A Short History of Falling. Joe Hammond

image of a corner shop, in which shelf items mysteriously disappear through the walls or the floor. Increasingly, the stock appears sporadic and the shop becomes less useful as a place for anyone to reliably buy their groceries. Sometimes the shop door opens and the visitor looks around, having arrived here through habit, forgetting that the place has fallen into decline. Others still choose to come, if they have the time, remembering what it was – or they maintain their shopping habit out of nostalgia and affection.

      It’s so easy to reach for these metaphors of loss and decay, and I think this has something to do with the absence of concrete information about what this disease actually is, or what causes it. No one appears to know why or how or when motor neurones die within the body; why the line of communication between brain and muscular tissue breaks down. It remains a mystery, so that in thinking and writing about my degenerating body, imagery and imagination can be everything. This is the reason why, despite writing about the removal of extended metaphors, I’m nonetheless tripping over smaller, rat-size examples of imagery darting in from every angle.

      But when reaching too far into metaphor, the experience of what something actually feels like becomes lost – and because I feel this experience so profoundly within my body, it’s description that really matters to me. I’ve had my moment here – descending into metaphor – to help explain the little I know about how this disease works. But I don’t experience the disease, I experience my body, and this is what interests me. I know enough not to think that sea vegetables or reindeer velvet can delay its course. Of course, somewhere out there, a reason exists for why these neurones die, and there’s probably something out there that will stop this. Maybe it is sea vegetables! But these dart-throwing investigations can’t be anything to do with me – not whilst the shamans are still shaking their sticks at the moon. They don’t interest me.

      All that interests me is being with people – and with my body as it dies – and writing about it.

      *

      On the other side of the room Tom and Jimmy are flapping on our bed like unnetted herrings on the deck of a trawler. Gill’s laughing and the boys are squealing, but I’m over here with my recliner all the way back resting my tongue on the floor of my mouth. It’s unusual to be this much on the outside of an escapade, not even to be enjoying the fact that my children are so happy. I could be in an adjacent hotel room or in a split time frame. There are other moments when I will sit and enjoy: laughing or smiling at acrobatics, or boofing a pillow into someone’s face. But on this occasion my recliner is tilted back and I’m interested in the difference between the roofs of the two terraced houses I can see through the window. The slate on one roof is clean and new, but where the roof becomes another property the roofer has left the moss-barnacled slates unchanged. It’s the same roof. A shared roof. But the two parts are cared for as if they exist in different continents.

      Gill and I can still talk and talk when we get the chance, and I can still read books to the boys, but this evening my facial and tongue muscles have grown more tired than usual. I spent the day on the phone to estate agents, solicitors and various health professionals. I became hoarse quite early on in the day and then the susceptible muscle at the base of my tongue began to ache. I used my reserves and now I’m spent. So I’ve tilted myself back in this moment and taken myself away. To a time, perhaps a year from now, when the voice is gone and the face is gone. And my hands can no longer make signs. Preparing for disability is like going on holiday somewhere new and wondering what clothes to pack. For now, I’m scouting it out. Just temporarily – just for an hour or two. Being elsewhere, in an expanding private world; a world I will get to know. I’m glad to feel it first. Preparing for when I will be looking out at the life of my family. Knowing that I was out there once. The clown. The protagonist. The herring.

Doctor Tiago’s Hydroelectric Power Plant