29. Holly Pandora's Big Day Out

Holly Pandora knew she was a special pig. She was a kunekune pig. Her skin was chocolate and ginger. Her eyes sparkled like black pearls.

Holly Pandora was Rory and Mila's pet. That made her feel even more special. She, Rory and Mila had been friends for a long long time. Almost as long as Holly Pandora could remember.

When Holly Pandora was just a baby piglet Rory and Mila went to the farm with Mr and Mrs Russell. They went to find a piglet as a Christmas present.

“Pick me, pick me,” each piglet squealed.

All of the piglets wanted to be Rory and Mila's pet. None of them wanted to grow up to be someone’s Christmas dinner. Or to be roasted on a spit at a wedding. Or turned into sausages.

Holly Pandora's brothers and sisters rushed over to meet them. But Holly Pandora hung back. She was very shy.

“Now, don’t take forever choosing, you two,” said Mrs Russell.

“Not like in the shoe shop,” added Mr Russell.

Sometimes Rory and Mila took a long time to decide what they wanted. This time they made up their minds right away.

“Oh, that one, that one,” they cried excitedly, pointing at Holly Pandora. “That one over there. She’s so cute."

Holly Pandora, Rory and Mila became the best of friends. They played in the paddock with Kurt the collie dog, Snowy the goat, and Gabby and Minty, the cats. Mum’s horse, Honey, thought it very childish and walked off to talk to her friends Oscar and Lucinda in the paddock next door.

Holly Pandora lived under the trees at the edge of the paddock. She had a little house of her own with straw on the floor and a fenced off area in which to run around.

Before and after school each day Rory and Mila brought her some vegetable scraps from the kitchen to eat. And some pignuts. Holly Pandora sat up on her back feet to be fed.

“Oh, that’s so cute,” Rory and Mila would say, tickling Holly Pandora under the chin.

Holly Pandora loved Rory.

Holly Pandora loved Mila.

And Holly Pandora loved pignuts.

At weekends Holly Pandora, Rory and Mila played on the back lawn or under the trees. Kurt would play too. Then they would have a picnic lunch on the grass. Once Mila fed Holly Pandora one of Kurt’s dog biscuits. Kurt was not amused. But Holly Pandora preferred pignuts.

Holly Pandora often played with Kurt by herself. Kurt would look out for her and see that she did not get into mischief. Especially that she did not go onto Mrs Russell’s vegetable garden where there were yellow and blue flowers and fresh green vegetable plants that looked good to eat.

Sometimes Rory and Mila put one of Kurt’s collars on Holly Pandora. They attached Kurt’s lead to the collar and took Holly Pandora for a walk.

They walked along by the colourful flower beds.

They walked round the rose garden.

They walked on the crunchy shell paths of Mrs Russell’s vegetable garden, surrounded by marigolds, sunflowers, lavender, potatoes, carrots, sweetcorn, beans, radishes, chives, parsley, tomatoes, and red, green, orange and yellow peppers.

They walked past the shed where the pignuts were stored.

They walked through the iron gate into the courtyard at the side of the house and Holly Pandora had a drink from the fountain there.

Once they even went through the back door into the kitchen, but Holly Pandora’s trotters slipped on the tiled floor and Mrs Russell shooed them out.

Holly Pandora, Rory and Mila had a secret place of their own where they would hide away and play. It was amongst the giant sunflowers.

The sunflowers were taller than Holly Pandora.

They were taller than Rory.

They were taller than Mila.

They were even taller than Mr Russell.

No one else knew of their secret place. Not even Kurt.

On Friday before Anniversary Weekend Rory and Mila came to tell Holly Pandora that they were going away for a few days. To a bach by the seaside.

Mr and Mrs Russell were going.

And Kurt was going.

Rory and Mila wanted Holly Pandora to go too but Mr Russell said that was not a good idea. Holly Pandora had to stay behind.

Holly Pandora was very sad as she watched them loading up the car.

Rory and Mila came to say goodbye. They tickled Holly Pandora under the chin. They scratched Holly Pandora behind the ears. They kissed Holly Pandora on the nose.

But Holly Pandora was still sad.

“It won’t be long, Holly Pandora,” said Rory.

"It won't be long, Holly Pandora," said Mila.

The next morning a strange boy came by to change Holly Pandora’s water and fill her bowl with pignuts. He came again in the evening. He came again the morning after that. But he did not talk to Holly Pandora. He took no notice when she sat up to be fed. He didn’t tickle her under the chin. He didn’t scratch her behind the ears. He didn’t kiss her on the nose. He treated her as if she was just a pig and not special at all.

Holly Pandora was bored and lonely. This was worse than school days when Kurt was there to jostle and play with. Honey ignored her completely. And Snowy stayed on the other side of the paddock with his head through the fence eating the neighbour’s grass and shrubs.

Holly Pandora decided to escape. She snuffled round the fence of her enclosure leaning against the wire until she found a loose part. Then she pushed the wire up with her nose and wedged her head underneath. She pushed and she pushed and she pushed.

It had rained in the night and the ground was soft. Soon Holly Pandora had made a gap beneath the fence wire large enough to slide through. She was free.

