Читать книгу The World I Fell Out Of онлайн

75 страница из 98

Oxbow the ecologist had been cycling to work when his front wheel hit a pothole and he broke his neck. He could hardly move anything; his elbows were supported in slings in hand therapy so that he could try and regain a scintilla of shoulder action and be able to work the joystick of a power wheelchair. Barnaby was an older man, a former ship’s officer, desperate only to learn to feed himself so he didn’t impose on his elderly wife. He had fallen at home. He would sit, his forearms in yet another kind of sling, waving with a spoon at a bowlful of apple segments. Occasionally he hooked one and got it as far as his mouth, and his face cracked open with satisfaction as he munched.

Stoical the businessman, who had slipped on ice crossing a supermarket car park and suffered cervical damage, had, like all of us, numb fingers. But his numbness was combined with painful hypersensitivity in his fingertips. Every single session he sat, like a man on a lifelong mission, methodically scouring away at them with gentle sandpaper, desensitising them. I envied him his calm.