The World I Fell Out Of

by Melanie Reid

  ‘Please tell me if I smell too bad,’ I whispered to my stylist, a sweet girl, but also young.

  ‘Yeah, OK,’ she said, round-eyed, and I could see her wondering why she always got landed with the nutters. There were later embarrassments with stoma bags coming unfixed, but never anything quite on that scale or with such dramatic flourish.

  The Nelly fall had one devastating consequence for me. It closed the door, for ever and a day, on riding horses again. It taught me that I was simply too paralysed and too breakable ever again to risk getting on the back of a live creature with a mind of its own. After what I’d been through, even fools start to parent themselves. The dream was over; the longest, unbroken love affair in my life was finally ended. This left me back with the void again. Horses had roamed such a big part of my head for so long that the sense of loss was profound. Disability was going to be acutely boring, I suspected. What could I possibly do now that would engage me, exercise me and stimulate my brain? I was an alcoholic looking for something to replace drinking. The comparison was not frivolous.

  In addition, I was forced to address the footprint of that life. What to do with my horsey kingdom? My tack room, my loose boxes, the endless paraphernalia which I would never use again. The tack room in particular was a shrine. To each their hobby, their temples, their divine objects. For all sports, for rugby players, skiers, cyclists, painters, climbers, it is the same: the smell of mud and changing room, the incense of tyre rubber and derailleur, ski wax, oil paint, rope coils or saddlery. Lifelong intoxicants. But what does one do with the accumulation of cherished but old-fashioned stuff when the game is over? With hobbies, the sad fact is that what you’ve got is never enough. You never stop acquiring. Hobbies blur the line between need and want. Nobody ever entered a bike shop or a climbing shop or a saddlery shop and left empty-handed. My tack room was stuffed with almost everything, except an air jacket to protect my spine.

  And so my eyes feasted sadly on that thirty-odd-year fairytale, the hoarded treasure of so many bridles, even more nosebands, snaffles and pelhams and gags, breastplates and martingales, fetlock boots and cavessons, leather hole-punches and hairnets. The esoteric trivia of a very small obsession. The horse corner of the barn was still in frozen animation, deserted since the day we never came back. Everything not in the tack room – dandy brushes, buckets, feed bins – was coated with an inch of dust and dead daddy longlegs. In the riding arena, baby sitka spruce and buddleia sprouted out of the rubber and sand, marking the years that had passed since I had been turned to stone by the evil spell. Immediately after the accident, my friends had sold my trailer, but had carried out no final house clearance. It was like a death but nobody had wanted to presume anything – and now, still living, I was some weird equine Miss Havisham, queen of a derelict domain I had once been so proud of. I had worked so hard all my life for my barn and my riding arena, and it was all I ever wanted. And now it was a lost playground.

  Something had to be done. We decided to rent out the stables, field and riding arena with our former holiday cottage, because it seemed a step away from the past, and because we needed the money. I laid down some stipulations. I couldn’t bear to have someone use it as a competition yard, with big glossy horses clattering up and down horsebox ramps. That would have destroyed me. We found tenants who were perfect – a kind couple with two Highland ponies who liked hacking. I carried out a wobbly hand-over – ‘It’s a handy set-up; I hope you and your ponies enjoy it’ – and then, to my own fury, started to cry in front of strangers. I told them to bundle up the old stuff to the back of the tack room, out of the way, and I gave away as much as I could. I took my favourite Stubben bridle up to the house and hung it by the kitchen door. For the next couple of years or so, I would put my face against it and sniff the leather every night on my way to bed. It’s still there, though I don’t stop to smell it any more.

