by Helen Garner
How drab the northern outskirts of Melbourne were. There was a whole new road system. I got lost in its flyovers and coloured shards and incomprehensible signage. What had they done to my city? And had it really always been so . . . flat?
My new house, a single-fronted, single-storey terrace rented on a flying visit a month earlier, had bulged and shrunk in my memory. The whole building, like my spirits, seemed sunken, unnaturally low. It had more rooms than I remembered but they were smaller. The backyard was tiny and closed off by a khaki rollerdoor that I had failed in my haste to notice. The kitchen was longer and narrower, the curtains stiffer and shabbier, the picture hooks higher, almost out of reach. One of the bedroom walls was bubbly low down with damp. But how could it be damp today? It was February. There was a drought. The mercury was touching forty.
I raised the bedroom window and looked out into the narrow light-well, where the metal coffins of the hot water service and the ducted heating unit stood in their casual ugliness. My eyes skimmed past them and up into the spindly foliage of a tall young eucalypt in the next yard. I saw the sky. It was a Melbourne sky, the sort whose hugeness you can know only by being a speck on a plain. It went up and up, a sublime blue, intense and pure, without a shred of cloud.
I laid the foam mattress on the carpet and stretched out. Whenever the hot air stirred, a metal wind-chime in the next yard struck a random cluster of notes: gentle, without force or pattern. Listening to it was like being sporadically stroked by someone whose mind was on something else. I curled up on my side, took three breaths, and fell asleep.
When I woke it was almost dark. The house was hollow and silent. Now: if only I had a glass I would drink a pint or two of Melbourne’s famous water, and go back to sleep. But the glasses were in a cardboard carton, and the carton was in a truck, and the truck was crawling somewhere on the curve of the planet between Bellevue Hill and here. I had four days till my life caught up with me, heavy, smeared, blunderous.
I walked down the hall to the kitchen, and opened the door into the yard. My first breath of night carried the scent of the grasslands, the mighty Keilor plains that lie northwest of Melbourne. I grabbed hold of the garden tap, swung my head under it, and guzzled the warm water till it became cold, and kept on guzzling till my teeth hurt. Then I stood barefoot on the brick paving and looked straight up. The air was dry, the sky was dry; and in it hung two or three high, dry stars.
The night had only just begun. What would I do until morning?
Tutto Sereno
The day Stuart the removalist’s packer came to strip my Sydney flat, he held my iMac poised over a carton and glanced at me with raised eyebrows. I clutched my temples: ‘Wait! I won’t have email for five days!’ He grinned, and with sadistic slowness lowered it into the box.
Already now, I’ve been in Melbourne a week. Standing among the boxes and wrong-shaped furniture, I struggle each morning to communicate with a cyber-kind at Bigpond: suppression of cardiac rage, abandonment of hope, phone flung down.
Where are all my emails? Are they clustering round the chimney, thronging there like the crows on the climbing frame in The Birds? Will there be a storm of beaks and claws and feathers, when I’m reconnected?
It takes me another three days to realise that I don’t care.
Now I wake up early. What is this beautiful calm? No point rushing to the computer: I’m cut off from the fast world. I lie under my sheet and gaze at the light on the wall. The neighbours’ chooks are quietly clucking. I get up, wash, make my breakfast, read the paper, start work – the way I used to, before email came into my life to obsess and fracture me.
Later comes the postie. He brings me two postcards, a glossy one from Italy with a Virgin and Child on it, the other hand-made from Sydney, showing a torn-out press photo of a steeple-chase. On the back of each of these, the sender has managed to compress in small handwriting a world of news, of intelligence, of affection – an urgent sense of reality.
What horrifies me about personal email is the vastness of its message field. This is chaos, the abyss. If you live alone, if you suffer at times from an anxiety that you might not exist, email tempts you to behave neurotically – to pour into its appalling infiniteness a cataract, a haemorrhage of words, bottomless, boundaryless. What feels like existential relief is in fact psychologically shallow, a dreadful and meaningless leakage of self.
