1
I was lying naked on the massage table, staring down through the hole where you put your nose. It’s called a face cradle. There was a lotus flower beneath me, artificial, but a nice touch. The towels were clean, although they had the roughened thin quality that suggested years of use. The person massaging me had moved silently into the darkened room, with a soft swish of a pretty dress I saw as I glanced sideways. The task was begun with quiet efficiency, using strong spiny fingers. I was asked whether the pressure was too hard, too soft, or just right? The voice was surprisingly deep.
There was a time when I would not have imagined myself in this twilight world of body and stranger, nor the vulnerability that demands acceptance and a degree of fortitude. What of the earthquakes that threaten us here in this shaky city where I live? How long might I have to stand wrapped in a towel on the street outside in the company of this unknown person? That’s extreme, I suppose, but it’s the level of exposure that begins as you strip off your clothes and slide under the towel on the high spindly-legged bed, not knowing how things will turn out.
You never know, you just don’t.
On this particular day, it was mid-morning and I had elected not to eat breakfast beforehand. There is the problem of wind when you are being borne down upon. Flatulence, burping, call it what you like – I was being considerate. But I am a breakfast eater by habit; it goes back to the farming days of my youth, when beginning the day without food was considered to be courting disaster in the hours that lay ahead. That morning, minus the regular blueberries and muesli and yoghurt, my stomach took on a life of its own, gurgling and cackling away with an increasing clamour. My therapist began to laugh. Note that word therapist. I understand it is discourteous to refer to a person who performs health massage as a masseur or a masseuse; there is a subtle difference in the duties they perform. Or so I am told. People like me, looking for health benefits, go to massage therapists.
At any rate, my therapist’s laughter turned into a different sound, and it is one I knew very well.
‘A duck,’ I said, ‘that’s a duck.’
‘Many ducks: clack clack clack …’
We had flocks of ducks on the farm. My parents raised them for Christmas fare. My father’s job was to chop off their heads, my mother’s to gut the creatures, and mine to pluck their feathers, before their carcasses were handed over to the buyer at the farm gate.
My therapist let out a low yodelling sound.
‘How do you know ducks?’ I asked.
‘My mother, in Thailand. She had many ducks. In the morning she called.’
And so the chuckling and quacking and calling continued and gradually my stomach subsided.
I’ve been back to this person. And, more than once, I have been transported to the steamy depths of a Bangkok hotel.
Bangkok, 1990. We had been through a bad patch, the way people do. We had had an extension built onto our house that took months longer than it should have, meaning no kitchen and a dog that had become irascible in the face of strangers. Earlier in the year, I had turned fifty and done nothing special to celebrate the event. Then I had an unexpected windfall. There were all sorts of ways we should have spent that money but I said to Ian, ‘Let’s have an adventure. Let’s go to Asia.’
Of course, people go to Thailand all the time these days; at least, when there is not a virus sweeping the world. But to us, thirty years ago, Bangkok was a destination, a place of mysterious possibility. We landed at midnight. As we were driven through the empty streets, our surroundings seemed as foreign as a moonscape. I remember drawing close to Ian as the smell of durian fruit filtered through the car’s air conditioning, thinking that it was the stench of open sewers. I had yet to learn that it was the fruit of the dying, so enjoyed in life that it was often pleaded for before death.
We were delivered to a riverside hotel called the Menam, on the banks of the Chao Phraya. The entranceway was tiled with marble, the corridors dimly lit, carpeted in green. I remember that there were large boxes of sand for smokers to stub out their cigarettes, and that the smooth surface was stamped with patterns of flowers. In the morning, we opened the curtains of our room, and below us lay the river and its bustling ceaseless traffic – ships, dredges, ferries with high piping whistles that signalled when they were pulling in to pick up passengers, traditional long-tailed boats. The Chao Phraya flows for nearly 400 kilometres through low-lying silty plains until it reaches the city and spreads into waterways and canals; these canals have been modified and reconstructed over hundreds of years. The name of the hotel, Menam or Mae Nam, is the Thai word for river. On old European maps, the city of Bangkok is shown as Menam. The Chao Phraya is also known as the river of kings. Upstream from Menam sits the vast glittering Grand Palace, for centuries home to the kings of Siam, or Thailand as it became.
