The Feel of Steel

by Helen Garner

  J.: ‘What parasites would you have?’

  MME M.: ‘In India I had a tapeworm’ (parts her hands in a fisherman’s gesture) ‘that long! I was crawling to the cafe! I was eating for two! One meal for the worm and one for me! I was as weak as a kitten!’

  J.: ‘How did you know how long it was?’

  MME M.: (airily) ‘Oh, I passed it.’

  J.: (grimacing) ‘How did you get rid of it?’

  MME M.: (suavely) ‘Oh, they have wonderful medicines for worms, in India . . . but I came down here to make sure there was nothing else in there.’

  She drifts away to the next table. I feel ancient, uncool, too well-scrubbed.

  J.: ‘I thought I saw disapproval on your face.’

  H.: ‘You’re projecting! I thought she was sweet – like Linda Jaivin if she dropped a stone and went feral. Would you get a tarot reading from her?’

  J.: (promptly) ‘Nope.’

  H.: ‘Too much bullshit?’

  J.: ‘All I see, when I look at her, is pathology.’

  H.: (flaring up) ‘What’s pathological about her?’

  J.: (severely) ‘She’s abandoned her tribe. Her mother wouldn’t be able to communicate with her.’

  There’s no point in squabbling: we’re both too out of it. I skulk off to lie on my board and brood darkly about what is pathological, where families are concerned, and what is simply survival. The little gecko pops out of his hidey-hole and keeps me company, gazing down with his head on one side and his throat pulsing.

  Nothing much happens colema-wise till I’ve almost emptied my bucket – then suddenly a whole lot of slithery stuff comes rushing out. I sit up, disconnect the colema tip, and peer into the toilet: a strange bumpy curved object, like a small brown croissant with a sheen on it. I’m excited. Can this be the famous mucoid plaque? I tear the long side off the KY jelly packet and prod the croissant with it. Yes! It’s a chunky-nubbly, stringy, almost odourless sort of chain. Brilliant!

  Dazed with success and starvation, I dismantle the equipment and hose the whole place down. Before I’m done, cramps rack my belly. Soon I’m curled up and groaning on the bed. But I’m not scared. I believe it will pass, and eventually it does.

  For the rest of the day I’m in a dream. Speaking is all but impossible. If someone addresses me I take ages to focus on their face, process what they’ve said, and dredge up a suitable reply.

  ‘I feel we’re losing you,’ says motherly, scientific J. ‘You seem other-worldly, as if you’ve left your body.’

  With shy pride I describe my mucoid plaque.

  ‘Huh,’ she says. ‘It’s probably only psyllium plus gel from the capsules.’

  ‘What?’ I cry, aghast. ‘You mean it’s all just hype?’ She shrugs and turns away.

  Day Five: My revulsion at the detox drinks and capsules intensifies by the hour. Gagging, I venture into the steam room, grope to the tiled bench, and sit meekly in my sarong, hands clasped on my knees. The air is white with fog. Am I even alone? A tall dark mass enters. I squeak, ‘Who’s there?’ It’s a man from San Diego, who tells me the tale of his gallstones. As it happens I have already heard it around the traps, for he is the legend of our intake: people point to him and whisper, ‘See that guy? He’s been fasting for, like, ever.’

  ‘We all have gallstones,’ he says, in the nonchalant but faint voice characteristic of someone more than seven days into the program. ‘I did the epsom salt treatment. I passed a thousand stones at first, then two and maybe even three thousand more. I lost a lot of them through the weave of the plastic sieve.’

  Gallstones? Do gallstones come out your bum? My croissant suddenly doesn’t seem worth mentioning. I sit in silence, outclassed, adrift in a world obsessed with filth. Everybody seems so sure. The printed instructions for the fast warn us against ‘negative people’ who may bring us down at vulnerable moments. Fancying myself an intellectual as I do, I consider it a matter of honour, in this credulous environment, to be one of those ‘negative people’ – but what do I actually know about the inner workings of the body? What is the basis for my scepticism? I’m still functioning on Miss Featherstone’s biology lessons at school, her simple diagram of a mouse: cheese went in at the top, moved down the tubes, and issued from the bottom in what she called ‘little – black – pellets’.

