Chapter 15: What the Hands Remember
There is a callus at the base of each finger on my left hand, four of them, flat and yellowish, about the size of a lentil.
They are not from the door frame.
They are older than that.
They are from a jacket collar.
You get them from the tsurite, the lapel hand, from ten years of closing on thick cotton several hundred times a day.
They went soft after I stopped, and then they came back, and they came back within about five months of my finding that ledge.
The body keeps its accounts.
It does not care whether you have decided to be a different person.
Here is what I mean by the hands remembering, and it is not a figure of speech, it is a physiological fact about pattern.
At the swimming baths there was a woman who used to leave her towel on the rail by the steps, and one morning the rail was wet and the towel went and I caught it.
I did not see it fall.
I was facing the other way, four metres off, and I had it before the noise of it reached me.
Not caught it neatly.
Caught it hard, in a fist, at chest height, having turned in and dropped my weight, which is not how a person picks up a towel.
She said, Goodness, you were quick.
And I stood there with somebody's wet towel in a fist and my knees bent and I could feel the exact places where my feet were.
That is what twelve years of not touching anybody buys you.
It buys you nothing.
The wiring is not in the decision.
The wiring is underneath the decision.
Which is precisely why the door frame mattered, and why I did it at one in the morning with the light off.
If you have a thing like that in you and you never use it at all, it does not go quiet.
It gets closer to the surface.
Two or three nights a week, twenty minutes, one arm, and then a glass of water at the sink.
That was the whole of it, and it was the only appointment in my week that nobody could cancel.
I had two other appointments.
Swimming, Tuesdays and Fridays.
Willow Bank, Wednesdays.
By November I had lost the swimming, because Lorna Vasey swam on Tuesdays and Fridays and I could not go and not speak to her.
So it was Wednesdays and the door frame.
I have been asked, by a woman whose job it was to ask and who was extremely good at it, why I never simply went to a club.
There is a judo club forty minutes away, in the back of a leisure centre, on a Thursday.
I had looked it up.
I had looked it up in my first year and I had the timetable.
The answer is on a form.
To train anywhere you sign on, and the form asks, and the form is right to ask.
I would have had to write it in a box in block capitals and hand it to a stranger and then walk out onto a mat in a room full of people who had just been told.
And even if nobody said a word, and people are often better than you fear, sooner or later somebody would have gone down and I would have been the one who put them there.
That is not a fear of being arrested.
That is worse than that.
That is knowing that the second time is not an accident.
The second time is a pattern.
So I did not go to the club, and I never wrote down the number, and every Thursday at half past seven I knew what time it was.
The night of the twelfth, I did my twenty-two, and I wiped the ledge, and I put the stool back second foot from the wall.
Then I stood at the sink and drank the water and looked at the black glass.
And in the black glass, over my own shoulder, at a distance I could measure without turning round, there was a shape in the kitchen doorway.
He was in the doorway to the hall, so he had come down the back stairs, which come out by the linen cupboard and are quieter.
He had been there long enough.
That is the part I worked out afterwards, from where he was standing, which was inside the room.
You do not arrive at a doorway and end up a metre past the frame.
He had walked in, and stopped, and stood.
I did not turn around.
I put the glass down on the drainer.
In the window I watched him look at me, and then look up at the top of the scullery door, and then look at me again.
He said nothing at all.
He went back up the way he had come.