I felt a little guilty about having driven Stevie from the dorm, if that was what I had done. He was an athetoid spastic, unable to control his movements, and Julian was much quieter company. No question about it, there was a certain amount of relief.
It wasn’t just the charger. None of the wiring was reliable. At Vulcan we were always having our own power cuts, on top of the general ones. Once one happened in the middle of the night. People went on sleeping. What else would they do? Why bother to wake up, just to find that the lights aren’t working?
Paul Dandridge, a year senior to me, slept on in his dorm like everyone else. The difference was that he started to die the moment the power went off. He was the severe polio case who did ‘frog-breathing’ during the day. He literally swallowed air — with a distinctly froggy expression — instead of breathing as other people did. At night, of course, he couldn’t swallow air the way he could during the day. When he fell asleep his breathing would stop, so at night he was connected to a respirator.
The respirator made no sound when the power went off. Just the opposite. Its hum and swish died away. The dorm was quieter than it had ever been since Paul arrived. Paul just stopped breathing — or rather, he didn’t start. It was all very peaceful. Then Abadi Mukherjee, in the next bed, woke up.
Not only did he wake up, he understood immediately what was happening. Only a few seconds had passed without power, but already amnesia was killing Paul in his bed. He was dying of forgetting to breathe. Nothing had replaced the mechanical wheeze of the respirator that had stopped, not Paul’s day-time gulping, let alone the smooth rise and fall of a normal boy’s sleeping chest. Abadi had very little time to reverse this trend of dying.
In a way, though, it wasn’t all that dramatic. He didn’t need to give Paul the kiss of life or anything. All he had to do was wake him up, so that he could be reminded to breathe. Abadi didn’t even need to get out of bed to do it. His polio was much less severe than Paul’s, but he couldn’t simply spring out of bed. Just as well he didn’t need to. All he had to do was shout, for Paul to live.
After that night they became inseparable. From being friends among other friends they became a consecrated couple. What could be more natural? Even if Paul Dandridge was poor and from the East End of London, and Abadi Mukherjee was very rich. His parents, they who ran the Appa Corporation in Bombay, paid full fees for him. In effect Abadi became Paul’s primary carer, despite being so very far from AB status himself, and it was a job he did very well.
All this was completely marvellous, and I did rather resent it. Although Abadi was a year above me, we had always had wonderful chats, particularly on scientific themes. Abadi took sugar in his tea, for instance, while I didn’t, and he had the idea that there is a moment when you withdraw the spoon after stirring when the tea eddies faster than ever. He wouldn’t be persuaded that this was a violation of natural law, acceleration in the absence of propulsion. We had a lot of fun wrangling over that.
Averages and statistics were also fertile grounds for debate. I told him that if a single person was immortal, that would be enough to raise the life expectancy of the whole human race to infinity. This is perfectly true (nought and infinity always make sums wonky and mystical), though he wouldn’t have it. But now he didn’t have time for me and my quibbles. His bond with Paul was all the go.
If I had my nose put out of joint by the intensity of the new bond between Paul and Abadi, it was only partly because I was cheated of a few satisfying quibbles. On a more general level the whole thing seemed so very unfair. Ideal friendship on a base of mutual self-sacrifice was just what I’d always longed for, and had looked for specifically in my experience of Vulcan School, and now somebody else had got it instead of me. There was even the element of class contrast for which I had always hankered, though Granny would hardly have recognised Abadi, heir of merchant princes, as an upper person.
I was always trying to imagine how I could behave on a large unselfish scale despite my un-coöperative body, and now Abadi had had heroic action served up to him on a plate. It had been so easy for him. Wake up, and shout. I was considerably more disabled than Abadi, but even I could have done that. It was as if I had been cheated. How hard was it to notice that a respirator had gone quiet, anyway? Paul’s respirator wasn’t a full-body one, the famous iron lung, fully enclosing the patient. It was something called a cuirass respirator, and it was powered by a modified vacuum cleaner. All Abadi had done was notice when a vacuum cleaner stopped roaring in his ear. I managed to forget, for the greater purpose of drumming up a grievance, how deeply I slept myself.
It was as if someone had snaffled all the soft centres from the existential chocolate box, and I began to feel very sorry for myself. I was useless. I couldn’t have a simple spy camera installed in my head without getting my knees hurt.
I was coming down with a particularly virulent strain of self-pity, a common condition in early adolescence. Who really cared about me? Who would miss me if I just disappeared? And why did I have to do history when I was no good at it?
I wasn’t even going to be made a prefect. In books about schools you could be a prefect as long as you were good at lessons and loyal to the spirit of school. At Vulcan you could only be a prefect if you were an AB, or at least a lot more able-bodied than me. It was so unfair. It was unfair to umpteen decimal places.
Peek Frean Peek Frean
On top of which I had been let down by the pen-friend I had been assigned, so that I could polish my German while she improved her English. We had only just started our correspondence, and her English was very formal. She sent her warmest compliments to my esteemed parents, for some unknown reason. Still, I thought we had a lot going for us as pen-friends. She was called Waltraut Bzdok. I imagine her family was originally Czech or Polish. I absolutely loved the name. In my bed-rest years I had hated the way words when you repeated them lost all meaning. The words on the biscuit tin just dissolved with repetition, as surely as if they had been bodily dunked in tea. Peek Frean Peek Frean. Waltraut Bzdok was different. She was immune to the Peek Frean effect. However often you said her name to yourself, it retained its gritty integrity. Cross-braced by all those sturdy consonants, it ran no risk of dissolving. That name was like a piece of heavy engineering, scoring highly on both tensile and compressive strength. It was impervious.
We were getting on so well I decided to send her a present to seal our friendship. I bought some shampoo from the village shop. Then the postmaster spoiled everything by saying I wasn’t allowed to put something in the post that might leak.
We had a hideous sort of conversation, which went like this:
POSTMASTER: ‘What is the nature of your package?’
JOHN (sings out happily): ‘I’m sending some shampoo to my pen-friend in Germany. She’s called Waltraut. Waltraut Bzdok. I think her family may have come from Czechoslovakia originally.’
POSTMASTER: ‘International postal regulations prohibit the despatch of items other than those certified leak-proof. They endanger legitimate packages.’
JOHN (doubtfully): ‘Perhaps I could wrap them up better? Pad them somehow? With tissue paper?’
POSTMASTER: ‘Send bath cubes. Girls like bath cubes. Even German girls must like bath cubes.’
I couldn’t out-run his decision, even though Mum always said that if you were a lady bath cubes made you go itchy between the legs. I bought some anyway, once my finances had recovered from the extravagance of buying shampoo I couldn’t send.
The postmaster must have been right about what girls liked, because Waltraut was thrilled. She wrote a letter saying that when she opened the parcel she thought that she would have been dreaming. I should tell her everything about myself. To begin, where was I studying at school?