Hopdance by Stewart Parker

Author:Stewart Parker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Hopdance;Stewart Parker;Amputee;Cancer
Publisher: The Lilliput Press
Published: 2017-06-30T22:35:19+00:00

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4 Parker’s final plan for the novel, not realized in all its particulars, indicates that he envisaged an additional section to go after this one, likely representing Tosh’s essay. For more information about this, see the textual note and Appendices 3 and 4.

III

For three days he had lain objectified, locked into the silent maelstrom of the casualty. On the third night his eyes were on the window in the ceiling and the blind was up. The moon swam into the window-frame. It filled his eyes with a pale beatitude. He stared at it in a long calm astonishment. It was alive with a benign serenity of light. He felt a smile of recognition breaking across his features. He had awakened to his world again.

—Aha, we came under our own steam, I see. The physiotherapist, brisking in through the agitated doors, there, you moved, it’s done. It’s you. Casualty. Survivor. Of a kind.

The physiotherapist is talking to you about your groin muscles, but it’s nothing personal. She wants them toughened up, who doesn’t. Her own must be like steel bands, she looks like a Quaker lady discus thrower. (Comic figures of speech, even – the boy is on the mend. Sad freak.)

— … to the point where it’s able to do the work of a whole leg.

As she lays you on your side, and fits a canvas strap around the fat stump, and you pull with it to lift the weight up and down, and sweat spangles your brow and your testicles slide out through your pyjama flies and you have to smile, just a pinch. Mooncalf.

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