The World I Fell Out Of. Andrew Marr

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      The Miami J spinal collar, a thing of claustrophobic torture, smelling of sour milk, and worn every minute of the day for three months. That’s not me modelling it, that’s one of my mates from the spinal unit. Looking only a little bit porny.

      There was Karen, wry and cheerful as ever, learning to hold her mascara brush. And Nevis, a high-flyer businessman who’d broken his neck ski-mountaineering, a silent man with the most harrowing thousand-yard stare I witnessed on anyone in the unit. Hand therapy was a misnomer for him: his hands were lifeless. Instead his arms were put in slings suspended on metal stands, the kind used to hang saline drips from, and he was trying to move his shoulders enough to be able to make them swing. If he could get enough motion, his insensate fists would brush hard enough across the pages of a magazine to turn them. The Professor was an elderly scientist who had been pulled over by his dog while out walking and broken his neck; he told whimsical, erudite stories and charmed everyone.

      We had some laughs, most in very bad taste. Joker was a serial offender with velvet brown eyes and winsome long eyelashes who had broken his neck falling through a roof. He was one of the brightest people in the unit, subversive in a way that challenged common perspectives. He just didn’t care about anything or anyone. He said he quite liked having a broken neck because it meant that he got looked after.

      ‘I’ve been in Y— [a young offender’s institution] thirty-seven times,’ he announced one day, sitting opposite me and flapping his elbows for balance as he reached up to try to rearrange an abacus.

      ‘Ooo,’ I said. ‘What for?’ My tongue was sticking out with concentration. I was doing my best to play Chinese chequers with rubber bands around the wooden pegs for grip.

      He looked pityingly at me, across our different worlds.

      ‘Stealing cars.’

      I found him fascinating. He told me the best makes to steal and how easy it was. He said it had been fun for a while but then it got boring and he didn’t like being on the streets, so he would steal a car deliberately to get caught, knowing it meant a warm bed and hot food. I always feared he would take his own life when he left the unit, but in fact, with proper care in place for him and a new sense of being valued, he forged a career online.

      Joker had about a year’s seniority on Kindle, another of my contemporaries, a brilliant schoolboy whose parents’ car had skidded on black ice. Kindle did his Highers, the Scottish equivalent of A levels, in the unit and went on to Oxbridge. He carried a tablet in his sweatshirt, and read compulsively, even on the standing frames. Both young men broke my heart: just boys at the start of their adult lives, making the best of the cards they had been dealt, from different ends of the pack.

      And so we gathered every weekday morning round the white melamine tables, and while those with no movement in their hands were put into arm slings, those of us with semi-viable hands had to start on our own personal lumps of hard, blue putty. This was our warm-up kit – we must mould and squeeze and grip and shape the putty, flatten and separate it into tiny balls and roll it into long sausages, all the while strengthening and suppling our hands. Cars droned past on the arterial city road outside, and the wider world was turning, but in our bewildering new pre-school this was the only task which must concern us. Here I was, I reflected, former mistress of my universe, member of the chattering classes, mover, shaker and regularly responsible for editing a national newspaper, here I was struggling to cope with playdough. It required astounding effort. At the end of the exercise you returned the putty to a big round ball, which you pressed into the table with the heel of your hand. Then you sat and panted for five minutes, wiped out by the effort required.

      My hands were more damaged than I liked to admit. Both were very numb. The left, in the beginning, badly swollen, flopped heavy and useless on the end of my wrist. I clocked myself in the face with it several times. My right, although fairly normal-looking, with a relative range of movement, had almost no power at all. My grip was gone. But the hand therapists, positive, cheery people, kept at us. The nicest times were when they took our hands and smoothed and massaged them within their own, so warm and active and normal. Leslie the senior therapist would take my hands, grotesquely white and crusty with dead skin, and soak them in a basin of warm water for ten minutes, and then scour off vast amounts of lizard-like scales with a coarse NHS towel. The result was extraordinary – the palms and the fingers felt liberated and free to move again. Then there were more tasks to fulfil: Connect4 to complete, tiny plastic cones to be lifted onto other cones; hoops to be taken off one peg and placed upon another. One fiendish challenge was a tall wooden stick, a tree with pegs instead of branches, СКАЧАТЬ