Fiction: The Shape of Endurance by Gordon Hayes

Photo Source: Picryl

Pain - what is pain? If you can’t see it, does it exist? Invisible pain like mental illness, or some debilitating trauma for which you are its only witness, is something personal. We each experience it as an individual torment, never shared. I see it as a haunting presence: something that waits in the shadows; that arrives uninvited at dawn or in the middle of conversation, reminding me of my mortality. But how do you describe it? How do you measure or compare it?

I feel it like an old enemy slipping back into the house, noiseless but known, setting its icy hands upon the small of the back, claiming again what it thought was always its own. It is not a momentary stab, but the long, slow inheritance of hurt, passed down as faithfully as a father’s brow or a mother’s silence.

Specialists in pain management, who focus on function, movement, and long-term pain care, disagree on a scale of pain measurement. They declare it is subjective, and personal; depending upon each person’s pain threshold.

However, they agree that illnesses and injuries that appear to cause the most pain are trigeminal neuralgia, that monster of the facial nerves: sufferers called it the Suicide Disease, as if someone whispered a malediction into a person’s skull. People said it came like a thief and left them at the edge of a window or a darkened bridge, and some stepped over. Others spoke of central neuropathic pain.

I cannot speak of the first of these torments, whereas the other pain, the one that came for me, I know it well. It does not leave. It lives within me. Central neuropathic pain, the doctors wrote. A spinal cord injury, the papers said. But the name doesn’t contain it.

We were cyclists that morning, my wife and I. The Bay was a sheet of glass beaten into green and blue by the wind, streaked with silver as if a god had dragged a knife across it. The swimmers and runners gathered like pilgrims for their Sunday rite, and the foaming surf broke and renewed itself, as it always had.

After our swim, I cycled across the empty road for coffee at the pub, the sun on my shoulders, and thought the drain ditch was a ramp for prams and bikes up to the pavement. It was a small thing, a foolish mistake. The granite kerb rose like a hidden wall and stopped me dead. Over the handlebars I went, a puppet cut from its strings, and landed on the back of my head. Limbs vanished into some far-off place; my arms and legs floated like lost birds. Faces came, pale and worried; words dropped like stones I could not catch.

An orthopaedic surgeon, of all people, knocked over his coffee to reach me. Don’t touch him! He called, and everything moved in a blur. Hours later: hours that had no hours in them, morphine at last swaddled the pain.

When I awoke, it was to a new country. Below my waist there was only silence. No foothold. No path back. Like Humpty Dumpty, I broke into pieces on the pavement, and no one, not even the cleverest surgeon, could put me back together again.

Anger came before sorrow. Anger like a tide, because I was still young enough to run, to swim, to ride, to believe in my physical fitness. Now my body was a barricade I could not cross. There was no one to blame but myself, and so I did.

I built a fortress of muscle in my upper body, spending hour after hour at the weights, sweating in silence. Then the disability support group: men and women who knew me, lent me one of their racers. A racing wheelchair: three wheels, two large ones at the back and a small obedient one at the prow, a frame of aluminium and carbon light as air, a seat low and inclined like a bullet’s cradle. I took it, and I raced.

Paralympics 2032; I whispered it to myself as a promise, a kind of prayer.

But the sea called. The sea called every hour of the day. I circled the roads by the beach in my chair, watching the swimmers and the surfers and the young lifesavers whose bodies were still whole. They saw me too, and one day they wheeled over a contraption with balloon tyres and a padded seat, a thing made to travel over soft sand. I hesitated. My shame was a weight. Surely there were others more deserving. But they waited, smiling, and I let them.

They rolled me to the water’s edge. I asked them to push me further, to the waist of the tide. And then I slid from the seat into the sea, like a man leaving one life for another. Face down I floated, arms spread, legs trailing like celery stalks, the fish darting and gleaming about me, making no distinction between the living and the broken. The water held me as if it knew me. I floated there in a dream, a mesmerised thing, while the sea sang its old magic into my ears. It healed me; in that moment I became complete again.

Later, I met many fellow travellers at the Spinal Cord Injury Outpatient Clinic at the Royal North Shore Hospital. We waited like cattle in the slaughterhouse: the air thick with the heavy presence of anger, worry, and powerlessness.

He was a big bloke, beard down to his chest and arms covered in ink. Wore one of those heavy leather jackets that looked like it had been through a few bar fights, and a red bandana that made him look like he’d just come off the road. He gave a sort of grunt when he got up, like he was racing for the clinic’s last shot of morphine.