How finite, by comparison, how human, how elegant and spare a postcard is! Its classic size, 100×150 mm., forces on the sender a stringent discipline – like algebra, or yoga. You cannot go on and on and on. It challenges you to get straight to the point, to fill its tiny oblong with energy. It’s like trying to write a poem: the struggle with the constraints of form ignites the imagination, rouses the sluggish mind from its torpor.
The humblest provincial art museum is as likely as the Louvre to distil the pick of its collection into small saleable rectangles. Smallness is all. The best cards make a virtue of their limitation, and focus on a detail of a masterpiece: a disciple’s wineglass sweating water-beads, an Empress’s forgotten dog, a violet sprouting in the corner of a mighty massacre.
But postcards don’t have to be bought. The newspapers of every land, including our own, teem with conveniently-sized pictures and paragraphs which, ripped out, stuck with Uhu glue on to a plain white system card, stamped and dropped into a letterbox, will carry to the hand of your friend, your child or your darling a perfume of place and of foreignness. My favourite is a little coloured weather map of Italy torn from a newspaper in Pisa: all down its length stretch the summer words Tutto sereno.
Sending postcards is a slow, amateurish game, physical, visual, with many stages, requiring contemplation and a certain amount of waiting. Not many people can be bothered any more to return the serve. But they will return your email so fast that it’s winded you before you’ve raised your racquet.
A Spy in the House of Excrement
I recall the precise moment at which I resolved to go to the Spa Resort on Koh Samui, in the Gulf of Thailand, and to subject myself to its famous Cleanse and Fast regime. A friend who had survived it told me that the cleansers and fasters sit about for hours at bare tables, comparing notes in shameless detail on the substances which the gruelling regime causes to issue from their bowels. I was ready to pack my bags, even before she added that one young woman had passed a small plastic doll, which her mother told her she’d swallowed in early childhood. This was the detail that decided me to become a spy in the house of excrement.
If you are squeamish, bail out now. Read a cook book instead. No hard feelings. But before you go, consider this piece of graffiti, written above the toilet in a Paris restaurant:
C’est ici que tombent en ruines
Les grands ched’oeuvre de la cuisine.
It’s raining when my scientific friend J. and I take a clapped-out taxi from Koh Samui airport to the Spa Resort. On the way everything looks desperate and squalid. Mangy curs scrounge in roadside bins. This is not what we had in mind. We heave our wheeled suitcases out of the boot, and drag them through puddles and wet sand to reception. A scattering of vagued-out New Agers are loafing about in an open-sided, cement-floored restaurant. Beyond it a beach, angled palms, a flat sea.
My bungalow with its tiny porch and louvres at first glance seems dark, even primitive. Wonky little fluoro lights are set here and there but only the bedlamp works. In the bathroom, tiles are chipped, window frames softly rotting. The bed, however, with crisp white sheets drawn tight and knotted at the corners, is firm as a board. I drag out my feather pillow from home and plump it up. Next door J. is washing her hands: the water from her basin pours straight out of an open pipe on to the bare dirt under her window. I lie down feebly under the ceiling fan.
At four o’clock all new fasters are invited into a dark library, clogged with large items of furniture and a shelf of execrable paperbacks. By means of a video (and later a more graphic personal demonstration) Buzz, the Australian mentor of the program,
tries his best to explain how one self-administers the two daily enemas or ‘colemas’ which are an essential part of the cleanse and fast regime.
Everything he says bewilders and appalls me. That huge bucket? I have to pump its entire contents into my colon? But what is this colema board on which you lie in your bathroom? Where do you put your bum? Which way does your head point?
‘Be creative!’ says Buzz, earnestly friendly with his big bony nose, dazzling eye-whites and toned bare shoulders. ‘If you want to put your legs up in the air, go for it! You might like to meditate, or call on your guardian angel, if you’ve got one.’
If I had one, she would be airlifting me out of here right this minute.
