When I was young I broke my arm. It happened on a Saturday afternoon, so on the following Monday I went to school with a plain white cast on my arm, my thumb and fingers wiggling out the end like worms.
As I was walking through the school gate, someone asked me what had happened. I told them. Then, as I was at my locker, someone else asked me.
By the time I got to my first class, I had been asked 9 times about my arm, and each time I had told the story of how I had broken it.
By lunchtime I was so sick of telling people the story that I wrote it out in the back page of my science book, and whenever someone asked me about it I stayed silent and handed them the book. It was no use though, because they kept asking me questions about it, and I’d end up telling the whole story again anyway.
I was so tired of telling people the same story, that I started to embellish it a little bit. And then a lot. First, it wasn’t a tree that I had fallen from, it was a big rainwater tank on my father’s friend’s farm. Then, instead of my father driving me carefully to the hospital, he had been speeding and we had had a car accident along the way. No, the car accident was actually how I broke my arm in the first place. And my father was still in hospital. And I hadn’t been in the car, but on my bike, riding to buy my father his newspaper because it hadn’t been delivered that morning. And a big dog had chased me and while I was riding away as fast as I could I’d pedaled off the gutter and knocked my arm on the edge of a payphone.
I told different stories to different people. If I liked them, they’d get a version that was closer to the truth. If I didn’t like them, they’d hear that I was helping my uncle move house and a fridge had slipped from our hands and crushed my right arm against the stair-rail in his block of flats. By the end of the day, everyone in the school was talking about how I had broken my arm. There were arguments, people would disagree with each other and assert their version of the story as fact. There were even some fights, I think. The teachers tried to keep the peace, but the boys were viciously defensive of the stories I had given them. I was so sick of them all that I couldn’t be bothered setting them straight, I just stayed silent. The funny thing was, I hadn’t really broken my arm; I’d used some bandages and some of my mother’s plaster to make the fake cast. I can’t remember why I did it. To get attention, I suppose.
