A Short History of Falling Read online

  *

  I apologized to the woman in the garden shed for comments in which I had compared her to a series of farmyard animals; in fact, she bore a much closer resemblance to a female TV presenter and panel-show host who was particularly popular at that time. I also apologized for saying insulting things about her family – something that I then felt extremely ashamed about and always have. I must have made these comments over a year before, but I had just returned after the long summer break and it was the first occasion when an apology had even occurred to me. I also thought about how boring and unpleasant that five-year period must have been for her and how much of her professional time I had taken up. Five years I had spent inside this tiny space, staring up at the light fitting, with its pot plant and its box of tissues and its smell of carpet and pine – and I think, on that first appointment after the summer, I looked around as if this had been my very first time in this tiny room. Or that I had taken my iron mask off and had looked around to find myself waist deep in five years’ worth of used paper tissues.

  I’d been wanting to tell the woman in the garden shed about God – the God who appears in cars on the edges of rivers in summer – but in the way that a child might come home from school and want to show the model of the universe he made from string and ping-pong balls. And I think the respect and care she took with my creation is something that has continued to make all the difference to me. I think of that moment on that bed, with her voice knowing and understanding me completely, as being the most important in my life; and that without it, very little would have been possible.

  I spent another year in the garden shed but had already started making up for my lack of qualifications by attending evening classes, so that a year or two later I enrolled at university in another part of the country. I don’t think my experience inside the garden shed enabled a huge amount to change in my life, but it was enough. I sold my old blue Saab 900 for scrap and, after that, God was never quite as intimate or loud as he had been before. But he’d made himself known and the memory of that remained important for me. Of most significance was that I had spent this time in a room with someone. It was as simple and as hard as that.

  Gill

  Near where the M40 slices through the Chilterns at High Wycombe or Beaconsfield, there’s a piece of graffiti spelling out Why do I still do this every day? in wonky fridge-magnet capital letters, along a stretch of concrete sidings a hundred yards or so from the road, high up on a grassy bank. Gill and I were looking at it from the coach on the way to London and we were talking about our futures and what we imagined for them. We’d been together a year or so by then and the conversation was about how difficult it would be for us because we were two wounded figures. We knew it about each other – that we had been ill, at times, in our lives; and frightened.

  It had been a more serious fifteen-mile stretch of motorway than the initial section of the A40 heading out of Oxford. I don’t know why it changed or why certain things came up. We imagined being older together. We imagined being a mum and dad. It felt like pulling down the small table from the seat in front and placing something on it from a pocket, just to take a look.

  And my perspective now, in remembering that moment, is from above, looking down at us in that traffic: these two figures side by side at the back of a coach, talking and wondering and doubting. I think about the children’s book, The Borrowers, about a tiny family, each a few inches tall, who live in the walls and under the floors of a country house. They manage by borrowing and adapting to make a home for themselves, so that a borrowed thimble becomes a bucket, or a cotton reel becomes a chair. I think we were such little people – we didn’t come from anywhere. We shared this: that we didn’t belong.

  We were on that bus imagining a life together that we didn’t understand, on a coach going along that stretch of the M40 just prior to the junction with the M25; before London starts building up: looking out through the window at the sidings and the graffiti and knowing it was both possible and unlikely. And we would have felt scared, wondering if it would be us together a year or so further on, still imagining and believing in something for ourselves, or whether we would be on our own again: two figures on a coach on the motorway talking and thinking and being together; not knowing, really, what this was.

  And yet we lived together, travelled together, worked things out together and bought a house together; we had children together. But always as composites of things that adults should already have understood. So many aspects of life we pieced together from discarded egg boxes and the cardboard from used breakfast cereals. We licked them and stuck them together and, over the years, we pieced all this together with Sellotape and decked our lives out with silver foil. Nothing was already there and we made this together into something that worked as well as anything ever could. Nothing real was given. We have been Styrofoam artists with the treasure from a wheelie bin that we pushed out on to the street on Friday mornings. And all these years later, something whole has been pieced together from these scraps of milk-bottle tops and used loo roll, so that everything has been created from something else. And at a certain moment the sea appeared and what we had made proved as solid as anything sleek and uniform or plastic that floated by. And I wonder what will happen to it and whether it will still exist in the future. What will it be? What will it be worth at the salvage yard or to anybody else? This tattery thing that I made with someone else.

  *

  At almost a foot taller than Gill, I knew the place on my chest where the left side of her face came to rest when something felt overwhelming. The strap of Gill’s bra would push into the palm on my right hand and, with my fingertips, I could feel several of the ribs at the back of her chest. And when her body moved it was like a series of extremely rapid shrugs, and the tip of my chin would carefully touch down on the crown of her head so that I could move more effectively to her rhythm in these moments.