I don’t believe a tourist can ever become part of Bangkok; the city has its own mysterious interior life. A brilliant façade of colour and movement invites the traveller to believe their experience is unique, but it shouldn’t be taken at face value. You can, though, allow yourself to be changed by it, as we were. On the river it’s possible to set yourself apart, out of the traffic snarls of the inner city and away from the tuk tuks waiting to whisk you away to distant warehouses. We became instant fans of the longboats and the River Express ferries that carried us from one riverside station to another. In the process, we fell in love with the river itself, the water swarming with hundreds of varieties of fish, dragonflies hovering above its slow eddying tide. There were houseboats that looked poor to our Western eyes, yet they glowed with garlands of orchids and bright rugs put out to air. Orchids, there were orchids everywhere.
A raised terrace ran in front of the hotel, intended as a viewing platform for the river and the spires of the magic city beyond. Often, we would be the only people there late at night, when lightning tore across the sky. It seemed close and thrilling.
We had begun an affair with that hotel and that river which lasted for decades, when age and indisposition put a stop to our ramblings in Asia. It became our base, our place, each visit like a homecoming.
Ian had been closely involved with the lives of young people who came to New Zealand to study and later in his career he became an international student director. We had friends in the city, so at night we would set off from the pier by the hotel and land at the River City Pier, en route to Sukhumvit, the main street of Bangkok, to meet people, visit the night markets, and eat sometimes from the street, other times in restaurants. One of the students had tried to disembowel himself when exams came round and Ian saved him; his family would take us to places we might never have found for ourselves, their hospitality endless in thanks for their son being returned to them. Or, in the old Oriental Hotel on the riverbank, we would take tea in the Authors’ Lounge, once visited by people like John Steinbeck and Joseph Conrad. Its walls were screened with bamboo, its white rattan chairs scattered with green linen cushions decorated with cream elephants; the terrace overlooking the river was flanked by orchids. We bought a print at the hotel gallery that we both loved at first sight; it faded in the bright sunlight of our house after it had been on the wall for a few years. Ian wanted to hang onto it until it was nothing more than a smudge. I insisted that it should go. Perhaps he was right; perhaps there are some things you should never let go. But then, as I’ve learned, there are some things you can’t hold on to, however hard you try. Sometimes the dark side of the city would confront us: a hotel lobby would not be that at all, but padded red walls covered with photos of girls seeking work.
And it was in Bangkok, in a small basement room of the Menam Hotel, that I had my first experience of being massaged. I saw it offered on the hotel information sheet and because our whole lives seemed suddenly different and daring, I knew I needed to try it.
I descended a flight of marble stairs and made my way through a labyrinth of passages, into the bowels of the hotel. I came to a reception desk, with an older woman behind it, who sized me up as she greeted me with a wai, that placing together of the hands, the slight bow, the smile that could hide anything and everything. I practised my greeting and was waved on. I entered then a damp room musky with something I would come to think of as the smell of wet soil. I was aware that I was beneath the river, and thought that this must be the smell of water pressing against the walls. Only a wide-eyed girl, who looked as if she might be about twelve, and spoke no English, was in the room. We greeted each other, her bow deeper than that of the receptionist, her smile more tentative.
… a skinny
girl who should perhaps
have been in school, huge
eyes and fragile limbs
and fingers of steel …
I hadn’t understood the finer points of the language of massage when I wrote that poem. The girl is no less for how I have described her.
I pointed to one garment after another. Should I take it off? Yes, yes, she nodded, until I came to my knickers. She nodded, her face becoming still and grave. She had guessed it was something I hadn’t done before.
She gestured, her fingers like threads in that damp river-smelling room, turned away hastily and disappeared. I thought about leaving. Instead I climbed onto the bed and waited for what happened next.
