Read the book: «A Short History of Falling»

Tumbling

If I could just stop falling over, this would be a funnier book. I’m a big man and I’m starting to cause a lot of damage. I’ve just written off a kitchen cabinet, and two weeks ago I dislocated my shoulder on the bedroom floor. Quite recently I fell into my son’s empty cot, but that was a peaceful experience. The sides of the cot snapped inwards, swaddling me in very fine, soft, white mesh. Given how unsafe I am at the moment, this felt OK. I decided to remain there, looking around. It was quiet. It would have been nice to sleep, but then my other son – my six-year-old – walked in.

If I’m near other people and I sway this way or that, it can seem balletic – like one of those trust games when a person is encouraged to tuck their arms inwards and let others prevent their fall. But often I find myself alone or out of reach, and from a height of six foot three falling always takes so long. Or it feels like it. I seem to have plenty of time to think and notice and worry in that quiet moment before impact. And that’s been quite frightening. Just observing the slowness of my descent and picking both a landing spot and part of my body that seems most capable of taking the impact. And whenever I hit the floor, or something on the way down to the floor, it’s never a funny thing or a funny moment. Never something funny that I want to write about the next day. Last week I fell and split my head open in the shower. And I just lay there. Because if I fall, I can’t use my arms to get back up. I lay there, beached and soapy on the white-tiled floor, with the water raining down turning pale pink around me. And my wife running in like a Greenpeace activist to a seal cull.

I’m getting to the point when I shall look back on these falls as moments of luxury. From a wheelchair or a hoist or a hospital bed, I’ll view these early days of motor neurone disease as a time of freedom. A time when toppling or tripping or tumbling was actually possible. Because I can put my finger through the place where muscles used to be in my legs, right through to the tendons, and can feel something like the substructure of myself emerging. And it’s not a particularly good sign, but it’s not everything. It’s just the physical body. This book is everything – the experience of my body as it changes and declines. The experience of saying goodbye to those I love. I’m scared – I know I am. But it feels strangely OK. And surprising too. I’m going to tell you about it. The story of my end, or as close as I can get to it.

*

The first I knew was about fifteen months ago. It was the sensation that I had a fresh piece of chewing gum stuck to the sole of my foot. Feet feel bigger when they don’t lift properly. My big clown foot, and the funny slapping sound as I ran for a bus. And perhaps I could have fixed this by attaching a piece of string to my big right toe. But where do you stop with such things? How much of a marionette can one person be?

I was walking like a passenger in the aisle of a plane going through gentle turbulence. It’s the walk someone would make just prior to the seat-belt lights coming back on again – that medium level of mid-flight turbulence. But not on a plane: on the ground. On the way to make a sandwich or brush my teeth. Just walking. With my palms face down, as if steadying myself on the headrests of non-existent passengers.

My first fall was when I was walking Tom to school. We had joined with several mums and their children and it was a cheerful occasion. I made my way to the edge of the pavement to widen our group so that I could chat alongside what was now a phalanx of mums. But as I put my right foot down, I felt only the very edge of the kerb. I’d expected more underfoot. And the rest of my foot fell away from the group. Not off the edge of a cliff, off the edge of a kerb, but somehow I kept falling. There was no correction from either leg, as if each were too polite to be the first to move. So the whole structure of me went down. It all landed between two parked cars. About five or six children looked over me, including Tom, and a number of the mums. Something about the choreography perplexed – I think we all felt that. After the briefest of moments, most of us started laughing. And then I got up and we laughed some more. We laughed about it again when our walks next coincided.

But Tom laughed the least. He wasn’t particularly upset; he just didn’t find it funny. He’s logged quite a few falls since then. Several weeks ago he was with a friend as she listened to an account of her aunt’s recent fall and then remarked that adults don’t do such things. My son corrected her immediately. It was a factually incorrect statement, and he is good at spotting those.

*

I next fell while trying to do an impression of a pop-up toaster. This was some months later. Actually, there had been other falls in the intervening period, but nothing calamitous. Nothing I remember. By this time we were living in Portugal, where the tiled floors are so shiny that I can’t think of anywhere less suitable for a man with my predisposition towards falling. And this was just part of the adventure. A new life on shiny floors. On this occasion I fell and slammed the back of my head against a radiator. Tom and Jimmy, who was then just over a year old, were sitting on Tom’s bed wrapped in towels after an evening bath. Tom had just correctly identified my washing machine and there had been other white goods, as well as a vacuum cleaner. With the toaster, I keeled over because my left leg achieved the elevation my right one couldn’t. It was a buckled-cartwheel move, and when my head made impact it was the deep vibrating sound from the pipes that shocked us all. I lay back with my head wedged uncomfortably forwards against the steel pillow. After a few moments, Jimmy started crying; then Tom. I looked over at them. Their tears. Their crumpled faces. And a nasally sound like two interlinked air-raid sirens being squeezed out through their ears.