Holly Pandora ran past the colourful flower beds. She ran past the rose garden. She headed straight to Mrs Russell’s vegetable garden where there were so many things that looked good to eat.

Holly Pandora tried them all. She ate marigolds. She ate corn cobs. She ate beans. She ate red, green, orange and yellow peppers. She ate parsley. She ate tomatoes. She ate chives. She dug up radishes and carrots and potatoes and ate them too. Only the lavender and giant sunflowers were left untouched.

Then, covered in mud, Holly Pandora headed for the shed where the pignuts were kept. She pushed the sliding door across with her nose. The pignuts were in a large chest with a heavy lid. But Holly Pandora loved pignuts. She pushed the lid up and climbed into the box. She was already very full. But there was always room for pignuts. Lots of pignuts.

When she could eat no more Holly Pandora climbed out of the pignut box. She was thirsty and wanted a drink. The gate to the courtyard was open so Holly Pandora went to find the fountain. She walked very slowly. She was so full. She took a drink from the fountain.

It was a hot airless day. Gabby and Minty were lying in the shade fast asleep.

Holly Pandora climbed into the fountain and lay in the nice cold water, spilling it over the edge. Holly Pandora lay in the fountain for a long long time. She was so full she could hardly move.

Holly Pandora knew she was in big big trouble. She knew she should not have eaten the tasty plants in Mrs Russell’s vegetable garden. She knew she should not have dug up the vegetables. She knew she should not have gorged herself on the pignuts in the shed. She knew she should not be lying in the cool water of the fountain. But Holly Pandora was too full and too happy and too sleepy to care.

Later that afternoon Mr and Mrs Russell, Rory, Mila and Kurt returned from their weekend away. Rory and Mila jumped out of the car and rushed over to see Holly Pandora.

“Holly Pandora’s gone!” they screamed.

Mr. Russell went into the courtyard.

“She’s been in my fountain,” shouted Mr Russell. “The water’s all muddy and there’s shell everywhere. What a bad pig."

“And she’s been in my vegetable garden,” yelled Mrs Russell, “and wrecked it. Just wait until I get my hands on that naughty pig!”

“She’s been in the shed too,” Mr Russell called out. “You should see the mess. I’ll make bacon of that pig when I get my hands on her!”

There was pandemonium. Rory and Mila were in tears. Mr and Mrs Russell were fuming. Honey and Snowy came charging across the paddock to see what all the fuss was about. Kurt was rushing around like a mad thing trying to round everyone up. Even Gabby and Minty woke up and took notice of the kerfuffle before slipping away quietly to find a more peaceful place to sleep.

Oh dear, Holly Pandora was in big big trouble. And no one could find her.

Now they were all looking for Holly Pandora.

Then Rory and Mila realised where Holly Pandora would be. Holly Pandora would be in their secret place. And she was.

Holly Pandora had staggered out of the fountain and headed unsteadily home. But she only got as far as the giant sunflowers. Then she lay down and fell fast asleep.

Rory and Mila crouched down next to Holly Pandora and tried to pick her up. But Holly Pandora was full of pignuts and all the other good things she had found to eat. She was too heavy for Rory and Mila to carry. And she was still sound asleep.

Rory and Mila fetched the wheelbarrow. They lifted Holly Pandora, put her in the wheelbarrow and wheeled her home.

Rory and Mila laid Holly Pandora down on the straw in her little house. Rory lay down beside her. Mila lay down beside her too. Mr and Mrs Russell found them there. They were still angry with Holly Pandora. Then they looked at Holly Pandora, Rory and Mila curled up together in the little house.

“Oh, how cute they look,” said Mrs Russell. “I suppose I can replant my vegetable garden.”

“Yes, I guess they are pretty cute,” said Mr Russell. “I suppose I can clean out my fountain. And I had better fix that fence.”

Rory tickled Holly Pandora under the chin. Mila scratched her behind the ears. They both kissed her on the nose.

Holly Pandora opened her eyes.

“You’re so cute,” said Rory.

"You're so cute," said Mila.

Holly Pandora smiled at Rory and she smiled at Mila.

Then Holly Pandora went back to sleep.

She dreamed about her big day out.

And she dreamed about pignuts.

Lots of pignuts.

28. Self Portrait of a Clever Dick

Who am I at this time of the morning? Let me introduce myself.

My name is John.

I was born on the 23^rd of June, one day before St John the Baptist’s Day. That is why I have the Christian name John.

The trouble with Christian names is that you are likely to be named after some poor sap that was martyred. And, in my case, someone whose head was served up at a banquet to reward that  teenage sexpot Salome for prancing around in veils.  Hardly a good omen, surely.

Salome had a major role in John the Baptist’s death. John had denounced Herod for enticing Herodias away from her husband in Rome, Herod’s half brother Philip, and shacking up with her in Galilee. At his birthday banquet Herod was so titillated by the dancing of his niece Salome, Herodias’ nubile fourteen-year-old daughter, that he vowed to give her whatever she wished for. Prompted by her mother, who was pissed off with John for calling her a sinful shameless trollope, Salome asked for John’s head on a platter, a wish that Herod reluctantly granted.

