The Cursed Hand

I realised immediately that I was going to die. 

I was on my way back from filming. We’d run late, and I was tired, my mind on my philanthropic work and the various other charity projects I’m involved with that I don’t usually like to talk about and won’t go into here. If you know, you know!

I’d offered to drive myself home rather than take the car they offered. "Give it to one of the crew", I said with a wink. "They’re the real heroes who make the magic happen." Little did I know that this was a humble and altruistic decision I’d come to regret.

The car in front of me had slammed on its brakes, but that fact hadn’t registered until it was already too late. I stamped down hard on the brake pedal, but the sudden motion coupled with the rain-slicked road was too much for even Jaguar’s exceptional braking system and had sent my car into a skid that put me on an inescapable collision course with a large semi truck. It was clear who was coming out of that encounter worse off.

I raised my hand instinctively to shield my face, and then...

The impact was sudden, obscene, shocking. Everything was blackness.

What came next is hazy. Scattered fragments - a flashing light, the hard, wet floor, the sensation of being lifted - the next concrete moment I had was in the hospital. I hadn’t died at all, but it was a close-run thing. From within my shattered orbital bones, I weakly regarded the clinical whiteness around me and the various machines I was hooked up to. I didn’t know what any of them did, but I knew the fact that there were so many of them probably wasn’t a good sign.

With great effort, I tried to prop myself up on my elbows to get a better look at my surroundings, which is when I realised that my right arm was strapped tightly to the bed.

With a kind of detached fascination, I stared at the arm, which now ended considerably earlier than it was supposed to in a shattered wrist, a flap of skin that had been pulled over the stump, and then nothing. My hand was gone, my brain told me, information I tried and failed to process before unconsciousness took me once again.

More fragments. The smell of disinfectant. The doctors talking to me about a new procedure. They could give me my hand back, they said. Nodding in agreement, signing forms with my left hand - as a public figure, I sign a lot of autographs, but the scrawl was nothing like my usual signature. They didn’t seem to mind.

The mask being fitted over my nose and mouth, being told to count backwards from ten. I could hear the doctors whispering in hushed tones about me, the procedure, and the donor hand as I went under, and then...

Clarity. 

The bright white light of the private hospital room brought everything into sharp focus, and I was awake. The doctor’s top button was undone, his tie loose - he looked like he hadn’t slept in days, but he was smiling. The hand had taken unusually well, he told me. I should be back to normal in no time.

My wrist throbbed.

I stared in fascination at the unfamiliar hand in its new home at the end of my right arm. The wrist remained bandaged, but I was already able to flex the fingers. Or at least, the fingers were flexing. How much of that was me, and how much was just muscle spasms I wasn’t sure, but there was bound to be some adjustment in the early days. The doctor had said as much.

I wondered what my followers who look to me for guidance on social media would think about me being gone for so long. It wasn’t like me at all, and doubtless they’d be worried. People tell me all the time that my work has helped them through hard times. I don’t know about all that, but hey, you don’t get to decide what your work means to people.

I had my phone back, but holding it for any amount of time was agony. As painful as it was in all senses of the word, we’d both have to wait.

The nurses brought in dinner and told me to get some rest. One left some newspapers and magazines for me on the side table, in case I got bored.

I slept. I slept for as long as I’ve ever slept.

When I awoke, I noticed something on my chest. It was a neatly folded copy of one of the more right-wing tabloids, which was strange, as I never read that particular newspaper. Picking it up, I noticed the crossword had been done, and some of the articles had passages underlined. 

It must have been someone else’s copy beforehand, I reasoned, until I looked closer at the crossword. It had been done in my handwriting. 

The anaesthetic then, I decided.

I must have been really out of it.

Eventually, it was decided that I had healed well enough to be allowed home. Elated, I called a car, but the strangest thing happened. As soon as the app announced my driver, Ibrahim, was on the way, my thumb jabbed the 'cancel ride' button completely against my will. I tried again, and as soon as the app pinged that Adewale was en route, the same thing happened.