He said the pain never left him. It was always there; quiet, like the hum of a fridge in the next room. Sometimes he’d forget it for a bit: watching the telly or listening to the kids carrying on. And then it’d come back with a twist in his back, just to let him know who was boss. It ain’t the pain itself that gets me, he said. Knowing that it will last forever is the toughest shit. That’s the killer. You can’t punch it, can’t outrun it. It’s just there, same as time: never stops, never gives you a bloody break.

A stick-thin man in his fifties paces around the room, mumbling half to himself. I heard him say he lived as though he had a wire soldered to his spine, left humming day and night. The pain was not a sudden blow or a clean cut, but a slow electrical gnawing that allowed no truce. It was a presence, like a jailer who never spoke but never left the cell.

He said he had learned to move about his days with it the way one carries a stone in the shoe: always there, always pressing, and always threatening to break his patience. Nothing more or less than the grinding certainty that his body had turned traitor, and that the hours of his life were to be measured not by clocks but by the steady throb in his back. 

A small, hunched woman glanced up at the others and said it was as if a small fire had been lit in the hidden chambers of her spine, never quenched, never fed, only burning on its own peculiar terms. A fire that sent its tongues outward, into the legs and arms, into the very map of herself, until she scarcely knew where she ended and the pain began. At night she lay awake listening to it, as one might listen to a neighbour muttering in the dark house beyond the wall. And sometimes she thought it was the voice of her own blood, reproaching her for living still, for walking about the earth as though she were a woman like any other.

A tall man fidgeted with a button on his light grey suit. His white shirt and dark blue tie gave him the appearance of an accountant or a solicitor. He nodded his head in greeting and said he carried his pain as a man might carry his father’s coat long after the father was gone, heavy on the shoulders, smelling of old storms and tobacco. It gave him a gait: a sort of crooked fidelity to the body that betrayed him. And yet, in the queerest way, it kept him company, too, the only sure companion left to him in those long corridors of days.

The others nodded their understanding. Then, another well-dressed, thin-faced woman in her late fifties or early sixties shrugged her shoulders in muted acceptance and said her pain was not dramatic. It lacked the dignity of a crisis. Instead, it was ceaseless, minute, unrelenting: a line of current threaded through the spinal cord, sparking against nerve endings as though a careless electrician had wired her incorrectly. There was no eluding it: the body carried it inside; inescapable as breath.

But she had learned to stand, to sit, to dress, all under its watchful regime. She knew exactly when it would flicker higher, like the faint surge of a voltage, and when it would subside, never into silence but into a lower hum. Sometimes she imagined that if the pain were visible, it would be a fine mesh of light, wrapped about her, tightening into a knot every day.

What unsettled her most was not the pain itself, but its indifference. It offered no meaning, no lesson. It was merely there, like a machine that she could not turn off. Her body had become the instrument of a low and endless experiment, one from which she could draw no conclusion.

A woman in her mid-thirties, dressed as if for secretarial duties, in a black pencil-thin, mid-calf skirt, white blouse and low-heeled sensible shoes, straightened up in her chair and flashed a bright grin at the older woman. She whispered. Yeah, that’s right. She said pain erased the borders of her life. It turned her into a set of responses rather than a person. She felt no longer herself, but her resistance to it, her evasions, were the fragments of normality she improvised. Pain showed her that character is not innate but performed. She said. People think they see me, but really they are observing my pain’s shadow. In this sense, the pain has become my truer self, the one I never consented to but which now occupies my days with the inevitability of weather. 

I kept my silence while the others sang, their voices twining into the room like an old air on a fiddle, the sort that lingers long after the bow is stilled. The tune threaded itself into my head, spooled and re-spooled, as if the pain itself had found its own refrain. Yet all of us, in our muted ways, understood the same inheritance: a curse that clung, a monster settled deep in the marrow of our days. Still, as the stories unspooled, a strange solace rose among us, tender as the hush before dawn. For in our brokenness we found a kind of fellowship: none of us was walking this road alone. In that shared telling; as fragile as candlelight in a draughty hall, there stirred the smallest flicker, a hope that might, against all sense, endure.

The author has university degrees in science, English literature, and philosophy and worked as an engineer, project director, and headhunter until an accident prompted him to become a full-time writer. Since then, he’s written many short stories for writing competitions, such as The Penguin Literary Prize, The Richell Prize (Hachette + The Guardian Australia), Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award, The Bath Novel Award, The Furphy Literary Ward, and The Bridport Prize.