As I watched Benedict’s little act, my own upper lip curled spontaneously upwards. It’s possible I looked mildly demented. Then he gave a sharp upward nod which dislodged the cigarette. He caught it smoothly in his mouth and lit it.
‘Don’t worry, we’re only doing a practice run today. Peeing permitted.’ I was glad of that, since the half-pint of Abbot had run swiftly through my system and was now anxious to move on.
A citizen’s arrest had already taken place
I watched his smoking style admiringly. Benedict caught my eye, smiled, and then ran the lighted tip of his cigarette, with agonising slowness, across the palm of his hand, just where it met the bottom of his fingers. He never stopped smiling. Then he winked at me.
Thomas da Silva leant towards me and breathed admiringly, ‘Benny has the hardest calluses on the river. Isn’t he remarkable?’ No doubt, but this was not a party trick I coveted.
‘To be frank,’ Benedict went on, ‘we’ve done a certain amount of practice in private before this dummy run. Don’t expect too much from us. We’re not after a record time.’ He lifted the stopwatch from my chest and took a look at it. ‘Tempus fuckit, men! Time to go!’ He left the watch where it was, though, around my neck. He seemed to have forgotten it.
Thomas da Silva had finished his pint and now pointed a finger at mine, which of course I hadn’t touched. ‘Have you finished with that, old man?’ I nodded and he picked it up. ‘You’re sure?’ He drank it in one long gulp while Benny looked on admiringly. ‘Our secret weapon,’ he said proudly.
‘Don’t forget your stopwatch,’ I said. ‘How do you mean?’ he said. Then they were off.
We were off, rather. Of course they hadn’t forgotten the stopwatch. They hadn’t left anything behind. They were taking the stopwatch (and me) with them. I barely managed to grab the crutch and the cane.
‘You chose the cox, Wop,’ said Benedict. ‘You can drive him.’
Thomas da Silva wasn’t in a fit state to drive anything. He was young and strong and clueless, ‘unsafe at any speed’ as a famous book title of the time put it. He was topping up his bloodstream with alcohol faster than a dozen livers plumbed in parallel could have hoped to clear it. He pulled the wheelchair roughly free of the pub’s furniture and charged the door with it.
From behind me came a muffled cry of ‘Oi! What the hell are you doing?’ Kerry was registering a protest. But what could he do — leave his post at the bar to give chase? Make a citizen’s arrest of the whole bladdered squad? A citizen’s arrest had already taken place on those premises, and I was the party apprehended.
Pushing a wheelchair isn’t much of a knack — say I, who have never done it — but it does require two things that Thomas was past managing. One: coördination. Two: attentiveness to the mental state of the passenger. Within seconds of propelling me on to the street, he gave the wheelchair a wild turn and came within an inch of ramming my car with my ankylosed feet. Mine! My car! My car as well as my feet.
Though there were footplates on the chair for once, my feet projected beyond them, and my own bodywork would have sustained as much damage as the Mini’s panels. I shouted out ‘That’s my car!’, but already Thomas was bouncing me at speed down King Street. He pressed down on the handles, with the result that the small front wheels reared up, and I reared up with them. Not for the first time, I thought of Luke Squires’s wheelchair at Vulcan, and the great advantages of having the small wheels at the back. From Thomas da Silva’s point of view, our progress may only have been a disorderly trot. From mine it was a boneshaking slalom.
When we came to the next pub — I never saw its name — Thomas da Silva would have used me as a battering ram on the door if I hadn’t screamed to alert him. He seemed to think that every pub door in Cambridge, however solidly built and firmly closed, was actually one of those hinged-slat arrangements you see in saloons in Westerns. He was in a Wild West of the mind, striding towards the high noon of alcoholic meltdown, but it was my feet that would have bitten the dust if he had gone through with his original plan. My hips had been operated on, but my knees still had no play in them, so my feet led the whole demented parade. They had no choice. There was nowhere I could stow them out of harm’s reach. It wasn’t much of a help that I had managed to grab the crutch and the cane. There was no point in me using them to guard my feet. In the event of an impact they would simply be rammed into my upper body.
Write Off Tuesday
Luckily the rest of the disordered group caught up with us, and Benedict opened the pub door courteously enough to admit the wheelchair. Of the group he was the one who still seemed on speaking terms with his wits. I decided it was him I must cajole and address if I had any hope of release.
The air in the new pub was sour. Emptying the ashtrays was clearly a chore that was left till after closing time. It was more crowded, and our erratic group ended up being crushed in a corner. I cringed as Thomas pushed me across the space, cheerfully calling out, ‘Mind your backs!’ The tables didn’t sit true, so that when Benedict plonked a fresh round of monstrous pints in front of me, beer slopped over and dripped onto my lap. There would only have been a few drops if I had been able to get out of the way, but I had to sit there while the rest of the little puddle followed at its leisure. Even a fair-minded person glancing at my trouser-front would assume I had lost control of my bladder.
I tried a sidelong whisper at the member of the group who seemed marginally the most trustworthy. ‘Benedict …?’
‘Yes, Mr Cox.’
‘Who are you? I mean, who are you, as a group?’
‘We’re Write Off Tuesday.’
‘And Write Off Tuesday is what?’
‘All the splendid intellectual specimens you see around you. A total of eight.’
‘Aren’t you seven?’
‘Really? Then we’ve lost one. Explains why there keeps on being one pint left over. Not that Wop minds. He’ll always tidy up. He’s good that way. Tidy boy.’
‘Yes, but who are you all? What is the nature of your group?’
‘Well, we were recently described, by the Master of Peterhouse no less, as a right-wing think-tank …’ I knew just enough about politics to understand that this was quite an accolade. In any assessment of academic figures at the time the Master of Peterhouse would rank as an exemplary figure, a reactionary’s reactionary. Then Benedict seemed to reconsider, almost going cross-eyed from the effort of dredging up the memory, and corrected himself: ‘Hold on. Not a think-tank … a right-wing drink-tank.’
‘And what does it mean, to “write off” a day of the week?’
‘You skip it altogether. You make sure it leaves no trace on the memory. Don’t you agree that Tuesday is an inherently boring day?’
I thought I had found a flaw in his argument, and asked as gently as I could, ‘You do know today is Monday?’
‘Yes. Another culpably drab day.’
‘So you’re writing off Monday?’
‘No, my dear Cox, you’ve missed the point completely. Try to pay attention. It’s all to do with preparation. Preparation is the key. To write off Tuesday effectively you have to start the day before. If Monday is properly squashed Tuesday doesn’t even begin.’
‘I see.’ By this time Thomas da Silva had moved off, perhaps to visit the Gents — a place I myself needed to visit — so I was able to concentrate hypnotically on Benedict. ‘Would you mind moving that ashtray away from me? The smell makes me feel rather sick.’ It seemed to make sense to impose my will on him in small matters before brokering my separation from the group, just as a conjuror will make coins disappear before tackling doves or elephants.