This is how it will happen. Circle Line. Liverpool Street. 7.16 a.m. Half asleep. Platform is a rugby scrum. Teetering on the edge. Dangerous territory. We’ve all been there. Mutant mice scurry around the live rail. Frantically late. The train rumbles in and grinds to a halt. The racket eviscerates my hangover. Squeeeeze into carriage. Airless. Breathless. Elbows jag into necks. Groins grind into bums. Grab at the handrail. Middle finger jams in sliding doors. Oh-fuck ... Yank it out. FINGERFUCKINGTIP MISSING! Blood splatters shirts and ties. Stick stump in mouth and scream FUCK! Try it. Strangely painless. Dribbling like cartoon vampire. My favourite hand. An exclusion zone will materialise around me. Then some angel pulls the emergency handle. Train judders. Doors crank open. Smother stump with hanky. A fist of crimson candyfloss. I imagine tearing up the escalator past a blur of cheesy advertising models with chewing gum noses.

Rush into the heaving concourse of the main line station. Out of the darkness and into the light. Shafts of sunshine dazzle down from the crystal roof. A cathedral of collisions; of gothic detail, of digital information, of screaming retail brands, of people from every race, nationality, class, culture, creed and who-knows-what sexual persuasions. Part of me will be going into shock. Part of me will be trying to think rationally; think A&E, think ambulance, think next of kin. But I’ll be swept along on tides of humanity; workers & skivers, day trippers & train spotters, beggars & scoundrels, pick pockets & ticket stammers; the itinerant and nomadic tribes that wash in and out of here every day. It will become impossible to move in a straight line. I see myself crashing into a tribe of American evangelists in sharp black suits bound for the airport with badges proclaiming Hi! I’m Cy front Miami! Praise the Lord! Outside the Easy-Walk-In-Tanning-Kiosk, I crunch into a gaggle of Essex girls with bronzed skin, snippety legs and diamanté belly buttons. I’ll be herded into Boots and collide with a teenage mother pushing two spitting toddlers who eyeball my injury with Midwich Cuckoo stares. I’ll tumble over suitcases, scatter florists displays, skid into scalding cappuccinos, wrestle with flexible queuing systems, emasculate small dogs and banjax signing systems.

I attempt to tack a haphazard course to the station entrance, but the faster I move the slower I go. By now, the blood loss will be making me feel woozy, but then a pair of friendly arms will envelop me, like landing on a cloud of cotton wool. Focusing, I’ll look up and see the face of a saint, her shimmering halo glowing like a Belisha beacon. Am I in Heaven? And she is going to smile back, a beatific grin that evaporates my anxiety. At this point, the rest of the station goes into slow motion, as if we are suspended in some once-removed dimension. And from this place of safety I’ll dare to ask who she is. She will inspect my throbbing hand, and tell me without a whiff of irony that she is Saint Mechteld, the patron saint of missing fingers. Programmed by years of religious iconography I’ll look for iridescent robes, celestial trappings, perhaps a pearly harp, or a lute, or a flute, or a magical singing lyre or even a pouting cherub. But she wears Calvin Klein this, Tommy Hilfiger that, FCUK something else and sports a pair of scruffy Nike Air Zooms. Over her shoulder is a zippered bag with Amsterdam-Schiphol flight tags. Mechteld will tell me in perfect English, with only an inflection of Dutch that she’s just arrived on the Stansted Express. And I hear myself splutter stupid questions like: How did you know I would do it? Can you get my finger back? Why didn’t you stop me? But she will simply whistle through her front teeth, remove a spliff from behind her ear, and plant it between my lips like a shut- your-gob thermometer.

Aided and abetted by an aura of Lebanese gold, she will spirit me out of the station, floating up the escalators into the frantic streets of the City. As we hit the open air, I discover her perfect halo is little better than the glitter and fuse wire constructions we made for our Christmas tree fairy when we were kids. She appears underslept and overworked. Her fingernails are almost nibbled down to the cuticle. But for all this mortal vulnerability, she will exude an ethereal credulity. Then forcing my hand above my head like a red flag, she will steer me through the secretaries, receptionists, managers and personal assistants as they are gobbled up by the office buildings. We’ll slip down the ancient lanes and dog-leg alleys to a Tower Hamlets Health Authority building I’ve never noticed before, with a sign outside announcing the Liverpool Street Finger Clinic.