  Day Six: A night of despair. At 3 a.m., the death hour, a hoarse, hiccuping, humanoid cry – ‘Huck-haaaah!’ – erupts from inside the wall right by my head. Heart athump, I kick the wall, then sit up in the dark and curse. I can’t go on with this. It’s masochistic – it’s insane. How can I get out of here?

  At dawn I meet J. in the sandy courtyard. She says, ‘I’m absolutely desolate. I hardly slept. In the night I thought, “I could just stand up and put my head among those fan blades”.’

  We exchange haggard looks.

  I whisper, ‘Wanna throw in the towel?’

  A pause. She sets her jaw. ‘No.’

  We trudge to the detox counter.

  ‘Gee, I feel cranky,’ I mutter to Henri (pronounced Ahnree), a cheery American know-it-all in his sixties with grey curly hair and faded tattoos, who has famously been on the road for the last seventeen years, carrying only a light rucksack and managing his investments from internet cafes.

  ‘Ah,’ he says, twinkling his eyes wisely, ‘if you’d done a cleanse as many times as I have, you’d know to expect this. It’s just the toxins coming out.’

  Toxins, shmoxins. What is a bloody toxin, anyhow? I stump away to the restaurant and sneak a big carrot juice. Jackie, an investment banker from London, tells me the horrid huck-haaaah creature of the night is ‘probably some sort of lizard’. Yeah, right.

  Henri joins the table of fasters. In three minutes flat he has skilfully derailed our bowel-centred conversation and is presenting his credentials as a sage. These stem from his glory days as a hippy, which must be as remote to his audience of young American backpackers as is the Civil War: ‘Back in the sixties, my former wife and I, we bought a Winnebago! We drove right across the United States – visiting communes!’

  When he leaves the table for his massage I expect us all to dive back into coarse boasting about our heroic feats of self-purification; but a deferential silence falls, then one of the Americans – the one I have until this moment liked best, a cute version of George Costanza – sighs and says, ‘Isn’t Henri great? I really respect his nomadship.’

  J. reports having seen Madame Mysterioso out in the courtyard the night before, ‘doing a sort of dance. With bells on her feet. If I’d had a gun I would have blown her away. She’s to me what the narcissist in the loin-cloth is to you.’ Grimly we fantasise a sten gun swivel-mounted on the verandah rail, and begin sotto voce to draw up a list. Sorry, Henri, but you’re on it.

  After what would have been lunch, J. and I nick across the road and through a coconut grove to a flasher, newer resort. Oh, an oasis of luxury. It has lawns. It has glass tables. It has alternating blue and green tiles. But even as we relax, guiltily, in the perfumed elegance of its sofa cushions, we experience a pang of loyalty to our battling old outfit down below, with its chipped bathrooms, its hard-labouring Thais – most of whom could afford these treatments only by winning the lottery – its spacy rationale, its credulous spirituality, its crackpot theories – and its dim little cabins full of westerners pumping filtered water into their bowels and then studying, theorising about, marvelling at and saying a jubilant farewell to the muck that comes out. We slip our thongs on and scurry home.

  Day Seven: How slowly, slowly, in a blur of detox, capsules and colemas, each day passes! The thick drinks and distasteful capsules I force down with a shudder, but I must admit that I like the colemas. I like them quite a lot. J. entertains herself during hers by listening to talking books on a Walkman, but I love just lying there in the cool, staring up at the criss-cross weave of the ceiling and listening to sounds drifting in from the world: cars and scooters on the road, someone scrubbing, water trickling, a
breeze rattling in palm fronds, a Thai voice raised in sharp chatter. Birds chirp in their business-like way.

  This dreamy pleasure can only be infantile – the body’s memory of lying swaddled in the cot, long, long before toilet-training, and being languorously aware of one’s bowels, sensing their fullness without guilt or anxiety, and being allowed to let go.

  After each colema I take a shower, curl up on my bed for a while, then dress and stroll out to the beach. It’s a plain, beautiful curve, shaded by palms and visited by high-prowed fishing boats. A steady, pleasant breeze blows across it, always from the same direction. In the distance comes and goes a line of mountains, faint as a mirage.

