It was the first day of spring this year. I was topless, face-down on a foldaway travel table, as the masseuse uttered six words that brought my attempt at relaxation to an abrupt end: “I think your arm is haunted.”
I have broken my right arm seven times: seven breaks on seven separate occasions. Some years, my arm was in a sling more than it was out of one. The novelty of getting your mates to cover your cast in that 00s grafitti “S” and the relief of missing the bleep test at school quickly wore off.
My arm-breaking debut came in 2002, when I was eight and fell off my bike. The second time, I fell off a trampoline. The third time, I jumped off a swing and into my younger brother. Then I was pushed off a bed by my eldest brother. The fifth time, I was playing hopscotch with the girls next door a little too vigorously and fell flat on my face (and arm). For number six, most agonisingly, surgeons deliberately re-broke my arm under anaesthetic because the previous operation had set it incorrectly. And the final time was in Paris in 2007, when I was 13. Playing football, I went to head a ball and fell, hard. Before the pain hit, I stood up and said to my coach: “I think my arm’s broken.” By then, the dull ache of ruptured bone felt familiar, but it didn’t take a doctor to see that my wrist was six inches away from where a wrist should be.
I grew up in different countries for most of my childhood, living across South America, Asia and Europe before moving back to the UK. My parents, language graduates with a severe case of wanderlust, kept travelling and we moved with them. I have experienced some of the planet’s greatest cultures and cuisines, but also some of its worst orthopaedic departments.
I haven’t broken my arm for almost 20 years now and I rarely think about those days of contorting my body like a gymnast to shower without getting my cast wet (top tip: put your arm in a plastic bag). Or of losing a chopstick under the cast after trying to scratch a hidden itch (another tip: metal or plastic chopsticks work best; wooden ones tend to snap and leave splinters).
I asked the masseuse what she meant by “haunted” and she explained that, in some cultures, a repeated injury to the same part of the body could be interpreted as your ancestors trying to contact you. Your ancestors are trying to teach you a lesson, and they are repeating it until it’s learned. “You seem a little tense,” she added, giving me the phone number of someone who could exorcise the arm.
Instead, I rang my parents and jokingly asked if there was any reason an ancestor might be haunting me. Mum said my great-great-grandfather lost his right arm in the first world war. In a rehabilitation camp back in the UK, he learned woodwork and weaving; he made a stool that I used to sit on as a boy. “What would he be wanting to tell me?” I asked. “I think he’s telling you to collect all your stuff from our shed,” my dad piped up, “because it’s taking up a lot of space.”
In the weeks that followed, I told the haunted arm story at the pub with a smirk. But when I was alone, I found myself reflecting on it more seriously. I didn’t feel as if I was haunted by a first world war soldier, but perhaps I was haunted by the raw and intense experience of repeatedly breaking a bone during childhood. Each time the plaster cast was removed, I would ignore the lingering dull ache, or the small voice telling me to wait another week, and within days I’d be back on my bike, or on the trampoline or annoying my brothers. I ploughed on, pushing through the discomfort. I learned how to play squash. I learned the drums. I even mastered the diabolo (remember the diabolo?).
But to this day, whenever I’m sick or stressed, my arm hurts first. When I got Covid for the first time, I Googled whether pain in the right arm was a symptom. On holiday last month, I went up the Eiffel Tower, and as I leaned over the edge, I swear my arm felt the fear before my brain did. And when I come home after a long day, I sometimes find myself subconsciously cradling my arm, as if it’s in a sling.
Perhaps ignoring what my body has been through, what it is “haunted” by, has caused me greater pain in the long run. Maybe thinking of myself as simply “unlucky” was a convenient way of not admitting that, somewhere around break number four, I had stopped trusting my body.
Since being told my arm is haunted, I’ve become more interested in listening to what my body remembers than ignoring what my mind wants to forget. These days, when I’m run down or I find the ache starting to creep in, I treat it as a sign to slow down and remain cautious. It is a useful reminder to take it easy. With that in mind, I haven’t called in the arm exorcist yet.
Jonathan Oldfield: Exquisite Corpse is at the Edinburgh festival fringe, 5–30 August
