I did not want to think of it. Watching her I’d forgotten where we were. But when they came for her she’d been upset. Nil by mouth. Weak and distressed.
Now she was gone and all her blue bags.
It was night time quiet. The lights were low. A storm was flickering in my cranium. I put one hand on top of my head to try to calm things down. Something was shifting, rising, teeming – something… microbial. My eyes were open or shut. Explosions of colour gave way to soft fur. A studio theatre with inky drapes felt familiar and benign but then it fell apart and was a vast and funnelling black hole.
Later on she was crying. I couldn’t see her. It was dark. Later still I would wonder if she was even real – I couldn’t know. When I’d seen her, had my eyes been open or shut?
Open, shut, I cried with her. Afterwards I slept.
I would think of her again much later, but at the time I had things on my mind. For one, I could not seem to get up. My hands, my arms, my legs, moved fairly freely – yes. My head up off the pillow – just a bit, not for long. For the rest, it felt like I’d been stapled lengthways through the middle and the giant staple had attached me to the bed.
The pain was tremendous.
My toes remained oddly detached. Long afterwards they seemed to try to move for the rest of me.
When a nurse showed me the mechanism that could tilt my bed, I pressed the button. My head was raised, my upper body too, the ward came more fully into view. It seemed stable.
Don’t get me wrong. When I left, I left sleek and slender and upright – a new and improved version of myself full of screws and rods and other things besides. A vague concern I might be struck by lightning. But I had backbone. I was spineless no more.
I could give you some associations of spinelessness – what it means to be without backbone at all. First up: a man attempting to crawl, flat out, face down in the dirt. This image perhaps comes from a film.
The dressings came off. There were large staples too. These had held the wounds together. The doctor used pliers. It was hard not to notice how she flinched.
The scars. The scars were livid. They ran in very straight lines beside the spine. There were rows of tiny legs where the staples had been. These tiny legs looked like they were running and running.
I’d not processed, somehow, that afterwards – after the procedure – I’d not be able to move, ever again, the way I’d moved before. I had not understood that it would seem to affect every small articulation.
I would envy the bodies of dancers, and gymnasts. It would seem not impossible, not far-fetched – another version, another me, who might have done just that… that bend, right there.
In my shoes my toes moved with longing.
Movement – it was so awkward. There was a way to get in and out of bed. No twisting. Roll. Roll to get up. Roll like a bug to get up.
Interest in the words exoskeleton, endoskeleton.
Imagine the tools – the tools they would use – the force it would take – to leave a person rigid – to leave a person full of rods and screws.
I wanted a reversal. I had a dream where I banged and banged on the door and I begged, Take it out! There is no way back, they said. The whole thing would crumble. It’s part of you now.
Time passed. Time passed. What had happened to my body was unspoken. Part of me.
So.
So time passed. It was much later. I met the translator. Everything she said was provisional. Subject to change. You might think it would be annoying – but I found that I liked it. I hadn’t expected this. If you’d asked me before I would have thought it preposterous for anyone to want to spend their time with someone who would seem never to get to the point. She would say things like, I think… What I mean to say… I have a notion…
The first time I saw her – an event in a bookstore. The kind of thing where the event is happening but even so the store is open for people to browse the shelves. She was the event. A man asking questions. I’d stopped in after work to look for a book.
It was the trailing off that caught my attention. I thought perhaps something was wrong with the microphone. I became aware of these – silences, in the conversation.
When I met the translator, I’d not thought much about the procedure in years. I’d thought of it a lot, at the start. It was hard not to. Then time passed. The scars were no longer livid. Those running legs faded and faded and then they were gone. Perhaps it was now a small thing, a smaller thing. A big thing, but not as big a thing as it had been before.
There was no pain now. I felt nothing.
The way she spoke. The way even… if I could describe it. The way even she sat on her chair. Who would have thought that could be so…
I sat at the back of the store to wait for the end. I spent half the time pretending to read but I was really in a panic staring at my hands.
Adjustments, refinements, rearrangements. She clutched them in her fists like a wild array of balloons. Pauses in between as she took time to think. Nothing taken for granted. Nothing allowed – not for long – to be fixed.
And I saw it. I saw this thing running through me. Running me through. Its grip.
Sometimes she’ll look at me, and I’ll think… I think she looks at me with pity? And I think perhaps that I should tell her, about what happened to me. Though I’m not sure I’d be clear, that I’d know what to say, that it would make sense. Where would I start?
She’s seen the scars on my back – but that’s not it, that’s not, that’s… that’s not what I’m talking about.
DIANA POWELL
WHALE WATCHING
She was standing on the headland when the whale came into view. Dishrag white, a floating giant barnacle. The man was spread cross-like on its flank, caught in a cat’s cradle of harpoon hemp. There was no-one else to see it, only her. She had started running as soon as it left the harbour; she knew the way. The creature turned towards her, watching her from its one pig-eye; the man looked, too. And then it turned again, facing the open sea.
The man waved to her, as they disappeared into the mist, towards Ireland.
‘Goodbye,’ she said, waving back.
When she told, toothless gums nah-nahed at her, hands came together and trapped her in a corner of the school-yard. Names boxed her ears.
‘Thicko!’
‘Fibber!’
‘Twpsin!’
‘Liar, liar…’
And yes, next day, at the harbour, the whale was there again, and the waving man was walking about, talking to the crowd.
‘There!’ her teacher told her. ‘You mustn’t make things up! That’s what films are for!’
‘Miss’ spent her Saturdays at the Palace in the big town. ‘We must visit the set as often as we can,’ she told the school. ‘It will be an educational experience.’ She brought movie magazines into class, and showed them pictures of the stars. One day, she brought the book, which had the same name as the film. ‘It’s too old for all of you, but I shall read you some.’
‘Call me Ishmael,’ she began. It was enough.
She told them how brave the whale-hunters were, how many useful things came from whales.