Chapter 14: Twenty-Two
The door between the kitchen and the scullery was Victorian and had never been touched.
Deep architrave, painted about eleven times, and along the top a flat ledge of maybe eighteen millimetres with a lip on it.
Eighteen millimetres is nothing. Eighteen millimetres is a rung.
I had found it in my second month in that house, reaching up to a shelf, and I had stood underneath it for a while the way you stand in front of a locked door you have found a key for.
The frame is two metres four to the ledge.
I am one metre seventy-four.
Standing tall with a hand up I was eleven centimetres short, so I had to jump for it, and a jump makes a noise.
So I did it from the low stool by the boot rack, stepped up, took the grip, and let the stool go with my foot.
The grip is four fingers over the ledge to the second knuckle, thumb underneath and flat, not wrapped.
You do not wrap the thumb on a ledge.
A wrapped thumb is a wrist that cannot rotate, and a wrist that cannot rotate is how people fall off things in kitchens at one in the morning.
Left hand.
Right hand at my side, or holding the hem of my dressing gown so it did not catch.
Then I pulled.
The first one is always the worst one, and it is not the muscle, it is the joint deciding whether it is going to allow this.
The scapula sets. The lat comes on.
Then the arm, last, which is the whole secret and I have never met anybody outside a gym who believes it.
You come up until the ledge is level with the collarbone, and you hold for a count, and you come down slowly, because coming down fast is what tears things.
Two.
Three.
By six I could hear my own breathing and I had to shorten it and put it through the nose because the kitchen was under the room where Julian was asleep.
At ten I stopped thinking about anything at all, which is what I was down there for.
At fifteen the forearm started to burn from the wrist to the inside of the elbow, and the fingers began to negotiate, and you learn very early that the fingers negotiate long before the arm does.
At nineteen my heels were touching the door of the boot cupboard on every descent and I had to move six inches left.
Twenty.
Twenty-one.
Twenty-two.
I did not decide to stop at twenty-two.
Twenty-three was not there.
That is the difference between a number you choose and a number you find out.
Then I came down properly, feet flat, no drop, and stood in the dark kitchen with my left hand shaking and the fridge running.
Twenty-two, left arm.
Right arm: none. Not one.
Not since I was twenty-two years old.
The right shoulder will carry, push, pull horizontally, and hold a wheelchair on a slope for two hours.
It will not hang a body from a single point.
It never will again.
I used to be able to do thirty-one on the left, at twenty, in a gymnasium in front of a coach with a stopwatch, and he wrote it in a book.
Twenty-two at thirty-four, at one in the morning, in a nightdress, on a door frame, is not thirty-one.
But it is not nothing, and I want to be extremely clear about what it is, because it is the load-bearing fact of my entire life.
A body that can lift itself twenty-two times on one arm can do other things.
It can put a grown man on the floor.
It can do it in under two seconds from a standing start.
It can do it without the shoulder that does not work, because the throw I know best is done with the hips and the legs and the hands only steer.
I had known that every day for twelve years. Every single day.
That is what nobody understands about restraint.
Restraint is not the absence of the ability.
Restraint is the ability, held, hourly, for four thousand three hundred and eighty days.
I had been doing this two or three nights a week for three years and not one person in that house knew.
Not Julian. Not Margot. Not Damon.
I did it at one in the morning in a kitchen with the light off, and I wiped the ledge afterwards with a tea towel, because the hands leave marks on paint.
I did that every time. Wipe the ledge.
Put the stool back against the boot rack, second foot from the wall, where it lived.
Then I drank a glass of water at the sink, standing on the cold tiles with the fridge going, and looked at the black window, and went upstairs.
Three years. Not one person.
That was the last night that was true.