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Article  •  31 August 2017

 

Short story club - 19 October

Read the story being discussed onJesse Mulligan’s show on Radio New Zealand on 19 October 2017

 

Golden Apple

by Stephanie Johnson

 

What they don’t understand is that I am the very first one, ever. The first woman to have been born a cripple but to compete at the apex, pushing for space on the icy slopes. Again and again through my training I beat athletes who could run before they could walk, perfectly formed runners whose parents had pushed them even harder than mine pushed me. Or they were fresh off the savannah or out of the Congo or some other hellhole where they’d run because they had to, they’d had no choice. But I beat them. Most recently, three years ago, the Olympics. It claimed the world’s attention, didn’t it, everywhere, television and net? Triumph of science over nature. The first. Record breaking cripplette. My fifteen minutes of fame.

Offensive? Not at all. Cripple is a word I’ve noticed they’re reclaiming. Those that stayed crippled, I mean. But you’re right — I can’t use it, not really, haven’t used it for years, even though I’m four foot two on my stumps and if I take it into my head to stump stump stump along like I did that fateful night it hurts like hell, the attenuated fibula not designed to weight bear directly. You see, there’s a nerve that runs through the centre of the leg into the hip and — pardon?

Yes, I know, of course you’ve seen it — they used it as footage to cover voice-track on media of the case. I saw it myself, over and over, head back and chest out, those bounding bionic legs eating up the course. When you watch it onscreen the legs look like skis, never thought that till I saw it played back a thousand times, like vertical skis en pointe, passing the others, passing them passing them passing them . . .

God what I’d give to be able to go for a real run. Exercise yard here is tiny and what they call a gym is a joke.

Push me? Suppose they did. Dad, mainly. No parent wants to send a compromised kid out into the world without making it the very best for them. They didn’t have to push me much actually, I wanted it myself. My older sister was a dancer, a ballerina — very good, one of the best, with the New Zealand Ballet Company at only eighteen and I always matched myself against oh yes of course you know. Awful. Embarrassing. Her tears there for everybody to see even though I know she thinks I’m guilty. I’m amazed she agreed to do it, you know, let the documentary crew into her home, film her kids and dog and show them the family album and — pardon?

Yes, definitely thinks I’m guilty — my finger was on the trigger, after all. No doubt about that. But I was off my head. More should have been made of it, I think. In retrospect. Antiflams, steroids, codeine, Prozac, too much booze and Gilmore had been nagging me to pull myself together. Two in the morning and I was in my customary black hole, having taken off my legs to lie down beside him and he did that downward look. It’s a look that chucks you back in the schoolyard, it’s the checking out, the registration of the flaw. It makes you crazy, leads you the top of the slope above the black hole, makes you believe you’re that kid again, buggered on the drawing board, coming up fighting, gasping for air. Sometimes the sportswoman saved me, reminded me who I had become; other times I lay legless beside that driving man. My lover, my personal trainer.

What I said before is true — I think about it a lot. Inside this skull are the sensibilities of a cripple and the sensibilities of a super-athlete. Diametric opposites in the same female brain for the first time in history.

You don’t think there’s a difference? We’re all the same?

I’ll let that one go.

Oh — you mean it wasn’t the first time. Of course there were others, but they were men. Wheelchair footballers. One-legged skaters, whatever. The point is I was the first to triumph again and again, win Golds. A superhuman. Frankenstein’s monster.

Have you read that, the original? A book. By Mary someone. You can ask for books here. They come from a little library. Kind of civilised and old fashioned. Anyway. She had it right. Not a good idea.

So I just lay beside Gil spinning a bit, praying for salvation by the sportswoman.

Criminally insane. That’s right. That’s what my lawyers tried, to get me off. But in here they’ve changed my drugs. Taken most of them away. I’m different now, can concentrate better. Even read. Think. Grieve. It’s nearly peaceful. The other women leave me alone, so far. My lawyer says I’ll be out earlier than yes of course you know he’s on the news the whole time or was, had a twitter feed for God’s sake – a lawyer – on a prominent trial. But that’s old fashioned too isn’t it, to even worry about that?

