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.

It’s morning and quiet. She calls but it isn’t her, 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

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.

Article about ancient amputation, large scale Serigraph reproduction (not yet made)

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. 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.

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 remain 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 test 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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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 long ago this one was involved in a different road accident, the rear fork destroyed and then rebuilt. It was my uncle’s and is forty years old. I take it apart, put it back together, and now it works great. I see N 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.

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.