If this was an early example of hell having no fury like a woman scorned, then heavenly retribution, vengeful and swift, was equal to it. Salome did not meet a happy end. Crossing a frozen river, the ice gave way and she found herself with her head wedged above the ice and her body dancing helplessly in the frozen water below. Eventually the ice closed around her neck and severed Salome’s head, which was then delivered to mummy and uncle. Her body was never found.

God must have been inspired to dream up such a tidy slice of divine retribution. Perhaps God is a fiction writer. Perhaps God was hacked off at having John sent up before room service had the heavenly mansion ready. Perhaps God wanted to claim exclusive copyright to the idea of poetic justice. Or perhaps God wanted to cement the notion amongst the faithful that (s)he, the godmother/father in the sky, was in control and would take care of things. To this day we vainly believe, in spite of the evidence to the contrary, that ‘God looks after his own’ and that ‘what goes round comes round’.

The saint’s day of most Christian martyrs is the day of their death. But not John the Baptist. His saint’s day is his birthday, June 24^th. The ‘Decollation of John the Baptist’ (I kid you not, that’s what it’s called) is ‘celebrated’ on August 29^th.

From my naming and birth date you will rightly deduce that: (a) my parents were religious and, (b) I am a Cancerian. These two ‘facts’ have no necessary connection.

This writing lark is fun, isn’t it? There’s me in the middle of the night – it’s 4.42am on January 24th 2012 – and there’s you, God knows where and when – reading this stuff when you just know you have better things to do with your life. And now it’s 4.43am! Anyway ignore the tangents in this piece if you are busy, or allergic to diversions, or irritated that I am enjoying the luxury of speaking to you in this inanimate way with its veneer of intimacy. Just remember the lesson of my last blog (27. "Blogging: Where Truth Lies") that literary voices come with forked-tongues. You only have my word for it that it’s 4.43am here. Oops, 4.46am! How time flies.

I was born in ‘Auld Reekie’. That’s Edinburgh, Scotland. The nickname Auld Reekie, or Old Smokey, dates from the 16^th century when the black smoke from the tenements in the Old Town produced a permanent smokey haze around the city.

I sometimes like to claim that my scoliosis is a characteristically Edinburgh deformity. The twelve story high tenements of Auld Reekie date back to the fifteenth century and the city became notorious for the filth thrown out from the tenement windows into the street below. Old Smelly would be an alternative translation of Auld Reekie, reflecting the reek, or foul, stale, fetid odour of the Old Town. Here’s how the historian G.M. Trevelyan described the Edinburgh streets of the early eighteenth century:

‘Far overhead the windows opened, five, six or ten storeys in the air, and the close stools of Edinburgh discharged the collected filth of the last twenty-four hours into the street. It was good manners for those above to cry “Gardy Loo!” (Gardez l’eau) before throwing. The returning roysterer cried back “Haud yer han”, and ran with humped shoulders, lucky if his vast and expensive full-bottomed wig was not put out of action by a cataract of filth. The ordure thus sent down lay in the broad High Street and in the deep, well-like closes and wynds around it making the night air horrible, until early in the morning it was perfunctorily cleared away by the City Guard. Only on a Sabbath morn it might not be touched, but lay there all day long, filling Scotland’s capital with the savour of a mistaken piety.’

And so I conjectured that my Edinburgh ancestors, roisterers all, over many generations developed, as a result of running crouched through the streets late at night with their coats pulled up over their heads, a hereditary scoliosis that I could proudly display as part of my birth right.

Born then in Edinburgh to a religious family, you may surmise that my parents were Presbyterian. You would be half right.

My mother was Presbyterian.

My father was an Anglican.

You now also know that my mother and father are either dead or gave up their faiths. Or both: - i.e. both are dead, or both gave up their faiths. Or either one of each - gave up faith but still alive. Each. Tricky little things words.

You have, however, discovered, or may think you have discovered, that: (a) I can be a right smarty-pants when I put my mind to it, and (b) I am showing off.

Am I showing off? Yes, of course. That’s what writing is, amongst other things. Display. Disclosure. Showing off.  Introverts tilting at extroversion.

I am also hiding. I could have told you some facts that would have created a different self-portrait. Full of intimacy and personal revelation. But, to my mind, writing is not therapy, however therapeutic it may happen to be.

So there are some facts about me. I know they don’t give you much of a skeleton to hang me on but then five facts don’t go far. Scarcely cover the nail of my little finger really.

Then again, when you think about it, the nail of my little finger is quite a lot. From a drop of my blood you could tell whether or not I was your father and from a hair on my head whether or not I murdered your Aunt Jessie.

If you had an Aunt Jessie, that is.

And she was murdered.

And they found someone’s hair on her corpse.

And it was my hair.

And there wasn’t any rational explanation as to what it was doing there.

Or my lawyer couldn’t think one up.

OK, Christopher, you can stop novel-hopping now. Go back to your own book. This is my story and I’m trying to develop a style of my own, not a pastiche of yours.