It was only on my third attempt at calling a car that I was able to stop this seemingly involuntary tic from occurring, and, exhausted, I fell asleep in the back of James’s Tesla.

The first few days back home were challenging. Not just because of the physical rehab, which took an enormous toll, but for other, stranger reasons.

One minute, everything would be fine. The next, I’d absent-mindedly look down at my phone only to realise that I appeared to have typed out a long post on a conspiracy theory message board and was about to post it under my real name. Or I would somehow be holding a bag of cocaine I'd never seen before. Or I'd start involuntarily making obscene gestures in Starbucks. What was going on?

I had my suspicions, but it was only when my new hand made a lunge for a woman at the bar in my club, then started trying to undo my trousers, that I realised the terrible truth: the hand was cursed!

The hand was trying to get me cancelled!

Staggering home, clutching my rogue appendage, I kicked open the front door and, shaking, grabbed the phone in the hallway. Dialling frantically with my good hand, I called the hospital and demanded to speak to the transplant clinic that had performed the procedure.

After what seemed like an eternity, the phone was answered.

"Who did this hand belong to?" I screamed into the receiver. "I have to know!"

"I’m sorry, sir, we can’t give out that information," mewled the receptionist, but her tone of voice told me that it was not good news: this hand had come from someone who had been cancelled, and if I didn’t act fast... I would be next!

But it was already too late. As if sensing that I knew its terrible secret, the hand curled into a fist and thrust itself hard into my stomach. Winded, I sank to my knees just as a thunderous uppercut caught me square beneath the jaw, smashing my teeth together and sending me sprawling backwards onto the floor. 

I could feel the hand groping around at the edge of my vision, and as I groggily tried to push myself up onto my elbows, there came the terrific crash of a heavy glass lamp across the back of my head, and everything went dark.

I don’t know how long I was out, but as I swam to the surface of consciousness, I became aware of the rough dragging of carpet across my face and a low, rasping sound.

Struggling to raise my head, I looked ahead of me and saw that the hand was dragging me bodily across the floor of my office, inching its way forward through the room as I trailed behind, trying not to pass out again. The hand clawed its way up the drawers and across the leather top of my desk to my laptop, where, horrified, I watched it open Twitter.

“No…” I whispered, “You can’t…” a sentence I never finished as the hand struck me hard across the face and then grabbed the back of my head and rammed it into the corner of the heavy oak desk.

Dazed, and through the tears in my eyes, I watched helpless as the hand logged into my Twitter account, typed out a tweet, and hit send. Spitting a mouthful of blood onto the leather desk top, I saw that the hand was now moving on to Facebook.

I knew I had to do something, or everything was lost. Summoning every last ounce of strength I had, I was able to swing my arm over and into one of the open desk drawers.

You could tell the hand was surprised. Flipping suddenly, palm upwards, it jerked back and forth, groping for something with which to defend itself.

I wasn’t going to give it the chance.

Reaching over with my other hand, I grabbed the brass handle of the heavy wooden drawer and slammed it shut on my wrist, shattering bone, tearing flesh, and horribly, impossibly, eliciting what sounded like a shrill shriek of pain from the hand.

Again and again I slammed the drawer, ignoring the pain, ignoring the screams. Finally, the door slammed into place, the hand inside and me, gushing blood, on the outside.

I could hear the hand inside the drawer hurling itself at the walls of its new prison, but for now I knew that I was safe.

The curse was broken! I was free of the dark influence of that diabolical, accursed hand!

I later got another new, non-cursed hand, if anyone is wondering.

So hopefully that goes some way towards explaining why I tweeted what I did last week. I understand it upset a lot of people, but as you can see, it really wasn’t my fault.

Nevertheless, I’m very sorry if anyone was offended by the words that were tweeted from my account. It was absolutely not intended. That’s not me. That’s not who I am.

I regret that the incident took place, and I certainly regret being given a cursed hand that gets you cancelled. Please direct any further questions to my publicist.