  Until a year ago, I had fallen a long way behind Gill. If your life is not quite functioning, as mine wasn’t, it’s not obvious what you should cry about and so you might cry about a crisp packet or a bus ticket, if anything at all, and never really know why. So in this moment with Gill I might as well have had two hands flat on the sides of a food processor, or both clasped around the handles of a powerful lawnmower. These were largely cerebral embraces and I was doing little more than holding on but, as the movement in Gill’s chest cavity and diaphragm subsided, she would pull back and I would see her more clearly. The tips of her cheeks would appear pink and swollen and drenched, with the residue of her left eye socket as a neatly printed triangle of moisture on my T-shirt and a tightrope of salty mucous still connecting us.

  Sometimes I would feel frustrated because perhaps I was browning some onions in a pan or was on the way to the bathroom to trim my nose hair. Or perhaps it had been one of several episodes in which Gill had felt sad or overwhelmed over a period of a few days and I wanted it to end, so that my inert body wouldn’t need a further reminder of this warmth and this movement.

  I wonder if Gill now observes the way my face changes: the way I cry by trying to connect the tips of my cheeks to the bridge of my nose and pulling down my bottom lip into an impossible V. I think this must be strange – to be next to my body when it is finally working and responding to loss in this way, and wishing there was more time for the two of us to share this knowledge: that we could go crying together, perhaps to different places around the world, in the same way that we go walking together. We could finally go crying together to Japan or sobbing to the Outer Hebrides, just like we’d planned.

  Years go by and the shapes you make with another person become moulded into who you are together: shapes in bed together or on a sofa or standing. And after many years together, it might be easier not to love, or to find somebody else to love, than to change the little indents or the handholds that time has smoothed so perfectly. The places now available to me are all such solo locations: in my wheelchair or recliner or in my hospital bed.
I might be in a gully or high up on a cliff. What must it feel like in that moment when Gill is overwhelmed and, where my giant legs once stood, the little engine of my wheelchair spins around and around? It’s like the clay or plasticine has hardened and there’s nothing but edges and metal legs or armrests in the way. And we message our distress with walkie-talkies or leave paper notes with little droplets for each other; until that moment near the fridge – two weeks ago – next to a fallen cube of Lego, when her hip slipped in below my arm and the left side of my face softened in below her breasts. Not quite leaving dark prints from my eye socket; just feeling that I wanted to be inside here with all of my face and how soft and warm this body is.

  And now I have this other opportunity, when I have to wake Gill in the middle of the night to help me up. I have started sleeping in a hospital style bed, alongside the larger one we used to share. It has a button to lift my head and torso, but it’s never quite enough when I’m limp and sleepy. So Gill comes around to be by my side, reaching in and clasping her hands behind my back, pulling me upright. And there I am again, dropping sweetly into her softness and her strength – slumped and mumbling, and no longer cerebral.

  *

  Gill’s body works really well. She doesn’t see it this way – she feels her body to be stretched and dragged by everything that is happening – but when I drop a fork or my phone or my water bottle on the floor, the movement made as she picks it up reminds me of the way a golfer collects their ball from the hole after a successful putt or the way a flamingo smoothly lowers its bill into the water to collect a fish. I suppose I now observe these efficient bodily mechanisms more acutely than before.

  I say thank you a lot to Gill. It must be thousands of times a day and I mean it so much. It’s not manners; I don’t employ any manners with Gill. I probably used to, but these days it’s just gratitude that comes tumbling out of me for all the things she now has to do for me. That’s a nice feeling to have so much of.

  The differences between our bodies does separate us; the difference between air and stone. Babies must feel lonely, with so much movement circling them, before they work out how good things really are. I tend to remain in one place and Gill is so much more mobile. I can hear a lot of what she’s doing. I can hear the bin lid or the front door or a pan being dragged from a cupboard. And I’m following her movements around the house and the footsteps in the hallway that I always hope will bring her to me.

  *

  It was October and we’d known each other a month. We were walking down the high street holding hands when I stopped and pointed at the coat in the window. Gill turned to look but only in its general direction, with her head moving in a more panoramic mode than I would have expected. This was a small boutique shop and the coat was on display at the very front. Everything else was folded or draped but the coat was on a stand, so that it could be seen full length by everyone who glanced in its direction.

  I jabbed my finger coatwards but could see Gill’s eyes chase her smile around her face, like one of those small handheld toys where you have to get several tiny silver balls to stay in place at the same time. I stood back with Gill on the pavement and we stood with our arms touching, facing the coat together, with people streaming by. There it was: a conspicuous black parka-style winter coat with a silver faux-fur hood and I wondered why she couldn’t see it. I tried to make the suggestion more intimately – how she mentioned she was cold without a winter coat. And I think in this moment my hands were making tumbling and pointing gestures, as if I were participating in a collective dance move, on a school gym floor under coloured lights. But really, it was the feeling of being in a foreign city with a phrase book and the warmth of the embarrassment from someone so amiable and forgiving.

