Eye of a Rook

by Josephine Taylor

  ‘Stabbing, aching … burning, sometimes. And this clamping sensation around my bum,’ she told them.

  ‘And when is that? With tight clothes, like jeans? Or with sex?’ Sally knew the answers to these questions already. She smiled encouragingly and Alice realised this was for the benefit of the others.

  ‘It’s there all the time,’ she said, ‘but it’s worse with sitting.’

  ‘Oh, Alice.’ It was Denise. ‘That’s crap.’

  ‘I used to have it like that too, back in my thirties,’ Sally said. ‘But these days it’s manageable. Sometimes just a dull ache. Maybe a little burning.’

  It was terrifying to think of someone having this pain for decades. Distressing to imagine the fabric of your life snagging on this burr, over and over. Was it possible that it could change? That being with it – living with it – might become a smooth hub around which spokes of meaning whirred, equidistant and gleaming? No, surely not.

  ‘I guess I just think of that as normal, these days,’ Sally continued.

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything normal about this,’ said Denise, her voice clipped, as if cutting off the terrible stories Alice could sense lay beneath.

  Alice felt the questions bubbling up in her own mind. Was Denise’s anger like her own, a mix of fury, bitterness and grief? Of disbelief? How on earth did Simone get pregnant, and was she scared about the approaching birth? What did they all do in the world, this Maria, Atikah, Simone, this Denise, and exactly how old were they? The questions spun and roiled, demanding she know more about these women, telling her she should stay, reassuring her she could be with them, at least for today.

  Outside, a willie wagtail swooped to the birdbath and flicked its compact, sprightly body about in the water. The world, framed like a picture, glowed greenly.

  It only made sense if there were two bodies, both equally valid. One body seen through the gaze of an early caregiver – ‘mother’ was probably best avoided in the essay – and the other body formed through sensation.

  Alice leaned back from the laptop and shifted her bottom so it fell more neatly into the kneeling gap formed by her lower legs. Thought about her patchy, nonsensical body and its unbridgeable distance from her visible body. One, a symmetrical image reflected in the mirror and the sight of other bodies, whole and cohesive. The other, a figure in fragments, its bits and pieces scattered through the brain.

  If you accepted the reality of the bits-and-pieces body-in-the-brain, then it became believable that pain could be felt in undamaged nerves and muscles. That it might seem to lodge deeply and stubbornly in a newly assigned anatomical home, or roam at whim, greedy for unclaimed territory, only answerable to a nervous system that has forgotten how to command it, or keep it in check.

  How best to express these complex ideas? Some context first, perhaps: Freud’s idea of the bodily ego – a theory that did not raise her hackles as did his insistence on female sexuality as a warped version of the male model, a theory that normalised pain, made it somehow approachable.

  Alice bent over the coffee table again and typed.

  Freud argued that the ego is initially forged through bodily sensation. He also suggested that the way in which we gain knowledge of an organ through pain, as an adult, might reproduce how we arrive at the first sensation-driven idea of the body.

  The rasping cry of a crow lumbering past the lounge-room window returned Alice to the complaint of her legs, cramped under the low table. She stood and stretched her hamstrings and calf muscles, swung her body in semicircles at the waist, felt looseness return. If only such measures would ease the ever-present throb and sting. They returned to her, the words spoken last week by the gynaecologist at the pain clinic: Do you think you might be dragging this on a bit? Tears prickled, and then the anger came again, weighted by that feeling of hopelessness.

  How could she make people understand this kind of pain? What made it so different? So bits-and-pieces and arbitrary? Was it possible to relate it somehow to what medicine accepted? What people already understood?

  She thought about the women in the support group with their abiding yet illogical conditions. What if this fragmented, ‘sensation-driven’ kind of body was the one active in other seemingly senseless disorders: pain in limbs already ripped away in shocking accidents, frantic itching in unblemished skin, the ‘shell shock’ of World War I or modern PTSD, disabling whiplash without anatomical damage … maybe fibromyalgia? Who could tell a person with any of these weird symptoms that their physical suffering was any less than that experienced through a torn Achilles, or acute appendicitis? And what if she were to argue for the validity of this pain?

  Should she resurrect and champion hysteria?

  She disconnected the open laptop and carried it through to the kitchen bench. Bent forward at the hips to type again. A sentence for later in her essay.

  Hysteria makes sense as a signal of disorder, not necessarily at the site of pain, but at the level of fragmented body parts and their central nervous system complementarities.

  Too cerebral. Too abstract. How might she bring it to life?

  What about all those miserable patients in Jean-Martin Charcot’s case notes? The photographic images from the 1860s – men and women with their bodies in strange, dramatic poses. And those described in the neurologist’s lecture-demonstrations at the Salpêtrière hospital in the 1870s and 80s, displayed like, like … objects, really: men shouting without sound; hypnotised women becoming, at command, unparalysed, paralysed; the famous – or infamous – epileptic-like convulsions of la grande hystérie, with its dramatic arc de cercle. She could feel it herself, a backbend of suffering grounded by flexed feet and neck, agony wrenching the mouth open.

  A flash through the kitchen window. Ah, the wattlebird, a fat black spider in its beak, swooping to clear the eaves, shooting above the garden, arrow-like, disappearing into the snowy blossom. The melaleuca eight now, its snow-in-summer blossom heavier each year. How old would the wattlebird be? Was it the same one that had been so busy last summer, feasting on spiders, cleaning their eaves?