I will never forget that young woman, the delicate pressure of her hands, her knees on the back of mine, the swish of her hair as she leaned over me, her musky fragrance. To enter into this personal contract, this sensual pleasure, yet at the same time to respect the distance of the other, is something you must learn. It doesn’t matter the sex of the other person, they are not your lover, they are your therapist. Remember. But I was so overcome with languor and delight that evening in Bangkok, that it was like an addiction. I went back to the girl in the basement every night that I was there. On the last occasion, I offered extra money, just thinking it would make her life easier. She shook her head. I saw that this might offend. I asked at the desk. Could I leave more money? I asked, offering a handful of American dollars. They were quickly taken, more wai exchanged between me and the receptionist. Would the girl have got any of the dollars? I have no idea.
Friends unfamiliar with massage ask me what actually happens. What do you do? What is the procedure?
It’s simple really. There is the bed with a towel or blanket lying folded on one end. Your therapist will discreetly disappear while you undress and, once you are lying face down on the cradle, you draw the folded towel up over your body.
Do you take all your clothes off, or do you leave your knickers on? It depends; it pays to ask. In Thailand, you are expected to be completely naked but here you may be asked to keep them on.
In a few moments the therapist will reappear and the towel will be lifted back and the massage begins, usually with a few smart taps on the back, oils and lotions applied. And while all this stroking and kneading is taking place you will lie very still, until the time comes to roll over. While that is happening, towels will be held up to shield your nakedness, and dropped back over you, so that you maintain the illusion that your private parts are guarded.
There are a number of massage techniques. Most therapists will specialise in one kind or another. Expect to be kneaded, tapped and sometimes pummelled, depending on the kind of massage you choose. My body knots up as I sit over my computer day after day. Deep tissue massage relieves the pain in my muscles. Swedish massage will relieve stress and anxiety. Expect Thai massage to be firm. I once asked for traditional massage in northern Thailand, in a place near Chiang Rai, not knowing that traditional in those parts meant exactly that, and different from what passes for Thai, as administered to Westerners. It involved being thrown in the air, suspended by the therapist’s hands and upstretched feet. She was angry when I collapsed on her. I fled.
For the most part, you will be at peace with yourself as the body’s sweet ache is relieved. When it’s over and you wish that it had never ended, your therapist will say quietly, ‘All done now, take your time getting dressed’, and withdraw from the room. Then you just have to put your clothes back on. And pay on your way out. And be in harmony with yourself for the rest of the day. It’s that easy.
Only there was nobody to tell me this, that first night in Bangkok. I experienced a kind of rapture, a removal of the self from the body, a kind of surrender.
I came home to Wellington, my body longing for that calming touch that had so beguiled me in Thailand. I needed to learn more about massage, its values and what to expect. I have suffered high blood pressure for more than half my life; massage offered relief from the physical effects of stress. And my life was stressful. I had become a full-time carer for my mother, who had come to live with us in our newly extended house. It was what I wanted to do; I had chosen this course as increasing frailty and the pain of rheumatoid arthritis overtook her. She and I got along so well – and we did for the remaining years of her life, seven of them spent with us. But it was often back-breaking work, and constant. The journeying that had begun as Ian and I discovered Asia was possible only when we could find suitable live-in carers, or my mother had respite care in a rest home. Before long Ian was travelling alone as he took up voluntary work with landmine victims in the region. I accompanied him when I could. But often it was just the two of us, my mother and me, and her need for care was constant.
I found a woman who was beautiful, with pale skin and long dark hair. She worked near a pool; the air was thick with the smell of chlorine. She had a foreign name although she had been born in New Zealand. Her touch was deep and sure. We talked little, which I prefer. I shy away from therapists who want to tell me their own problems: their chatter distracts from the flow of meditation that goes on during the procedure.
