by Melanie Reid
The divine madness continued. In one session, from the moment I was hoisted onto Nelly’s back, I could feel something slightly different; a loosening around the hips, the tiniest glimmer of a memory of what riders call a seat, a softness and connection. For the first time back on a horse I was able, by trying to wiggle my thigh, to achieve flickers of movement in my right calf, bringing it back against her side on the girth. I couldn’t see it happening, which made it difficult, but Sara was my eyes on the ground. When my legs moved, the mare moved obediently sideways, or forwards, depending on my fumbled instructions. I was riding independently every session, and even starting to attempt shoulder-in, a lateral dressage movement where you ask the horse to walk forwards but with its body angled; its front legs on different tracks to its back legs. The centaur, within her little fantasy world, was getting ambitious.
Some time earlier, I had gifted the centre my dressage saddle – that powerful symbol of the past – and, by sheer serendipity, Sara found that it fitted Nelly’s back. Thus I sat, snug within my own prized possession, the deep dressage seat holding me in an upright position, opening up my hips at the front and straightening my legs.
‘When you ride you don’t look like a paralysed rider any more,’ Sara told me one day. ‘We have crossed a line. Up until now, I taught you with my eye on your vulnerabilities, always ready to intervene. Now, I’m teaching you as I would any horse and rider, trying to create improvement. We’ve been set free.’
Despite what was to unfold, I still regard that as one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me in connection with my riding. We all had to be patient in our dream chasing, but oh, I was so upbeat. We were kindred spirits, Sara and I, both unable to resist a challenge. She entered me for my first dressage competition as a tetraplegic. The test was at Level 1a, walk-only, for the most physically disabled riders, and the occasion was a Riding for the Disabled Association regional qualifier, fortuitously being held at her centre.
As a spectator sport, it was at the watching-paint-dry end of dressage – no trotting, no cantering, no music and most certainly none of the extravagant movements you see in dressage at the Olympics: piaffe, passage, half-passes, flying changes, where high-trained horses display a kind of supreme, controlled but explosive equine ballet. No, from the ratings point of view, this was the opposite of spectacular. All I had to do was to get my carer to dress me in riding clothes, wedge my oedema-plump feet into jodhpur boots, and then be judged ambling around an indoor riding school: a grey-faced spectre, frozen but for the flappy elbows, steering a placid horse in diagonal lines, circles and smaller circles.
My dear friends got me there on time and turned me out well, grooming the old stains off my riding jacket, tying my stock tight around my neck for me. They admired my substitute breeches, a pair of £4 oatmeal-coloured leggings which Barbara had sourced in Primark, because proper breeches weren’t stretchy enough to fit a urine bag down the thigh. And lastly, before the hat, they put my hair in a net. Hairnets, a relic of the elegant, haughty Victorian horsewoman, mounted sidesaddle, with a habit and a veil.
I had a flashback, fleeting, stabbing. The neck brace. My dinner-plate-sized view of the sky. Moving away from the whirling rotor blades and there was the A&E doctor’s face, the pretty blonde one, leaning close; warm, friendly, warning me I was about to go into resuscitation. And then, amused, she was disentangling something from the top of my head, dangling a cobweb of nylon into my field of vision.
‘What on earth is this?’
‘A hairnet,’ I explained. ‘To keep my hair tidy under my hat.’
Tidy above an exploded spine. How silly, how eternally poignant, the minutiae of normality alongside utter, screaming catastrophe.
That competition day with Nelly, the glory was to participate. For many of the vulnerable people who attend Riding for the Disabled, it was as great an achievement as any Olympic medal by an able-bodied athlete. To my amusement, I found out I was the only person entered in the walk-only class, therefore the most solitary humble of the humble. Unless I really stuffed things up, it seemed, I might be about to win my first ever dressage class. Sara would be there to call out the movements to me but, like a child sitting a music exam, I had conscientiously learnt the test myself. My judge, I was told, was to be Lady Hope, whom everyone called Mary, a woman much loved in the horse fraternity. I had heard complimentary things of her in the past, but you were always slightly scared of dressage judges; they could be terrifying. She wanted to meet me beforehand and I remember her drawing up a chair next to me in the hall outside the riding arena, exuding warmth. It turned out she read my newspaper column.
‘I’m so thrilled to meet you,’ she said. ‘I know I shouldn’t tell you this when I’m about to judge you, but I’m your number one fan.’
Still smiling from the encounter, I was hoisted off the platform onto the gleaming, polished Nelly, mane plaited, hooves oiled. The girls had worked so hard on her. There was a potential for drama. Nelly was in season, a female on edge and at the mercy of her hormones, and in order to keep her settled during the competition a small pony, a gelding, was brought into the indoor school as her companion. In human terms, you might describe him as a walker, the kind of non-threatening, asexual manfriend a famous woman might take to parties while she hunted for prey. Grey-haired and testicle-less, he stood bored in a corner, oblivious to Nelly’s bottom-wiggling.
