By the time we got him back to the village where he’d slept, it was lashing rain and almost dark. He was a day out of sync with his accommodation. We insisted on taking him on, by road, to where he had booked a bed for the night. He protested mildly, not disguising his gratitude. When we stopped, at the car park by the shores of Loch Lomond, he got out, retrieved his pack from the boot, and returned to the driver’s window. He leant down to thank us. We knew we would never meet again.
‘You’re good people,’ he said warmly. ‘Good things will happen to you.’
Five days later I fell off my horse and broke my neck.
CHAPTER ONE
Who rides the tiger cannot dismount.
CHINESE PROVERB
I was happy, I do remember that, although those were the days when I rarely stopped long enough to appreciate it. Isn’t it always the same old story – that hindsight is the teacher who always arrives too late and says I-told-you-so? We’re always blissfully ignorant and complacent leading up to life-changing events.
So, how to pin down those hateful seconds which I will gnaw regretfully over for the rest of my life? One moment I was cantering towards a small-to-medium-sized cross-country jump, relishing the unity with my own, my very own, lovely handsome chestnut Champion the Wonder Horse, high on the hill and the thrill and the freedom and the wind in my face.
I was hearing the little girl inside me crying out, ‘Look at me, look at me!’ – the next moment I was pinned to the ground with a broken neck and fractured lower back. I was conscious throughout; I knew it was catastrophic. I said, ‘Ow!’ to myself when my face slammed into the turf, and then I experienced a blinding red flash and felt my whole body suffuse with a most beautiful, intense feeling of warmth; my own internal nuclear explosion; my own terrible mushroom cloud. In those seconds I was already aware that my life as I knew it had ended. Everything had internalised. The only place where I could survive was in my head. The little girl was dead. Her dreams were atomised. Dust. You stupid, stupid idiot, I heard the voice inside my head. Damn, why did I let this happen to me?
High on the hill and the thrill.
Here are the bald facts. My horse refused a piddly jump, on a piddly little British Horse Society instruction day for piddly middle-aged wannabes playing with their piddly ponies. Harmless, happy people like me, playing at the bottom end of a thrilling, dangerous sport; pretending that I was thirty-two when I was fifty-two. I can still taste bitterness in my mouth, even as I write this, at the unfairness, the bad luck, the everyday, non-earth-shattering mundanity of the whole thing. I was a competent, experienced rider on a competent, steady horse, being coached by competent, qualified people. But horses are horses; they belong only to themselves. That day he didn’t want to do it. Jumping stickily. He refused one practice fence. Jumped it the second time. We were still warming up. I doubly committed to go over another jump – ‘Kick on, throw your heart over’ as the old manuals taught – but he didn’t. At the take-off stride, he ducked out sharply, I carried on going. And with impeccable hubris, my pride made me try to stay on by gripping his neck, which was the worst possible thing I could have done. It meant my arms were not in front of me when I hit the ground, so I did a fairly steep, slow-motion head plant. My body and long, long legs pivoted over my neck. ‘It just looked like an ordinary fall,’ said a friend nearby, shrugging helplessly at the memory. A millimetre or two difference, I would have been fine.
How to pin down the moment when your body deserts you? When you are forcibly divorced from yourself? Wedged face-down, I can taste dry, gritty, late winter Perthshire soil, and I realise I can’t move anything but my right arm and my shoulders. My elbows flip-flop a little, like a seal. I reach down and touch my leg – the hand feels the leg, feels the texture of the riding breeches; the leg doesn’t feel the hand. Doesn’t feel it at all. I can’t quite believe it, but I know what has happened. It really has happened – the thing I’ve always tried to put to the back of my head. The thing I sometimes dwelt upon, ever since I read about how the Hollywood actor Christopher Reeve, a tall, well-built man, had toppled over his horse’s ears at a small jump and become paralysed from the neck down.
I manage to lift my shoulders a fraction, and turn my head. My left hand is lying out there, sprawled where I can see it. It responds a bit when I try to clench my fingers. This reassures me, oddly, and I put my face back down in the soil so I can think a bit. In a perfectly cold, logical part of my brain I’m utterly furious with myself. Arrogant enough to think it would never happen to me. But it has.
They have gathered round me by now, my friends, training-day organisers, the instructor. I can’t feel my legs, I tell them, please phone for an ambulance. The two nice elderly men from the St John Ambulance, first-aiders in attendance at the course, have arrived. I can hear the anxiety in their voices, their fractured breathing. They put an oxygen mask on me. ‘Lie still,’ everyone is saying bossily to me, like they’re rehearsing a training drill. ‘I am,’ I say grumpily. Then they start nagging me again: ‘Keep talking. Don’t fall asleep.’ But I am growing weary and want to close my eyes. ‘Please phone my husband. His number’s on my mobile, in the pick-up,’ I tell Helene, one of the organisers. Someone comes back. Says: ‘There’s an ambulance coming from Perth.’ I nestle wearily into the soil. I’m struggling to think straight, but I know I have to try and stay in control. ‘Phone for a helicopter too,’ I say. Strangely unembarrassed. I hear them, voices off, urgent, ordering a helicopter, giving directions. On stage meanwhile, my monologue is internal.
The brain was still functioning. I held lucid conversations with the paramedics from Perth, who had arrived and were preparing a neck brace. Then, still face down, I heard the helicopter, felt the shock waves of noise, an implacable clatter descending above us. At the time, I convinced myself there were two; could have sworn I heard someone say: ‘Here’s another helicopter.’ What a bloody waste, I remember thinking grumpily. Which was one way of expressing the whole catastrophe, although I didn’t see the irony until later. Later the Royal Navy air-sea rescue pilot who picked me up told me I was wrong; there was only one chopper. But that’s the tragi-comic essence of disaster: the everyday runs head-on into the bewildering.
They turned me, releasing me from the earth, slowly, carefully – I don’t know how many of them, I couldn’t feel their hands – onto a spinal board. I remember my vision spinning, the sky suddenly unbearably bright, but my head and neck were trussed with pads, so I could only look straight up, a small dinner plate of vision. My friend Katie was bending over me, telling me that I was going in a Sea King to the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow, where the main emergency specialities were. ‘Check out the winchman, he’s really dishy,’ she told me. ‘I’m coming with you.’ She always could be inappropriate, but I think she was trying to buoy me up. Of all the emotions, the pressing one in my head was annoyance: one, for causing all this fuss, and two, for not being able to sit up and enjoy my trip in a helicopter. Perhaps shock was setting in.
The inside of the chopper was furiously dark, crowded, vibrating and noisy. I felt sick and claustrophobic, strapped down. Panic started to rise. He was indeed dishy, the winchman, in the rare moments he crossed my limited field of vision. He’d taken off his helmet. Mostly it was his voice I hung onto. I told him that I couldn’t breathe and he leant over me, speaking softly but urgently to me above the noise: ‘Yes you can. Keep breathing for me, girl. We’ll be there in six and a half minutes. Do it for me.’ Pure Mills & Boon. It felt profoundly intimate, romantic – but also heart-splintering, because in that same instant, deep