I told you I was showing off. This is an in-joke for the literati. The literati like in-jokes, oblique references to obscure texts. It makes them feel superior. Like they are well read or something. Up with the play. If you don’t know what they are on about, just fake it. Look knowing and grunt approvingly. Christopher is the narrator of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), a novel by Mark Haddon. Christopher has Asperger’s, a form of autism. I hate reading books that good. Puts me off trying to write.

Christopher has Asperger’s. He likes to hide away in private places where people can’t bother him. Like on rooftops. This is not in fact one of Christopher’s favourite places but that of an Asperger’s boy whose behaviour I hear about from my wife Sharon, a primary school teacher.

Here is another fact for you. My father did not lose his faith.

Therefore, QED, he is dead.

This is a cue for a story about only receiving 99% for a maths exam at school, and being angry about it. How competitive can you be?

Sorry. Here we go again. Can’t keep away from going off at a tangent. Like providing footnotes. I like the aura of veracity that footnotes convey. Through the close-knit conspiracy of a different font and smaller font size, they give a sense that the secrets of an underworld are being laid bare, the hidden mechanics beneath the text above. They give the reader access to the mysteries of the writer’s craft and the confidentiality clauses of the writer-reader contract.

The point of this tangent? My best subject at school was maths. I like the surface safety and rationality of maths, the world of theorems and proofs. Fantasy in contrast makes me feel vulnerable. In one exam we were required to show all the calculations in the quadratic equations we had used to work out the angles in various geometric figures and conclude our answer with QED, quod erat demonstrandum. In one of my answers I neglected to write QED at the end and was deducted a mark. No wonder I am so anal-retentive.

Now I am admiring my 1960s young manself in our full-length wardrobe mirror. All dressed up for a night in the West End. I look pretty cool in my Buddy Holly glasses, my cutaway collared pink Pierre Cardin shirt, my knitted royal blue tie, painstakingly Windsor-knotted, my light grey shorty jacket, matching trousers and black wet-look ankle boots. Behind me my Mary Quant young wife in her plum skinny-rib sweater, suede mini-skirt and matching thigh-length boots looks on approvingly.

I walk into the room and see myself looking in the mirror.

“My God,” I say, looking at this preening apparition of younger myself, “Whose idea was that?”

“What’s bugging you, old man?” he replies. “Forgotten what it’s like to be with-it? Trendy? One of the Mods? I mean, look at you man. You’re ancient! A grandad! Where’s the glamour in that?”

“Mock not, lad. Mock not. You’ll arrive here yourself one day if you don’t cut yourself to death in the meantime by being so sharp.”

“Yea, but come on grandad, why so square? You could at least make an effort. Buy something new for Chrissake. You look like a fifties’ hangover. Get a new jacket, a new shirt, some new trousers, new shoes. Just something new… Please… You’re embarrassing me.”

“I like these clothes. They’re comfortable.”

“Comfortable! Comfortable! When did you start wanting comfortable? What happened to the Londoner in you, grandad man, the city kid? Why did you have to become so goddam suburban? Should have stayed in London, that’s what you should have done. Myself, I blame New Zealand. You’ve gone soft and soppy down there. Views of the stars at night and all that pastoral crap. Cats’ comforts grandad. Move back here. Get a life again!

Resumé.
London Scottish Kiwi. Likes privacy and own spaces. Happy exploring and reminiscing about the past in a self-conscious and sentimental way. Lived in Auckland, New Zealand from 1972 to 2011. Now living in Orewa

.

Oh yes, and John had an Aunt Jessie. A Great Aunt Jessie Munro. A formidable lady in her widows weeds. She’s very dead now. No, he didn’t murder her. [Only the memory of her.]

27. Blogging: Where the Truth Lies

Two of my last three blogs ("Jesus v Lenin..." and "Rachel's Massage") contained reconstructions of conversations part real, part imagined, so I wanted to write something about the blurred line between fiction and non-fiction, and about public and private self-invention and self-disclosure. These are matters at the core of everything we encounter and contribute online.

To set me going I have taken the luxury of a random dip into The Book of Disquietude by Ferdinand Pessoa (see blog 3, "Inspiration and Sources"). Here are some excerpts from the writing of this pre-blogging blogger with the multiple dramatis personae in his 'theatre of himself (entry 405 in my edited text):

Do we really feel what we think we're feeling? Does this conversation, for example, have any semblance of reality? None that I can see. It would be prohibited in a novel. And with good reason...  I mean, I'm not absolutely certain that I'm talking with you.

Every good conversation should be a monologue by two... We ultimately should not be able to ascertain whether we've really conversed with someone or if we've completely imagined the conversation... The best and most intimate conversations... are those that novelists have between two characters in their novels.

I slam doors within me where certain sensations were going to pass in order to be realized.

I suppose neophyte writers are like NZ Idol aspirants, each convinced a star is awaiting discovery. We scribble in the privacy of our studies, sing our songs in the bath or shower, and dream of our fifteen seconds of fame and fortune. Our family and friends, wisely hiding their true feelings, may grunt encouraging noises about the little we reveal to them of our efforts, but by and large we prefer not to put our fantasies to the test. Our stories, along with much of our lives, lie unheralded in bottom drawers. We are fearful of the consequences of daylight for our sense of who we are.

