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.
There was nothing irretrievable about the situation, or there wouldn’t have been if she hadn’t gone on to say, in the same grudging tone of voice, ‘I knew there was something I had to do.’ That tore it. That ripped up the social contract and threw the scraps in my face with a sneer. It turned out that having dinner with me was something Rebecca ‘had to do’, like getting vaccinated or going to the dentist. From her point of view my paella, so carefully considered that it was like thought itself on a plate, tender thought sending up its fragrant steam, was no more than a chore. And that was really the end of Rebecca as far as I was concerned, and veganism was tainted by association. I might reap the benefit of a calf’s stomach-scrapings from time to time, and indeed I eat honey without giving much thought to the sorrows of the bees who made it, but at least if you invite me to dinner I turn up.
It was her loss — particularly as I’d done a little research into the homœopathic remedies for facial reddening. I could have worked wonders, and now we’ll never know.
The Day of Action for disabled people was the high point of my political involvement as an undergraduate. It’s true that I signed a petition of protest when it turned out that the college kitchen was serving South African cling peaches, supposedly blacklisted at the docks but brought into the country hugger-mugger by scab labour on barges, but that was about as engaged as I got.
Those were great years for revolutionary behaviour by students, for demos and sit-ins, but I was largely a spectator. I didn’t really subscribe to the reality of the world we were supposed to be changing. I wasn’t profoundly opposed, either, just unconvinced that there was any point in using Maya to fight Maya. On one occasion, though, I got caught up in quite a dust-up.
I don’t even remember what the issue was. I may never have known, and I dare say I wasn’t the only one to be storming the barricades without much clue about the nature of our cause. In the wheelchair I was a fellow-traveller by definition. Oh, we were against oppression, against discrimination, for liberty and the people, but as for what it was actually about, well, search me.
All I knew was that without any active decision I was being pushed along Kings Parade as part of a large and vocal crowd. We were shouting, ‘Down with —’ something. We were strongly opposed to something. And we wanted something too. When did we want it? We wanted it now. We were all agreed on that.
Then the crowd parted in front of me to reveal Graëme Beamish, looking distinctly anxious, asking if he could have a word. He was wearing a gown but it hung down unevenly from his shoulders. I imagine there’s just the one size. I was startled, but had no control over the momentum of the group. Graëme had to keep up with us as best he could, shouting in my ear as we trundled along in our cavalcade of slogans. ‘I wonder if you realise, John,’ he shouted, ‘that you make rather a potent mascot for any cause that chooses to brandish you? I would take it as a personal favour if you took no further part in this “demo”. Just say the word and I will deliver you back to your room.’