  As John McEnroe once said, the older we get the better we used to be. I was never a great horsewoman, but I was humble and aware; and looking back, I was always trying to improve. One day around that time, in the office, I came across a box file with notes from my dressage lessons, an attempt to pin down those brief, addictive seconds when you achieved ‘feel’ – when mind and body and horse melded in softness, lightness and understanding. When it happened you wanted to capture it so you could do it again. It was the same as a sports person finding the sweet spot on a tennis racket, or pinging a golf ball four hundred yards without trying, or a professional dancer entering the place where the conscious and unconscious meet, and letting loose their soul. ‘Between the idea and the reality/ Between the motion and the act/ Falls the Shadow,’ as T.S. Eliot wrote in ‘The Hollow Men’. The magic in between. The tantalising glimpse of why we all strive. In the file, stored away, were notes and certificates from decades ago when I took British Horse Society exams, along with notes from various intensive riding courses as I tried to improve my lightness of being. Every lesson, every instructor, I took away a nugget and wrote it down. God loves a trier. Or perhaps in my case he didn’t.

  There were notes from the summer I took Horrid Dan to a famous riding centre in England and was introduced to the concept of the four stages of competence. An instructor used it to illustrate the subtle, invisible art of shifting the balance of your seat bones to ask a horse to canter. Sitting reading those notes, I was back there – in a hot indoor school with the dust motes dancing in the sunbeams; in the pleasure in losing myself in an all-consuming mental and physical challenge. Anyway, stage one – for anything: chess, parenting, ballroom dancing – is in a state of unconscious incompetence. We don’t know how to do something; we don’t even recognise what it is we don’t know how to do. Once we acknowledge our own deficit, we move to the next stage, conscious incompetence – when we realise how much we have to learn. Did I remember how I strived to pick up that canter stride invisibly? In my wheelchair, my limbs twitched wistfully, reprising the memory: the minutest pelvic slide, the tiny shift back of the outside leg; the subtle lift on the inside rein. Occasionally during those lessons I got it, everything came together and the horse rose up into canter, but it required body- and mind-sapping concentration in the hot dust. Horrid Dan was a horse who knew most things already. Gradually, as a rider, I learnt which of his buttons to press and entered stage three, conscious competence: you know what to do and how to do it, but it’s still exhausting.

  Sadly, we never reached stage four – unconscious competence: the place where experts reside, between peace and concentration, where you have practised so much that the skill becomes instinctive. It remained the unfulfilled dream of my life: Dan got navicular disease in his feet, became chronically lame and was put down. I bought Terry, whose heart was never in jumping, and the accident happened. Horrid Dan never refused a jump; he ate fences the way he tried to eat humans.

  And there too, pitifully, I found the notes from my riding lessons in spring 2010, the days before my fall. The happy esoteric jottings of someone who would soon, to all intents and purposes, be dead.

  14/3/10 – pretend to carry a tea tray as I ride. Bent elbows. Shoulders back back back. Look at horizon. Outside rein, inside leg. Then turn using nothing else. Come off track 5m loop, then counter canter. HE DID IT!!

  20/3/10 – 15 metre circles= jog a few strides, then walk, then jog. Sink legs. Higher I sit the better the transitions. ***Tricia told me I looked like a pro!!*** On right rein I have to try so much harder to lift my body up … it collapses.

  28/3/10 – jumping lesson with Mandy. EYES BEHIND HIPS ON APPROACH. FOLD HIPS NOT SHOULDERS.

  And then five days later my hips folded all right, but the wrong way, up my back towards my shoulders, when Terry refused a jump and my eyes nearly drove into my brain. And all the dreams died. If nothing else, I suppose, my notes are a fair summation of my riding career: shows passion and commitment if nothing else. And the saddest resonance from those notes is that within seven years of my accident those instructors, Tricia and Mandy, good
women both, had died prematurely of cancer. And I, wrecked though I was, lived on with a void that screamed to be filled. After that I grew used to seeing the great solid grey bottoms of the Highland ponies plodding from field to stable, and hearing once again the sound of horses’ feet around the place. But it satisfied nothing.

  Old passion gnaws at you. If addicts can give up heroin, then I could surely give up horses, couldn’t I? Or, if I couldn’t ride, was there some way I could still remain connected to them? My problem was that it was the actual riding which had fulfilled me – the freedom, and action. I wanted my mind wiped, my body and brain engaged. After my accident Nelly had given me movement, empowerment, independence, connection, intense physiotherapy. Just for a few precious minutes, a couple of times a week, she removed the pain of my existence and gave me legs again.

