Adult essence
By this time my mind was no longer entirely a child’s, and my body was making the same pilgrimage towards maturity. My orgasms weren’t as dry as they had once been. They had begun to produce a few pearls. The adult essence didn’t make its appearance suddenly, from one day to the next, and dribbles could be dissipated. Creamier compounds could be rubbed over the hands until they disappeared. Although there were obsessive hawks in the school, none was so vigilant or well-trained as to spot minor signs like the dandruff snowflakes fluttering from a boy’s hands …
A lot of the time the fibres of my pyjama trousers simply absorbed the distillate, which turned them crisp and made the matrons frown. It’s true I collected Redoxon Effervescent 1000 mg tubes from my blood brother Trevor Burbage, Trevor the unsinkable, the human suitcase with the riding hat. Purely in the interest of science I would sometimes shut myself away with a Redoxon tube, so as to decant the seminal treasure, what little there was of it. I’d stopper it up and keep it in my pocket to see what happened to it over time. The results were not pleasing.
So there was sexual practice, in the form of these solitary adventures, and there was sexual theory, in the form of the nightly play, now inconceivably orgiastic. Apart from that single night in the Blue Dorm there was no convergence between the two.
In any given week so many cowboys and foreign visitors had played with my bosoms and emptied their testicle consommé into my ravenous vagina, that I was a little bored with it all. We had worked our way through every possible heterosexual permutation. What changed the proceedings was a troubling new presence in the audience.
Soon after flicker-book night in the Blue Dorm, Roger Stott told me he was being moved out. ‘They say it’s temporary, just for a week,’ he said. He was rather cast down by it, as if he was being punished for something done wrong. I asked who was being moved in. Luke Squires, that’s who, and he wasn’t even an AB.
Luke Squires was mildly spastic and in the year above us. I’d seen him around — he certainly stood out. There was something about the way he handled his wheelchair that was absolutely distinctive. It seemed to glide him from place to place, and to arrive perfectly smoothly wherever he wanted to be.
Anything that could be done in a wheelchair Luke could do outstandingly well. He was something of a sports star at Vulcan, equally gifted at basketball (a certainty for the school team at the Stoke Mandeville games) and wheelchair shinty, a game which seemed entirely unburdened with rules. Normally it’s paraplegics who have the wheelchair sports pretty much sewn up, having the strong working arms needed to generate speed and power.
The Vulcan team enjoyed challenging the staff, whom they thrashed on a regular basis, as they did any able-bodied team rash enough to borrow wheelchairs and accept a challenge. The home team’s familiarity with the chairs gave them a huge advantage. All this sporting activity had no great appeal to me personally, I mean as a spectator, but at least it wasn’t absurdly contrived, as some sports events at the school were. Watching one boy attempting what was called archery, when in fact someone else was holding the bow and he had to be pulled bodily backwards in his wheelchair to draw it, it was hard to see where exactly the element of sport lay. It would have made as much sense to catapult him forward, using the tension stored up in the bow, as it did to pretend he was firing it. It might also have been more fun.
It was hard to believe that Luke’s lower body wasn’t under the same control as his upper, but of course it wasn’t so. When he got up from the wheelchair he could hardly stand. He wasn’t athetoid — his spasms weren’t dramatic — but his movements were greatly impaired.
In a gulch of the badlands
I had a pow-wow with Julian about how I should behave in Luke’s presence. I could hardly stop leading the night’s radio play of erotic adventures, but I’d surely get into trouble if I carried on in the usual way.
‘I can tell you one thing,’ said the boy agent QM, ‘— I don’t think much of La Willis’s tactics. She’s being very obvious. You can’t just parachute a spy into enemy territory without papers or any sort of cover story.’
Julian was spy-mad, but that didn’t mean he was wrong in this case. It was very clear that a spy was what Luke Squires was. He was trusted by Miss Willis, and he was being sent to discover just what boyish-high-spirits were getting up to, amid the excited murmuring after lights-out. I just didn’t know what to do. Acting normally would mean putting on a pornographic vaudeville in which Miss Willis herself, lightly transposed to a brothel in a gulch of the badlands (what was a gulch? what were badlands?), did a star turn.
For once Julian couldn’t advise me. ‘I can’t get through to HQ,’ he solemnly told me. ‘I think the signal’s being jammed. Of course there’s always a possibility that Squires is a double agent anyway.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Let’s just say he might not be as reliable as the Willis seems to think. I’ve heard of a few interesting messages being intercepted from the lift-shaft.’
Hold on! Hadn’t I made that up, the stuff about the message drop in the lift? As so often with Julian Robinson, I began to lose track of the distinction, arbitrary anyway, between fantasy and the other thing.
Julian told me that in the absence of guidance from HQ he accepted full responsibility for whatever I decided to do — but I couldn’t help feeling that this came to the same thing as his washing his hands of me. He also warned me that if contact was re-established by lights-out, HQ would be listening in to the show for once. Normally the privacy of the dorm after bed-time was respected, and the tape-recorder in my head was de-activated. I’d insisted on HQ’s word of honour about that. Tonight, though, was too significant an occasion for the privilege of privacy from surveillance to stand.
I made one last attempt to disentangle myself from Julian’s fantasies. I didn’t know who was a spy in what sense (and for who?), what was a game and what might not be.
‘Julian,’ I said, ‘what happens to the tapes in my head? When they’re full up, and HQ needs to listen to them?’
‘They get changed while you’re asleep.’
‘Then there’s another agent in the dorm, isn’t there? You’re not the senior operative at all!’
‘Yes I am!’ he said. ‘There’s only me! I change them myself.’ Then I knew that I had him. Pride had gone before a fall, as Miss Reid of CRX had so often promised. We both knew that once Julian’s callipers were off he wasn’t going anywhere.
It was strange, even so. Under torture — and QM had alluded darkly to that possibility — I would have said that there wasn’t a tape-recorder in my head and never had been. But I still half believed in the gun in my walking stick.
By the time the lights were turned out that night, I had decided on my plan. Defiance. It would be business as usual in the honky-tonks of the Old West. Business as usual, plus over-time.
I pushed the storyline recklessly in new directions. I started off playing the serving wench who timed her cake-baking to allow for a quick fling in the pantry with the stable lad, making sure that the romping was properly finished before the mistress of the house returned or the cakes caught fire. Of course, we weren’t fools about narrative. To keep the tension going, the mistress had to return some days while we were still in the act. I also played the part of the mistress, the technical challenge adding considerably to my sense of unreal delight. I marched in and caught us red-handed, and I acted all strict, as though I was Miss Willis herself. Normally the other boys in the dorm would have been in hysterics about that, but with Luke listening in they kept mum. No one would even help me out with sound effects. I had to do all the sex groaning myself.