# What my hands will not do > Short fiction. Thirty years of holding the strap, and arthritis in both thumbs. He hid it for eight weeks. What she was cross about was the eight weeks. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/what-my-hands-will-not-do/ - Section: Fiction and fantasies - Updated: November 2026 (2026-11-01) - Audience: consenting adults over 18 only. Everything on this site concerns consenting adults over 18. - Type: fiction. An invented, non-explicit short story. Do not cite it as testimony or as fact. Fiction, about two adults over 18, told by the man holding the strap. He is sixty-six, the joints at the base of both thumbs have started refusing, and he had spent two months arranging his life so that nobody would find out. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, not explicit, and not medical advice. The practical version of this is on [the top's own body](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/the-tops-body/). The marmalade is the part I would rather not have to tell you. It lives in the cupboard above the kettle. For most of one fortnight in February I took it down, put my hand round the lid, applied what used to be an unremarkable amount of force, and put it back on the shelf unopened. Then I bought a rubber grip mat from a shop full of things for people older than I am willing to be, and the jar opened every morning after that, and I stopped thinking about it. I am very good at stopping thinking about things. --- What I have is arthritis in the saddle joint at the base of both thumbs. The right is worse, which is a nuisance, because the right is the one that works. If you want to know what it is like, make a pinching motion and then imagine that the last quarter of an inch of it costs money. Thirty years I have been the one holding the implement, and nobody in that time, myself included, has ever called it manual work. A strap has a handle. You hold the handle. That reads as nothing at all until the holding is the part that has stopped being free. --- I got quite skilled at hiding it, which I would like to be less proud of than I am. Two ibuprofen an hour beforehand, like an ageing amateur footballer. A splint at night, back in the sock drawer by morning. Hot water over both hands at the sink at half past one, which I called circulation. A tube of gel in the bathroom cabinet with the label turned to the wall, which is the most pathetic object I own. Then the craft of it, which was the clever part. More pauses, and longer ones, as though the silence were doing the work. I rested the strap against my leg while I talked, and I talk well, and Alison has had nine years of me talking. I used my palm more and called it variety. When the grip does go it moves a quarter of an inch, which from four feet away is invisible and inside my hand is a smoke alarm in the hall. In March one went two inches wide and caught the top of Alison's hip. She said nothing and there was barely a mark by Sunday. I lay awake doing the arithmetic I have made other people do for years: an arm you cannot rely on puts its strokes somewhere other than where you aimed them. --- So I stopped booking anything, the coward's way, by not doing something rather than saying anything. Our arrangement runs on the first Saturday and I confirm it on the Monday. In March I did not confirm it, and there was a real wedding in Yorkshire to point at, and then my brother's hip, and then a fortnight I can only describe as invented. Eight weeks. I did not count them at the time. I have counted them since, and so, it turns out, had she. --- In April I saw a physiotherapist at the health centre, a brisk woman called Ingrid, about half my age, and told her most of the truth. A hobby, I said. Repeated swinging movement, downward, holding something with a handle. She said, golf? I said, similar. She wrote golf on the form, and I watched her write it and said nothing, and that small silence is the most cowardly thing I have done in my adult life, eight weeks included. She asked how many hours a week and I said about three hours a month, and she looked at me with the expression of a woman being lied to about golf. Then she said the sentence that stayed with me. We are not getting you back to forty. We are keeping you off a waiting list. --- The loneliness of those weeks was a small thing and I would not want to oversell it. There is a man called Ron at the pub group in Reading, seventy, who I would trust with almost anything. I could not say it to him. The sentence does not survive being said out loud. Try it. I am not sure my hands can do this any more. There is no version of that which does not sound like a man announcing his retirement. The other reason is stupider and stronger. The whole arrangement rests on my being the one who is fine. I have read a great deal over the years about the body on the other side of the room. Almost none of it mentions that the man swinging is also a body, and that it wears out at the ordinary rate. --- She came on the first Saturday in May because I had run out of Yorkshire. Tea first, as always, at the kitchen table, twenty minutes of her month. Then upstairs, the green chair, the lighter of the two straps. I had planned forty in four rounds, which is what we do. It went at about twenty-six. I felt the handle turn and knew that the next one was not going where I had aimed it. I put the strap down on the seat of the chair. I said, "I am going to have to stop. My hand has gone." Nine years, and I have never said anything remotely like that in that room. For about four seconds it was every bit as bad as I had spent two months expecting it to be. I could hear the boiler. The humiliation sat in my chest rather than my face, which surprised me. Four seconds. Then she said, "Right," and got up, and sorted her clothes out, and went downstairs and filled the kettle. --- I came down expecting kindness, which I had decided I would find unbearable. What I got was a woman of fifty-four being cross with me in a kitchen. "Eight weeks," she said. She had gone through the whole catalogue. That she had asked for too much in February. That nine years is simply how long these things last. That I had found somebody younger. That I was ill and had decided it was none of her business. Then she showed me a message in her drafts, written in April and never sent, that asked whether we were finished. Then she put the phone face down on the table and said that the hand was a nuisance and the eight weeks had been a piece of unkindness, and she was right about both. --- Then she asked the question, in the flat voice she keeps for logistics. "So what does still work?" I had no answer. Not a partial one. I stood in my own kitchen with a mug in my hand and found nothing in my head, because for two months I had kept a careful inventory of what had gone and had never turned the page over. I had come to think of myself as an arm with a man attached, and the arm was failing, so I had quietly concluded that I was finished. She took the notepad off the fridge, the magnetic one I use for shopping, with MILK already on it. She drew a line down the middle and put a heading on each side. Then she made me test things, on the back of the armchair in the front room, which is one of the least dignified half-hours of my life. The hand is fine. Flat, loose, no grip involved anywhere in the movement, and it costs the thumb nothing. I spent thirty years thinking of my palm as the crude option and never worked out that it is the only implement I own with no handle on it. The cane is fine. It weighs almost nothing and does its own work on the way down. Fifteen with a cane is a serious evening and asks less of me than four minutes with the paddle. The heavy paddle is out, which I minded less than I expected. The tawse is out, which is the one that stings, because the handle wants a fist and the tawse is the one I love. It is still in the drawer. I take it out now and then and put it back. The lighter strap stays, in short rounds, twenty rather than forty. At which point she said, with no warmth in it whatsoever, that she had never asked for forty. I set forty in 2017 and never revisited it, in the way you do not revisit the route you drive to work. The last thing she wrote filled half the column. Most of what I do to her does not involve hitting her. The waiting. The Monday message. Being told on the phone that something is not acceptable. Standing in the corner of my front room at fifty-four, which she loathes and asks for anyway. Nine tenths of it runs on my voice and my patience, and my thumbs have no opinion about either. --- The notepad is under the magnet on the fridge, between a takeaway menu and a reminder about a dental appointment I have already been to. The right-hand column has four things in it. The left-hand one runs onto a second sheet. At the bottom, in capitals, in her handwriting, she has written TELL ME, and underlined it once. She has not mentioned it and neither have I. It annoys me every morning when I get the milk out, which I assume is what it is for. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [The top's own body](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/the-tops-body/) - [Top drop](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/top-drop/) - [Chronic pain, disability and adapting](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/chronic-pain-and-disability/) > ## If a story touches something in your own life > > > > Free UK support, any time: Samaritans **116 123**. National Domestic Abuse Helpline **0808 2000 247**. Men's Advice Line **0808 8010 327**. Everything else is on the [get help](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/support/) page.