The smudges on the screen suggested a sort of ghost archipelago – a splatter of grey and white irregularities set like islands in a black sea. Each one of the islands had its own distinctive coastline, some more jagged than others, some less. I studied them blankly, trying only to imagine which archipelago this might be – some dense quarter of the Aegean perhaps? A section of the Hebrides? The Galapagos? Then again, it was not important which archipelago, not really – only that it must be one. Although I did note that the filaments of barely discernible white-ish fibre that flowed between the jagged islands in curves and esses might represent shipping lanes. Or perhaps flight paths overhead.
“They’re like shipping lanes between islands in an archipelago,” I thought. “Or flight paths. Con trails. It’s an archipelago photographed from space.”
Tom had always been a climber… up he would go until he found the light
“Okay,” said the doctor, leaning the base of one fist up against the illuminated image on the wall, leaving the other hand free to rest lightly, briefly on my shoulder. “Okay… what you’re looking at here is the spine. These solid areas are the vertebrae. Okay? You can see how they’re all broken and separated, like islands. Yes? Well, they should be lined up together and joined, as you know very well – but they’re not now. And these,” he indicated the fine filaments splaying against the black background, [the ones] like shipping lanes or con trails, “these are the nerves of the spinal cord, which have come out of the vertebrae and are now not protected and are in very great danger of being damaged further than they already are by the floating bits of vertebra. In fact, if you look right here,” he indicated with his smallest finger where a con trail appeared to be touching the ragged coast of an island, “well… it will take serious surgery to rescue that situation.”
He looked at me. He had kind Latin-American eyes. He was definitely kind. Maybe 45? Not a junior. Nice guy, I thought. I liked him. I looked back, as blankly as I have ever looked at anyone or anything. I could see him, but I was not able to absorb what he was saying.
“It’s an archipelago,” my mind said. “It is not my son’s spinal column. It’s an archipelago.”
Tom was always a climber. Not from the first, perhaps. He was not one of those children, half-monkey by instinct, who sees a vertical and has to swarm up it. But once he’d worked out the benefits of making an ascent of a tree (although anything else obviously climbable would do) then up he would go until he found the light – or at least a better, remoter, longer view and clearer air. He was methodical about it. Serious. He’d do it at every opportunity and without apparent inhibition; he’d do it anywhere and everywhere, on any occasion. He has for instance adorned the wedding photographs of friends, a tiny presence hovering above embowered exchangers-of-vows at the top of the nuptial portrait, a not-so-Baroque Cupid among the branches. And he once levered himself into the foliage of a dense lime tree on Hampstead Heath in preference to sticking out his own birthday party. The football had got too intense. He needed to check out, so up he went, evaporating into the green. No longer present. If Tom ever disappeared for more than a very few minutes, the first recourse was always to look up.
It wasn’t the risk he buzzed on, it was the prospect of reaching the top of the tree and breaking through. And of course the very top, where the clearest air is, was seldom achieved. Well, never actually. But the effort was always made to get as close as possible. He’d keep going until he got as near as he could and then he’d stop and he’d stick. He’d just hang on, like a baby lemur; like the small boy at the start of The Singing Detective, innocent as an apple among the leaves of the treetops, searching for the breeze and sunshine, locked onto the tree’s limb system so that he might sway gently with its rhythm, breathing calmly and gazing out steadily as far as it was possible to see. Like this, Tom would go clear and stay clear for as long as seemed possible in the circumstances.
His childhood had been fraught. At birth, his spanking new nervous system had been delivered with a rare genetic mutation built in, called Tuberous Sclerosis, which left hardening deposits of non-malignant material on or within all his major organs, including his brain. The largest of these tubers were the size of garden peas, but mostly they were petit pois, or smaller. This left him grimly, persistently (though not extravagantly) epileptic and slow to develop in a number of ways; he was switched-on, charming and lively when comfy – especially outdoors in the bosom of nature – but not exactly absorbent of information, or charming, if the environment he was occupying were in any way distracting or pressing him hard. Then, he tended to switch off. He was a fit and nice-looking little curly guy, but he had spent far too much of his childhood in hospitals and had struggled at school. Focus and Tom were not mates. His teenage years were spent in a state of blue resistance to the world.