When, about ten years ago now, I finally made a concerted effort to write creatively, I found myself outside my comfort zone, personally and professionally. Personally, in that I have never been one given to public displays of emotion. Professionally, in that my published work has been exclusively non-fiction, the psychology of which I find different to creative writing. In the academic kind of non-fiction writing that I have been involved with in my professional life, there are certain rules and formalities that provide a divide between the ‘self’ and the ‘self-in-print’. In creative writing, it seems to me, there are no such protections and there is a stronger identification between the ‘self’ and the ‘self-in-print’.

The most difficult transition has been to come to terms with the freedom of creative writing. It takes me time to realise that I can simply make things up. Anything at all, without constraint. Pure invention. That I live in an exploding universe of multiple realities, some grounded in time and place, others hyper or virtual. Like Reality Nirvana Tuttle in Lee Tulloch’s Fanciful Nobodies, I can try out a new costume every day:

I can be vamp, tramp, flapper, sleaze, mod, postmod, Pop Art, disco, retro, rococo, go-go, gypsy, new wave, new romantic, New Look, Carnaby Street, Cossack, Bonnie and Clyde, directoire, debutante, existentialist, belle époque, buffalo girl, baby doll, Barbarella, punk, postpunk, Pre-Raphaelite, even preppy if I want to, which is almost never.

I can be any one of these things, and I never know which one I’m going to be when I wake up in the morning. It’s exciting.

I don’t need to read a pool of research studies, carefully referenced, to justify my conclusions or an extensive bibliography to demonstrate my erudition. My first tentative storyline, ‘Space Truckies’, was never developed further, but it gave me an inkling of the imaginative freedom of science fiction writing. Cameron Gunn, my first tentative character, was a cardboard cut-out figure modelled on a contestant in the Survivor Island TV series, but he was not me nor was he anyone I knew. He was a fictitious person sketched in contrast to myself. (Are all my ‘characters’ alter egos, all my protean authorial personae masks to reveal myself?)

These two firsts were watersheds for me in the creative writing programme I was attending. They endorsed the workshop’s permission to fictionalise. Anything. From fact, from fancy. I realised I can fictionalise myself and my life in multiple guises, that a truthful fiction writer is a chimera.

There is a new self-consciousness in this realisation, a self-consciousness that underscores my sense of the continuity, for the fiction author, of the ‘self’ and the ‘self-in-print’. Perhaps there is nothing I can write, no matter how fanciful, that does not ease open a window on myself, a window that as a non-fiction author I can keep tightly shut. Even in my oppositional creations, of characters or story lines, or of my father in a poem I wrote about him (‘The Tennis Racquet’), I am partially disclosed, undressed, laid bare. I found myself, like Dave Eggers in his wonderful twenty pages of acknowledgements to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), reluctant to tell people what I was writing about… “The author said Oh, well, that he was kind of working on a book, kind of mumble mumble… it’s kind of hard to explain, I guess it’s kind of a memoir-y thing.’ I enjoy Eggers’ advice ‘PRETEND IT’S FICTION’, and laugh appreciatively at two of the themes of his book - ‘The Painfully, Endlessly Self-Conscious Book Aspect’ and ‘The Memoir as Act of Self-Destruction Aspect.’ And I invent my own ambiguous account of my work. “It’s sort of ninety per cent true,” I say, “and one hundred per cent fiction.”

William Boyd’s Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart (2002) is a convincing display of fiction masquerading as autobiography. Logan Mountstuart is a fictional character caught up in real historic events. That’s the joy of story telling. Everything is as it seems or nothing is as it seems. The self portraiture and disclosures of pieces in my blogs could be my fictional creation of a character modelled on my father, my uncle, a friend, anyman, everyman, or plucked from a randomly accessed internet biography. Those who know me may have some inkling of where the truth lies. Those who don’t will have to grapple with the alternative view that ‘truth lies’, that the voice that seems most authentically truthful may merely (though, as a would-be writer, there is really no ‘merely’ about it) be the voice that is most giftedly crafted. Language is seductive and creative writing is one endless tease, a kind of hide-and-seek of the mind.

There is another aspect too to creating confusion about the truthfulness of one's blogs - concern with the feelings and sensibilities of family and friends. Things may be said behind the masks of fictional personae that are not easily said directly to people one loves and cares about. For me this becomes particularly problematic in my attitudes to religion and to homeopathy, both of which live strongly in my family environment. There are things in my writing that I would not have cared for my parents to read (and probably not my children either) and I am cautious about drawing on some of this material for my blog. Against that cautiousness I have to recognise two things: one, that some of my best writing is the stuff that is closest to the emotional bone of my life, and two, that the more self-disclosing and intimate pieces that I have shared are often greatly valued by others who can relate to similar events and feelings in their own lives.

