Chapter 68: Twelve Weeks
It began on a Tuesday at half past five in the morning in a room three metres by four.
You need a doorframe, a length of red rubber band, and enough floor to lie face down on.
I had all three, barely.
The floor space, once the divan was pushed against the wall, was one metre eighty by ninety centimetres.
I am one metre seventy-eight. Face down with my arms out, my fingertips touched the skirting on one side and the table leg on the other.
Band external rotations, elbow tucked at the side, three sets of fifteen.
The movement is about twenty centimetres of travel.
That is the whole thing.
You rotate your forearm out against a rubber band twenty centimetres and then you let it come back.
The first morning I did forty-five of those, and my shoulder was hot afterwards, and I sat on the floor and thought: this is it. The great return.
Prone horizontal abduction.
Lie face down, arms out in a T, lift them two centimetres off the floor.
No weight. Not a tin, not a book. Nothing.
Two centimetres.
Ten times.
On the fourth repetition of the first morning my right arm was shaking.
Nothing in my life has been as humiliating as an arm that will not lift itself two centimetres off a carpet, and that includes being made to kneel in front of twenty-two people.
I want that comparison in writing because it is true and because it is not what people expect.
Kneeling was done to me. This was mine.
Prone Y. Same position, arms at forty-five degrees, thumbs up, lift.
Wall slides, forearms flat against the wall, sliding up, keeping the shoulder blades down the back.
Isometric holds at the end. Push into a doorframe for thirty seconds and do not move.
Twenty minutes. Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
Half past five, because the shift starts at seven.
There is no drama in it at all. That is the thing nobody puts in a film.
Week one I could not do ten prone Ys on the right without the elbow bending.
Week two I could.
Week three Jo measured me and said nothing had changed, that this was correct, and that I should come back in a month.
Week four something did change, and it was not in the shoulder.
I started counting the repetitions out loud, under my breath, and counting out loud does something to time.
Twelve years ago I counted everything.
Kilos, minutes, matches, the number of steps from the changing room to the mat, which was thirty-one.
Somewhere in those twelve years I had stopped counting anything except kneelings.
Now I was counting again and the counting was going somewhere.
On the Wednesdays it was worst, because half past five on a Wednesday morning had once been the start of a day with two good hours in it.
I thought about Iris Penhale's hands about once a week.
And once, in the middle of a set of wall slides, I thought about the trolley outside room fourteen again. The open drawer. The blue tunic. Four minutes to two.
It arrived the way a name arrives when you are not trying to remember it, and I stopped in the middle of the set with my forearms on the wall.
Then I did the last eight and went to work, and I did not think about it again for months, and I have gone over that morning many times since.
Priya came on Sundays. We walked, mostly. She is a fast walker and she does not fill silences.
Ruth wrote letters and the prosecution wrote letters back and the date moved twice.
Julian sent one message in April. It said: My mother has asked me to say that if you were to reconsider, the family would not stand in the way.
The family would not stand in the way. That is the closest thing to an apology I have had from that house.
At week six Jo put me on the dynamometer again.
Ten point four kilos on the right.
Fourteen point six on the left.
Seventy-one per cent.
“Eight per cent in six weeks,” she said. “That is exactly what should happen and I'd like you to be pleased about it and I know you won't be.”
I asked her when I could take a fall.
“Not yet.”
“When?”
“When you stop asking me every time.”
Every Thursday at seven o'clock I was not at Marchbank.
I knew exactly where I was each time. Week one, at the sink. Week two, on the bus, going past the top of Vernon Street on the number nine.
Week five I got as far as the door of the carpet warehouse and stood outside it and read the opening hours on a laminated sheet for four minutes.
Week seven I got to the bottom of the stairs.
There are nineteen of them and I counted them from the bottom without going up.