I felt that we had a connection that I couldn’t have described. Some kind of electricity was transmitted as she worked. And then, one afternoon, this feeling became transcendent. I was moved in my mind to some other place, somewhere exultant and free. Did anything physical take place between us that was different from the run of a massage? No, and I doubt that I would be telling this if it were so. And yet, I knew that there was some indefinable magnetism between us, and when it was over I was crying. So was she.
Thank you, I said, and then she thanked me and we never spoke of it again; nor did the experience repeat itself.
I continued to see her for some months after that. Before she left, she did tell me she had been a prostitute earlier in her life. She told me in a matter-of-fact way as I lay on the table and it neither surprised nor shocked me. She was happier working as she did now, she said. She liked sex but her boyfriend had got tired of her sleeping with other men commercially and, when she stopped, she discovered that she was tired of it too.
What I took from her was not just the memory of that day but also a sense of her generosity. Like all of the best therapists I have been to, this giving of the self is something that shines through over and again.
After she had gone, another woman took over and I stayed with her for several years until she gave up to start a family. She was a down-to-earth, highly trained woman who helped me to stay grounded throughout the time my mother lived with us. The massages were never highly charged, but she was a steady, calm influence in my life. I remember her telling me once about how the widowed would come to her, and how, at her touch, their emotions would be released, remembering the sensation of the lost other body. That was something I would come to understand.
Later, I stayed faithful to another woman for a good many years. She was from China and practised Qigong, a form of ancient Chinese healing. Meditation and controlled breathing are involved in Qigong practice, which is sometimes described as mastering one’s energy. On my first visit, she put on a tape of repetitive Chinese music and, as the years passed, she continued to play it, until I knew every thrumming beat, and where there were pauses as if the tape had been spliced. Above the massage bed there was a railing on the low ceiling. She held onto this as she walked up my legs and then along my spine; she was tiny then. It took an act of faith on my part to stay still and allow this to happen.
In the beginning, we had little to say to each other. But I discovered, in brief conversations before and after the sessions, that she returned to her ‘master’ in China once a year and that the meditation would involve living in a cave underground. She helped me to write one of my novels that featured a Chinese character and I learned about Chinese food and culture from her. We drifted apart. Perhaps in the end there was nothing more to say, or we had tired of each other in some way. When, after some time, I looked for her again, her rooms had been closed and there was no way of finding out where she had gone. Perhaps the spirit of adventure had deserted us; she had got heavier and it was no longer safe for her to walk all over me.
Over the years there would be others. There was a man once, whom I hadn’t expected when I made the booking. He was abrasive and rude, and rough – the only time I have felt afraid. There were many cups of herbal teas along the way, served after the massages. There was a woman whose large dog shared the room as she worked and occasionally it growled. There have been tired young women who hadn’t been trained well or have taken up massage because they could get no other work. You know them soon after they have started: they talk too much, or they slap you up and down without rhythm, they sigh heavily. It’s not always perfect but you have committed your body to this process and once on the table, short of assault, you have to see it through.
For the most part, though, this laying on of hands, as it were, is a powerful tool for being well.
I’m not a person given to talking much about healing, and people’s spirits are their own business. Massage is, in the end, a personal meditation on your own body, a way of offering it ease, a way of honouring the self.
2
One of my grandsons, a medical practitioner, told me that the best answer to wakeful nights was to sleep naked. There is much to be said for it. The body, unfettered by the binding of clothes, lies between the sheets as if they were a skin. It’s the fifth sensation, that of touch, which in the absence of another carries its own sensual message.
It was years before I reflected on the body, as such. It’s not all about beauty, something I understand as I get older. I cannot entirely buy into the idea of the body as temple; if so, there are a few crumbling ruins to consider. Angkor Wat and the ruined palaces of the Greeks come to mind. Yet these are the places where we go sightseeing. Just to look at a fold of skin on a beloved person can still fill me with awe and a certain delight.
