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 now tightening, clawing into stumps like decrepit Trafalgar Square pigeons, had to learn how to hold a kettle or a toothbrush and bear the pain of the push rims of the wheels on my palms. I was given thick leather mitts, which fastened with Velcro and were specially designed for easy use by tetraplegics, to protect the skin (see photo here). One day, trying to come back from the gym along the carpeted stretch of corridor – installed, sadistically but sensibly, to prepare us for real life – my arms gave up and the pile of the carpet steered me into the wall. I sat quietly weeping in frustration until a nurse took pity on me and pushed me off the carpet.
In the gym my routine was simple: arm exercises first – twenty minutes on the handbike, then biceps curls and triceps lifts on the weights machines. Then, hoisted onto the specialist plinths, I began the process of coping with the appendage formerly known as my body. Propped in a seated position, my feet on the floor, foam wedges behind me to catch me if I went backwards, I started to learn how to balance sitting upright. How peculiar it felt. Because I could not feel my backside in contact with the plinth; I had the sensation I was a head and shoulders poised on wobbly air. I swayed like a blancmange, only staying upright because I could grip the edge of the plinth with my crocked fingers and lean back on my arms.
Next, from the same seated position, as my left wrist strengthened and began to hurt less, I was told to place my hands beside me on the firm surface and try and lift myself. Impossible. But critical to the future. When your body is paralysed and you try to lift your own body weight solely with your unaccustomed arms, you cannot believe how hard it is. The movement starts in your brain with a huge heave and ends, if you’re lucky, in a flicker you barely perceive. The physios put a bench in front of my knees so that if I toppled forward, I would not go onto the floor. And there I sat, for perhaps forty minutes at a time, hands aching on the blue plastic, wobbling, tilting forward a little, bracing through my shoulders and arms, trying to heave. Did anything happen that time? I could only tell by peering down, trying to imagine a sensation of lightening. It was exhausting. And I couldn’t kid myself that I saw anything.
The gym had a radio, with notoriously bad reception, tuned by whichever member of staff got to it first in the morning. If Big Willie switched it on, we had Radio 2, because he was addicted to trivia and knew the
