Chapter 65: What My Right Arm Is
I had not looked at it in twelve years.
That is not a figure of speech. I had washed it and dressed it and slept on the other side of it, and I had not once stood in front of a mirror and made it do things.
On the Saturday I did.
I stood side-on to the mirror above the sink with my shirt off and the door open, to see more of myself in the strip of glass.
There are three scars on the front of the right shoulder.
Two of them are eight millimetres long and one is about fifteen.
They are the colour of old candle wax.
Nobody has ever asked me about them, including my husband.
They put a camera through one and instruments through the others and stitched the rim of the socket down with four anchors when I was twenty-one.
The surgeon was called Mr. Ives and he told me it had gone well.
It had gone well.
That is the part people misunderstand.
The operation was a success and my career was over, and both of those were true at the same time.
I put my back flat against the wall, heels to the skirting, reached up with my left hand as far as it would go, and made a pencil mark.
Then the right.
The difference is nineteen centimetres.
I measured it with a tape from the laundry that I had taken home in my coat by accident.
Two hundred and twenty-one on the left.
Two hundred and two on the right.
Nineteen centimetres of a life I had not been keeping track of.
Then I made a different list, and it took all day, because it had to be collected as it happened.
Every time I used my left hand for something a right hand should do, I wrote it down.
Kettle, off the shelf. Left.
I do not have a car. On the bus I hold the rail with my left and stand with my right side to the window.
The light cord in the bathroom is on the right of the door, and I have been reaching across my body for it since November.
Coat on. Left arm in first, always. I have done that since I was twenty-three and I did not know I did it.
Bag on the left shoulder.
Sheets at the machine. Left high, right low, four hundred an hour.
The tin opener.
The window catch. The bolt on the side door.
Nineteen by nine o'clock at night.
Nineteen adaptations, made one at a time over twelve years, each one so small that no single day of my life ever contained a decision.
That is how a body gets put away. Not in one afternoon. In nineteen small courtesies to yourself, repeated four thousand times.
I sat with a piece of paper with nineteen lines on it, angrier than I had been at any point since Christmas.
Not at the Ashfords. That surprised me and it has kept surprising me.
At the tape measure.
On the Monday I rang the surgery and was told the wait for musculoskeletal physiotherapy was eleven weeks.
Eleven weeks takes you past a trial date. I said thank you and put the phone down.
Then I looked up sports physiotherapists within four miles and there were three.
The first did not answer. The second wanted a doctor's letter. The third was a woman called Jo Farrar at the back of a gym on Padgett Street, and she picked up herself.
“What's the injury?”
“Labral tear, right shoulder. Repaired twelve years ago.”
“And what's happened recently?”
I thought about how to answer that.
“Nothing recently. I want to know what it is.”
There was a pause on the line of about two seconds.
“That's a better reason than most. Forty-eight pounds, an hour for the first one. Can you get here Thursday at four?”
Forty-eight pounds is four and a half hours of feeding sheets into a machine.
I said Thursday at four.
Then I did the sum for how many of those I could afford before June. The answer was six. I wrote that down too.
Six hours. That is what I had.
I want to put down what I actually felt, because it was not hope.
It was the feeling you get at the top of a set of stairs in the dark when you think there is one more step and there is not.
For twelve years my right arm had been a subject I did not raise. It was the reason for everything and it was never discussed.
Thursday at four I was going to hand it to a stranger and let her tell me the size of it.
I put the paper with the nineteen lines under the mug, next to the strip of newspaper with Priya's number on it.
Then I put my coat on, left arm first, and went to work.