Lionel Shriver, in reviewing reactions to one of her novels (see link), considers that 'anyone considering writing fiction or a memoir that brushes even slightly against real-life family should take heed: think twice.'  Her 2007 novel A Perfectly Good Family caused a huge and unanticipated rift in her family. Her mother and Presbyterian Minister father were 'incandescent' and her younger brother stopped speaking to her for two years. It made her aware of the defencelessness of those who are written about in fiction, however carefully disguised. 'Text', she writes, 'trumps truth'. Nevertheless, she concluded, even knowing the consequences, she would write and publish the book again: 'That may make me a real writer. It doesn't make me a nice person.'

Now me, well I never particularly wanted to be the nice person. But reading Shriver's experience makes me unsure whether I want to be the real writer either.

25. "Rachel's massage."

It’s Rachel’s suggestion that I write. About my feelings. Other things too if I wish. Anything that takes my fancy. She thinks writing will help. Be therapeutic.

I protest half-heartedly. Say I don’t have the energy, or the inclination. And certainly not the talent. That I wouldn’t know where to start.

“Start at the beginning,” she says.

“But it’s so long ago,” I reply.

“Start at the end then.”

“It’s too fresh,” I say.

“Just an idea”, she says. “Don’t fret about it. It’s just an idea.”

I want to say that I can’t write, that I won’t be able to find the words. The words I need. And I want her to persuade me that I can do it, that there’s nothing to be afraid of.

But that isn’t Rachel’s way. I suppose that’s why I keep going back to her. She never seeks to control my life, never bullies me. Scarcely even gently cajoles me.

“You’ll confront your ghosts in your own good time. In your own way,” she says. “There’s nothing I can do for you that you can’t do for yourself. When you’re ready. And if you want to.”

She leaves it at that.

I’m not sure I do want to. To unravel the past. I fear that. Unravelling.

It’s not as if I don’t think about it. God knows I do. Every day. It’s part of my early morning ritual. But to recall what happens is one thing. To decipher meaning quite something else.

How can I construct a true account of that year, let alone describe it for you? Not that there is a true account, or ever can be. There’s only my account. I don’t know what credence you should give it. I no longer know what credence I give it myself. It’s only a story. One of many that could be told. My story.

Well, fragments of it.

I live alone now, which suits me fine. If I wake in the night, which I do most nights, I can turn on the light and read in bed or go down to the kitchen and make a cup of tea. I watch BBC World News on the hour, whatever hour it happens to be. Usually three or four a.m. Sometimes I watch HARDtalk if there’s an interesting guest and that Sebastian fellow doesn’t irritate the shit out of me with his aggressive aren’t-I-the-smart-ass interview style.

After an hour or so reading or watching tele I drift back to sleep and dream. I don’t know if I dream earlier in the night. If I do I generally have no memory of it. But the early morning dreams are vivid and memorable. Sometimes I stir in a sweat of terror, usually from being lost in a strange place or not being able to find something precious to me, something that if I don’t have this instant my life will fall to pieces.

By six I’m awake again. Another cup of tea, a glass of water, the first of the day’s pills. The local news on the radio, weather, traffic reports, all the routine business of the other worldly day starting up in the street outside. The growing crescendo of cars and buses. The kids next door chivvied to get a move on so that mum or dad or a friendly neighbour can drop them off at school and still make it to work on time. On Friday mornings the rubbish collectors.

When the mood takes me I do a little morning exercise. On the upstairs deck if the weather’s fine, in my bedroom if it’s wet. I watch the wind on the lake to gauge where the day’s weather is coming from and how well I’ll be able to breathe today. Westerlies are good, and north westerlies. But if the wind’s in the north or northeast I’m in for trouble. I shut the windows, go down to the lounge and turn on the dehumidifier.

I shower and shave. Since the year that stops my life I’ve gone back to shaving the old fashioned way. With brush, shaving stick and razor blades, just as my dad showed me all those years ago. I still have an electric shaver, a broken down old Remington with holes in the tinfoil. But I’m in no hurry. Not anymore. My time’s my own; my whole day is my own. A shower, a shave. These are to be savoured.

Sometimes I shave only one side of my face. Leave the other covered in lather. I look in the mirror. Pretend I’m a clown with a red nose. Behind me the feast of old fools is in full swing, savouring the banquet of madness. My madness. I pull faces. The lathered side dries and cracks. It looks like crazy paving. I peer closely at the cracks and try to trace a pattern in them. Occasionally, with a lot of imagination, I do. Mostly I find only randomness.

After I shave I put on moisturiser, a recent affectation for me and an antidote to the dryness of my aging skin. I squirt some on to the tips of the index and middle fingers of my right hand, remove my spectacles and gently massage the scar on my right temple just below my receding hairline. I always start with that scar. It’s almost invisible now, skin heals so fast. Indeed you wouldn’t notice it unless I showed it to you. Even I have to look hard in the mirror. Yet I can immediately locate it by touch. I touch it every morning and remember. Inner scars open wide.