And by the age of fifteen he was staring down the barrel of disastrous GCSE results and some tough decisions to make about what to do next. His mother and I were getting it wrong at every turn, or so it felt – you only had to utter the words “A level” and his face would cloud. Tom did hang-dog like no other dog. Fortunately, the SENCo (Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator) at his North London comp was a sympathetic soul and had raised the question of whether, given Tom’s abiding taste for immersion in the natural environment – trees in particular – he might not be better suited to the educative world offered by agricultural college? At sixteen. Next year. We had no idea you could go to agricultural college at sixteen. “Do you think Tom might like to train to be a forester or a tree surgeon?” she asked, one frustrated morning in a school meeting room. “If so, I can make a couple of suggestions…”
“You mean,” said Tom, later that same day, “I could study how to look after trees and not have to do A levels? What, really?”
A burden seemed to lift from him, body and soul, as if divesting him of a freight of grinding anxiety, and he applied himself at last to schoolwork, did rather better in his exams than had seemed remotely possible – and duly fetched up at a suitable college, living there semi-independently close to nature’s bosom. He seemed to become porous again: you could see him accepting the world and letting it pass through him. Reciprocally, the world filled him out and he grew fast, in every sense. He spouted Latin. “Quercus robur!” he’d announce quietly on random avenues, flicking a finger at gnarly roadside growths. He was still less than keen when it came to writing essays but he could scale a pine or an ash or a plane with ropes and spikes, and execute the rudiments of tree-care with skill, even tenderness. For the first time in his life, Tom felt fully in the world.
“You do realise that he’s broken his back, don’t you?
I took the call one morning in the kitchen. I was making a cup of tea in recess from a sticky paragraph. Tom had fallen. It was an oak. He had been at the top of a 40-foot quercus robur when the class had been summoned to gather for a tea break. Tom was still in a tangle with his ropes at the tip of the stem. “Come on, Tom,” shouted the tutor. “Down you come.” And Tom had hastened. In his haste he made a technical mistake. He fell but no one actually saw him go, nor heard him, because he fell silently and there were no branches between his perch and the hard floor of the wood to brake his progress. Someone turned on an intuition to look back and there he was, already broken at the bole of the oak.
“You do realise that he’s broken his back, don’t you?”
The junior doctor trying to escort us away from the scene seemed somehow irritated with us. For being there. For not knowing what was going on or what to do. For standing white-faced and dumbstruck in A&E, shocked into immobility, gazing at the prostrated form of our seventeen-year-old son bricked up in a rigid frame of day-glo blocks and coshed into insensibility with heavy doses of both morphine and ketamine. He was drooling.
“He fell out of a tree and disintegrated his lumbar spine,” said the junior doctor, his irritation becoming more imperious. Did he perhaps think that it was our own negligence that had brought Tom to ruin his day at the end of a long shift? Or perhaps Tom’s? “Perhaps you’d like to wait over…”
What?
What?
We both turned simultaneously to face the source of the bleating. He did not roll his eyes but did at least close his mouth with a snap, and then departed in a cloud of sighs. Tom was coming to. His eyes were like saucers pooled to the brim with fluid. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, looking up at us as if from under water. The fluid began to spill over the brims of the saucers. “I’m… I’m… I think I’m going to be sick again…”
He’d already thrown up once – a small geyser of green fluid had bubbled out of his mouth and then gone back in again and down his throat, because his head was locked into position. His whole body was locked. He was not able to rotate his head so much as a solitary degree. If he was not to choke on his own vomit then something needed to be done, and quickly…
“Nurse! NURSE!!”
“Nurse!!”
We both called as urgently as felt seemly in the circumstances, in a sort of shouted whisper. Of the junior doctor there was no sign. A nurse appeared.
“He wants to throw up again and he can’t move his head,” I said, flapping.