  Kindly people urged me to try carriage driving. The first time I did was back at the same Riding for the Disabled centre – I confess I didn’t go anywhere near Nelly’s stable – in the shafts behind a black cob who resembled an ocean-going tugboat: low-slung, broad of beam, with legs like oak trees, and a backside the width of a small car. Sara was the driver and my chair was bolted alongside; she handed me a second set of reins. And it was a lovely jaunt, along quiet lanes, the cob steady as a rock. The last time I was in a pony and trap was in County Down, age six, with my big cousin, clopping down the Hillhall Road to buy sweets. I remember the jauntiness, the fun, and the always good wind that blows between the ears of a horse.

  One of the doyennes of disabled carriage driving persuaded me a couple of years later to join her in the south of England at purpose-built facilities for competitive paradriving, where she handed over the reins of her experienced pony and we whizzed around an indoor course of gates like a timed jump-off at the Horse of the Year Show. It was seriously fun and fast, but deep down it did not compare to the fulfilment of riding. The sense of feeling the horse’s mouth, but having no contact with its body, was disconcerting. One felt detached, unconnected, unconsumed.

  ‘Probably not dangerous enough,’ sighed Dave.

  Driving Rogan the cob at Riding for Disabled. It was fun. But not a patch on riding.

  In place of the physiotherapy I had received from Nelly, I even tried being hoisted onto a mechanical horse. Sara’s one at the RDA was an elderly thing which only rocked like a cantering horse, but you sat in a proper saddle. Physiotherapy-wise, it was good to prise my pelvis open and straighten and loosen my torso, and it had the benefit of being unlikely to take off with me, but it lacked all the subtleties of communicating with a real animal. I would have carried on using it, but the centre was forced to end its tenancy and close, and the option was taken away. I still dream of finding somewhere with a sophisticated mechanical dressage horse, capable of lateral movements and mouth-responsive, fitted with a hoist for riders without any mobility, but sadly I haven’t found it yet. Gradually, I began to distance myself from the horse world. It hurt too much.

  Little else physical was left to me to escape the crushing passivity of the wheelchair. I was picky. Few things appealed, mainly because they involved the help of so many people, and I sought to be independent. I had tried disability skiing at an indoor slope but found it an intensely bitter-sweet experience. Too many memories of past good times in the Alps. At the top of the slope, I ached to push off and gather speed, swooping freely, but I was trussed like a turkey in a sleeping bag on a sit-ski, with someone snow-ploughing behind, steering me. I would never have sufficient arm function to sit-ski by myself and I would always be that much-attended, fussed-over, disabled skier whom we’ve all watched idly from the chairlift, patronising with a ‘Wow, isn’t it amazing what they can do?’ I was too proud and arrogant and fussy and ungrateful and shitty and masochistic to do that. I wanted to be alone, doing it by myself. An angry conscious incompetent.

  I craved to be active in some way. Shortly before my accident, I’d been the fittest of my life – that dreadful creation of the Saturday supplements, the fifty-something who was reliving her thirties. I had gone to a boot camp in Somerset, pushing myself to extremes under the tuition of former marines. At home, at weekends, I ran in the forest. One evening a week I went to the local village hall for a Pilates class followed by an hour of riotous hard-sweating step class which I relished to my marrow because it made me feel so alive. Our instructor used to play an extended work-out re-mix of the famous Killers anthem, ‘Human’, about ten minutes of unadulterated, full-volume, soaring escape, as we joyously stomped out the answer to the song’s question about whether we were human or dancer.

  Years passed before I was able to listen to that song again without weeping, because whenever I heard it I was right back in that hall on a cold winter night, joyously springing up and down. Because I could. It amuses me to read on the internet that the song’s lyrics are regarded as some of the most opaque and mysterious – for me, post-accident, they made total sense and had absolute, cruel synchronicity with my life. I knew the answer to the question all right, cold hands, vital signs and all. Once a dancer, now I was merely human – they were two separate tribes and I had passed from membership of one to the other, never to return.