I cling to rituals to give structure to my life. Daily rituals, weekly rituals, monthly rituals. Rachel becomes part of my weekly ritual. I find her among the classified ads, listed under Professional Health Services alongside offerings for psychic Tarot readings, Tantric balancing, Chinese massage and cut rate haemorrhoid surgery. Rachel’s ad is one of two emphasising straight therapeutic massage. Neither mentions ‘stress relief’. I phone Denise initially, but Denise - “How can I help you, sweetheart?” - is bypassing the trade descriptions law. Later I joke with Rachel about the bad company she keeps in print. She explains that she’s recently returned from Germany and, until she can survive on word of mouth recommendations, the local classifieds are her main source of work.

My first appointment is on a hot evening in late January, just ten days after I move into the area. Rachel practices from her rented home, a shabby weatherboard bungalow in a street off Lake Road.

I park in the shade of a tree outside and enter the property through a rickety gate hidden in the unkempt hedge that surrounds the house. A concrete path leads across the long grass to the front door porch, grass littered with the detritus of previous tenants – an upturned rusting doll’s pram, a punctured football, a tractor tyre, a chewed plastic dog-bone. There is a flurry of well-tended pot plants on the freshly painted porch.

I’m apprehensive as I ring the bell. Rachel comes to greet me.

“You must be James,” she says.

We shake hands. She has a firm handshake. An open direct manner. I like her. Attractive too. About Charlotte’s age.

“I hope I’m not too early,” I say.

“No, no, it’s fine. Come on in.”

Rachel leads me through to the front room. The curtains are almost completely closed. It’s pleasantly cool. She motions me to an armchair by the window and sits next to me at her desk. We go through some of my biographical details, which she fills in on a form. She asks about my medical history and any medications I am currently on. I explain that my poor health is tied up with the events and stress of last year, which I outline briefly. She makes notes as I talk. It takes some time.

“You’ve had a tough spell,” she says kindly, touching my forearm.

I start to joke about it but find myself crying silently. I tell her I cry a lot. That sympathy makes it worse. A lot of crying, not much sleeping. I let her know I’m going into hospital again next week.

Rachel tells me she’s a counsellor as well as masseuse. But not both with the same client. Suggests counselling sessions might be the better option. I say that, after last year, I have little faith in counselling and would like a massage. That I need to relax. Not think, not talk. That it would help if I could stop going over and over things in my head. Just for an hour or so a week.

“Have you had massages before?” she asks.

“Yes, one,” I reply. “Last December, about a month after Anna and I broke up. A deep tissue massage. Someone called Kirsty. Maybe you know her? Aussie girl. Strong hands. Very fit. She brought everything round, massage table, everything. It hurt like hell. Like an assault. Like it was a workout for her and I was a piece of gym equipment. I wouldn’t want a massage like that again in a hurry.”

Rachel describes in detail her massage method and its pedigree.

“Sounds good to me," I say.

“I think we should start today,” she says.

“I’d like that,” I say.

She asks me to undress to my shorts and lie face down on the massage table in the centre of the room while she goes to fetch some warm towels.

I take off my shoes and socks. I put the socks inside the shoes and place them beneath Rachel’s desk. I fold my trousers carefully, put them over the back of the armchair together with my shirt, take off my glasses, put them on top of the clothes and climb on to the massage table. I shift my head until it is supported comfortably by the padding around the hole at the top of the table. I look down at the Turkish carpet below, a blur of greens, blues and burgundy. I squint to try and see the intricate pattern that I know is there. I’m irritated that I can’t make it out. I stretch my arms out by my sides, close my eyes and tell myself to relax.

Rachel returns and lays warm towels across me. She puts a CD on. The music plays softly. It sounds Celtic.

Rachel presses the towels against my skin and then removes them. I can see the back of her legs as she selects some oils from the cabinet on the wall at the top of the bed. Her feet are bare beneath her jeans.

I close my eyes in anticipation of her touch. My body tenses.

I feel the palms of Rachel’s hands move in long slow gentle strokes across my shoulders, down my back, thighs and calves to the soles of my feet. She periodically replenishes the oil as she goes.

“Is that lavender?” I mumble to the floor below.

“Sorry, what’s that?” she says.

I raise my head.

“Is that lavender?”

“It’s rosemary,” she says.

“Rosemary? That’s for remembrance.”

“Good for the respiratory system. And stiffness in the joints, arthritis.”

Rachel returns to my neck and shoulders and starts massaging with more pressure. Gradually, as one set of muscles relaxes, she works her way systematically down my body, discreetly lowering my shorts to massage my buttocks, then drawing them up again to work on my upper thighs and down to my toes. Then my arms, hands and fingers.

I feel relaxation spread from limb to limb. As Rachel works, I stop fighting my body and escape into it, giving myself over to the power of her hands. I recognise my craving for touch. A woman’s touch. Deliciously sensuous and, to my surprise, only momentarily erotic.

Rachel starts once again to run her hands in long slow soft strokes from my head to my toes.

I drift off. I’m in the doctor’s surgery. There’s an onion on the windowsill. An everyday garden brown onion. I’m surprised to see an onion in such a setting.