The nurse disappeared and then reappeared almost immediately with another nurse and what appeared to be some sort of orderly.
“Wait, WAIT!” the nurse commanded.
A few more seconds passed and then two more handy-looking individuals appeared and between the five of them they log-rolled Tom, quickly and firmly, onto his side so that he was able to emit half a pint of green flux into a contoured cardboard receptacle.
“I think,” said the nurse, “he may be rejecting the morphine.”
Meanwhile, my inner space reconstructed with Gothic emphasis the spectacle of my father on his deathbed, emaciated and moaning incoherently as he was log-rolled by a smaller cadre of four nurses, for the administration of his last bed bath. He had weighed nothing by then and there was no need for so many rollers. They might have been rolling a bundle of twigs and leaves.
I felt myself begin to crumble.
“Come on,” said Jane. “Out of here.”
The decision was taken overnight to perform emergency neurosurgery with a view to saving Tom’s legs, if at all possible. No guarantees or percentages were being offered and the signals were that it was more than possible that the surgery would fail. The options were presented with kindness and professional assertiveness and there were hardly any of them. Well, two: either attempt the risky surgery or accept the probability, no, the certainty, that Tom’s walking, running and climbing days were over. His independence and his independent shitting too.
I hazed in a wakeful stupor on the general theme of falling: Icarus, Lucifer, Troy, darkness, leaves, cadences
Jane had stayed overnight while I had driven home to rescue our daughter from a friend’s house. It took hours and during the journey I had gradually come further apart, fragment by fibre. I found myself on the inside lane of the M25 in encroaching darkness doing 30mph and slowing with every passing furlong, quite unable to summon the levels of sentience required to make the car go any faster. Eventually I ground to a halt, edging onto the hard shoulder, to allow the wave of shock to work its way out. It took at least ten minutes. Somehow, I got away with it.
But in bed that night I did not sleep and so was unable to dream about my son as a subaltern in a cavalry unit, charging and falling and smashing his body to pieces. Instead I hazed in a wakeful stupor on the general theme of falling: Icarus, Lucifer, Troy, darkness, leaves, cadences in music, scoops of ice cream on pavements, the writer on whose behalf I had once wrangled over a dying fall…
Once upon a time I had been a senior editor on a broadsheet newspaper, and one year, during my editing prime, I had commissioned an eminent author to put together a piece for the features pages at decent length, and at some cost. The precise subject matter of the piece commissioned escapes me now, and it escaped me in bed that night after Tom’s fall too – but what little I did remember of the episode was that the piece had concluded with a rather beautifully cadenced final paragraph – the very quintessence of a literary “dying fall”, as the writer himself put it when justifying its presence over the phone on the morning of delivery. The paragraph was not adding much of substance, it had to be said, but it did finish the piece with grace and mordancy. A sort of departing sigh. And I had shepherded the article through production and seen it pretty much intact onto the page apart from a necessary couple of small cuts agreed with the author. Yet, of course, when the paper appeared the next morning a small ad adorned the foot of the page and the final, dying-fall paragraph did not. Furthermore, the writer was on the blower, his tone aggrieved rather than openly hostile. “But you said you liked my dying fall,” he said plaintively, “and that you would keep it.”
Those were the days when sub-editors really existed and there were even chief sub-editors above them; not only that, they had authority over everything they surveyed, and mere Features Editors such as I were expected to bow and scrape when it came to page display. Well, so the sub-editors thought. But I stood on my dignity.
“The writer in question may get the hump with us now,” I explained sadly, “because he explicitly asked – and I agreed – that we should keep his dying fall.”
The sub looked up at me, contempt humming in the surfaces of his lovely visage. “This is a newspaper, Nick,” he said slowly, as to a cretin, “and in newspapers we don’t do dying falls. We get to the end of an article and then we stop.” I glared back. He shifted in his seat, aware that his condescension was excessive. “Come on, old chap,” he said, softening. “You remember the old Quiller-Couch adage. Always, always, always kill your darlings.”
