A Short History of Falling

by Joe Hammond

  But something else is present that feels less like this grieving for my body. Beyond the envy and the shock and sadness, is the gratitude for being helped. How can I not feel this? It’s the bodily acknowledgement that what I really need in these helpless last months of my life is a father. So I can feel myself leaning into this help and feeling comfort. That’s part of what’s happening physically in these moments, absorbing what this feels like, this exchange, through my body – letting go and giving in to it. Wanting and needing it.

  *

  When Jimmy returns from nursery, I see him padding along the corridor towards me.

  ‘Jimmy cool!’ he says, and then comes to a stop in front of me.

  ‘Ah! You’ve been to Jimmy school?’ I ask.

  ‘Yep,’ he replies, exhaling with pleasure. ‘Girls,’ he then adds.

  ‘There were girls at Jimmy school?’ I ask.

  ‘Girls!’ he confirms.

  ‘Girls? Really?’

  ‘Yep, tractors,’ he replies.

  These are the biggest, most complex conversations in my life. I may talk about love and death and grief with others but nothing this profound.

  ‘Girls and tractors?’

  ‘Yep!’ he was delighted to confirm.

  ‘Were there? Really? That’s really great! Girls and tractors at Jimmy school.’

  ‘Me Jimmy school.’

  ‘I know! Jimmy school sounds amazing.’

  ‘Dinner,’ he says.

  ‘Dinner?’ I ask.

  He shakes his head.

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘girls!’

  ‘Dinner and girls?’ I ask.

  He seems startled by my reply, as if questioning how I could know this.

  ‘Yep!’

  ‘That sounds amazing, Jimmy!’

  ‘Tractors.’

  ‘Tractors?’ I ask.

  ‘And dinner,’ he says, ‘and girls.’

  Though my tongue and vocal cords are now affected by this disease, my lips, cheeks and the muscles around the eyes and the bridge of the nose are not. So that even though I now slur, in my conversations with Jimmy, this is of less significance. With Jimmy, the communication is more bodily; it’s joyous and all-consuming. If I could engage Jimmy like this for hours, I would.

  I’ve been managing the slurring (known as dysarthria) by placing greater care and effort when enunciating multi-syllable words. A word like elasticity would require a long run-up and a mouthful of effort. One of the markers is with Gill or Tom – and the frequency of recent occasions on which they have had to ask me to repeat myself. At this stage, I’m able to come back with renewed energy and repeat myself, like a second attempt at vaulting a fence. It’s trickier if it’s noisier or busier in the house. This is when voices become more agile and melodies overlap and, when there’s laughter, it’s like being heard over the spin cycle of the washing machine. At a certain point, I’ll leave the group, trailing the whine of the motor from my electric wheelchair. And then someone might come to chat with me in my bedroom, knowing how much more manageable this is for me.

  Over the last five years I’ve become more relaxed in company. It’s been a gradual change and it’s hard to know what to attribute this to. But I’ve travelled from moderate avoidance of social situations to, on occasions, craving them. So I suppose I’ve come closer to people and now I’m retreating back. But not as the same person. I listen to laughter and observe group behaviour, recognizing how much I would like to be part of that, but it’s not a hard loss to adjust to. Other losses feel irreplaceable, but not this one. I take myself away and listen to the sound of something I was once part of. It’s sad, of course, but it’s also one of those changes that I’m able to regard as simply different. I’ve had my conversations in life; I don’t absolutely need any more of them. Perhaps if I wasn’t writing, I couldn’t accept this; but I do.

  *

  I’m at my most disorientated watching Gill put shoes and socks on for me. I’m looking down at the unfamiliar view of the top of her head. Gill doesn’t know this is what I see; that I am paying attention to her in this way. She feels so real to me. I’m looking at the lines of hair pulled back over her crown and thinking that I’ve never had the chance to see so much of her hair. Viewed from above, her head bowed and on one knee, her body takes a servile form. But I’m also looking down as a child looks down at his mother. I can’t do this for myself any more. At what age did I learn to do my laces up? How long since I was here? It feels both new and rich with familiarity.

  Tom can dress himself, but Jimmy and I wait our turn to have our shoes and socks put on. I’ve become the third child, meeting my sons going in opposite directions. And then I watch her get to me. Her husband. Her lover. How patient and efficient she is. She knows just where to pull the lace. I feel her strength, the economical movement of her hands, the drawing taut of fibres, the contraction of leather around my foot. And she is done.

  At other times I wait and wait and that’s about as peaceful as it gets. For some lunch. For something that I’ve dropped. Or sitting on the edge of the bed, naked from the waist down, with my pants and trousers around my ankles. I’ve got this far but lack the strength to pull them up. Gill is darting here and there and I just wait. I’ve found it easier than I thought, waiting. What else can I do? It’s in these moments that the room seems quiet and everything is still. I’ve waited all my life to know this peace. To know that I am nothing more than this body.

  Some segment of imagination thinks about the time to come. The thought of myself when I have lost it all. When the body is just weight. When all that’s left is what’s inside, still processing, still thinking. And what I can communicate now, to those I love, that it will be OK.

