Best British Short Stories 2020

^{KJ ORR} BACKBONE

My father long ago said – about something I had found tough, really tough, almost too tough, for me, almost too much – that the thing was to find your way to letting it shift from being a big thing to being a small thing.

This I thought sage. This I thought helpful. This I remembered.

Easier to remember, perhaps, than to actuate.

My partner and I would always joke about my having had back surgery. My partner at the time. The joke was about the fact – true or imagined – that I was the kind of person who would walk into a room always in the company of my surgery. With, as it were, my surgery on my arm: May I have the pleasure of making you acquainted with my back surgery?

Or – we’d be out on the street, in the city, and someone would, say, jostle just that bit too hard on their way past, and my partner – whose comic timing I have to say was better than mine – would wait just a beat and then call out, Hey, don’t you know she’s just had back surgery? And then my partner would turn to me po-faced and say, I don’t think they appreciate that it was major back surgery.

Anyway, that was the joke. It served purposes.

So. This is the way a friend of mine used to start his stories. So.

So – I needed some backbone. I signed a form. I had the strangest feeling that the anaesthetist was laughing at me as I went under. Five. Four. Three.

Anaesthetic is the strangest thing. The strangest thing. Complete surrender. How can such complete surrender be acceptable? That degree of trust.

I woke up. And I’ll be honest. I woke up happy. I knew there was something solid in me now, something fixed.

Though I could not imagine what had gone on inside my body. If I’d been asked to describe what it looked like in there now, I couldn’t have said.

A visitor. My mother. She stood at my bedside and she smiled and she wept. I found this lovely and I found it also unnerving. And then I was alone, because she left.

I lay there. I lay there a while – I had to lie there a few days in fact, for the backbone to take.

Here are some of the things I began to notice as I lay there (I gave them numbers as I lay there to create some kind of order in my mind):

1. I could wiggle my toes. I was grateful. I’d been worried beforehand that this facility might be gone. (Though my toes – afterwards – hard to explain – but they felt disconnected.)

2. Flat on my back I did not know how to move. There were people who came and went. They adjusted things attached to me – wires and tubes. But this critical matter of how to move was not something anyone seemed compelled to address. I myself, in the state I was in, shelved the issue for later.

3. I had not been told I would no longer know the difference between what I saw, eyes shut and eyes open. This confused me. It all looked the same. I’d open my eyes and see the beds lined up opposite, the rows of bedside lights on the wall behind – and then I’d close my eyes and see the exact same thing. It was alarming. I found it distressing. Even to think of it now. The implications were – hard to grasp. How was I to proceed with any confidence when I no longer knew if I was awake or asleep?

Something else.

A woman arrived. One of the beds on the opposite wall. She was beforehand – her procedure. She was beforehand. I was afterwards. It was night. The lights were dim. She blessed the nurse who accompanied her in. She wished her a good life. She seemed to go through some kind of ritual placement of objects. This seemed important, though I struggled to grasp what she was doing or why. I myself had done nothing like it. I had arrived and unzipped my boots and slipped off my clothes. I hadn’t blinked. I’d signed my form. I hadn’t blessed anyone. And then the anaesthetic. Six. Five. Four.

She had arrived with bags. A lot of them. These bags were plastic. Blue. She clutched them in her fists like a wild array of blue balloons. I was flat on my back, but with my head slightly raised I saw. And I heard the rustling as she took things out of them.

She had arrived with her husband – I assumed him to be. He stood and watched close by. I remember his head was – tilted to one side.

She was rustling all the time. It made me smile.

He watched and I watched as she set things out. Cloth – a length of cloth – on top of the side table. Small items – great care – on top of this. On the the… shelf, table, table-top over the bed – that swivelled over the bed – perhaps it was a basin. I don’t know. Perhaps there was a towel. The last thing she did though – she rolled out a rug. A small rug. Great care. And then she turned to the man, to her husband, asked for help. I think perhaps what she wanted was alignment – the the the the the side table, the edge of the rug, the bed…

He raised both hands. He said something to her. Perhaps he said… you know, I can’t be sure. His voice was gentle, hard to hear. I can’t be sure what it was he said.

When he’d gone – the man – and then when she’d gone – the woman – when she’d gone for the procedure, her procedure, a man in green appeared – snorted – a sound like laughter – said, You’re kidding me – cleared her things away. It took no time at all.

Having seen the effort she had gone to, I found this troubling. I felt – great concern. I had… how can I describe it? I was becoming increasingly anxious that the woman might not return.

