Rye came in with a folded form in his hand and went over to a woman at a table by the window.
She is the facilities supervisor. Her name is Noreen Sackville.
She took that form out of his hand, folded it again without opening it, and put it down under her own elbow.
And she said, to a canteen with twenty-five people in it:
“Give me that. You mop floors, Rye. You don’t hand me paperwork in here. Put it away and get back on your shift.”
The room went quiet.
Twenty-five people. Two porters. Three nurses. A consultant at the next table.
Nobody said one word.
And Rye Colvin said, “Sorry, Noreen,” and went out.
I was one table away with a sandwich in my hand.
And I did not say anything either, which is the entire reason I am able to write any of the rest of this.
PART 2 — ELEVEN YEARS
People hear that I walked again and they hear a miracle. It was not one and I am very careful about how I say it now, because there are people reading this for whom it will not happen and I am not going to be another person selling them something.
My injury was incomplete. That is a clinical word and it means some signal was still getting through, and roughly a third of people with what I had get some function back and two thirds do not, and which group you are in is decided in about eleven seconds on a road and not by anything you do afterward.
I got some back. It took four surgeries and eleven years.
I walk with a stick. On a bad week I am in a chair and I have never once pretended otherwise or hidden it, because the pretending is a thing that took me until about thirty-four to stop doing.
I did engineering, badly at first. I worked for a mobility equipment company for nine years and spent most of it being furious about how things were designed by people who had never sat in them.
In 2011 I started Vantry Mobility with two other people and a loan.