Buzz leads us into a cement enclosure where a Thai woman is preparing the afternoon’s colemas for a small, dreamily milling crowd of fasters in sarongs. With a composed, mysterious smile she ladles boiling water out of a gas-heated vat into numbered clear plastic buckets, and mixes into it a dark fluid – coffee – then adds a spoon or two of cider vinegar. Youch. What if I perforate my bowel, poison myself, introduce a bug I’ll never get rid of? Ruin completely what remains of my battered old body?
‘Let’s go out later,’ hisses J., ‘and buy some Dettol.’
We spend the eve of our fast at a table overlooking the smooth water (the rain has stopped) and perusing Cleanse and Purify Thyself, a brick-sized, often incoherent, and bizarrely Christian harangue by a Dr Richard Anderson N.D., N.M.D., from whose theories the spa regime draws its inspiration and its authority. According to him, the traditional North American meat-eater’s acidic diet causes the body to secrete a substance called mucoid plaque. This lines the intestine, combines with other elements and hardens into toxin-holding layers. For good health, he argues, this plaque must be periodically scoured off.
Dr Anderson’s book features hair-raising photos of the mucoid plaque passed by his acolytes. He himself has spent time hiking in the High Sierras with a friend, eating only salads of the raw herbs they find growing there, and carefully measuring the long strings of mucoid plaque they pass. I keep cracking up as I read, he’s so fixated and grandiose, with his claims to be in possession of a revolutionary new truth; but while his theories make me glaze over, I am gripped by the photos, his anecdotes, and letters sent to him by his grateful followers: ‘I could not believe the filth and slime that came out! And so much of it! Where does it all come from? Amazing!’
Day One: Surprisingly, I sleep deep and still. Early next morning we are given a tiny strip of blotter to lick – a pH test. Mine goes green. This qualifies me to do the fast but no one seems particularly interested. A questionnaire handed out on our arrival is never mentioned again or checked by anyone. (How annoying. I love filling out forms. One of the questions is ‘When was the last time you had an orgasm?’) We are repeatedly told that our health is our own responsibility, that the Spa management ‘do not profess to be medical authorities or advisors’. I note the furrowed brow of a Frenchwoman, who whispers to me that she has done a cleanse several times in her country where, however, things are more . . . supervised.
J. and I have signed on for seven days. The regime goes like this. Five times a day, you gulp down a thick ‘detox drink’ of fruit juice, psyllium and bentonite clay. (All I know about bentonite is that Australian farmers throw it into leaking or algae-infested dams. But I have read T. Coraghessan Boyle’s satirical novel The Road to Wellville, in which a doctor explains that ‘psyllium . . . is hydroscopic; . . . it absorbs water and will expand in your stomach, scouring you out as it passes through you just as surely as if a tiny army of janitors were down there equipped with tiny scrub brushes . . . Like eating a broom – but that broom will sweep you clean.’)
The gluggy doses are staggered with three-hourly handfuls of six capsules: three herbal supplements, and three ‘chompers’ or ‘intestinal cleansers’. Each evening you take a Flora Grow capsule, to re-equip the scoured intestine with friendly bacteria. You are so sodden with fluids that you are never hungry.
And twice a day you collect your numbered bucket of fluid and retire to your private bathroom. You hang the bucket from a rusty wire hook in the ceiling over the toilet. You take off all your clothes (this can get messy). You lay your four-foot-long colema board down flat, resting the holed end of it over the toilet and balancing the other end on a low plastic stool.
You give a quick suck – as if stealing petrol – to the long plastic tube that drops from the high bucket, and when the fluid starts to flow, you block it off with a large rusty bulldog clip provided, while you get settled on the board. You lie on your back with your knees bent and your bottom over the hole. Your ‘personal colema tip’, like a tiny sprinkler that fits on to the end of the long tube, you anoint with KY jelly; then you slide it a little way into your rectum, lie back on the board, release the bulldog clip, and let warm water from the bucket flow into your lower intestine.
You hold your anal sphincter closed for as long as you can tolerate the steadily growing sensation of fullness, then clamp off the tube again and gently massage your abdomen with your fingertips. Then you relax your sphincter. And into the toilet slithers a luke-warm gush of . . . we’ll get to that in a minute.