And then everything was up to me, to my voice and the give in my hands, and the cooperation of a good-natured big animal. Heart thumping, very alone under the fluorescent lights in a big empty arena, we entered the stage. She who had lost her body could once again, in partnership, create free movement again; she could put on the show required for the judge and the small audience watching from the benches at one end.
Live in the now. Breathe.
Enter at marker A, at X halt, immobility, salute. Keep breathing.
Proceed in medium walk, track left at C.
The discipline of remembering the dressage test and riding the mare with what function I had left erased my mind of corrosive things. Frozen hands made suggestions along narrow reins, and Nelly answered. The body continued to balance. And the mare held calm, a little bored, going where I asked in a rhythmic walk in a nice shape. I had never felt more alive, out in the middle of the arena, beyond help. The funny thing is, I didn’t feel at all precarious. Unbeknownst to me, Zen Master, my friend from the spinal unit, was by sheer coincidence in the small audience. His daughter was a competitor too. Afterwards he emailed me:
I wonder if that’s a world record; two dozen people simultaneously holding their breath for four minutes. Frozen until your final salute. At first you seemed so vulnerable up there, but then I saw a horse striding with absolute concentration, so aware of her huge responsibility to you, and also to the rest of us audience, readers and medical staff who have shared your anguish over the past two years. A glass of water would not have spilt on Nelly’s quiet back. An achievement to have done it; yes indeed, but by far the greater achievement to have arrived to Enter at A at all. Four minutes of a dressage test – less than the sum of its parts. Well done Melanie; admit and enjoy the sheer scale of what you have achieved.
He saw it, of course. He was aware that only by the good grace of the horse was I balancing on her back, something I had chosen not to dwell on. Only Nelly’s good behaviour, and my trust in it, kept me aboard her. My vulnerability was absolute: if she had moved unexpectedly, sideways or forwards, I had no power in my body to respond or grip. My hands alone could not hold me on.
Finishing my first tetraplegic dressage test, both first and last. Bottle the look of happiness in my face.
Evidently, we made a sufficient combination for the test. I was delighted to show more promise as a disabled rider than I ever did able-bodied and Lady Hope gave me 69.4 per cent, a respectable score; in fact, one of the best I’ve had in my life. And of course, as the only entry, Nelly and I came both first and last, a suitable commentary on
the state of my life. The red rosette still hangs in my kitchen, as does the one for sixth place which we won in the subsequent Scottish RDA dressage championships walk-only class. I was beginning to dream big and Sara was encouraging me.
Where my body was concerned, I had reached a state of strange duality: although my internal health was deteriorating because of my guts, there were definite improvements on the muscular and neurological side. Bad and good thrived together. Bad, I was all too aware, dominated. At the spinal unit, I asked Dr Purcell to refer me to a colorectal surgeon – I had decided the only way out of the daily torture was a colostomy, rerouting my intestines out of my stomach and bypassing the stasis of the lower bowel. Graham Sunderland was a doctor with an evident sense of humour, which struck me as rather essential in his job. His was well-paid, vital work and he was hugely in demand, but it was not the most glamorous end of life. Either you were consulting, and your time was spent wearing a sympathetic face and listening to lengthy tales of gut ache and jobbies, or you were elbow-deep stitching up coils of intestines. As the song went:
We praise the colorectal surgeon
Misunderstood and much maligned
Slaving away in the heart of darkness
Working where the sun don’t shine.
He agreed with me that I had reached the end of the road and was a candidate for a colostomy. I was entering new territory, and it scared me, but I told myself it was reversible and if a miracle happened and my innards started to function again, I could revert back. The date was set for the operation.
Meanwhile, despite the nausea and the oedema, my optimism about my neurological recovery was high. It was by then almost three years since my accident and I was still noticing improvements, infinitesimally slowly, unpredictably – but unmistakably. With the self-carriage that the riding required, my torso muscles were flourishing, to the extent that two weeks before the date for my colon surgery, I had a breakthrough with my walking, and I use that loaded word deliberately. It was extraordinary. Everything came together. Legs, torso muscles, stamina. I found myself walking up and down the living room, turning, pausing, pushing the Topro Taurus frame myself with ease, full of breath, confident, unstrained. I felt light. It was all I had dreamt of. A phased leap in recovery, Kenny the neurophysiotherapist acknowledged. Like all of his profession he was cautious verging on sceptical about spinal recovery. I did so well we tried again, this time with Dave filming me on my iPhone. That thirty-second clip is now a precious snippet, a window that opened – there I was, leaning with my elbows on my frame, but walking forwards all by myself, slowly, rhythmically, independently, calmly, my torso strong enough not just to support me but to create forward momentum. In the background Kenny lurked with the wheelchair, a large incontinence pad on the cushion as a reminder of my fragility. I have never managed to walk better since, or to push the frame of my own accord like that, and I am in no doubt that it was the therapy from horse-riding which strengthened and suppled my torso. And who knows how much more I could have improved if I could have continued riding long-term – another poignant ‘what if’ to keep me warm on a winter night.
