Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

‘He has better things to do, my lightweight friend. He has important cigarettes to buy.’

‘I can wait.’

‘I thought you couldn’t. Isn’t that what you were just saying?’ He looked hurt. ‘Don’t you trust me?’

‘Your driving can be a bit erratic, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

‘I’ve got the hang of your buggy now. I’m sure of it.’

I broadcast a general appeal. ‘Anybody care to give me a hand to the Gents?’ But Thomas da Silva had already grasped the handles, and we were off. The door to the Gents swung freely, or else it would have been agonising when he used my feet to push it open. I started panicking the moment I saw the wet floor of the Gents. A slippery floor is a death-trap in my book, much more so when I’m landed with an assistant who can hardly stand up himself.

Pure jets of desperation

‘Do you mind if I go first?’ he said. ‘It turns out the need is rather urgent.’ He unzipped his trousers without waiting for an answer. I gritted my teeth somehow as a fierce bolt of liquid escaped him, bouncing noisily against the porcelain of the urinal. ‘I know, I know … not a good lookout for a tie with no Ps on it. But I expect it’ll be all right on the night.’

The pressure of the urine-stream was so intense that like any other substantial fall of water it created a drifting veil of moisture, a fine mist which stung my eyes but cooled the backs of my hands. For a second I was transported back to the sea front at Bognor Regis, on a walk from Mr Johnson’s Home, safe in the care of people who knew what they were doing.

I was so frantic to urinate myself that I had something close to an out-of-the-body experience. I felt I could see myself from above thrashing miserably about in the wheelchair, flailing my arms through their limited arc like a defective clockwork toy, a drummer whose sticks have been taken away. My mundane bladder was churning, and suddenly my astral body leapt upwards. Normally this can only happen in unconsciousness, with the arrival of a dream of knowledge, but I soared above the body on pure jets of desperation.

Then Thomas da Silva finished his business and it was my turn. He came round to the front of the wheelchair, stooped and grabbed me. It’s not a good lifting position. It squashes me, it’s bad for the lifter’s back, there’s nothing to be said in its favour. I never allowed it in normal life, but then I had been not allowing things for almost an hour now without making the slightest impact on what is alleged to be reality. More frightening than being lifted in this way was the prospect of being dumped back in a chair that could easily roll backwards. There was some hope of a safe splashdown if I could at least get him to put the brakes on.

‘Put the Brakes On, Please! … BRAKES! … BRAKES!!’ I bellowed. I tried to pattern my intonation on the nurses at CRX, whose capitals and exclamation marks were palpable in their delivery.

Thomas da Silva didn’t understand, or at least paid no attention. He lifted me roughly, agonisingly, by my armpits and yanked me towards him. There was a moment when his balance faltered, and the wheelchair (with the brakes disengaged) slid sharply backwards away from me. I had a limited choice: either to lean backwards, on the off-chance that the wheelchair, sentimental about our long association, would wait for me, or forward, into the grip of a tottering unmindful drunk. I leant forward with my full two or three stone (which at this stage of my life even Maya assessed at four-and-a-half), and Thomas fell backwards.

This was both a lucky and an unlucky fall, depending on who you were. If you were Thomas da Silva, unlucky, since he fell on his back (unable to break his fall with hands that were fully occupied with me), with his head unpleasantly close to the trough of the urinal. Lucky if you were me, since I landed on top of him. Otherwise I could have been badly injured or even killed. It wouldn’t have taken much to break my neck.

Landing on top of Thomas da Silva’s stomach was like doing a belly-flop onto that fantasy item of the time, a water-bed. The pressurised liquid with which my landing-cushion was filled was beer, of course, and not water, but the same hydrostatic laws applied. We were both winded for the moment, so there was no interference from breathing. The liquid was driven out to the edges of the organism, then surged back rebounding.

My luck was about to change. Thomas took a slow rasping intake of breath, then his insides gave up its struggle to contain what in his folly he had taken in. He gave a groan, and the groan became torrential.

Obviously the jet of vomit didn’t reach the wheelchair, far across the room, and slam it against the opposite wall. That was only the picture in my mind. Now I was experiencing something that was as far from my circumscribed reality as a water-bed. I was riding a roller-coaster. I didn’t like it. I wanted to get off. Though Thomas politely turned his head away from me, I was perched on a set of abdominal muscles which were being trodden on by a huge internal foot, and the violence of the ejection, its muzzle velocity so to speak, was awe-inspiring. From my skewed point of view he was a geyser rather than a human being, a personified hydrant of swill.

I thought it would never stop, and then it did. He was sobbing with the effort of it. Otherwise there was silence, apart from the drip of cisterns refilling. My arms were hurting. I can’t lie flat on my front, the joints don’t permit it.

Up to this point the evening had been a disaster in every way, but now it became something worse. A disgrace. I urinated on Thomas da Silva. There was no element of retaliation involved. I wasn’t saying, You soil me, I soil you . I just couldn’t hold it in. For so long I had been engaged in a battle of wills with my bladder, while no one helped or listened. Now this body had its triumph and my bladder won. Thomas’s vomit had sprayed far and wide, but he had been considerate enough to turn his head away from me. My released urine had nowhere to go but downwards, though capillary action ensured that the cloth of my trousers absorbed its fair share.

And to think I had been worried that the beer-drips on my trousers in the Cambridge Arms would make people think I had pissed myself!

Thomas didn’t move while my bladder added the finishing touches to the tableau of degradation. It seemed highly likely that he had passed out. My mantra flowed more cleanly in my head now that the tempo of events had slowed.

The landlord came wearily into the toilet where the two of us were wallowing in the failure of our bodies to contain themselves. He asked, between his teeth, ‘ Gentlemen, may I have the telephone numbers of your tutors? ’ Then he said, ‘I thought I’d seen everything there was to see in these four fucking walls. But I was wrong about that, wasn’t I, gentlemen?’ The expletive was painful to listen to, since it seemed unhabitual.

A basset-hound with a secret sorrow

He picked me up from the stinking cushion that was Thomas da Silva and propped me competently against a wall. Unfortunately he didn’t hand me my crutch and cane, which would have made me feel less helpless. Was it really likely that I would make a dash for it, if my utensils were left within reach?

The landlord looked from Thomas to me, directing his remarks in my direction, where they might have some effect. ‘If you find you have somehow forgotten those telephone numbers, gentlemen, I’m sure your colleges will be happy to supply them.’ He looked like a man who had come to a decision. To retire from the publican’s dismal trade, perhaps, to sell at a loss or simply walk away. He looked like a basset-hound with a secret sorrow. His breathing was the very respiration of exasperated reproach. Then he stood up and walked out of the urinal. He left us to think about our shortcomings as human beings, though Thomas wasn’t doing much thinking. It wasn’t his style.