One Step At A Time | Tom Berry
This collection of text, paintings and images are my response to the accident that my wife was involved in. It is my account and my account only. I speak for myself and not for N. It is with her support that I make this work and share it.
It’s morning and quiet. She calls but someone else is speaking, and I know something is very not right, and we do actually talk briefly as she lies there in the road, in the middle of it all; I say I’m coming now and fear gathers; Out of the house and up to the station, walking/running through the barriers and all the way through London to the hospital.
Gathering Fear | Acrylic and soft Pastel on wood panel | 18 x 55 cm
Both the accident and the week following are saturated in a brilliant light. I know N could remember how much she enjoyed cycling through the sunshine that morning. My memory is skittish and patchy but the brilliance of the week is clear - how incongruous it was with what happened. I cannot forget speaking to N or calling her parents with the news, but there are entire conversations that I know took place and don’t remember.
This is what happened - The HGV signalled late and turned across her, catching her back wheel and pulling her under. A witness had to stop her car, run out, and bang on the window before the driver understood what had happened.
N was running entirely on adrenaline at this point. Her entire body was tightly tensed, unable to relax. Her mind was incredibly clear and sharp. She was very loving and empathetic and gave a lot back to those who supported her. She also exhibited traumatic behaviours - a repetitive rubbing of her right thigh (which she still does today), and eating a polystyrene cup on that first confusing night, during the moments that she was left alone on the major trauma ward. You have to understand that for a few days her normal bodily functions completely stopped - She didn’t sleep for the first three weeks and it was a big relief when she started to again.
Finding Your Feet | Acrylic and soft Pastel on wood panel | 75 x 103 cm
Rerooting | Acrylic and soft Pastel on wood panel |75 x 104 cm
I picture her as a metamorph. Ovid relayed how the gods shifted the shapes of mortals, and like them I twist and turn her body from its damaged form into a sprouting tree, the branches folding out of her as the roots support her stump and the place where her leg once was. A flying foot would be fitting; part of her which has already died in advance, stepping between the world of the gods and mortals as Hermes does.
Here is something that both N and I felt around the accident: The world seemed to throw up parallels and coincidences much more than in normal life. The nurses on major trauma most involved in her care all shared her birthday, which was three days after she was admitted.
An amputee cycled past our friend on the morning of the accident, and amputees suddenly began to appear everywhere. On my third trip back from the hospital a man stood in front of me on the underground, making a single right leg from clay. These instances waned slowly as we became more accustomed to the situation, but the quality of feeling was very much a magical one. Perhaps the world stopped giving us little patterns in circumstance because we needed them less, or because we stopped looking for them.
A Quantity of Love (detail) | Acrylic and soft Pastel on wood panel 104 x 75 cm (left)
The Acceleration of Coincidence (detail) |Soft pastel on paper, mounted on wood panel | 21 x 30 cm (right)
Still Life | Acrylic and soft Pastel on wood panel | 36 x 37 cm
That hot stinking spring, as people emerge from a long pandemic on two healthy legs. Never have I found the word pedestrian so offensive before. The drudgery of squashing her wheelchair into our tiny car boot, the weight and the awkwardness of it. Everything is raw. I lie still through yoga listening to the instructor wish light to all beings everywhere. I think about dead pig, floating in my stew at home. The lamination of a Croissant. The sanding and priming of a wooden panel. These are her skin: healing, breaking down, and healing again. My bicycle helmet has been scribbled on by snails when I do finally dig it out. I plan a painting to capture this moment of waiting.
Solace | Acrylic and soft Pastel on wood panel |104 x 75 cm
The Weight of a Limb | Acrylic and soft Pastel on wood panel | 91x62cm
Look, don’t look Acrylic on wood panel | 59 x 95 cm
N is advised to not tip back on her wheelchair, so she can’t really cross a road as the pavement is too high. She could learn to use crutches, but is advised not to in case she falls over. Maybe it is safer if she just remains in a room and looks at the walls? She goes with her mother to get a PCR test - required ahead of her going back into surgery. They drive to the closest test centre but the lift is out of order so N can’t access the test. She asks the staff if they can bring one to her but they refuse. She asks if she can enter the premises by getting out of her wheelchair and going up the stairs on her bum, which they angrily tell her is unsafe to do. She does it anyway; furious, upset and shuffling on the floor, whilst the manager of the centre tells her workers ‘not to dare’ help, angrily saying that she will lose her job. The staff are outraged when N points out that they are discriminating against her. She complains, and gets a formal rebuttal, citing safety.
All the test centres close across England the following week.
What has happened reveals itself is in occasional bouts of extreme anger. Usually someone doesn’t see me, or N, and some small or near-collision occurs. In France a guy leaves his bicycle in N’s path and she can’t pass in the wheelchair. In our neighbourhood a man is on his phone, similarly doesn’t see her, and walks into her. In these cases the people I explode at are particularly passive and say simply, ‘i’m sorry, but I didn’t see her’. I’m angry because they aren’t looking out for us. No one is looking out for each other and no one feels that they should be. The lorry driver who stole N’s leg from her wasn’t looking out for her. Anticipating and giving space, offering a seat; these behaviours prompt us to see, to watch, to look out for.
Stars Above, Stars Below | Acrylic and soft Pastel on wood panel |104 x 75 cm
Two of my oldest friends have children during this time. I feel connected to them despite the difference of our life changing events. One tells me about swimming in phosphorescence whilst pregnant, the baby floating inside the mother, also floating and surrounded by stars. I stay in our house, but N can’t live there (too many stairs). When she does visit our cat curls up and sleeps in the space where her leg was.
Salvo Sleeps in the Gap | Acrylic and soft Pastel on wood panel | 38 x 57 cm (left)
Jumper | Mended by Florence Carr (right)
Fixer (A Bicycle is not a person) | Acrylic on wood panel | 104x72cm
A bicycle is not a person, but as my wife moves from wheelchair to crutches to prosthesis I can’t help but draw parallels. We are creatures with levers and cables that stretch through our body. Our replacement attachments (walking sticks, glasses, prosthetic arms and legs) are tweaked and optimised. They move with us and become us. Limb loss is so baffling to the body that many people feel the limb long after it has gone. One relative doesn’t believe it - ‘you’re saying this because you have heard other people say it’. But wouldn’t it be stranger to not feel a limb, when 36 years of life and the entirety of recent evolution suggest that it should exist? In his book about consciousness Anil Seth describes the idea that we experience the world top down - overwhelmingly our consciousness is based on what we expect rather than the data we process. So N is feeling the confusion of nerves with broken signals, the mismatch of her mental leggedness. A bicycle is not a person, but long ago this one was involved in a different road accident, the rear fork destroyed and rebuilt. It was my uncle’s and is forty years old. I take it apart, put it back together, and it works beautifully. I see N rebuilding and her new form being optimised - sockets, liners of different materials, mechanical feet with lateral movement, a series of experiments intimately attached to her which slowly alter her ability.
Flying Foot | Wire, plaster, feathers (left)
N | Photograph by Jake Schühle-Lewis |25 x 37 cm (right)
One year after that transformational day we hold a ceremony to bid N’s leg farewell and to celebrate how far she’s come. I collect branches on quiet, solitary walks and weave them together. We fill it with wishes, before igniting and sending to high heaven.
4 Kilometres | Acrylic and soft pastel on wood panel | 65 x 99 cm
Put your foot down, get on the good foot.
Find your feet, drag your feet,
One foot in the grave.
Step by step. One step in front of the other.
One step forward,
Two steps backwards,
One step at a time.
