The Times Magazine 9SPINAL COLUMN
MELANIE REID
t started with a problem with the
plumbing. No, not my plumbing for
once, not the paralysed bits I’m
forever moaning about, but the
house’s plumbing. Much easier to deal
with. I know exactly where the drains
lie, so I booked a specialist.
Easy peasy, I thought. Nice, strong,
can-do blokes will come and put it
right. I adore practical people with
hard, physical, dirty jobs, who fix and build
and make the world turn. A good one is worth
ten intellectuals. But unfortunately they
turned up unexpectedly early on a Monday,
a bad day for us because Dave stands in as
my carer. Dressing rather than undressing
women has never been his strong point, which
means my leggings get put on upside down
and back to front.
Suddenly there was a big truck outside and
two men in head-to-toe orange wandering
round the garden. Dave shot off in his slippers,
leaving me semi-dressed, boots unlaced, half in
and out of bed, wailing, “They’re looking in the
wrong place!” Completely ignored.
As I was to be for the rest of the day. It’s
funny how you can be disabled for many years
and never quite grasp how other people see
you. Or rather don’t see you. Or hear you. But- trust me – no woman in a wheelchair ever
quite gets how disempowered she is until she
talks to a certain type of workman.
Clutching my wardrobe malfunctions
around me, hoping nothing was hanging out,
I pushed as far into the garden as I could. All
three men were poking around in entirely the
wrong area. Dave’s slippers were sopping wet.
“The pipe’s over there, under that shrub,”
I called, pointing.
“Here’s my wife. She knows,” said Dave.
Senior operative orange was straight from
central casting, one of those maddening chippy
young jobsworths who talk at 300 words a
minute, is convinced he knows everything and
doesn’t listen. He started walking away before
I finished explaining where the drainhead was.
And returned swiftly.
“It’s no’ there.”
“It is,” I said, and explained that if he
searched under the branches he’d find the
manhole cover, pipe and the tank, all in a line.
“That’s the wrang one. It’s no’ there.”
I insisted – very politely – that it definitely
was, because 25 years ago I’d stood next to the
digger as the system was installed. It was just
overgrown. He shrugged, turned his head
away. FFS, said the thought bubble. Old
woman in a wheelchair thinks she’s an expert
in drains. Dave tried to help, but he’s the most
impractical man and far too dignified to go
crawling in the undergrowth.
Can I describe the frustration that boiled
inside me as I sat there, pleading with a young,
fit feckwit with an attitude problem to listen to
me? To believe me? To show me some respect?
Impossible. Give me back my body for two
minutes, give me the ability to walk across the
grass, bend down, pull aside branches, scrapethe ground with hands or heels, and I would
have exposed the bloody manhole cover. Give
me back the body language that allowed me to
move and show, a language that even he would
understand. Give me back my right to be a
woman with a brain and a can-do attitude,
who could once stride over almost anything.
Even give me my off-road scooter so I can
cross the grass and point. And then run the
little prat over at 11mph. Honestly, I felt truly
murderous. The fury of insignificance. It was
just as well that I had to turn and go, heading
for my next research training session at the
spinal unit (it’s going very well, dear readers,
thank you for your encouragement).
When I got home Dave described several
hours of high farce, in which the workies went
away, returned with more equipment, fixed
part of the job, but never found the missing
tank. In the middle of it all, they had him
running in and out turning taps on and off, a
delivery van arrived, he forgot where he put
the packages, the dog went crazy, and he was
so stressed he had a nosebleed.
Senior operative orange’s parting shot- such men always have the last word – was,
“You’ll need to get a digger in.”
The next day our friend John, armed
with garden loppers, found the thing within
five minutes. n
@Mel_ReidTimes
Melanie Reid is tetraplegic after breaking her
MURDO MACLEOD neck and back in a riding accident in April 2010
I
‘The feckwit
workman ignored
me – the woman in a
wheelchair. I longed
to run him over’