Tom underwent six hours of spinal surgery. The archipelago was reconfigured to form a backbone of sorts and the shipping lanes/flight paths were threaded back into their proper place within the column, insofar as it was possible to do that given the damage done. The snagged nerve had been retrieved safely from its snagging place in the jagged coastline and had rejoined its fellows in the fantail delta at the base of the new spine, and the entire apparatus was then bolted and screwed together onto a ten-inch-long titanium ladder, enclosed within the body, designed to hold everything in place with absolute rigidity. The idea was to create a frame on which a new spine might shape new strength from the fragmentations of the old. You could see sometimes the top of the titanium ladder trying to burst through Tom’s skin halfway up his back when he inclined his torso in a certain direction.
And so he did not die under the knife and within a week or two it became apparent that, with a lot of work, the tree boy would at least be able to walk again one day, even if trees were now off-limits. He was dispatched to Stoke Mandeville for several months’ rehab and it was there that we were informed by a doctor that, in the moment that the first surgical incision was made into his back, there had been no more than a ten per cent chance that T-Bone would ever be able to stand up again, let alone walk.
Meanwhile, the boy lamented his incarceration near Aylesbury and steeled his resolve, over weeks and then months. And when it was time to bring him home at last to begin the next phase of his rehab, he walked slowly to the car between his parents, a hand on each parental shoulder, chirruping as he went, stiff and vertical as an obelisk.
It was during this period of convalescence that we found out just how much resolve was contained in the wiry frame of our firstborn, a creature disadvantaged by life in more ways than one, yet an alchemist of sorts who had transformed those disadvantages, within himself, into the raw stuff of animal willpower. He simply refused to allow that his life was going to be meaningfully compromised by his brush with eternity. If he had to sit on his backside for the majority of the coming year to get past this latest mishap, then so be it. If he also had to flog himself hard in the gym then so be that too. Likewise with the morning ritual which required his grim-faced old dad, with gritted teeth, to inject Tom’s abdomen with anticoagulant; and also with the boredom that ground down the surfaces of his inner world. He would accept everything. He stayed resolute and absolutely focused on his lived present. He would not complain, nor fret, nor worry, nor whine; nor would he revisit the fall, not during his waking, walking hours.
And so he did not die under the knife and it became apparent that the tree boy would at least be able to walk again one day
In fact he simply refused point-blank to talk about it even when asked direct questions and revealed nothing of the experience of his plummet beyond insisting that the critical error had been his and he would have no part in it if we decided to go after the college for negligence. He said he wanted to return to the institution to complete his studies, and how would that be for him if his parents were mobilising against it legally? As to the fall itself, he had no memory of it at all beyond the first moment, the moment in which he realised that he was heading south. “I think I lost consciousness immediately and that’s all I can say,” he insisted doggedly. “I remember making the mistake, I think, and I remember maybe the first three or four feet of the fall – and that’s it. Please don’t make me go back there.”
This notional spontaneous loss of consciousness was supported as a genuine possibility by several of the medics involved both with the surgery and the rehab. The damage they had observed conformed to what they’d have expected from a falling body in a state of complete relaxation. Tom had landed on his bum, already folded in two, allowing some of the thump to be dissipated in loosened joints and floppy musculature. The impact had been absorbed by the five vertebrae of his lumbar spine and then diffused as they broke apart to form the archipelago, causing some minor damage to the nerves of the spinal cord but nothing critical. If he’d landed on his legs or his head, especially while conscious and braced, it would have been a different story entirely – certainly one resulting in quadriplegia and very probably death. But no. Instead Tom had been a falling leaf, gently coming to earth without dread. Silent, unagonised, floating, he swayed down like a spoor of Quercus robur, primed to generate new life where he landed. His was not a dying fall, but a living one.
He was back up trees within the span of another year and is now a freelance tree surgeon with a passion for the work that knows no bounds. He belongs up there and he knows it.
Nick Coleman is the author of three books, all published by Cape/Vintage: “Pillow Man”; “Voices: How a Great Singer Can Change Your Life”; and “The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss”, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize
