Chapter 118: The Shoulder
I had the MRI in the February, two years and two months after Christmas.
It was not for the club.
It was because I could no longer sleep on my right side, and had not since about the previous August.
The consultant was a woman of about my age who spent eleven minutes with the images and four with me.
The labrum tear from when I was twenty-two is still there. It has not healed. Labral tears do not heal.
There is now degenerative change at the joint and some thickening in the capsule.
She called both consistent with age and load.
Age and load. I have moved perhaps nine thousand tonnes of wet linen since December of that year.
She said surgery was possible and that she would not advise it.
Her reasoning was that repair at thirty-five, on a tear of that age, buys a bad six months against an uncertain gain.
She said: “What do you actually need it to do?”
Nobody had asked me that in thirteen years. Not one person.
I said I needed to lift above head height about forty times a shift, and to be able to take a breakfall on my right side.
She wrote breakfall down and asked me to spell it.
Then she said the honest thing: the shoulder would tolerate falling far better than being fallen on.
That is the whole of it, medically, and it decided the rest of my life.
I can fall. I have always been able to fall.
The first thing you learn, before any throw, is how to land.
You learn it for two years before anyone lets you do anything interesting.
You slap the mat with the flat of the arm at forty-five degrees, chin to chest, and you breathe out on the impact.
The shoulder does not object, because the arm is straight and the load goes through the whole limb into the floor.
What the shoulder will not do is take an opponent's weight through a bent arm at an angle above the head.
Which means no gripping fight. No competitive practice. Nobody hanging off my right sleeve while I try to turn in.
I can demonstrate at quarter speed. I can be thrown. I cannot be gripped.
So I am not a person who trains any more. I am a person who teaches, and those are different jobs.
I went back onto a mat properly in the March.
Not the crash mat by my bed. Sixty second-hand tatami on a concrete floor in a tyre bay with two industrial heaters.
We laid them on the Sunday. Six of us. Priya came and did the taping.
Tatami are not soft. People expect soft.
They are firm, they have a grain, and they warm up under a room full of people in twenty minutes.
I did twenty breakfalls that afternoon. Ten right, ten left.
The first one was a controlled sit-back from a squat, which is what you give a beginner on day one.
The tenth was from standing.
The nineteenth was over Tobias's arm at walking pace, which is not a throw.
It was the first time another human being had put any part of me on a floor in fourteen years.
I lay there and looked at the ceiling of a tyre-fitting bay, four and a half metres up.
A strip light, and a pigeon in the roof space.
Tobias said, “Again.”
I did the twentieth.
Then I sat on the edge of the mat with my legs out and my hands behind me.
I could not get up for a bit, and he let me not get up.
He is fifty-seven now. He has a knee that clicks and a hearing aid he pretends is for the phone.
He taught me at twelve. He taught me at seventeen.
He wrote to me twice while I was on probation and I did not answer either letter.
We have never discussed that and we are not going to.
What he said, sitting on a rolled mat with his forearms on his knees, was this.
“You could not do a breakfall in the October two years ago. You did one. It was bad.”
“It was very bad.”
“Twenty today. That is what it is. That is all it is.”
Then he said the only sentimental thing I have ever heard him say, looking at the shutter.
“I kept your name in the club book. Every year. Under coaches, non-active.”
Fourteen years of a printed A5 booklet with my name in it, in a hall in Rosgate, in a list nobody reads.
I went home on the bike with my right arm aching in the deep place rather than the sharp one.
That is the difference between wear and damage.
Then I filled in the form for an enhanced criminal record check.
I put it in the postbox on Bevin Road myself, because I did not trust myself to keep it in my bag.