The onion sits in the sunlight. I don’t think it’s impressed. I keep looking at it but it doesn’t meet my gaze. It’s looking towards the window and the open air. It says nothing eloquently, evocative if voiceless. I don’t think it’s a happy onion and, as onions go, it’s a bit dishevelled. Has started balding from the top where pieces of its brown membrane have flaked away to reveal a paler shade, more cream than tan, on the flimsy layer below.

“I don’t know why you keep looking at me,” the onion says loftily over its shoulder. “What do you expect to find? Food for thought?”

I groan. O God, a smarty-pants anthropomorphised punning onion.

“Don’t be cute with me,” I reply. “I’ll peel you apart, slowly, layer by layer, right down to your core. I’ll lay bare your naked soul. Then I’ll chop you into dicey pieces and fry you with liver and bacon for my tea.”

“You’ll be sorry if you do,” the onion says sniffily. “I have ways to make you cry.”

The onion is such a cliché. I don’t want to go down the route of layers, of unravellings, the revelation of soft skins beneath hard shells and veneers of niceness covering inner passion, of emotions to be stripped bare and tears to flow, of ideas of an inner core of something, a soul, an essence, a god figure at the root, in the underground of being, as though when everything is torn away we are all the same sad undressed salads, poor forked radishes all. No, I want some other emotion than that. But onion images from down the ages are hard to shuck off, dead and dying images by and large that require the destruction of the onion to find its inner meaning.

My brother and I are scavenging for lost golf balls among the hazards of the local course. The reeds on the edge of the lake by the thirteenth green are our favourite spot. If the balls are in good condition we can sell them for fifty cents each. Sometimes a ball has been in the water for months or more and the outer casing has cracked. We prise it off. Inside is a mass of wafer-thin strips of rubber wound tightly round and round the core of the ball. We take turns to see who can peel off the longest length of rubber without it snapping. Initially, where the rubber is wet, we can only detach small pieces, but the dryer rubber towards the core of the ball doesn’t break so easily. If the ball is relatively new, and we are careful peeling the rubber away, we might disentangle a flimsy strand of a metre or more. In an old ball, long exposed to the hazards of golf, the rubber is so rotten throughout that we are lucky to pull off a centimetre before it snaps; all we are left with is a pile of fragments. At the core of the ball is a soft rubber bag, spongy and bouncy. We find a wall to hurl it against until it bursts open in a splatter of milky grey fluid.

I stir from my reverie. Rachel is placing more warm towels over me. My time is up.

“Just rest,” she says, “and get dressed when you’re ready.”

She fetches a glass of water for me and places it on her desk, then leaves the room.

I lie there thinking about nothing. Peaceful.

After a few minutes I reluctantly stir, sit up and swing my legs down toward the floor. I sit on the massage table for a time shrouded in the towels.  Finally I jump off, retrieve my spectacles and get dressed.

While I’m waiting for Rachel’s return I sip the glass of water and wander round inspecting the paraphernalia of her professional practice. On the wall, posters of the male and female musculatures; promotional material for essential and fragrance oils; charts showing the properties and therapeutic uses of different oils with warnings of allergic reactions for particular skin types; a diagram of massage strokes with strange French-sounding names – effleurage, petrissage, tapotement, framed certificates for training courses completed at the Swedish Institute in New York; her Diploma in Holistic Massage from the International Therapy Examination Council; a poster for a conference in Hawaii on Hakomi and other forms of body centred psychotherapy. It’s as if she lives in a parallel universe to mine. In a world I thought I was too tough to need.

I scan some titles from the shelves of books – Bioenergetics; The Body in Psychotherapy; Your Body’s Wisdom; Listen to Your Pain; What’s Really Wrong With You? Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends; Narrative Therapy: the Social Construction of Preferred Realities; Healing Trauma; Compassionate Touch. I pull out Job’s Body: a handbook for bodywork and leaf through the chapter titles and subtitles. Some of them are, on the surface, inaccessible to me. Others, ‘Skin as a sense organ’, ‘Touch as food’, more transparent. Poor old Job, I think. If only he had been able to have a good massage.

When Rachel returns we make an appointment for a fortnight’s time. As I’m leaving, she wishes me well for my surgery.

I drive home with a sense of euphoria. I feel less pessimistic about the week ahead and look forward to my next massage. I remember it is Anna’s birthday that day. I start to wonder about Job. How did he survive the divine dismantling of his life? What sort of comfort was his wife when things turned bad?

When I arrive home I take the bible down from the bookcase in my study, thinking to read the Book of Job. But I’m diverted. My bible’s a gift to mark my confirmation, inscribed To James With Love from Mummy and Daddy. Ephesians 6.17. I look up Ephesians 6.17 expecting to find something of significance there. ‘And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.’ It means nothing to me. I suppose there is significance in that. I recall that one of the wonders of the ancient world was the marble Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. I remember Anna and I passing near the site of the temple on our bus trip up the Western coast of Turkey. It’s a swamp now. Artemis, the virgin huntress, twin sister of Apollo. And there on my bookshelf a photograph of me. A younger bronzed me sitting on the beach at Apollon in Greece, taken by Anna in one of her rare ventures behind the lens.

Everywhere I turn I return to her.