The World I Fell Out Of

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Melanie Reid. The World I Fell Out Of

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Foreword by Andrew Marr

Prologue

Farewell Happy Fields

Put Your Finger in the Crow’s Nest

Swallow Diving from the Seventh Floor

The Angels of Mons

Pollyanna Syndrome

This Way Madness Lies

Aunt Averil and the Hidden Army

Home

A Lost Body

Just Like a Woman

Of String Girths and Running Martingales

When Melly Met Nelly

In Bed with a Walrus

Am I Human or am I Dancer?

A Pocketful of Diamonds

Epilogue

Specialist Spinal Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

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Title Page

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Afternoon gym was also becoming less unfamiliar. I was starting to recognise faces and understand the rhythm of therapy. The gym was two large spaces linked by a glass divide, and equipped with about ten pale blue physiotherapy plinths, which raised and lowered electronically. To a layman’s eyes, the landscape was hard to interpret, more like a medieval torture chamber than anything. There were standing frames and tilt tables beribboned with heavy-duty Velcro straps to bring paralysed people upright, jutting pulleys for carrying arm and leg slings, hooks hanging from mesh cages suspended over more plinths, two sets of parallel bars, a conveyor-belted machine with robot legs and a harness suspended over it, and various arm and chest weight machines. Plus, splendidly, like a piece of modern art, half a car – a Fiat cut off in front of the windscreen, which was attached nose-in to the glass partition. That was for the future, for those of us who were able. We could learn to transfer into driver or passenger seats, practising for a life outside.

Everywhere I looked, I saw devices I could not understand but was desperate to try. My desire to get better was atavistic.

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