I’m sure) did Rebecca.

I let her keep the credit note. I didn’t feel I had any right to share it — it was like her carob bar. The Day of Action had been her idea, after all. She was much more likely to find something she wanted to buy at Josh Tosh than I was, and when she did she would be able to carry it home with her to Newnham. It cost me a small pang, all the same, to say goodbye to it. It was only money, of course — in fact it wasn’t even money, being a credit note. But twenty pounds went a long, long way in 1971.

When Rebecca had delivered me back to A6 Kenny I didn’t know what I felt, not just about our windfall but about the whole Day of Action. Day of inaction, more like. It was the only day in my life when being disabled was my job, no more and no less. At first this was embarrassing for me, but I grew to enjoy the feeling of being the advance guard of an army of wheelchairs which would trundle smoothly into every last cubicle of the city, glide up every stairwell.

My exclusion gave me a strange sort of authority, and no one thought to ask, ‘What good would ramps do you anyway, John? Unless the gradient is undetectable you’re no good on a slope — you’ll always need assistance anyway. So why all this fuss?’ Now my hectic day of employment was over. I had clocked off, and the difficulties of my daily life no longer stood for anything outside themselves. They lost their audience and their power to stir the soul.

Looking back on it, the strangest part of the day was the little squabble over Rebecca’s name at lunch. It was as if I felt threatened in my niche (what niche? I didn’t have any such thing!). Some part of me seemed to think that a gay occidental Hindu with Still’s Disease was beaten at his own game by a Welsh-speaking vegan named after transvestite rioters, soundly thrashed in the struggle for supremely specialised status.

We’re all in the same minority. Minority of one. That’s what Maya tells us, anyway.

I tried to keep in touch with Rebecca. It would have been nice if she had kept in touch with me, but perhaps the credit note stood between us. I couldn’t do anything about that. All I could do was invite her to dinner, though it meant taking a lot of trouble. I had to find a non-dairy meal which was worth eating, for one thing, and that could be assembled using no more elaborate equipment than the frying pan banned in Kenny. The most alluring dish I could come up with was imam bayildi , or ‘the imam swooned’ — an aubergine stew with a lot of garlic in it, so fragrant that the imam (the legend has it) swooned when he opened the lid of the pot. I would have loved to see what effect it had on a vegan sociologist. It wasn’t a practical meal, though — it needed more than a frying pan.

My major discoveries at Cambridge were Thomas Mann and the aubergine. Hard to estimate their relative importance, but I think the aubergine wins on points. Only a madman would read Buddenbrooks every day, or even every month, while a regular intake of aubergine is entirely sane.

I decided on a rice-and-aubergine improvisation with some cashew nuts in it for the contrast of crunch, stained the dish with tomatoes, turmeric and chilli (the purple-grey of cooked aubergine is its least attractive feature), a sort of Indo-paella or Ibero-biryani, and I invited Rebecca by way of the college post, giving her a choice of dates and times.

Other people’s social lives, I can see, involve the fluent exchange of little favours. Come to dinner — no, we came to you last time, come to us. Fine as long as the difficulties are equal for both parties. It seems natural that I should always be the guest, but only to other people. This body is a bad host, but I’m not. So I periodically move mountains to set a modest plateful before an acquaintance. It’s either that or break off the friendship before it has a chance to get established.

Not bleeding intracranially the slightest bit

If I’m only ever a guest then I’m a charity case, and I won’t have that. Why shouldn’t I be charitable too? Let’s forget for a moment that from another perspective ‘I’ am as unreal as the body whose limitations I disparage. A dream hunger requires dream food — a dream cut requires a dream bandage — dream sociability requires a dream party. Still, at this time I sometimes felt like the social equivalent of a Doodlemaster machine, trying to construct the flowing shapes of a connected life out of the bare straight lines of what was possible for me, the fiddly intractable knobs that leave only horizontal and vertical traces.

Then on the appointed day Rebecca didn’t turn up. I waited an hour and a half, and then mounted an expedition to the Porter’s Lodge to phone Newnham. I said it was an emergency, which it could easily have been. It seemed perfectly likely that Rebecca had tripped in the bathroom and was lying there on the floor with a subdural hæmatoma, leaking her life away. Why else would she miss her appointment with a vegan paella? A Newnham porter was sent to rout her out. Eventually she came to the phone herself, not bleeding intracranially in the slightest bit. ‘Sorry sorry sorry,’ she said in a tone of voice that carried more exasperation than regret.