  Every action has a consequence. Although the hip healed and the pain from it receded, I was far less physically active than I had been. I began to put on weight, and that made me eat more. Sometimes the only rational response to your circumstances is to be depressed. There was bugger-all pleasure anywhere else in my life. But then the tendons in my shoulder started to rub against the bone, worn out pushing a heavier body, a job they were never designed for. Night times were the worst, when, like toothache, my shoulders constantly interrupted my sleep. Then a hernia blossomed at the site of my colostomy, evidently kinking my gut. Oedema and nausea returned and, within a few months, the bulge developed to the extent I went back onto the waiting list for more surgery to get it repaired. A year later, I was back in hospital for that ordeal. I was due shoulder surgery as well, but after the operation was cancelled because of emergencies, I decided I never wanted to go back into hospital, and put up with the pain.

  For a good while, it was hard to avoid feeling sorry for myself: it seemed that whatever I did, and however hard I tried, something would thwart me. Although I was still taking anti-depressants, it didn’t feel as if I was. I would binge on sweet food and then spend several hours a day in deep, depressed, uncomfortable sleep, slumped in my chair, my neck bent cruelly forwards, hands clenched in misery, control and hope abandoned, not at all interested in waking up.

  I flailed around for a meaningful life. Long-term coping seemed to be dependent upon finding enough distractions to stop me thinking too much. It was as if paralysis had erased most of what my life had used to consist of – sport, interests, pleasures, travel, my image of myself. In my writing, I still had the concept of work, although changed and somewhat limited. But while my cerebral life was rich, I couldn’t possibly spend the rest of my days reading or painting or watching films. I felt as if I had stopped accumulating proper experiences. Going anywhere new became an ordeal. I graded places not by their visual splendour or the nice food, but by the accessibility of the kerbs, the minutiae of the ground. I looked down, not up, and ate weary meals at rendezvous in shabby roadside places simply because the parking was flat and generous. I learnt about being a helpless victim of diesel fumes – at waist height, child-height, buggy-height you have no idea how foul city air is. My memory bank of movement, my former, mobile relationship with places, was receding into the past. My cognitive dissonance between old self and new self meant I could no longer inhabit and enjoy old memories of what I had and did. Even my sense of touch had changed. My entire independent life hung upon the thumb and forefinger of my right hand, which had developed enough grip to enable me to muddle through the day – my own small private miracle. The other fingers were clawed, unfeeling, and useless. But essential as my finger and thumb were, I couldn’t trust their judgement. Subtle messages were absent or false
. I could touch my hair, but never again would it feel silky or soft or clean or greasy: it just felt coarse. Likewise, the skin on my face grated when I ran my thumb over it. Because I couldn’t unclaw my hands, I would never again stroke properly a horse or a dog. Just one of a thousand daily bereavements and daily signposts removed.

  Some people, disabled as adults, claim to accept their handicap quite quickly. For me, it was a period of mourning which was to take years, the long, slow, lingering death of one person while someone else with the same name tried to make sense of the changes and reorientate themselves in a foreign landscape. I seemed doomed not to accept. In this compulsion to probe and analyse my situation, I irritated myself. But I needed meaning; I couldn’t just resign myself to stasis. Why couldn’t I just get on with it? The late John Hull, an academic who lost his sight as an adult, wrote: ‘My desire for coherence … impels me to probe the experience, to grapple with it, to strip off layer after layer from it, to find meaning within it and to relate that meaning to other parts or aspects of living.’ I knew exactly what he meant. I used to secretly envy the patients in the spinal unit who were entirely passive. Their heads went down from day one, they didn’t engage, or go to the gym. They existed. Perhaps once they got home they would anaesthetise themselves with drink or drugs or food. But I couldn’t do that. Alcohol held no appeal to me; I rarely drank and then only socially. Drinking was associated with being young and letting go a bit, having fun, feeling sexy and irresponsible, dancing. Now staying in control was my preoccupation. I was eternally watchful over my own body, delving, analysing, making comparisons. At some bewildering point, I passed the watershed where I forgot what it felt like to be normal – forgot how to sit up in bed, throw my legs on the floor, and get up and go to the bathroom. Now I could watch others, and think, how does she do that? And try to remember what it felt like to reach a high shelf, or wash my face under the running tap.