The first unclothed body I saw was that of my father. This was one of the primal scenes of my early life. I can describe it no other way. It happened when my parents and I were living in the cottage in the Far North. A curtained window linked the kitchen and the bathing area, in the lean-to. This is from my story, ‘All the Way to Summer’, in which the narrator thinks of Oliver Reed in the movie version of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love: ‘I raised the curtain and he was rubbing himself dry in the dark room, lit only by a single bulb and the reflections of the flames from the copper fire … that same pale English flesh, the colour of potato flesh. He was long and spindly, his chest slightly concave, and yet in the flickering light I found him mysterious and oddly beautiful.’
Bodies were more private when I was a child than they are now. I didn’t see my mother’s body until she was an old woman, but then I think she covered up a lot of things that were hard for her to acknowledge. Her hair was as dark as a blackbird’s wing when she was young, her eyes a gleaming brown that my father said were black when he first knew her, her skin never tanned even though she often worked outdoors. She was a tiny woman who worked like a dervish, as hard as any man, and in the end her body became a damaged shell full of pain, the spine a bent ‘c’ shape. I wished that I had seen it when it was young.
I don’t recall whether I was curious about my own body in childhood. I know I was hungry all the time, rather plump, with straight brown hair that suddenly curled in adolescence. I know I told outrageous stories about bodily functions to other, usually older, kids, gleaned from my imperfect reading of adult books. In my fevered imagination, none of it applied to me. I knew my body was different from the one I had seen through the window, that my father’s had an unexpected attachment. But the body was a secret taboo subject, and children had to be covered up. Girls were taught to keep their dresses over their knees, to reveal nothing. A part of me understands that. To love children well, the gaze of adults must remain chaste. This means not just one’s own children, but everyone’s. There are many who cannot be trusted. If the sight of impoverished children in the back streets of Asia pained me, so too did the sight of men, wearing gold chains at the throat of their open-necked floral shirts, eyeing them. It’s a pain that doesn’t leave me.
Yet it was in Asia that I discovered how bodies fascinate children. In the streets of Saigon, children would come up to me, pinch my flesh and run away laughing. They would come back and do this again. How old? they would ask. They would want to press their arms against mine to compare the colours, to trace the lines on my hands.
I was sixteen, turning seventeen, before I became truly aware of my own body and its power. I was necking with an older boy and he ran his hands over me. ‘You have a beautiful body,’ he said. ‘Do you understand that?’
Later that year, I was invited to be a beauty queen. It was suggested that I parade in a bathing suit at the local summer carnival in Rotorua. How it all unravelled forms the basis of a story called ‘At the Lake So Blue’.
I had been hanging out with a summer crowd and we girls were oiling one another’s skins to improve our tans, as we lay in the grass beside a lake. The young men with us were part of a water-skiing group. In a desultory kind of way, they eyed us up, contemplating who would be a good candidate to represent the group as beauty queen of the year. The other two girls had already had a turn, so they looked to me. I had felt like the plainest girl there, but all of a sudden, they were telling me what a great figure I had, and asking me my measurements. And I found myself looking at what I had to offer and knowing it was good.
In the end, I turned them down, in the face of disapproval from family and the woman I worked for. It wouldn’t do to show off my body like this. It cost me the friendship of the group but I don’t recall any regrets. I found myself agreeing with my elders. When I revealed myself, the audience would be of my choosing. But I had learned some things about myself.
The power of the body.
Soon my body would be busy with other things besides being admired.
It hasn’t been a particularly clever body. It was only a moderately good dancer, it wasn’t the body of a gymnast, it learned to stand on its hands once, and only once, it missed balls when they were thrown. But it has served me well enough.
I remember these things sometimes when I’m stretched out on that table, experiencing the body’s burn of skin on skin. The way one looks after it, comforts it as it ages, in moments of bliss gives oneself over to it.
Outside I hear voices of people
walking past in the street,
which is reassuring when the rough
stuff begins, although it turns
out bearable enough. When it is done,
I accept the cup of chrysanthemum
tea, the assurances that my liver
is sound, that I am indeed
a healthy person, if a little tender.
I eye the reservations book.