  And yet the regime is a strain, an assault. Nothing here is imposed. There is no big stick. You have to find the discipline within yourself. Fasters greet each other with nods, and sit in a stunned row on palm-shaded deck-chairs outside the restaurant. The non-fasting Spa guests, of whom there are plenty, look up from their plates of exquisite tropical food and stare at us with awe – or is it merely pity? My emotional state lurches between rapture and dejection. Fresh revelations of the obvious (‘Time passes! Youth does not last! Life is short!’) strike me the crushing blows familiar from long-ago acid trips. Somehow, though, one emerges from sloughs of despond, and slogs on.

  There are three sets of rusty scales at the Spa. Even the management jokes about their unreliability. A charming young Bostonian couple on their honeymoon, who have been fasting and cleansing for ten days, are collectively two stone lighter. J. is crestfallen that she has lost only one kilo. She gets on her mobile to a gym bunny in Sydney, who reassures her: ‘It’s all fluid, darling! It’ll drop off when you come home!’ I, catastrophically, seem to have lost weight only from where I most need to keep it: my face.

  But you can see a change in people’s eyes and skin: clarity, freshness, brightness. To look at the face of the Gallstone Legend from San Diego, on day thirteen of his cleanse and still counting, is to behold the pure, sensitive lineaments of boyhood.

  Day Eight: Today we are to break our fast. We are advised to eat, that first incredulous afternoon, ‘only’ a plate of sliced papaya. How gluttonous it seems, to approach that pile of glistening orangey-pink slivers! When the moment comes, we pick up our spoons with a strange dreaminess, reluctant to break the spell. And yes, it does taste good, and feels even better – but there’s a kind of disappointment in it, too. Now everything will become ordinary again. The days will be divided by those weird social events called meals. We could have salads this evening, or soups. But, still in love with our self-discipline, we pick at the delicious food without appetite.

  I play Scrabble by candle-light with a new arrival, a green-eyed boy from Long Island. He is ambitious and beats me hands down. In my vagueness I let the candle burn to a stump and set fire to the edge of his plastic board. He cannot conceal his annoyance, but this new, purified me smiles at him, maddeningly no doubt, out of the deep well of my tranquillity. Secretly I long to have become a fanatic like San Diego Man and fasted for, like, ever.

  Day Nine: Departure time approaches and we all become light-headed, hilarious. I find myself fooling and laughing with people I’ve wanted to gun down in the throes of our ordeal (though nothing can redeem Narcissus in his nappy). Jackie, the young London banker whose sly wit has reprieved several nincompoops from our firing squad, remarks happily, ‘I feel as if my personality’s come back, since I started eating again.’

  That’s it exactly, and it’s happening all around us. Have I lost it completely, or has the moustachio’d bore metamorphosed into a wit, the MASH addict revealed a passion for Henry James, the prune-lipped divorcee begun to weep for joy in a deckchair, the neurotic Jewish mother at last turned off her mobile? Nothing but euphoria, wherever I turn.

  Late that day I sit under a palm tree and watch Madame Mysterioso, her fake plaits flopping on to her shoulders, emerge shining from a swim in the sea and walk slowly back to her towel. She lies on her back, rests a moment, then raises both knees and rolls her back right over like a hedgehog’s, till her knees are touching the sand behind her shoulders. The knobs of her curved spine gleam in the low sun. She is so slender, so relaxed, her muscles so delicately and firmly defined, her posture so beautiful, that I find myself contemplating her, for the first time, with something like respect.

  Baby Coughs

  First, the baby was born. Then everybody became ecstatic.

  When they brought her home two days later, the house overflowed with a new kind of air. People came in cars and on foot to adore her. Small crowds of visitors fell naturally into the configurations of religious paintings. The women pushed their faces in close, to smell skin. The men stood further back with their arms folded, smiling, talking quietly among themselves, but always with their bodies turned towards mother and child. The father’s school friend struggled in carrying, in a pot, the Greek tree that she was named after. It was found that one bottle can supply enough champagne for nine people to toast a baby.

