Jenn Ashworth - Notes Made while Falling

Jenn Ashworth

In Collaboration with the Goldsmiths Writers Centre

2019 Goldsmiths Press

Published in 2019 by Goldsmiths Press

Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross

London SE14 6NW

Printed and bound by TJ International, UK

Distribution by the MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

Copyright 2019 Jenn Ashworth

The right of Jenn Ashworth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews and certain non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-912685-19-6 (hbk)

ISBN 978-1-912685-20-2 (ebk)

www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-press

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A beginning is a cut in the onward flow of things. It is a lie too: we section out the story, slashing away what came before and after. A cut can form an opening: a hole or a door or a cave or a mine. But what kind of mine do we open? A landmine? Yes. A bomb.

Knowing already that this is the wrong place to start, we will begin with the operating table, and me upon it, abdomen gaping. The sound I hear is my blood hitting the floor.

I have been operated on once already today. In the recovery room, after the first incision was sutured closed, I started to haemorrhage. The epidural left me too numb to feel the wetness of the blood on my legs and I didnt notice it. The man who I live with tried to get the attention of the theatre nurses discreetly, because he didnt want to frighten me. Later, he will tell me that my blood was blooming through the sheets like poppies and before his mind could parse what he saw he thought someone had spilled a glass of Ribena.

But, befuddled and blurry as I was, I did already suspect that something was wrong. My heart was fluttering in my chest like a mad trapped bird against a window. I was hot and clammy and I couldnt see properly: the world started to tunnel in and fade away. It was letting go of me, I think. They wheeled me back into the operating theatre and erected a sheet between my head and the rest of my body. The surgeon re-opened the wound and it was during this second opening a present tense moment that will expand into the years that havent happened yet that I heard my blood fall.

Then the epidural started to wear off. First came a great burning, then a disturbance I still dont have a word for. Pressure? My internal organs in a wind tunnel. I felt hands inside my body. Pulling and squeezing. Unimaginable pain like bright lights no, like nothing else, coupled with the urge to sit up, to kick my legs, to move them away and to run my heart thrumming with terror but the paralysis that came with the spinal anaesthesia was still near enough complete, the drug-numbness lapsing just enough for the pain to break through, but not enough so that I could move. My legs were dream-legs: rubber, treacle. I knew the heat and pressure of the surgical stockings around my ankles but I could not move my feet. I think I spoke but my mouth was a dream-mouth. My skin turned into mist.

Panic is worse than pain. Worse still was the calm and single-pointed knowledge that if I didnt move or speak they were going to carry on cutting me up and I would be utterly unable to defend myself. Rage at my own helplessness built hot and strong in my hands, which I could move I felt them bat uselessly against something soft a sheet? The physical sensation of knowing where I ended and the rest of the world began faded, and with it, my rage ebbed away. I had been exploded and rubbed out. I was falling. / I still am. They had a suction machine and I heard my blood rattling away through it, as if down a drainpipe.

Id been here before: not surgery, but this feeling of rage and helplessness. Childhood had served me a lot of that. But Id grown up. Id carefully built an entire adult life around a private and unarticulated vow that I would never feel it again. I was in pain and terror and fury, yes. I was panicking. But on top of all of that, I was incredulous. This was not me, gasping on the table. Im the type of person who would sit up and grab the sheet and take the butchers hook out of the hand of the Jack the Ripper who attacks me with it. I am the type of person who would threaten to lodge a complaint and who knows the words for everything they are doing to me. My rights. Im the type of person who knows her rights. Im not the type of person to be cowed by the fake authority of a white coat. The surgeon was in blue and I could see nothing of her face but her eyes above the mask pale eyes though she was looking at the mess shes making and not me. I was / am so very afraid.

I started to hyperventilate and someone injected something into the cannula on the back of my hand. I immediately became drowsy but that didnt end the pain and the panic, it only made it more difficult to express.

What did you give me? I asked.

Just a little something, the man who did it he sat behind me and I never saw him replied.

Rage returned, and compared to the fear and the panic, anger was a comfort so I held onto it as well as I could. How dare they put something into my body without asking me? Without even telling me what it is? How dare they? They were all so calm.

I told them I could still feel it. I did tell them. And I told them again. Then I after some superhuman effort managed to twitch a toe. They saw that: my heroic dream-legs saved me! A glance passed between surgeon and nurse and someone in royal blue brought me a little brown glass medicine bottle with a straw in it and told me to drink it and I did, then she put a mask over my face. There was no time to count. This wasnt sleep. No time passed, but I lost five hours before waking for the next round.

What else to say, as we begin? Well, the sensations I felt in those moments go entirely beyond my vocabulary but Id take those moments again a helping of them every day every hour for the rest of my life rather than the fall into madness that followed.

I am sitting here typing / I am in the literature tent at a Christian music and arts festival. The organisers of the literature programme are particularly interested in The Friday Gospels and my impressions about religion and writing, growing up in a religious family and leaving my faith community. Ive never imagined myself speaking at a Christian music festival, or a Christian anything, but all the same here I am wearing muddy boots and a cagoule / sitting in bed with my laptop on my knees. Its the August bank holiday weekend / last weekend in November, dark before the kids come home from school so of course the small audience / Im alone / is sitting on blankets on the grass listening to rain patter on the roof while I read to them. When I finish reading from my novel a woman in a blue coat puts her hand up to ask me a question.