In reception, a triage nurse who obviously knows Mechteld well, peeps under the sodden wrapping to ascertain the extent of the damage, then logs my details. Our entry to the outpatients’ waiting room is greeted with cheers of recognition by finger victims whom Mechteld has helped in the past. Some wear slings supporting heavily bandaged, half-cocked arms. Some hold pinned and wired fingers aloft like reluctant pupils in a detention class. Others are just popping in for post-op check-ups, and quietly appreciating their mending fingers like never before. Mechteld’s presence warms them up, and knuckle-biting narratives of industrial accidents and unfortunate occurrences trundle round the room - everyone has a story to tell: Egbert Monchique sliced his fingers off with a DeWalt radial arm saw at the City & Guilds Apprentice Centre just around the corner. We cringe as Mechteld recalls him carrying the tips to the clinic like fairground goldfish in a plastic bag. He says the surgeons worked through the night to glue them back on fuelled by fixes of Mars bars and Tizer. Johnny Toronto tells us he works for a geophysical exploration outfit on the 37th floor of the Broadgate Centre above the station. Three months ago he lost his little finger to a maverick detonator during a seismic survey in Azerbaijan. He’s here today because a slip on the Millennium Ice Rink has opened up the old wound again. Nasimah from the Batigalorious Fashion Emporium in Petticoat Lane had her index finger amputated after mangling it in the cogs of a Singer hydraulic steam press. Jean-Patrice d’Allery, from a Parisienne dynasty of master wood carvers has restored Grinling Gibbons’ masterpieces all over the Parish of Bishopsgate. Jean is a regular at the clinic having whittled away most of his fingers over the years. Albion Milton, the septuagenarian Master at Arms of the Bunhill Fields Burial Grounds severed his ring finger when removing William & Catherine Blake’s restless tombstone during the refurbishment of the unisex public toilets. Hanna Hilb rescued a fox that was hit by a bus right outside the main station and took it back to the Museum of Immigration in the old Huguenot quarter of Spitalfields where she is a curator. But the ungrateful beast attacked her, bit off her middle finger and then stole a chicken from the Three Monkeys Curry House in Brick Lane. Charles Crispill runs a veneer warehouse in Patina Yard, Hoxton. He shredded his left thumb while quarter cutting a burl of precious thuya from the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. He proudly holds up his transplanted big left toe for all to admire, which now flourishes on the space his thumb vacated.

Visits to hospitals confront us with our ephemerality. As we tread limbo in corridors and cubicles, I’ll ask Mechteld how she got the gig to be a patron saint. She’ll explain that Liverpool Street is twinned with Amsterdam Centraal station and they enjoy reciprocal patron saint arrangements. She says fingers are in her blood and that she comes from a long line of fingery heroes. Her great, great grandfather Joop was the boy who stuck his legendary finger in the Domberg Dyke and saved the village from drowning. Her cousin Geertje’s family have been manufacturing the world famous Gouda cheeses for generations, and every hallmark hole is still gouged by their stiff Lutheran fingers. Back in the early seventeenth century, Mechteld’s green-fingered ancestor Jochem Hoogaboom, hand-reared the very first tulip bulbs that triggered the tulip mania, that lead to the crash of the Amsterdam stock exchange.

Mechteld will tell me that anyone can become a patron saint: choose your cause and apply for the vocation. The training is not dissimilar to The Knowledge - the competency test for London taxi drivers. But instead of practising how to get from A to B, you learn how to navigate fate and fortune. There’s not much money in it, but the job satisfaction is beyond measure. Mechteld cautions that in these times of universal diaspora, compulsory multi-tasking and diminishing attention spans, we all need someone to look over our shoulder.

While positioning my hand for X-ray, Mechteld will confront me with my collision and question whether it was really even an accident. Once the film is processed, we pore over my ghostly skeleton. We stare at the missing fingertip; this intrinsic part of me that does not exist anymore. Mechteld observes that for many of her customers, the accident is often an unconscious cry for help; the body mutinies against the errant ego and attempts to return it to the fold. At first I’ll feel hostile to such a suggestion, because I’ve always believed in the supremacy of mind over matter. But she will couch her arguments in such intriguing and unthreatening terms, I’ll begin to see right through my defences. We’ll talk so effortlessly, I’ll find myself admitting to vulnerabilities I wouldn’t dare share with others; that my life has been like a dog chasing its tail; that I’ve never given much thought to where I was going or why.

A nurse will appear and show us into a small specialist operating theatre with anatomical charts of hands, tendons and nerves on the walls. She sets out plastic sheets, kidney bowls, scalpels, forceps, tweezers and swabs on an orthopaedic trauma table. While waiting for the surgeon, Mechteld and I shall reflect on our progress through life, and the difference between what could have happened, and what did. We’ll talk about what’s true - and what’s not true, and how through failure or disappointment, some people turn their lives into elaborate fictions.

