The World I Fell Out Of. Andrew Marr
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of the plinths while my physiotherapist attended to another of her patients, I could observe fellow inhabitants who were learning to mobilise their bodies and cope with their new lives. I felt all of eleven years old, wide-eyed, evaluating my new classmates at the big school. Who would be a kindred spirit? Who would have a sense of humour? Swiftly you learnt who to seek out, who to avoid. Fetlock had also fallen off a horse; she’d had a close escape, was walking wounded and would be going home soon, but she wanted to tell me, in great detail, in the way only horsey people do, about every wisp of hay and variation of snaffle bit she had ever seen. I shrank inside myself when she walked – walked, damn her – over to me, and I could not escape, because I was not in my chair.
‘So what horses have you got? I’ve got three – my old mare and my young one – it was my young one that dumped me – and then there’s my pal Sheena’s pony, I have him too, but he pulls like mad and he’s a bugger to catch and keeps ripping his rugs and I have to soak his hay. Do you keep yours at livery?’
Like I’m going to keep any horse, ever again? Please go away, Fetlock. I don’t wish to be cruel, but don’t you realise that my dream has ended, that you’re shooting holes in my soul?
I smiled up at her, and made some anodyne reply. On a cruise ship, be tolerant. Keep your own counsel.
Wee Jimmy had been shot in the spine, for all sorts of alleged reasons. You never asked too many questions. Some said it was revenge for a murder by his uncle Tam-the-Hatchet. In that sense the unit was akin to a church, a place of sanctuary where you accepted people for their needs rather than their deeds. Jimmy was gangly, mild-mannered and wary. He had the air of someone faintly bewildered as to why the staff were being so nice to him and he tried hard in rehab. He gave everyone on the ward a slice of his birthday cake and when he left hospital he made the front page of the tabloid press. As well as their victims, every now and again you got criminals in the unit with broken spines. Big Willie, one of the physiotherapists, a benign sixteen-stone barn door of ex-rugby player, remarked that over the years he’d had several as patients but only realised it when he read about the court cases in the paper afterwards. One man was later convicted of organising a murder.
‘Honestly, you couldn’t have met a nicer guy,’ said Willie, shaking his head.
Mostly we were innocent, life’s fallen jesters. Cycling and sports injuries were common. Cog was a mountain biker from down south who’d gone over the handlebars on a boys’ biking weekend in Scotland. He was semi-dazed and nauseated by tramadol. I remembered its ghastly nausea-inducing and head-fugging qualities. Taking tramadol, you were in the world but not of it. Pretty soon Cog transferred back down south, still looking grey and confused.
Tourette was a middle-aged man who had had a stroke that damaged his speech, long before a car accident broke his back: he was in a wheelchair and came to the gym but could only shout ‘Fuck Off!’ or ‘Pish!’ Again, his ability to swear endured, although his brain had closed down more sophisticated speech circuitry. Tourette looked like Waldorf from the Muppets, his mouth set in a determined upside-down U. Despite appearances, he was very cheerful and seemed to enjoy amusing the rest of us by cursing inappropriately. Spatula, the chef who’d broken his back in a drug-addled suicide attempt off a cliff, befriended him, and the two of them sat outside and smoked, mostly in silence but for the cursing. Spatula could stand, and mobilise a little, and could have improved, but he stopped coming to the gym and the rules were strict. If you didn’t buy into rehab, you had to leave.
And then there was Grit, a former soldier, five-foot-two tall and as hard-boiled as a twenty-minute egg. I loved Grit. He possessed very little in the world but an outsize sense of decency; his flat in a Glasgow high-rise had been broken into and when he challenged the suspected culprits, they stabbed him. One knife wound pierced his spinal column and he was paralysed down one side. Grit had been treated with little sympathy by the police and had languished without expert care in another city hospital – just one more knife victim with the wrong post code – until a doctor had recognised the seriousness of his injury and got him transferred across the city to spinal. He couldn’t believe how well he was treated in this unit by comparison.
‘Night and fucking day, Mel,’ he told me. ‘They’re just fucking angels here, the nurses. The doctors listen to you. They just didn’t care in the last place. Not fucking interested.’
Grit and I were mates from the days of high dependency when we’d had beds in facing bays; I told him he’d be walking soon and so he was, within a month, so he took to calling me Crystal Balls. He had a lot of mates, hardmen like himself, who crowded round his bedside and told him how his football team was doing and discussed the people who’d stabbed him. They knew fine who’d done it.
‘Fucking terrible, sure it is. You should see what the dirty wee bastards are getting away with now.’
‘We’ll fucking get them for you, Grit, we will.’
Sometimes the crescendo of cursing got so bad that my husband, a man not unknown to swear himself, would turn his head and lift an eyebrow. Grit would clock it, and his natural courtesy would kick in.
‘Listen Dave, big Mel, ah’m sorry, ah cannae stop fucking swearing. Lads, tone it down. Stop fucking swearing so much. Youse are upsetting people.’
Weeks later, in the gym, when Grit was getting around, first on crutches, then a stick, he busied himself bringing cups of water from the cooler to those of us stuck on machines. One day I was strapped upright, my head at least twelve feet in the air, on a tilting table with a mechanism which moved your feet backwards and forwards – towering like some ghastly human sacrifice over everyone else in the gym. Grit, who couldn’t reach high enough to put the plastic cup of water in my hand, put down his stick and starting climbing up the frame to give me the water. Only one side of his body worked, and he was utterly precarious, but he made it up and down safely and glowed with paternalistic pride as he watched me.
‘Fucking brill, big Mel. Youse are doing great, Crystal Balls.’ In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man was king.
There were Buddhists, and poets from the Scottish islands, there were heroes and villains. There were several patients with old injuries, returned for treatment, whose voices we only really heard if the drugs trolley was a few minutes late, which it often was, and they would ring their buzzers crying for their methadone. Had their injuries made them opiate addicts? You could not ask, and no one would ever tell. Nor would judgement ever be passed. We mostly lived out our private lives in public, but we gathered into ourselves what scraps of dignity remained behind those grotty thin curtains, and kept some secrets. There was a policeman who had had his back broken by a getaway car; he often rehabbed on the plinth next to a stone-mason whose bungee jump had gone wrong and whose mum kept complaining about the quality of the food. Mrs Bennet, a school dinner lady, didn’t come to the gym often – hurt in a fall, she seemed to accept her fate with remarkable good grace, though I suspect it was partly to do with the amount of tramadol she took. She was not at all unkind, but very lazy, and liked to know everyone’s business. Had there been a God, she would have had several unmarried daughters, and an acerbic husband. And who could forget Passion, the Brazilian stallion, whose spinal operation had not been successful? He fretted very publicly about whether he would still be able to have sex and boasted that his body would be perfect again soon. Very swiftly he earned a reputation for commandeering the communal bathroom when his wife came to visit, presumably so he could check out whether things were really as bad as he feared. He was ignorant, and sexist, and thought nothing of making insulting remarks to female patients, me included, but I watched him on the parallel bars one day, straining to make his steps fluid, trying to convince himself he was winning, the beads of sweat glistening on his upper lip, and felt sorry for him. We were all in our own ways trying to kid ourselves.
So I began my rehabilitation, trying to ride that ghastly non-compliant new horse which was my body; a terrible physical challenge that bucked and threw me contemptuously, time and time and time again. They had given me a wheelchair with the brand name Quickie and in it I learnt a new definition of slowness. My nails grew faster than my progress down the corridor. Somehow I had to learn to exist again; my arms had to learn to support and move me; my hands, the fingers