The Cellar Under the House Learned to Hold Me Up

The crash I did not see coming

The cellar came into my life because my shoulder went out of it. I want to be honest about the order of things, because for a while I got it backwards and told people the room came first, as though I had planned any of this.

I came off my bike on a wet Tuesday in April, on a bend I had taken a thousand times, two streets from my own front door in Manchester. There was a diesel slick I never saw. One second I was upright and thinking about nothing at all, the next I was on the tarmac with my right arm folded under me in a way arms are not meant to fold. I heard the collarbone go before I felt it. A small, dry sound, like a dropped stick of chalk. Then the pain arrived, and it did not leave in any real sense for the better part of a year.

The surgeon put a plate in and told me the bone would knit. He was right, but he said it the way doctors say things, as if knitting were a quiet job the body got on with while you waited. Nobody tells you how long the waiting is. Nobody tells you that you will sit in your own kitchen at thirty-eight years old, unable to lift a full kettle, and feel something close to grief for a version of yourself that existed on the Monday.

Why I went down the stairs at all

I am a man who moves to think. I always have been. Cycling was not a hobby for me so much as the place I did my worrying, out on the roads at six in the morning before the world woke up and started needing things. Take that away and I did not know where to put myself. I paced. I got short with my wife over nothing. I stood at the window and watched other people ride past the end of our road and felt a meanness I was ashamed of.

There was another thing pressing on me. My uncle Raymond had died the winter before the crash. He had been the one who put me on a bike in the first place, holding the saddle and lying about letting go. Before he went, when he was already thin and tired, he made me promise I would do the charity walk he had done every year, the long one across the moors that raised money for the ward that had looked after him. I said yes the way you say yes to a dying man, meaning it completely and understanding none of what it would cost. The walk was the following autumn. After the crash, autumn looked a very long way off and uphill the whole distance.

So I went down the stairs. We have a cellar under our terrace, the way a lot of these old houses do, a damp cold space that had held nothing but a dead freezer and the smell of the river for as long as we had owned the place. I stood down there one grey afternoon with my arm in its sling and I thought, this is a room. It is ugly and it is cold, but it is a room, and if I cannot ride then I can at least learn to walk again in private, where nobody can watch me wince.

Making the room plain and usable

I did it slowly because slowly was the only speed I had. One-handed, over weeks. I painted the brick a flat white so it would stop looking like a place you store things you have given up on. I ran a cheap electric heater down there and bought a dehumidifier that rattled like an old train but pulled cup after cup of water out of the air. I put down rubber tiles so the floor would stop leaching the cold up through my feet. I was not building a gym. I kept telling myself that. I was building somewhere to move without an audience.

The one real piece of kit I wanted was something I could walk on when the weather kept me in, which in Manchester is most of the time. I had no interest in anything fancy, nothing with screens telling me about imaginary mountains. I just wanted a belt that turned so I could put one foot in front of the other and slowly ask more of my body. New machines were absurd money for what I needed, so I spent a few evenings on the sofa looking through listings of used treadmills for sale while my shoulder throbbed and my tea went cold beside me.

It took longer than buying new would have, and that was fine, because I had nothing but time. I found a solid old thing a chap two neighbourhoods over was selling because his own knees had retired him from it. Getting it down my cellar stairs with one good arm and a borrowed set of hands from next door was its own small comedy, and I will not pretend there was not swearing. But it fit in the corner, it turned when I pressed the button, and it asked nothing of my collarbone at all. That was the whole point.

Learning to trust a body that kept saying no

The first week I managed four minutes. I am not ashamed to write that down now, though at the time it felt like a humiliation. Four minutes at the pace of a man leaving a funeral, and my heart going like I had sprinted. The bone was still deciding whether to forgive me. Any jolt through the shoulder sent a bright line of pain down my arm, so I learned to move in a way that did not jolt, smooth and careful, almost gentle. It was the opposite of everything cycling had taught me, where you push until something gives. Down there I learned to stop just before the edge and come back the next day.

That is the thing nobody warns you about with a long injury. The hard part is not the pain. The hard part is the patience, and patience is a skill, not a mood. I had always thought of myself as a patient man and I discovered I was nothing of the sort. I wanted the bone healed on Tuesday. I wanted my old self back by the weekend. The cellar taught me, four minutes at a time, that the body keeps its own calendar and will not be hurried by a grown man sulking in a basement.

Somewhere in the middle of the summer I noticed I had stopped counting the minutes and started counting the weeks differently. I could walk for half an hour. Then I could walk while carrying a light weight in my good hand, then eventually in both. The dehumidifier rattled, the heater ticked, and I walked nowhere for forty minutes at a stretch, going absolutely nowhere and getting steadily closer to the moors. A friend who had his own bad back asked me where I had found the machine, and I sent him the same page of used treadmill listings I had used, which felt like passing on something useful rather than clever.

The promise, kept at my uncle's pace

By September the surgeon looked at the X-ray and used the word healed without any qualifiers, which from him was close to a brass band. The shoulder would always be a shade stiff in the cold, he said, and he was right about that too. But the bone had knitted, quietly, in its own time, while I had been learning in a cold room to let it.

I did the walk in October. Raymond's walk, across the moors, with the wind coming at us sideways the way it always does up there. My shoulder ached by the halfway point and ached worse by the end, and I would not change a single step of it. I thought about him on the long climb, about the saddle he pretended not to let go of, and I understood something I could not have understood before the crash. He had not given me the bike to make me fast. He had given it to me so I would always have somewhere to put the worrying.

I finished. Slower than most, cold to the bone, grinning like an idiot at the top. I kept the promise.

The cellar is still down there, still plain and white, the old machine still in its corner. I ride again now, out on the early roads, and most days I do not need the belt that turns. But I go down on the wet mornings, the ones that would once have made me mean at the window, and I put one foot in front of the other for a while. If anyone ever asks me what finally mended me that year, I will tell them it was not the plate in my shoulder and it was not the surgeon, kind as he was. It was a cold room, a borrowed pace, and learning at last to wait. I have even told two other people recovering from their own knocks to go and look at the used treadmills rather than sit at a window watching the world go past, because the window teaches you nothing and the slow walk teaches you everything.