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
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
“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
Everywhere I turn I return to her.
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