Free By My Side by Alice Peterson Page A

warned that it will be crowded, ‘So you’re going to have to have all your wits about you,’ Lindsey said.
    During the training we are watched every second of the day. Lindsey is never far behind us with her clipboard. I am certain she was hiding behind Trevor’s bedroom door last night to see if he was acting the same behind closed doors. Did he go from jolly old man to gruff demanding old sod, ordering Pandora to get him his slippers?
    ‘These dogs are not machines,’ she reinforces daily. ‘You must love them and treat them with respect.’
    The hardest part, however, has been learning the commands. If a dog jumps up at you, you don’t say, ‘Down,’ as that’s asking them to lie down. You say, ‘Off.’ There are four positions around a wheelchair: ‘Heel’ is asking your dog to stand on the left-hand side, ‘Behind’ is behind, ‘Go through’ is go in front of the chair and ‘Side’ is please stand on my right-hand side. It’s important to know where the dog should be placed at all times so they’re safe. Lindsey told us about one of their dogs on the last course who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time when entering a lift. The doors shut and his paw was broken. There’s so much to learn that I’m not having nightmares any more. Instead I wake myself up saying the commands.
    Lindsey slots the video into the machine. We have to watch on film how we work with our dogs outside the training room. I’m anxious about seeing myself on screen, but thankfully it’s Trevor first. We watch as he throws a tennis ball across the field. ‘Play ball,’ he calls out to Pandora. Trevor struggles when it begins to rain, grappling with his hood and trying to zip up his anorak. Rain turns into a hailstorm. Trevor is spitting in fury now and making no sense at all. He calls for Pandora, distress in his voice.
    ‘Why did you flip out?’ Lindsey asks him, pressing the pause button.
    ‘I forgot my command, went blank! It’s not easy remembering them all, especially at my age,’ he jokes.
    Lindsey places her hands on her hips. ‘That’s not good enough, Trevor.’
    ‘I know,’ he says, cowering in his seat.
    ‘If you panic, so will Pandora. You see here?’ She turns to all of us. ‘Pandora is stressed out by Trevor losing his cool. Commands can be less formal inside your home, but outside, there are too many risks so you’ve got to stay calm. Better luck next time, Trevor. All right, Cass next. Are you ready?’
    The last time I looked at myself properly in a mirror was during one of my sessions in the gym with Paul at the hospital, over six months ago. I didn’t recognise myself. My face was pale from being cooped up in the rehab ward for weeks and my feet looked dead against the footplates.
    ‘It’s purely from the point of view of Ticket and his responses to you,’ Lindsey says, sensing my apprehension as she presses play on the machine. ‘You see here,’ she begins gently, ‘when you were at the supermarket and Ticket was sitting by the chocolate stand. Now, I don’t blame him for that –’ she looks at me, hoping for a smile – ‘but he’s not in a safe place. Do you see? You need to manoeuvre your chair around him, to protect him from another person’s trolley.’
    I thought I looked better than that. In my head I imagine I’m the same old Cass. Five foot eight and slender, deep brown eyes, OK, not model legs, but good legs, thick dark blonde hair scooped back into a ponytail. Sean loved to sneak up on me when I was studying and blow softly against the nape of my neck. Then he’d wrap his arms around me, I’d turn and we’d kiss …
    ‘You positioned yourself nicely there when it was your turn to pay,’ she continues. ‘But did you see what you didn’t do? Cass?’
    I open my eyes and the image on the screen is still there. I look like a giant slug in my wheelchair. I hear Lindsey say something about the conveyor belt, that I should have asked the shop assistant to