  The Woman Who Lived in a Shoe

  One of my aunts had been married to an Earl and they had children together. I never really knew this aunt or saw much of my cousins, who were quite a bit older than me.

  But when I was around twelve or so I started considering whether I might also be nobility. I think I asked around for answers but didn’t find any of the negative responses particularly helpful, even though cousins and aunts sounded like close family to me. I was startled to realize that everyone was quite old-fashioned and rules-based about these things. I tried adding Earl on to the front of one of my school exercise books, and even though it wasn’t on the actual dotted lines where my name was supposed to go, and was sort of tagged on, I still thought it looked quite good. I started using my title here and there, but it all felt a little understated. I didn’t want to make a tremendous fuss of my lineage, and I never expected anyone to use the title with my full name, but I did think it reasonable to expect that Earl might at least stick as some kind of nickname. I think the problem was, by this stage, Hammondeggs was just too well established.

  At around this time I was in the habit of cycling over to visit one of the girls at school on Saturday mornings so that I could talk to her while she mucked out her horse. She was one of the kinder children at my school and I think she was sympathetic towards me. She seemed very strong and beautiful to me, with deep brown eyes and abundant dark wavy hair, and didn’t seem to mind me chatting to her as she shovelled horse shit from her barn. I had probably talked to her about the frustrating lack of respect for my ancestry because I remember her putting down the shovel and coming over to talk to me. I was balanced on my bike because I never quite committed to being there, but she pulled herself up on to a low wall and seemed very serious and beautiful as she asked me why I wasn’t happy being called Joe. It was a difficult question to answer and I don’t think I really wanted to. It was clear to me that she wouldn’t be calling me Earl and I didn’t want to come straight out and ask for that because I don’t think she would have agreed.

  *

  Even though I was quite taken with her, it was another year or so before it occurred to me that I might try being flirtatious or expressing interest in girls. Some of the other ways that I had been trying to feel better about myself a
lways seemed to deliver limited results. I began to see that other things were going on around me with my peers and it seemed appropriate to set myself on this course of action. It wasn’t driven by anything I actually felt – more by the sense of what I felt was appropriate at this stage in my life. I couldn’t detect any feelings or sensations that might have been helpful in this enterprise; in the same way that you might not be able to connect your tuner to a signal because the batteries have been removed. My reference points remained those two-dimensional forms acquired when I found the stash of porn at my father’s house. I was aware of what I thought intimacy looked like but not what it was. Desire was a bit like a project with a scrapbook and some glue and scissors. It makes me wonder if anyone ever took the time to make such a craft project with porn and how such a thing wouldn’t be possible in the digital age. It wouldn’t be a very healthy thing to do and I know I thought about the images far too much and that I hadn’t really moved on in my life. I was a boy huddled over my transistor radio, fiddling with the dial, when I might have been better trying to hum a tune to myself.

  I developed an increasing tendency to place myself in situations for which I was completely unprepared. I’d tried this at the age of six and, as time went on, I don’t think I became any less confused. The first real occasion was in France when I was fourteen. I went with my French exchange partner and his friends to the woods, where an extremely tall, extremely confident girl waved a condom in my face as she gestured towards a small clump of trees. I followed her but, as we approached the trees, I found myself increasingly regretting the interested and experienced impression I had been trying to convey to her. I hadn’t expected the situation with her to be real. Entering the soft, leafy enclosure, she knelt and, with the hand that wasn’t holding the condom, pulled at my elbow to follow her downwards. At this point, I took an interest in one of the trees and, moving towards it, started scratching away at the bark with my fingernail. She called over to me and I decided it would be appropriate to feign a lack of understanding by deploying a language barrier and, after a moment, she gave a shrug, a grunt of irritation, then got up and returned to the group.

  I’d like to remember this encounter in a wood in Brittany as the last moment of its kind, but instead I have to accept that I was made entirely out of wax and that, despite all the evidence this moment afforded me, I left this woodland enclosure having moulded myself into the appearance of a functioning sexual person. I didn’t stop to recognize that I lacked any kind of substance to support this. Something historic in me always felt compelled to try again, even though it was never going to work, and would be like expecting a hovercraft to hover without air, or that it might be possible to enjoy a good night’s sleep on a waterbed without any water. Throughout all these years of my young life I did nothing but subject myself to experiences I never understood – as if I were a tulip in a boxing ring; a flower or a blade of grass that thinks it is another thing. Mown down or blown down and completely out of place.

  *

  At twenty-one, Catherine was a year older than me, and I was impressed that she owned her own flat. It didn’t occur to me that she had acquired her home as the result of a personal tragedy – I just thought it was quite amazing for a person of our age. I was impressed by her French Korean heritage – and almost everything else about her – so that I didn’t particularly register that she had recently lost her father and that, in a kind of way, she had lost her mother too. She was a lot brighter than anyone I had ever spent time with and this seemed to matter to me. She had needed to be independent in her life and had recently turned down the offer of a place at Cambridge University. I think I was taken with the confidence of her decision-making and resolved to do everything I could to be liked by her.

