The next time I was up to the chore of creating my surroundings, I was in Addenbrookes Hospital with an unfamiliar man, formally dressed, sitting on a chair by my bed.
I don’t remember the fall itself, nothing from the moment of being routed out of the library and heading towards the stairs. If I try to force my memory all I get is an academic version of the Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin, with the shiny shoes of faceless proctors replacing the implacable boots of the Tsar’s soldiers, the wheelchair standing in for the baby-carriage as it bounces helplessly down. Of course it didn’t happen that way — I wasn’t in the wheelchair, and there was no massacre on the Senate House steps. There was no massacre on the Odessa Steps either, for that matter, but there is now. That’s just the way Maya works.
My heart was on its last legs
The slightly daunting man by my bed introduced himself by saying, ‘I’m one of your nasty proctors.’ Which made me feel a little queasy and a little guilty too. My voice sounded very tinny when I answered, as protocol demanded, ‘And I’m one of your revolting students.’ Was he a guard or an interrogator-in-waiting? Perhaps my tutor had told him to hold me fast until he came in wrath.
My next concern was for the wheelchair and what had happened to it, but there it was beside my bed. This was a lesson in itself: the wheelchair had followed me to my new address like a faithful pet. My shoes too had made their own way. It all went to prove one of Ramana Maharshi’s favourite teachings, that self-enquiry is the only priority. Everything else takes care of itself.
They wanted to keep me in Addenbrookes for a night or two, under observation, but I didn’t see the fun in that. They did an ECG, which I consented to — for all the good it would do them. An ECG is all very fine, but it’s a standard procedure designed to measure a standard organ. What else could it be? But my heart is not standard. My heart is my own. Under my first diagnosis, of rheumatic fever, there was worry that my heart would be permanently damaged by the infection I was supposed to have.
Under my second diagnosis that worry was made moot. As my joints began to follow new laws during the ill-advised period of bedrest, the chest cavity was squeezed and skewed, and the heart followed suit. My heart has adjusted to new conditions, but it’s anyone’s guess how well it has maintained its functions. My diaphragm, the heart’s body habitus, is irregularly shaped, which makes the echoes hard to interpret. I have yet to meet a specialist who could decide from my ECG readings whether my heart was on its last legs or likely to beat its little drum another billion times. We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we? Household items seem to know when their guarantees run out. Perhaps I’ll feel the existential twinge which in a washingmachine immediately precedes the outpour of dirty water onto the kitchen floor.
I couldn’t wait to get out of Addenbrookes, mainly because my digestion demanded it. The wheelchair had followed me to hospital, not so the loo chair, and I badly needed to defæcate. Nurses are all very well, some of them even know their business, but I’d rather do my business in my own way.
The disturbances were serious enough for the university to commission a report into them. It commented with displeasure on dis order ‘during which a student was injured’. That’s me. If you can’t make the headlines, at least make the footnotes. It’s my only real presence in the official record between the rites of passage of matriculation and graduation, and I’m being used as a stick to beat my radical generation. No mention of the fact that it was the university’s own crackdown which caused the incident. We were snoozing happily in the library before then, safe and sound. Even without the report, though, my telephone would have been back in its original category, as far as Graëme Beamish was concerned. A lost cause. And Cambridge is not the natural home of lost causes — Oxford claims that distinction.
During the Easter holidays, in consultation with Peter, I decided it was time to try the substance which had fascinated me for so long, mescaline, which was on offer in a local pub. It would be silly to have my heart conk out with my curiosity still unsatisfied.
We had done a lot of research, one way or another. Peter wasn’t much of a reader, but I had read bits of The Doors of Perception to him, and he had spent the previous summer hitch-hiking round California and asking a lot of questions. He volunteered to be my psychedelic chaperone, and I could think of no one better for the job. I felt entirely safe with Peter, and it made sense for him to see the effects of the drug at close hand before he slipped into the unknown himself.
We decided to avoid Easter week itself. Even if you think you’re not a believer, that story is so strong that it’s bound to percolate into your opened mind, even if you avoid, say, Good Friday and Easter Sunday. You’d better not be playing on the railway when the express comes through, or your consciousness will be flattened like the pennies we used to leave on the tracks.
We secured our supply well ahead of time. It was mescaline I was after. LSD-25 sounded exactly like what it was, something made in a laboratory, lacking any tradition of use, an industrial product originally intended for a different purpose and opportunistically diverted when it turned out to have surprising properties. This hardly corresponded to my sense of the sacred. I wanted a proper rite of passage, dissolving the appearances and inducting me into a higher order of meaning, not some brute of a rocket which would twang me up into the mental sky to find my own way home.
Luckily there was a dealer at the Castle pub in Windsor who supposedly sometimes had mescaline. I didn’t have a sense of wrong-doing, so there was no frisson about being a stone’s throw away from the Queen’s residence. I would have liked her blessing on the enterprise.
The dealer in the pub was rather ratty-looking and couldn’t keep his eyes still. ‘Not here, not here,’ he muttered, and led the way to the lavs. Peter had spoken a lot about the importance of setting for the encounter with hallucinatory reality, but the same rules applied, I felt, more generally. My ingrained sense of the integrity of an event made me sit through all the end-titles of films. Why would it be content with a drug experience that began in furtiveness and indignity? I wanted solemnity, if not priests in robes then some closer approximation to masonic regalia than a greatcoat with some buttons missing.
I had to generate the sense of sacrament more or less single-handed, though Peter was sympathetic from behind the handles of the wheelchair. ‘What do you have for me?’ I asked gravely, but the only answer I got was ‘Two for a pound.’
‘Is this mescaline?’
‘Yeah, yeah, good stuff. How many d’you want? Two for a pound.’
‘Two doses, please.’
‘Is that two or four, then?’
‘Er … two, please. Pay the gentleman, Peter.’ The moment the money had changed hands, our friend grabbed a piece of hard Izal toilet paper from the cubicle and screwed it up round two little pills. Then he shoved the tawdry little packet into Peter’s hand and scarpered. It was all a far cry from the enlightened heyday of the Catholic church in Mexico, the slices of peyote button offered up in all reverence at Communion long ago.
Peripheral swirling
On the day itself I would trust Peter to choose a suitable spot, scenic and not too frequented. He was the one in the family who was best at buying birthday cards — from a young age he had been able to match the image to the person perfectly, and this was really only an extension of that. We had decided that the Tan-Sad was the suitable vehicle. It was better suited than a wheelchair to rough ground, and we were mindful of all the horror stories about people having ‘trips’ who thought they could fly and threw themselves off buildings. Once I was in the Tan-Sad I wasn’t going to throw myself anywhere.