Is it fading now, the story? Now I’m in here? Must be. My story?

Accident of birth.

No. No reason.

Yes. It still happens.

A gene. You’d think so, wouldn’t you?

No. Look. No point wondering. Could have been anything. Radiation. My mother grew up in St George Utah, downwind from Nevada where they tested the bombs. And my father started out fixing televisions in Invercargill and moved onto computers when they came out. So my dividing cells were exposed to everything from the cathode tube to the motherboard, to the lead in the soil and mercury in the fish, lack of trace elements, electromagnetics and Mum’s smoker genes. One of a long line of smokers, the old girl. My sister too she — I know every time the camera found her she had a fag in her gob, wasn’t it pathetic? Even smoking in bed!

But she’s given up now. She said that she would. She’d give up after the sentencing. After we knew.

Now we know.

Oh alright then. I’ve told the story a hundred times. A thousand. I heard an intruder, I got onto my stumps, I was off my head, I pulled the trigger sorry? You mean before that? The dialogue? The internal dialogue? While I lay there spinning a bit, not saying anything even though I’d seen the downward look? Oh yeah I’d clocked it, but I couldn’t process it, couldn’t believe it happened, kept playing it back in my head and looking for a reason for him to . . .

Anyway. So I lay on my side, Gil facing away from me; I had one arm across him. The soles of his feet lay against my stumps. He used to do that. If I was an ordinary woman he would have laid them against my shins, warmed them. Not that it was cold, that night. The night in question. You know, I never really liked that, the thing he did with the soles of his feet, even though I know he did it with all the love in his proud, ambitious heart.

But I didn’t want to be reminded. I wanted to be the whole woman. And it wasn’t all that comfortable either, scar tissue and patches of skin rubbed raw and pardon?

Of course. I must have gone to sleep, eventually. I remember thinking about his serratus anterior — thinking about the name of the muscle under my arm, and his fleshless, hard ribs, the rise and fall of his breath. Don’t think I dreamed at all. When he dropped his aftershave in the bathroom, the shattering glass bottle — that was when I woke up. It was a couple of hours later. Four o’clock, maybe. The room was dark. I didn’t know that he’d left my side. I thought he was an intruder.

I was off my head.

In pain but still winning.

No I’m nothing like Pistorius. He’s a man.

Yes I know there are similarities, strong ones. But he ran and lost, I ran and won. Again and again and again. And I’m not South African. Pure South Island New Zealand, trained in the Alps. And he’s ancient history. I’m the story of the moment.

Did you know there’s a theory that human beings automatically register, always, no matter what, another person’s gross impairment? Like birds do, every animal, monkeys and higher primates. Look at the countless cultures and civilisations where crippled babies were left to die. Maori got rid of the ones with clubfoot. Desert tribes left infant freaks in the sand dunes. The Chinese exposed them on hillsides no, no, not just the girls — it’s an instinctive repulsion and it runs deep. All the surgery in the world can’t save you. They’ll still see it and mark you down, some primal connection firing across the hippocampus.

No, I don’t think that’s a sick idea at all.

This, in my ear? No it’s not a peanut. Why would I stick a peanut in my ear? It’s my device, my programme, what they’ve selected for me. Did I say it was peaceful here? It’s not really. There’s always the danger that this will come suddenly to life, run on and on and bloody on with motifs and homilies that some bunch of bleeding-hearts designed to improve my nature. Banal and moronic, most of it. Pop psychology. What would they know? Eh? How it is, inside the same brain?

Are you wired? I’m not supposed to be doing outside interviews but they would have told you that when you got permission to visit. See up there, the camera? It’s imprinting anyway. And there’s a device in the table, bound to be. You and me, we’re going out and over, all around the world, if any one’s interested.

Yes of course we’ve made a deal. Private prisons have to pay the bills somehow, don’t they? That is, if anyone is still interested in my story. Must be fading by now.

I was the first though. I got the golden apple. Nobody should forget that.

 

 

‘The Golden Apple’ © Stephanie Johnson

Stephanie’s most recent novel is The Writers’ Festival a companion to The Writing Class.

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