  I remember that she was bothered by a nervous twitch in her eye and would spend large amounts of time using her hand as a pirate’s patch. But she would always make me laugh and I don’t think I ever recognized that she was feeling the loss of her father – or how it must have felt that her mother had decided to live abroad. I’m filling this memory in behind me because I wasn’t attuned in that way – just as I can only now recall that the pitch of Catherine’s voice heightened when she referred to any of these details and that her body – her eye and vocal cords – was flickering and vibrating and communicating her painful story. But despite this sadness, she cared for me and worried that I was squandering my life and had no plans for anything really. She knew more than me, had a greater hold on what was important, and the tender, enquiring intimacy of the way she discussed my future with me is one of the reasons I can recall her so vividly.

  For several weeks, we just existed and floated or orbited together, in and out of the bookshop where we worked, along the streets of Oxford, or in cafés or sitting on a wall somewhere – and we’d always end up at her place, just listening to music and talking. And this felt like a separate existence to anything that had gone before – as if I had stepped out of something and into another something and had zipped up the opening behind me. I suppose she was outside and maybe that was it – not connected to anything. I think I liked that about her. And that she was ephemeral – that she had bought a plane ticket to the other side of the world and would be gone within eight weeks. She was so impressive to me and I probably tried less because of that. Maybe I felt I didn’t need to try because I admired her so much and she wanted to be with me. There must have been a reason in all of this – in the details of who she was that can explain why I clung to her and why my experience with her was unlike anything that had gone before.

  It happened slowly and almost imperceptibly – after days and weeks of talking and walking and laughing, about anything. This life and relationship had its own gentle pace. I think I just relaxed and slipped into being with her and it didn’t feel like I was trying any more. I was just there and I don’t remember that I worried much, which was strange for me, so that when our bodies gently came together, it wasn’t much – or wasn’t too much – as it always had been before. I don’t remember even being surprised, as if I’d always been this way. Because now it seems remarkable to me – or even something like a miracle – but at the time, I think I probably forgot that my body had ever been that different in this situation. And nothing was adept or confident about our physical relationship; just tentative and careful. It wasn’t something big – just something on the map that we had shared. It wasn’t everything about that time – just part of that time – and this sense of balance was something I had never previously understood. So we carried on with our days and nights together – talking and drifting and laughing and listening to music. We were intimate together and cared about each other and then she left to spend six months travelling in Korea.

  *

  In writing this book, and in recording the details of the difficult experiences from my early life, I also want to record details of the people who have helped me. It’s no surprise to me that every religion of any kind that’s ever existed has developed a belief in the spirits that surround us in our lives. It seems to me that souls are always transmigrating and transmogrifying willy-nilly and have absolutely no interest in delaying their departure for the formality and finality of death. Such promiscuity is essential because, where spirits exist, there upon a muddy bank also sits a long line of toads. So there are two presences in life: there are the spirits that are all around us and there are the stinky, warty, stolid toads lined up in opposition.

  I am as aware of the spirits as I am of the toads. And having already written of the toads, it’s a pleasure and a necessity to write about the spirits too. And just as the toads never really leave, even if you kick them, neither do the spirits. Some people might choose to explain these presences as a product of what adheres from life’s good and bad experiences, but that does nothing to explain the stink of a toad or the oily mess it leaves behind. Whilst memory of that time with Catherine fades a little, and despite the way I let her down in the end, and even though I turned away from
something so precious, and even tried to deny that it ever existed, despite all of this, the wing-shaped presence from that time in my life still flits around my ears and is about as solid as a house-brick.

  It’s therefore obvious that I will never really die; not really die. And that the spirits in my life – those I am now starting to tell you about – are already forming with my own in some splendid fairy commotion, not unlike the spectacle of a crowded outdoor swimming pool in summer, and that I will be a spirit completely free from my body, and that I will always be and that I will never leave Gill’s side, or Tom’s, or Jimmy’s, for as long as they need me. This strikes me as something so clear and unquestionable that it hardly needs saying.

  *

  When the letters started arriving they took the form of opened-up paper bags from Korean fast-food restaurants, ornately covered on both sides with criss-crossing stories and messages and annotations. The first of the letters startled me because, in a way that now seems incomprehensible, I hadn’t been expecting to hear from Catherine again.

  I laid its geometric presence out flat in front of me and naively examined the artefact for evidence of what this meant. Very little had been discussed on the way up the escalators to the departure terminal or in those moments when I lay on her bed watching Catherine place folded items into her suitcase. But over a period of months the letters kept coming, emblazoned with Korean promises of tasty food – and funny stories and doodles – and no sense at all of something having ended. And at the foot of her very final letter was a flight number.

  I kept a few of the belongings that she had discarded in the process of packing, but these were never items I thought to use. I just liked their familiar fragrance, and I laid them out on the little table near my bed. There was a small black knapsack and a collection of pens in a blue fabric pencil case. I also held on to her potted palm, and I was unusually diligent in watering it and keeping its leaves free from dust. But with the letters themselves, I don’t know where I kept them – amongst a pile of papers perhaps, or tucked away in a drawer somewhere, as items of lesser significance.