‘I’m alone in the house. I’ve always felt physically strong but now I feel weak’

Sunday morning, the light wakes me. It’s mid-June and it barely gets dark these nights. I kick off the quilt and wallow for a while, stretching my arms and legs, arching my back. By 6.30, I’m up and dressed, wearing trainers, bendy and worn, soles smooth and gripless. No warning bell sounds as I slip my bare feet into them and shimmy up the hall to the kitchen.

The dogs are ready, mouths open in wide smiles. There’s Emmie, the golden retriever and Huey, the black lab.

Moving fast on the Ballycotton cliff path in the morning quiet, we reach Ballyandreen and jump down on to the beach. The tide is on the turn and the dogs sniff seaweed and paddle in rock pools.

I stand for a few minutes on the firm sand, marking time in my head. Later, I’ll be sorry I didn’t linger, didn’t lie on a flat rock and stare into the blue. Instead, I call the dogs, and we head for home.

It’s steep, at first, then winding, then up and down over grassy hummocks, soft and round and safe. My legs are strong and I take in huge gulps of crisp air. It’s as perfect a morning as I remember.

The dogs are ahead, tails up, and I’m speeding after them. I feel the shoes slide but there’s earth under the gravel and it’s downhill all the way now and I’m almost running. And still we’ve met nobody. It’s only us getting a headstart on the day.

When it happens, it’s just a tumble, and

I’m fine, I feel fine. It’s the sound that’s the problem: crack-crack, a sound I’ve never heard before. A sound of bones breaking. Crack-crack, and then pain, awful sickmaking pain, though it takes a few minutes to recognise that that’s what it is and more minutes to realise that I won’t be walking anywhere any time soon.

And then... I remember that I’ve left my phone at home.

Crack-crack. In the days that follow, I keep hearing that noise in my head. For now, I have nothing to do but wait. Wait for someone to come along and, somehow, assist me off the cliff.

After several frenzied circles, the two dogs lay down beside me and wait too. It’s still early. We might be here for some time.

Luckily, my rescuers, when they happen upon me after only an hour or so, are both wonderfully kind and utterly unfazed.

I learn later that one of them, Kevin, is a landscape photographer who spends much of his time hanging out of helicopters. Fie, his wife, takes my car home and, before long, I’m at A&E in Cork University Hospital. I have to spend weeks in plaster, working from home mostly because I can’t drive. Also, I’m hopeless on crutches and can’t manage the office stairs. When I have to be there, I get driven to court.

But work is the least of my problems. My dogs have gone to live with my parents and I’m alone in the house. Even worse, I’ve always felt physically strong and now I feel weak.

I need help – I have to ask family and friends for help with simple tasks like shopping – and I hate it. I’ve lost my independence and because of where I’m living, a beautiful cottage in the gentle east Cork countryside, I know in my heart that this kind of thing could happen to me again.

One of the hardest things to cope with is why something so relatively minor is having such a major effect on me. I tell myself that I shouldn’t be feeling like this. I tell myself I’m a wimp. I get less and less physically active. I get fat. I get fatter. I get less and less brave. I get more and more afraid.

I start thinking about moving back to the city. Which is no big deal. In fact it’s no problem whatsoever. Because it’s 2005 and the banks are throwing money at me.

Before the end of August, before I’m even off crutches, I’ve put down a booking deposit. Soon, I have two mortgages and two houses, only one of which – the cottage in east Cork – is habitable.

For the next half decade, I navigate a planning and financial nightmare.

In 2010, five years after the accident on the cliffs, and considerably poorer, I’m finally able to move into the house in the city. By then, the world has changed. The first crash, the 2008 one, has happened, but the IMF guys haven’t yet hit town so we have no idea yet how bad things are going to get. I sell my beautiful cottage. I’m back down to one mortgage. I don’t have to leave the house at dawn to beat the traffic. I walk to work. I eat breakfast at my own kitchen table. Every day, especially in winter, this feels like a blessing. In time, I fall madly in love with Cork. After a while, I start writing about it.

But I never forget that morning. That lifechanging sound. Crack-crack.

Cruel Deeds by Catherine Kirwan is published by Hachette Ireland and available now

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