Highgate, December 1984
On 21 December, Lynda comes home to Highgate, having told the doctors she wants to be out by Christmas so that she can cook the dinner (‘I’m doing it!’ she tells John. ‘Your mam pokes t’ roast taties too much.’) John hoiks her up into his arms from the front seat of their Austin Allegro, missing the catheter bag so it swings wildly free, making Lynda shriek with laughter, and carries her into the house at chest-height, like a bride. Finally he lays her on the bed, runs a bath, undresses her, lowers her into the bath so she can wash herself. When she has finished he carries her back to the bed.
‘This is the life!’ she says.
‘Don’t get used to it,’ says John. ‘I’m starting your exercise regime as soon as you’ve settled in.’
And he does. A friend has lent them an old exercise bike, and John lifts her from her chair into its saddle. She wobbles because of her lost balance, and tumbles sideways.
‘I don’t know if I can do it, John.’
‘You’ve got to do it. Get on.’
He holds her up with one arm, and with the other hand reaches down to her feet, and puts them on the pedals. The foot that she can wiggle flips, flaps and falls off. He puts it back on. It flaps off again, like a heavy, finless fish. She tries to fix it with her will, but while she can make it move, she cannot control the movements that it makes.
On again. Off again. On. Off.
‘Just a minute,’ says John. ‘Wait there.’
‘In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t have much choice.’
He brings a ball of white string from the kitchen and moves the bike so Lynda can lean against a wall. Then he bends down and ties her feet to the pedals.‘Now pedal.’
‘What if I fall off?’
‘Don’t fall off. And a little less conversation, please. Just pedal.’
*
Christmas Day. At half-past two Lynda is in her steam-soaked kitchen with the vegetables boiling on the hob and the turkey in the oven. She wanted to cook on her own, so John is out, and Karl at Winnie and Harry’s. So far she has coped in the wheelchair, though it is strange to have her pans and worktops at chest height, unbalancing her if she stretches too far towards them. It is the balance that does for her when she opens the oven door to slide out the turkey for basting. The weight pulls her forward, she jerks back and the roasting tray tips, spilling scalding hot fat over the oven and floor. She twists away. ‘Damn you! Bloody damn you!’ She shoves the tray back in, slams the door and in anger grabs the nearest object, a full bottle of washing-up liquid, and hurls it across the kitchen towards the door. The bottle thuds against something, and the thing says, ‘What the bloody hell’s that for? Happy Christmas to thee an’ all.’
‘Dad?’
He looks at her, and at the fat on the floor.
‘What’s up wi’ you?’
‘This bloody thing.’ She gestures at her wheelchair, and bursts into tears.
‘Ayup,’ he says. ‘Shut up and come on. Tha’ll be all right.’
She would like him to put his arms around her. He has done it before: she thinks of her twenty-first birthday party when he asked the DJ to play ‘The Wonder of You’ and held her close as they danced around the dancefloor. She knows that would be hard for him in private, though; it is the shyness of the comedian.
It had been clear when they visited her that both Harry and Winnie had been harrowed by Lynda’s disability. Beside their daughter’s hospital bed, Winnie had cried a little, but had in the main appeared stalwart and encouraging. But with Jane Seels, Winnie had sobbed and confessed to feeling guilty because of her estrangement from Lynda at the time she was admitted to hospital. She had also thanked John for helping Lynda, and then even hugged him, her embrace a sort of apology-gift to them both.
‘I know,’ Lynda says to her dad, as he puts the washing-up bottle back on the side, ‘I will be all right. I’m just feeling sorry for myself.’
‘You will be,’ he says. ‘I know thee.’
Harry is better at doing than talking. In the New Year, he helps Lynda and John to put into action a plan that Lynda made in hospital when she watched a woman walking her dogs on the moor. Together they teach Sam the sheepdog to fetch and retrieve household items in the way that he might have brought sheep for a shepherd. Lynda drills him in bringing her clothes and shoes. John hangs a low clothes line, and she trains Sam to carry the peg basket, and to pick up the pegs that she drops. Harry shows him how to bring sticks from the yard when she is making a fire. It becomes an act at parties: Sam the dog who collects pegs, followed by Karl wheelie-ing the wheelchair around the back garden without touching the front wheels down once.
Lynda attends physio sessions and check-ups at the hospital, and, with John’s help, repeats the cycling exercise with the foot she can move. One gloomy morning in February, when the news has been about more miners going back to work, and police vans with keening sirens have been racing up and down Barnsley Road, John helps Lynda into the bath, carrying her from the bedroom over his shoulder like a fireman. He helps her wash herself, and then when she is clean wraps a towel about her and carries her back to the bedroom, dripping over him and the carpet like a bath-warm, Imperial Leather-scented mermaid. He flops her onto a towel laid over the bed. ‘Now, you get dried, while I get in t’ bath.’ Always businesslike and crisp, as if not being able to use your legs is like having a sprained wrist. Lynda, laughing, hauls herself up and sits on the bed edge, and begins drying herself. From the bathroom comes the sound of her husband splashing and singing ‘I’ll Remember You’. Through the outside window, beaded with condensation, she sees the squat, strong white-headed shape of Winnie walking slowly down the backings.
Now for her legs. She imagines her mind being in the whole of her body, instead of her brain. She tries to feel her feet without being aware that she is feeling them. Room and house recede. She imagines dancing. She remembers the little girl dancing the part of a bewitched fairy for Mrs Buxton.
‘I can’t hear you moving! Come on and get those legs going,’ calls John. ‘We’re off jiving tonight!’
When she thinks about something happening, the thinking is what seems to prevent it. It feels more a matter of letting it happen. ‘Don’t think “connect”,’ she says, ‘just do it.’
Just do it. Suddenly her leg shoots up violently, a damp white, warm limb rearing up before her. It falls back. She thinks it must have been a spasm. She tries to stop thinking and allow the connection, and her leg shoots up again. Then it falls, and rises again.
‘John!’
He jumps out of the bath and comes running to the bedroom.
‘Look what I can do!’
Her leg is sticking up at ninety degrees to the mattress, and she is keeping it there.