Dr Bethiana Sanchez - on secondment from Hospital del Dedo Sagrado in Barcelona - breezes in like a mother hen surrounded by a flock of medical students. She is delighted to see Mechteld and they embrace like old friends. She inspects the remainder of my finger and instructs the surgical nurse to administer a local anaesthetic. As the needles go in, Mechteld slides her arm round my shoulder. The doctor talks the procedure through as she sews up the blood vessels, pulls the muscle over the bone, folds the skin into a neat flap and stitches everything together. After dressings, tetanus jab, antibiotics and an appointment for tomorrow, I am let out on probation.

As we emerge onto the steps of the clinic it is clear that something has happened between us. It’s incredibly tangible but impossible to articulate. We have been manoeuvring towards it since the moment we met, and it feels exhilaratingly awkward.

Wafts of lunch from numerous cafes aggravate our hunger and we walk back towards Liverpool Street and the Great Eastern Hotel, a terracotta temple to the glory of rail travel. We hog a squashy leather sofa in the Fishmarket Bar, sip pints of medicinal Guinness and talk about the power of fingers and how they are taken so for granted. Mechteld touches my cheek and says fingers are sense organs, a kind of radar, antennae, existential measuring sticks. She clenches her glass and describes fingers as the tools of the hunter-gatherer, designed to catch, select, shape and make their mark. Gathering momentum, she’ll talk excitedly about how we use our fingers to communicate, and with animated gestures, act out the universal signs - pointing, warning, beckoning and ticking off. She’ll poke out her tongue and sneak in a V sign and I’ll instinctively counter with a fist. Then suddenly, giggling like kids we are playing Rock Paper Scissors and the kiss just happens. It startles us but feels alarmingly natural. And then the kisses will come rapidly and spontaneously as if our lips were made for each other.

Our destination for the rest of the afternoon is inevitable, but we need fuel to get us there and find a table in the art deco Aurora Dining Rooms. There is a delicious sense of erotic anticipation as we gorge ourselves on regional dishes expressed into Liverpool Street from all over East Anglia: Butley native oysters dredged from the brackish creeks of Orford Ness. Toad in the Hole made from Norfolk Old Spot porkers reared in Great Snoring with heaps of juicy samphire from Wells-next-the-Sea. And finally Walberswick fudge cake, dripping with sheep’s yoghurt from Suffolk ewes grazed on the Blythburgh flood meadows. Over espresso and armagnac, Mechteld tells me she is being relocated. The world is changing fast and there are new insecurities for patron saints to address such as self-help groups, international terrorism, cigarette smoking and genetic engineering. She says one of her friends is now the Greek patron saint of mobile phones. Mechteld has been offered postings in South America; maybe Chile, maybe Honduras, maybe Brazil. But she’ll add that she’s not decided anything about her future ... yet. Then we check into the hotel and take the glass lift to the seventh floor. The luxurious room is set into the eaves and oriel windows peep out over leaded roofs, flagpoles and church spires towards Threadneedle Street. We’ll wash away all the crap and crud of the day in a scalding power-shower - my bandages protected by a pedal bin liner - and collapse on the fresh linen sheets. One handed, I’ll feel clumsy, an awkward sexuality, my fingers like blunt instruments without any sensitivity. But Mechteld’s fingers are exquisitely tuned. They have a phenomenal touch; like hummingbird’s sneezes, like a kitten’s inquisitiveness, like peals of laughter. And I’ll learn so much from her. My fingers will find a new voice and we shall tease and tickle and stroke and squeeze each other into a frenzy of pleasure.

Afterwards, clinging close, as naked as you can get, we’ll listen to the muffled drone of the traffic and the whine of jets limbering up for Heathrow. The rumbling of Tube trains way down below will shudder up through the fabric of the building. I’ll slip into the deepest sleep and wake hours later.

Mechteld has gone but her halo reclines on the pillow, with a small note in spidery handwriting, asking me never to forget what happened to us today, and to light the occasional candle for her.

*

© Tom Lynham, 2007. This story was previously published in the collection From Here to Here (Cyan, 2005, ISBN: 1-904879-35-7) edited by John Simmons, Neil Taylor, Tim Rich and Tom Lynham. Tom Lynham tried to change the world by inventing the Televisor and building the Unfinished Table, but now he writes stories about how other people do it.

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