One Step At A Time
This collection of text, paintings and images are my response to the accident that my wife was involved in last year. 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.
Gathering Fear
Acrylic and soft Pastel on wood panel
18 x 55 cm
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.
Finding Your Feet
Acrylic and soft Pastel on wood panel
75 x 103 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 at the accident, or calling her parents to with the news, but there are entire conversations that I know took place but don’t remember.
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, when she was left alone on the 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.
A Quantity of Love
Acrylic and soft Pastel on wood panel
104 x 75 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 a damaged vessel into a sprouting tree, the limbs and branches folding out of her body as the roots support her stump and the place where her leg once was.
A flying foot would be fitting, as a part of her which has already died in advance. It represents stepping between the world of the gods and the mortals, as Hermes does.
This 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. Two of N’s nurses shared her birthday. One nurse and the lady who probably saved her life at the scene of the accident share the same name. 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. This finding of patterns waned slowly as we became more accustomed to our 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.
The Acceleration of Coincidence
Acrylic and soft Pastel on wood panel
(not yet made)
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 prostrate in yoga listening to the instructor wish light to all beings everywhere. I think about dead pig, floating in my stew at home.
My bicycle helmet has been scribbled on by snails when I do finally dig it out.
Solace
Acrylic and soft Pastel on wood panel
104 x 75 cm
The lamination of a Croissant. The sanding and priming of a wooden panel, all of these are her skin: healing, breaking down, and healing again.
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, and other people just stay in a room and look at the walls?
N and her mother go to get a PCR test ahead of her going back into surgery. They drive to the closest vaccine centre but the lift is out of order so N can’t access the test. She asks 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 it is unsafe to do. She does it anyway; furious, upset and shuffling on the floor, whilst the manager of the centre tells her workers to ‘not dare’ help N, 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 PCR clinics close across England the following week.
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 gap.
Salvo Sleeps in the Gap
Acrylic and soft Pastel on wood panel
38 x 57 cm
Stars Above, Stars Below
Acrylic and soft Pastel on wood panel
104 x 67 cm
Two of my closest friends have children during this time. I feel connected to them despite the difference of our life changing events. E tells me about swimming in phosphorescence whilst pregnant, the baby floating inside the mother, also floating and surrounded by stars.
One year after that fateful 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 it to high heaven.
Look out for me
Acrylic and soft Pastel on wood panel
(not yet made)
What has happened reveals itself is in occasional bouts of extreme anger. Usually what happens is someone doesn’t see me, or N, and some small or near-collision occurs. In France a guy left his bicycle in N’s path, and she couldn’t pass in the wheelchair. In our neighbourhood a guy was on his phone, similarly didn’t see her, and walked 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. To see, to watch, to look out for, is to be considerate of strangers, of your common human being. Offering a seat on the underground, anticipating and giving people space - these are active behaviours with a precedent, not an amalgam of moralistic rules to chastise people with.
The Value of a Limb
Acrylic and soft Pastel on wood panel
(not yet made)
Walk, don’t walk / Safe Passage
Acrylic and soft Pastel on wood panel
(not yet made)
‘Fixer’ (A Bicycle is not a person)
Acrylic and soft Pastel on wood panel
(not yet made)
A bicycle is not a person, but as my wife moves from wheelchair to crutches to prothesis, I can’t help but draw parallels.
We are mechanical creatures, with levers and cables that stretch through our body. Our replacement bionic attachments (walking sticks, glasses, replacement 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. N’s grandmother 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 it was involved in a car crash like my wife was, and the rear fork destroyed and then rebuilt. It was my uncles and is forty years old. I take it apart, put it back together, and now it works great. I see N being rebuilding, and her new form being optimised - sockets, liners of different materials, mechanical feet with lateral movement, a series of experiments so intimately attached to her which slowly improve her ability.
