Twitch I

That last toe keeps twitching. It is a random thing. It is coming back to life, which was not truly dead; that makes it seem like some horror out of H P Lovecraft. But it is not; it is only my toe.

And there is where the horror lies. It began on 20 October 2007, when the aptly named Gabriel Agbonlahor poked Manchester United Football Club in the eye by scoring within a few minutes of kick-off. For this Gabriel, while not blowing the Last Trump, had effectively played a trump nevertheless. MUFC would overtrump and win 4-1 that evening, but I was the big loser.

As the crowd erupted, so did I. In doing so, I left my seat, tripped over a chair leg, regained my balance, watched the replay of that goal, and discovered to my great consternation that it had been a bad trip. The chair leg had remained caught between my last two toes long enough to wrench the last one out of its socket slightly and, as I was later to discover, fracture the longer phalange almost (but not quite) cleanly across.

This story has been told often and to many who have inquired. I think of it as a football-related injury.

But the horror of it, the long hours of waiting in the time-compromised hospital, the first sight of the x-ray, and the crrrickt of the fracture being reduced – these were nothing compared to the crawling agonies of a foot coming back to life through the stages of its failure as a member of the supporting cast. Or the casted support. There is something odd about that toe now, as there is with all entities who have died and been reborn. They are not quite right.

And the first sign of this lack of rightness, this failure of rectitude, is the twitch. It keeps me up late at night (although not much). Any kind of twitch is unnatural, and this one more than most. I have thoughts of the toe seceding and just not being there when I awake, like the fabled Gingerbread Man.