Chapter 69: The Honest List
At week nine I put the kettle on the shelf with my right hand.
The shelf is a hundred and sixty centimetres up.
I had been putting the kettle on the worktop for six years and telling myself it was because I used it a lot.
It went up and it came down and nothing happened.
I stood in that kitchen area, which is a metre of worktop and a cupboard, and did not move for about thirty seconds.
That is the whole event.
A woman put a kettle on a shelf.
At the laundry I started catching high with the right hand for one hour a day, and only one, because Jo had been specific.
Hour three, every day.
Right high, left low.
Four hundred an hour.
By the end of that week my shoulder ached from the joint to the elbow every night, and it was the good kind, which is dull and gone by morning.
Terry stopped by the line on a Friday and watched me for forty seconds without saying anything, which is his way of doing a performance review.
“You've changed your grip.”
“Yes.”
“Don't get hurt. I've no one to cover Saturdays.”
Then I wrote my own list, because Jo's list was a clinician's and I needed one in my own words.
I wrote it on the back of the sheet with the nineteen adaptations on it.
What I can do.
I can pull a person towards me with both hands at chest height.
I can lift a person's weight in front of my body.
I can grip anything. My hand is thirty-eight kilos and my hand is not the problem and never was.
I can be thrown.
I can, according to a woman with a dynamometer, get my right shoulder back to about eighty per cent of my left over about a year of tedium.
What I cannot do.
I cannot take an arm to the end of its range with a person's weight on it. Not once. Not ever.
I cannot put my body weight through a straight right arm from height.
I cannot do anything overhead repeatedly.
I cannot compete. I wrote that down and underlined it and then wrote underneath: this was decided at twenty-one by a man called Ives and it is not new information.
Then, at the bottom, in a different pen, on a different day, I wrote the third list, which had one line in it.
What I have never been able to do: describe any of this to another human being.
Ruth's letter came on the second Tuesday in June.
The prosecution would not accept the amended basis of plea.
Their position was that the account of the complainant taking hold of the defendant's dress was not supported by the majority of the witness statements and could not be agreed.
Therefore the disputed facts would have to be determined by the court, and a hearing had been listed for the eighteenth of September, with a time estimate of one day.
One day. That is what my eight seconds are worth in a diary.
Ruth's covering note was four lines long and the last one said: This is what you asked for. It is now a fight and I am glad you know that.
I read it standing up in the yard behind the loading bay with the fans going.
Then I did an eleven-hour shift.
Priya came on the Sunday and we walked four miles along the towpath because the weather had turned and neither of us wanted to sit down.
She asked me one question the whole way.
“Are you going back to it?”
“To what?”
She gave me a look that I deserved.
“There's a club on Vernon Street,” I said. “My coach still teaches there. Thursday nights at seven.”
“And?”
“And I've stood at the bottom of the stairs twice.”
She walked forty metres without saying anything, which is a long time when you are next to somebody.
“When I was looking for you,” she said, “I stood outside nineteen of those places. In a cardigan. And every single time I nearly didn't go in.”
“That's not the same.”
“No,” she said. “It's much easier than what you've got. I know that.”
That is why I can be around her. She does not make things equal to be kind.
On the Wednesday night I took the plastic bag the laundry gives out for spoiled linen and I put in a clean towel, a pair of tracksuit trousers, a T-shirt, and a pair of socks with no holes in them.
I stood the bag by the door.
Then I moved it, because it was in the way of the door, and put it on the chair.
Then I put it back by the door.
I did the band exercises at half five on the Thursday morning, three sets of fifteen, and my hands were shaking on the second set and it was not the band.