Read Online Peeling the Onion by Wendy Orr - Free Book Online

to smash that brick with your bare hand, and the rest of you knows that you can, and you concentrate, visualise — and let loose and do it, do the impossible . . .
    He's grinning. 'So what are you breaking now?'
    'My plaster,' I admit— does he read everyone's mind, or just mine? 'You still haven't told me why you left uni.'
    He shrugs. 'Business studies was bad enough, but when I got into the advertising stream I really started to hate it. Every assignment was worse; in the end I could barely force myself to do them—it was all completely alien to the way I think. Why should I want to manipulate people's minds to buy what I want?'
    'So why'd you do it in the first place?'
    'I thought it would be something my dad and I could share—he's totally wrapped up in his work. Pretty mature, eh? I was going to live with him, get to know him . . . maybe I even wanted to be like him, strange as it sounds.'
    'Not that strange—he's pretty successful.'
    'He's paid a price for it! Which is okay for him, it's his choice—but it's not mine. I figure there has to be something more important than money and power, prestige and all that; eventually I realised that it was my life and I'd have to work out what to do with it myself. It didn't exactly improve my relationship with my dad, but I guess that's the price I have to pay.'
    I'm not sure about his 'life as a river' theory, but at least he's open and honest—no bull! When he's talking about something serious his eyes go dark—then suddenly he's teasing again and they go back to that deep, brilliant blue.
    FLD. Foot Liberation Day.
    I follow Mr Osman out to a back room, with shelves of instruments. The power saw is the one that grabs my eye. It must be the reason the floor's linoleum—bloodstains are a nightmare on carpet.
    The ferocious saw whirrs and whines, slicing the plaster but—miraculously—not me. My right leg looks like a plant that's been growing under a rock, skinny, white and wrinkled.
    It feels light and free.
    I've brought my right sneaker in a bag; I put it on and parade up and down the hall— I'm walking, I'm normal! —while Mr Osman watches, frowning.
    'I'll write you a referral for physio,' he says. Jeans! With the fat foot gone I can wear what I like—the bottom half, anyway. Maybe I'm even glad that they're the old pair, the ones that weren't cut off in Casualty. I feel more like me in well-worn denim.
    When my foot touches the floor in the morning it feels as if some idiot's come along and hammered spikes up through the floorboards. Looks like it'll take a while to get used to not having the plaster. I still walk like a baby, legs straddled wide across an invisible nappy, arms out for balance.
    'Come in three times a week,' physio Brian says, grunting with the effort of trying to yank my ankle into the shape he wants. When he's exhausted he lends me a wooden rocking board so I can practise at home. Just a few minutes, he says, three times a day.
    Bend, stretch, pull it up, point it down, swivel in circles. Looks so easy when Brian's foot does it.
    Coming home from physio I'm tired. That's my excuse anyway. I miss the doorway to the kitchen; hit my shoulder, scrape my thumb. Sticking out like a sore thumb. Such a stupid expression; such a stupid-looking thumb. Weak, red and stiff; wouldn't be so bad except when you think of it being like that forever. Or worse.
    But compared to the other things . . .
    I offer my thumb up as a sacrifice, a bargain with God or whoever makes the rules: I won't complain about my thumb, if you heal my ankles and my neck.
    Jenny on the phone, 'What's that tapping?'
    It's the ankle-rocking board. My parents are always complaining about how long Jenny and I talk—at least now I'm doing something useful at the same time.
    'I knew you'd be happy once you got some exercises!' But you don't know what happy is till you can't do something normal and you learn to do it again. This morning Sally