  She took the breast. Milk flowed. The father cooked and served. The nanna washed dishes and clothes. The granny got down on hands and knees and went at the kitchen lino. It was early in a Melbourne winter. The extended family hummed like a well-cranked top. The heart-broken old blue heeler slunk with impunity on to a forbidden rug, and rested her muzzle on her crossed front paws.

  Two weeks passed in peaceable veneration. Everything about the baby was a perfect glory. Her hairline. Her orange poo. Her squashed right ear. Her long fingers. Her very small cough. ‘Like a bark!’ said someone fondly. One cough at a time, maybe once a day. Bark! through stiffened pink lips. Then twice a day. Two at a time. Then three, then more.

  And then one day when she coughed she didn’t stop. Everyone rushed to the sofa. The mother held her folded forward like a tiny choking koala. Out, out, out went bark after bark after bark, and not a single breath came in. Her eyes screwed shut and disappeared. Her face went red, then royal purple, then greyish-blue. Before their eyes she shrank, intensified. At last she got to the bottom of it and a harsh thread of air sucked itself into her with a noise like a hammy actor dying. The man from along the street said, ‘You take that kid to hospital.’

  Whatever she had was very infectious. They put her in an isolation unit on the fifth floor, with her mother beside her on a fold-out couch; and every hour or so, for five days, the baby coughed and went blue and fought for breath. They even clapped a weeny little oxygen mask on to her. After each paroxysm, nasty pale sticky foam coated her lips and she sank into an exhausted sleep.

  They pushed a tube down through her nose and sucked muck out of her. They got some blood out of her tiny sausage of an arm. The tests were ‘inconclusive’. Whooping cough? Her parents weren’t even sure how to pronounce it. Isn’t it a disease of the olden days? Hasn’t it been wiped out, like polio? It’s coming back, said a nurse. I’ve seen this whole side of the thoracic ward – nothing but babies with whooping cough.

  The baby coughed, the mother coughed, even the nanna coughed, but the father stayed healthy, which was just as well since attending mothers don’t get fed: he was bringing in three meals a day. By the time the baby left hospital, she was three weeks old and a different, darker, more serious person. The nanna crept home and stayed in bed for a fortnight, choking and gasping, her tear ducts spouting water and the whole front of her torso in spasms.

  And once they started telling people about it, they heard that whooping cough is indeed cropping up all over the place. The baby’s uncle had it at fourteen. An academic in Newcastle at forty-two. Somebody’s eighty-year-old mother up in Woy Woy (she swore by Bonnington’s Irish Moss). The baby’s great-grandfather, from the Mallee, thought he felt it coming on, but claimed to have kept it at bay by frequent garglings with Listerine. It got to the point where one of the nanna’s friends told her that she’d heard you can immunise a baby against whooping cough with garlic. Gradually it all started to seem less terrible – more ordinary – almost as i
f they had overreacted.

  But the fright was real. And the nanna had missed three weeks of the new life. She missed the baby and the baby’s parents, and the work she’d been doing around their house, and the privilege of spending hours of each day holding her grand-daughter in her arms, watching the waves of expression sweep and falter and resolve over her pure face.

  Our Mother’s Flood 1

  Our mother is eighty-one. She has a husband, a son and five daughters. In her youth she was modest, even shy – a sportswoman, small, slender and graceful, with beautiful legs and quick physical reflexes. I have to remind myself of this, because she’s in a nursing home now, with shattered bones, chipped teeth, incontinence, and the alternating rage, euphoria and stupor of Alzheimer’s disease.

  Each of us has a different version, but we all agree, looking back, that it came on slowly, and that she was depressed for a long time.

  I am ashamed to recall how harshly we witnessed the years of her decline. When she told the same anecdote over and over, in exactly the same words and with the same intonation, we would roll our eyes at each other behind her back, or joke about it on the phone afterwards. We were impatient with her growing fear of the physical world, her refusal to drive, her stubborn slowness, her resentful timidity, her inability to take pleasure in anything.

  We thought it was just Mum growing old. We exchanged our brisk theories: she should get more exercise; she should drink less wine and eat more raw vegetables; she should see a psychiatrist; she should have more of a social life.