I did not want to think of it. Watching her I’d forgotten where we were. But when they came for her she’d been upset. Nil by mouth. Weak and distressed.

Now she was gone and all her blue bags.

It was night time quiet. The lights were low. A storm was flickering in my cranium. I put one hand on top of my head to try to calm things down. Something was shifting, rising, teeming – something… microbial. My eyes were open or shut. Explosions of colour gave way to soft fur. A studio theatre with inky drapes felt familiar and benign but then it fell apart and was a vast and funnelling black hole.

Later on she was crying. I couldn’t see her. It was dark. Later still I would wonder if she was even real – I couldn’t know. When I’d seen her, had my eyes been open or shut?

Open, shut, I cried with her. Afterwards I slept.

I would think of her again much later, but at the time I had things on my mind. For one, I could not seem to get up. My hands, my arms, my legs, moved fairly freely – yes. My head up off the pillow – just a bit, not for long. For the rest, it felt like I’d been stapled lengthways through the middle and the giant staple had attached me to the bed.

The pain was tremendous.

My toes remained oddly detached. Long afterwards they seemed to try to move for the rest of me.

When a nurse showed me the mechanism that could tilt my bed, I pressed the button. My head was raised, my upper body too, the ward came more fully into view. It seemed stable.

Don’t get me wrong. When I left, I left sleek and slender and upright – a new and improved version of myself full of screws and rods and other things besides. A vague concern I might be struck by lightning. But I had backbone. I was spineless no more.

I could give you some associations of spinelessness – what it means to be without backbone at all. First up: a man attempting to crawl, flat out, face down in the dirt. This image perhaps comes from a film.

The dressings came off. There were large staples too. These had held the wounds together. The doctor used pliers. It was hard not to notice how she flinched.

The scars. The scars were livid. They ran in very straight lines beside the spine. There were rows of tiny legs where the staples had been. These tiny legs looked like they were running and running.

I’d not processed, somehow, that afterwards – after the procedure – I’d not be able to move, ever again, the way I’d moved before. I had not understood that it would seem to affect every small articulation.

I would envy the bodies of dancers, and gymnasts. It would seem not impossible, not far-fetched – another version, another me, who might have done just that… that bend, right there.

In my shoes my toes moved with longing.

Movement – it was so awkward. There was a way to get in and out of bed. No twisting. Roll. Roll to get up. Roll like a bug to get up.

Interest in the words exoskeleton, endoskeleton.

Imagine the tools – the tools they would use – the force it would take – to leave a person rigid – to leave a person full of rods and screws.

I wanted a reversal. I had a dream where I banged and banged on the door and I begged, Take it out! There is no way back, they said. The whole thing would crumble. It’s part of you now.

Time passed. Time passed. What had happened to my body was unspoken. Part of me.

So.

So time passed. It was much later. I met the translator. Everything she said was provisional. Subject to change. You might think it would be annoying – but I found that I liked it. I hadn’t expected this. If you’d asked me before I would have thought it preposterous for anyone to want to spend their time with someone who would seem never to get to the point. She would say things like, I think… What I mean to say… I have a notion…

The first time I saw her – an event in a bookstore. The kind of thing where the event is happening but even so the store is open for people to browse the shelves. She was the event. A man asking questions. I’d stopped in after work to look for a book.

It was the trailing off that caught my attention. I thought perhaps something was wrong with the microphone. I became aware of these – silences, in the conversation.

When I met the translator, I’d not thought much about the procedure in years. I’d thought of it a lot, at the start. It was hard not to. Then time passed. The scars were no longer livid. Those running legs faded and faded and then they were gone. Perhaps it was now a small thing, a smaller thing. A big thing, but not as big a thing as it had been before.

There was no pain now. I felt nothing.

The way she spoke. The way even… if I could describe it. The way even she sat on her chair. Who would have thought that could be so…

I sat at the back of the store to wait for the end. I spent half the time pretending to read but I was really in a panic staring at my hands.

Adjustments, refinements, rearrangements. She clutched them in her fists like a wild array of balloons. Pauses in between as she took time to think. Nothing taken for granted. Nothing allowed – not for long – to be fixed.

And I saw it. I saw this thing running through me. Running me through. Its grip.

Sometimes she’ll look at me, and I’ll think… I think she looks at me with pity? And I think perhaps that I should tell her, about what happened to me. Though I’m not sure I’d be clear, that I’d know what to say, that it would make sense. Where would I start?

She’s seen the scars on my back – but that’s not it, that’s not, that’s… that’s not what I’m talking about.