There’s so much more indignity in failed silliness. The thought of no longer being the clown brings me as close as anything to feeling defeated. A lot rests on being able to impersonate a toaster. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to spend more than five minutes with anyone who isn’t in some way capable of being a clown. And my feelings of loss are at their most profound when these opportunities evade me. If I can’t brush my teeth in the style of a camel. Or getting dressed in the mornings and no longer being able to chuck my discarded pyjamas at my children.

I’ve noticed that nothing can trigger tearfulness quite like an unexpected sound. This was the case with my toaster and the deep clang of the radiator, but also with the time I wrote off the kitchen cutlery drawer. I’d grown weaker, but was reluctant to give up my role as house cook. In the kitchen I needed to hold on to the counter to keep myself upright. So it was all quite sloppy; a little desperate. I’d chop an onion by throwing a knife at it or chuck a used spoon at the sink from twenty feet away. On this occasion my energy was particularly low. We had guests and I should have asked for help. I remember I didn’t bother counting the cutlery. I just shovelled it up and left the drawer open, then spun around towards the dining table. I shouldn’t have been spinning. I shouldn’t have been manoeuvring in such a casual way. But I doled out the correct cutlery at the table and spun back towards the drawer with the spares, catching the left toe of my rubber trainers on the shiny tiled floor and my right spastic foot on the heel of my static left ankle. Having reached tipping point, there wasn’t a chance my legs could save me. By this stage of the disease, rather than legs, my upper body was being supported by a creaky twin-set of large Victorian steel stanchions. I knew I was falling. It’s passive knowledge. Knowing it’s about to happen; knowing I can’t prevent it. In a cartoon, I would be whistling at this point, or checking a wristwatch. But actually, in that moment, I was gauging my total ‘arms outstretched’ length, my distance to the cutlery tray, the fixed position of my feet, and had calculated that my hands would become parallel with the cutlery tray at the point at which my falling body would reach an angle of thirty-five degrees from the floor. And I had judged it well: that’s exactly where my hands were. But I had not allowed for the velocity with which my hands would be travelling through the air, and this was considerable. My upper limbs crashed through the open drawer before I could reasonably subdivide into forks, knives and spoons, bringing the drawer and its contents down with me, in much the same way that simulated films show the collision of an asteroid into Earth, bringing an end to the age of dinosaurs.

*

My role as house cook began sixteen years ago. I’d known Gill a week, so we weren’t even living together by this point. I was lingering outside her kitchen, trying to catch sight of her as she prepared a meal. I didn’t know what to do and I was a little nervous. A little expectant. I heard clattering sounds and moved to take up a better vantage point. I remember the excitement of then seeing Gill through the frame of the doorway. She was holding a tin of tuna, trying to get the contents out. She was thrusting it downwards, the way a person might try to get some very stiff ketchup from a bottle, the way someone would do this when they don’t know the technique of slapping the base of the bottle with the palm of the hand. She was trying so hard. And I have always remembered the repetitions of the despairing downward plunge of her arm. That repeated, forlorn, hopeless, futile, beguiling, beautiful movement of her arm through the air.

*

It’s hard to live the losses moment to moment, accepting them as they arise, dispensing with pieces of the self fluently like a bag of birdseed strewn into a flock of pigeons. Lying on my back on the shiny tiled floor, I was struck by the amount of metal and detritus that can be loaded into one cutlery drawer. I was turning as I hit the drawer, so my hands and wrists connected side-on to the open drawer and the impact turned me completely. I couldn’t necessarily see what was lying all around me, but the sound of falling metal seemed to continue like hail on a skylight. And I lay, arms outstretched, on this sea of steel and crud. A friend and her sister were staying with us, and each got up and took my arms, raising me to a marginally more dignified seated position. Directly in front of me were Tom and Jimmy, standing side by side. Three foot tall and two foot tall. Their lips were beginning to agitate, like four pink caterpillars rippling across a leaf. Sitting on my bum amidst the debris, I watched as their faces crumpled and they again began squeezing air-raid sirens out through their ears. Once they had levered me up, the two sisters began gathering in all the items. It was a job I desperately wanted. I wanted to be down there, on my knees. Putting it all back together again. The spoons in one place, the forks, the knives. The masher, the crusher, the bashers, the smashers. The togs, the bottle tops, the skewers, the openers. And then a dustpan and brush for all the accumulated dust and dirt.