Shortly afterwards, ten days before I was due to go into hospital for my colostomy, I heard that I was to receive an award. The trustees of the Riding for the Disabled’s national organisation wanted to present me with the Birt Spooner Cup, awarded periodically to someone who had done an exceptional amount for riding and disability. I was supposed to go to London to be presented with it, but my underlying health was such I could not travel so far. It was determined that the cup would be couriered up and that the Scottish head of the charity would present it to me at the stables when I was there for one of my lessons.
So much pitch-black irony abounds now, when I look back, that I quail in the face of it. Even me, with my darkest of dark humour. The Birt Spooner Cup, it turned out, was enormous: a solid silver extravaganza about a metre high, an ornate fussy monster of a trophy straight from a long-forgotten age of ostentatious display. Unfortunately, in transit, the cup had been dropped and badly bent: when propped on its stand – and we could hardly lift it; it was so heavy – it listed far to one side like a drunken relic. The whole thing was a little ridiculous and over the top.
‘Never mind,’ said Sara, chortling. ‘I’ll get it mended so it can grace your sideboard.’
The plan was that after my normal half-hour lesson, the four of us – Nelly, Sara, the charity lady and I – would do a quick presentation and pose for photos. The cup, meantime, was placed on the spectator benches of the indoor riding school, propped on a horse rug to stabilise it. The charity lady sat beside it, a pleasant person who wanted to watch my lesson. My cup, you might say, awaited me, though not quite yet overfloweth.
The routine was familiar. Nelly was led in; I was placed in the hoist and then lowered onto my dressage saddle, thinking, fleetingly, how much I looked forward to this now, compared to the apprehension of that first time, sixteen months earlier. As a standard warm-up in my lessons, I would do a couple of circuits with Sara walking at the horse’s head, after which I would ride solo. The three of us moved away from the hoist.
And that’s when Nelly decided there was a monster lurking behind the doors, and took off.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In Bed with a Walrus
No matter. Try again, fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
One of the popular definitions of insanity, usually attributed to Albert Einstein, is of doing something over and over again and expecting a different result. I don’t think I would ever be classified as insane, but I was, with hindsight, naïve to convince myself that getting back upon a horse was without considerable risk. Aware in my rational brain that I was vulnerable, I preferred not to explore the consequences of another fall. Lightning was unlikely to strike twice. I chose merely to trust and hope and enjoy.
Nelly was not having a good day. With hindsight, she may have come into season, and her hormones were making her skittish. Or maybe there had been a first flush on the early spring grass, unnoticed by the staff, and she was a little intoxicated with sugar. Either way, she was not her normal relaxed self, and within a few strides, as we passed the doors of the indoor school, she became jumpy. Sara was at her head, controlling her by the mouth, talking to her. But the mare suddenly became electric, certain there was something terrifying behind the entrance she had passed a thousand times. As I clutched the saddle strap, and Sara struggled to hold her, she shied to the right and exploded into canter. Now, when half a ton of horse panics and decides to go, it goes. There is a finality to the act; several millennia of equine survival distilled into an instant, the instinct of a creature liberated from all reason and training. Horses have no weapons, they escape predators by running away. They have lightning-quick responses, the fastest of any domestic animal, in order to live another day. To flee is to survive.
I think I stayed on her for the two strides it took her to mow Sara down under her front legs, but on the third stride I felt myself going. Or rather, I felt my head and arms going. Watching in the café, behind the glass divide, one of the stable staff said she saw something pink flying through the air. That was me in my favourite microlight duvet jacket. And just as I had felt only my head and shoulders take off, so they were the only things I felt land, some agonising, bewildering, empty seconds later. My left shoulder blade hit the rubber-chipped surface first, then the back of my head with a thump. The rest of my body landed too and was, well, still attached, but insensate.
In the shock and embarrassment that followed, I clawed myself up onto my left elbow, gazing down my unfeeling body, declaring to anxious faces: ‘My neck’s all right.’
My right thigh was slung across me, on top, as if I had been put in a recovery position.
Those words. The ones Dave hates so much.
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said.
Bleakness and reflection, however, were for later. Lying there, the immediate priority was to get back in my chair.
I had the self-composure to instruct them how to scoop me back into my wheelchair from the floor, an art drummed into me in the spinal unit. You lie on your back, your legs are elevated, and the chair is tipped over so its back, mimicking your shape, so it can be slipped under your hips. Then, with enough helpers, you and the chair can be lifted as one, the axles doing most of the work, the frame turning round the unbraked wheels. Subsequently I found myself in the café drinking sweet tea and telling them repeatedly I was fine and yes, I was OK to drive home and no, I didn’t want a lift and no, I most certainly did not want to go to hospital to be checked out.
We even went into the yard with the drunken, lopsided Birt Spooner Cup and posed for pictures, me balancing the damn thing on my knee, smiling through the shock and still pretending, as hard as I was able, that I was OK. The alternative was unthinkable. And I did feel mostly fine. Oh, I knew I was jarred up – the right hip felt uncooperative, and it hurt enough to make me gasp transferring into the car. But I hadn’t landed on it, there had been no impact, so how could it be broken? Once home, I transferred into my recliner chair to rest it. It ached. True, I felt a little queasy.