  Five years later we owned our own flat and fitted a new floor and a fireplace, but for Gill it all went back to the coat, and also the mushroom risotto I made when we arrived at my place. She had watched me with such excitement, as I put butter and cheese into the pan, and smiled so much that our teeth clashed when we kissed for the first time a few moments later. I was cooking at the open end of someone else’s history and I like the idea that this was some small part of why Gill fell in love with me: that I was someone who thought she might need a coat when she was cold or a meal when she was hungry.

  *

  Gill helps me out of bed, she puts a teabag in a cup and wraps a blanket around me, so that I can start work. It’s 4 a.m. and, midway through the question ‘Is that it?’, she touches me softly with her palm cupped over my wrist, opens up a yawn and turns to go back to bed.

  I met Gill when I had just started writing plays. She shared in the excitement of that time and we read plays together and saw plays together, until I lost my way and didn’t know why I was doing it or what else I should be doing.

  And now I’m sitting down in the small hours to write about this person. This person with a mind and a body who I took so long to understand and be with. Now that I have come back to writing, I’m writing about her, and that feels like the best of ways to end this.

  Everything takes so long and is nearly gone, apart from the millions of moments still remaining.

  *

  There was a moment last week when I was lying in bed and heard Gill and Jimmy on the other side of the door. Something had piqued Jimmy’s curiosity – some kind of container or a tool, perhaps – and he was employing one of his new ‘What this?’ phrases. Their voices weren’t in any way muffled and I could see the shadow of their movements through the slit at the foot of the door. I could tell they were sitting there together, contemplating the identity of an object, and Gill was guiding his hand in its operation, so that the joyous sounds were of oohs and aahs, with very little explanation.

  I’m writing this and thinking about what it means to be self-taught. I think it’s less to do with the private nature of the learning, more that a person arrives at a point in their life when they might already expect or want themselves to know something vital but don’t. The knowledge isn’t formed developmentally; it’s a chasm waiting to be filled.

  I hear Gill with our children and I can hear the beeps of large machinery reversing; the vast sides of earth being turned up like a playing card and moved. Even though Gill is exhausted and wants to stop, I can tell she is digging into me and moving me around – turning over the chasm I’ve been filling in all these years and expanding into it, as she now has to, in the momentary spaces of the day and at night. She knows in her body how to do this. I hear her voice with our children and how the sounds she now makes are mine as well: that in the lonely hours, she is becoming both of us. It can’t be stopped by self-doubt – it’s happening anyway – even in the dark and in the rain, high up there in the cab of a vast digger. The chasm of knowledge she is filling. The power of it. Tom and Jimmy know this too.

  *

  Until it was destroyed by fire, Gill spent several years as a young girl living on a boat, and up to the point at which we settled to live in our London flat, none of her subsequent homes had proved in any way reliable.

  We lived in our flat for fifteen years. Tom was born in its living room, and for Gill, surrounded as we were by trees and a rare London silence, ascending all these flights of stairs to the top always felt like a perch or a parapet, high up in the skies. It was safe and unexpected, like the experience of a new coat. And I know this safe, beloved home is where Gill always expected to return to: this high-up place, now out of reach to us.

  Nobody who has ever felt unsafe as a child ever loses that feeling completely. And the fact that we are having to sell the flat is stirring all of this. We’re miles from home but still a little fear is crumbling away, under her feet and in the plaster of the walls. It doesn’t matter where we are – I see the little tremors where she walks, and all the cracks appearing in the ceiling overhead. I can see it’s always there – how at night she slips between the tiny gap at the edges of our bed.

  And when I have any dreams for Gill and Tom and Jimm
y, they are masonry dreams and garden dreams and room dreams, of somewhere they will one day live. I want to find this place, to build it in the night, whirring around foundations in my chair, with a trowel in my good hand and a mortar board on my lap.

  *

  I remember that we were crossing over from Crystal Palace Park to Westow Hill and I was expressing frustration with my writing career, a subject that I was carrying around with me, even on a walk in the park. We were standing at the traffic lights and Gill was walking ahead as she said, without looking at me, that she wasn’t interested. The lights had turned green and I missed my step and then I shuffled forward to catch her up.

  I could write this chapter as a history of all the different ways Gill has waited for me or made allowances, or the many different sizes of sacrifices she made, until she didn’t – like this moment, five years ago, as the lights turned green, and she wasn’t going to wait any more, for anyone.

  Everything gets heavier as you get older, so that you can end up as a person weighed down, wearing several hundred coats, with the pockets full of other people’s pebbles. Maybe you’re born with a duffel jacket draped around your shoulders; perhaps a trench coat as well.

  Gill was born ten years after her siblings, into the disappointment of a failing marriage, and spent her life managing other people’s expectations until this time, around five years ago, when she decided not to. At this time in her life she had decided that other people’s disappointments or frustrations were not her responsibility and never had been. I noticed the telephone conversations with her family getting shorter, and how she’d always spend these calls removing several dozen overcoats, with the phone pinned between her cheek and shoulder, or how she returned discarded jackets into my arms as I stood waiting at traffic lights.