Many westerners have bad memories of enemas. As children we were given them for threadworms. Women of my generation going into labour, thirty years ago in a public hospital, were first shaved, then given a rough and hasty enema: an experience sorely humiliating. Yet in alternative healing circles, colonic irrigation has always been popular. Indeed, the practice has a long and chequered history, probably in every culture. Not the least of this is erotic. Upper-class British boys of earlier times, whose colons were briskly washed out by beloved nannies, felt the thrill of it; and Victorian prostitutes would number enemas among their professional services.
Dr ‘Rich’ Anderson, whether he’s aware of it or not, stands in a long tradition of almost Manichean loathing of the putrefying inner caverns of the human body. His diatribe echoes inarticulately the angst of the great eighteenth-century Irish satirist and cleric Jonathan Swift: ‘But Celia, Celia, Celia shits.’
Has my learned disquisition got you past the squeamish moment? If not, leave now.
So here I lie, on a chipped white melamine board in the spartan bathroom of the bungalow, letting the water in, letting the water out; and eventually a series of small, soft objects slides out of me into the bowl. I repeat and repeat until the bucket is empty. It takes about forty minutes. And all the while, a small silvery-brown gecko is perched high on an upright of the window frame, head down, feet spread: I could swear he was watching me.
That evening, after the last drinks and capsules, we’re advised to take a bowl of clear vegetable broth. It’s the first thing I’ve put in my mouth all day, apart from the doses and my toothbrush. Just vegetable-flavoured water, really, with a dash of cayenne thrown in; but I approach it avidly, this liquid so clear, so fine, that one can barely believe it would have a flavour. It’s a large bowl and I eat it slowly, with a dessertspoon, faint with delight at its simplicity and purity.
Day Two: At 4 a.m. I wake from a dense, dream-filled sleep, imagining bacteria swarming on my ‘personal colema tip’ where it lies on the bathroom shelf. What would my sisters, the nurses, say? ‘You mean you stick that thing up yourself without sterilising it?’ The ceiling fan whirs. Waves on the nearby beach surge and flop. Crickets and frogs keep on seep-seep-seeping in their strange unison. A small motorbike goes screaming past, a hundred metres from my head, along the road to Lamai. What am I doing here? I fantasise scrubbing my colema board with Dettol. Dawn comes and I can’t be bothered – so swiftly does one adapt to the unimaginable.
The day crawls along. I do the regime, I sleep, I sprawl in a stupor on a deckchair. I have a massage in the pleasant, open-sided, palm-thatched sala where gentle breezes fan the air. The Thai masseuses in their loose Spa uniforms wait for requests, sitting in a group near the steam room, murmuring to each other and deftly crocheting
toilet roll covers. Some people are regularly doing yoga, other eager beavers mention a gym. J. is out there being sociable, but I can’t bear to hear one more person say ‘Amaaaaaazing!’ I hide in my bungalow and continue to plough through the pile of novels I’ve brought: A Change of Climate, The Hours, The Untouchable, Cold Mountain.
Day Three: Each day is superficially the same but psychologically distinct. I am weak, vague and hyper-sensitive. My personal vibe is plummeting. Several young princes of narcissism swan about the place. One in particular grates upon my nerves. He speaks to no one, withholds eye-contact from all but a favoured few, and poses ascetically on the beach and near the restaurant, naked except for a loin-cloth like a nappy. His body is slim and strong but his face is blank, vain, fanatical; he tosses his clean, thick hair about his shoulders, and adopts flamboyant yoga postures in spots where he is sure to be noticed. If my looks could kill, he’d be stretched out beneath a palm, still beautiful in death.
Day Four: Escalating misanthropy. J.’s is most exercised by Madame Mysterioso, Psychic and Tarot-Reader. She’s a skinny, rather dingy-looking, but endearing eternal traveller in a set of bulky hair extensions, a nose-ring and silver bangles, a grubby white crocheted bikini top and a brief sarong. While we peruse her laminated tarot brochure, she tells us she’s ‘zapping her parasites’.