  Alice walked to the window. Kangaroo paws leaned towards her from the new bed of natives, planted by Duncan in the cooler months, their orange heads swaying on elegant necks. The tiny pink flowers of a native pea bounced cheerily in the breeze. Then the skimming wattlebird cut the blue bowl of the sky again. She heard some maggies warbling, noticed a cluster of winging twenty-eights in the distance.

  Quarter to five. Duncan would be home from work soon.

  She’d made the mistake of showing him those photos from the Salpêtrière, thinking he might understand images if not words, wanting to share her fascination. He’d raised his eyebrows and said, Are you up to the end-of-year staff bash? Carried on about how she still needed to be seen – when she wasn’t. Not really.

  She turned back to her laptop and notes.

  Maybe she could describe some of Charcot’s cases in detail, represent some of the lives from his published lectures. Like Ler—, whose contorted arms and legs crisscrossed each other compulsively as she screamed the cumulative distress of years: villains! robbers! brigands! fire! fire! O, the dogs! I’m bitten! Or the paralysed Le Log—, another of Charcot’s hysterics, who, though he had no lasting damage to his legs, remained frozen in that moment when a heavy laundryman’s van, pulled by horses at high speed, bore down on him and his loaded handbarrow.

  How else might she legitimise her idea of the ‘sensation-driven’ body?

  She scribbled on her notepad as ideas coalesced.

  Nineteenth-century understanding of different diseases: functional/dynamic versus organic (tie in with own idea of ‘two bodies’?).

  Scene at the Salpêtrière. Recreate a hysterical attack?

  No, don’t get too lost in that world. Find a way to link then and now.

  Scene at the Salpêtrière. Recreate a hysterical attack?

  Compare ‘hysterical’ symptoms at Salpêtrière with e.g. modern-day whiplash – case fr
om each (both ‘sensation-driven’?).

  People needed to know how Charcot took his patients seriously. How the neurologist saw in the bizarre contractures and strange shifting anaesthesias of his patients something that made sense. These motor paralyses of psychical origin are as objectively real as those depending on an organic lesion, he declared.

  So,

  Hysteria as real and legit outcome of Charcot’s ‘dynamic lesion’ in nervous system.

  What about Charcot’s post-trauma regime? She scrolled back to an earlier spot in her essay –

  Dealing with two patients with hysterical (traumatic) paralysis, Charcot recognised the value of specific physical exercises, not to build muscle strength, but to ‘revive’ the ‘motor representation’ in the brain; a necessary precursor to voluntary movement. He notes the way in which, through repetition, this movement strengthens.

  – and jotted more ideas to be included:

  Charcot’s modernity, despite spectacle and showmanship.

  Parallels past and present: Charcot’s findings along with recent research and practice with stroke victims (retrieval of motor programs in nervous –

  This time it was her tight neck that brought her back.

  She straightened, rotated her head on its base and checked the kitchen clock. Five pm. Time to think about dinner. Finish the scribbled sentence, save the document, close the laptop. Later she would return to it, this writing – historical culture uncovered and examined through a modern lens, current medical knowledge understood differently through it in turn.

  Already, though, she could sense something else, something different from academic enquiry … something beneath, or just out of her line of sight – so hard to know how to think of it! – that sensation of density, of urgency, so familiar to her from years of writing fiction. And she knew … yes, she remembered what she must do: hold it there, just hold it, until she was ready. Until it was ready.

  Three things Alice liked about these sessions: Sasha always remembered that she couldn’t sit, always asked first, always warmed her hands. That attentiveness told Alice she might trust the physiotherapist, even when this session, and what was done to her here, was always an invasion, no matter the liking.

  ‘And how have you been going at home?’ Sasha’s pen at the ready.

  ‘I still have that day or so of more stabbing and aching after each session, but I don’t think it’s as bad lately,’ Alice said. She wasn’t entirely sure whether this was true, or whether she simply hoped it was. ‘But I leave the pelvic floor exercises until it’s settled down.’

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ said Sasha, jotting a note. ‘And what about the TENS unit?’

  ‘I reckon it’s helping with my bladder – I don’t feel like I have to go quite as much? It doesn’t seem to be making any difference to the vulvodynia though.’

  It was a new sensation, that low hum through the electrodes near the base of her back, the muted buzz momentarily overriding other sensations. But her vulva always bit back again when she turned the little machine off.

  ‘Well, it’s early days, so let’s keep trying – if you’re fine with that?’

  ‘Sure,’ Alice said.

  ‘And the massaging? Have you tried that? Or asked Duncan to?’

  ‘He’s done it a little.’ She didn’t want to tell Sasha that Duncan’s hands were awkward when it came to relieving pain rather than creating pleasure, or how she herself felt uncomfortable directing her husband, correcting his clumsy efforts. ‘It’s easier if I do it alone, even if I have to be a contortionist!’

  Sasha laughed.

  It had taken weeks for Alice to feel brave enough to venture inside her own body. There she’d found rigid bands and sore walls, not the welcoming and erotic space she remembered.

  ‘And what about today? Are you okay to work?’

  There it was: her permission requested.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay, then.’ Sasha stood. ‘You’re doing really well, Alice.’

  This she liked too: that Sasha simply left the room with a smile lately, trusting that Alice knew the order of things. It gave Alice a little glow, the familiarity. Perhaps it helped with what had to come next too.

  Alice pulled the curtain across, took off her skirt and undies and climbed onto the bench, pulling the crisp sheet over her torso. Let her knees relax outwards and tried to forget the other people with whom she’d opened herself this way – the cold metal implements and even colder fingertips. She breathed deeply into her abdomen, into her pelvis, trying to send kind thoughts there, but her mind skittered and her heart still drummed its warning.

  She heard the snick of the door as Sasha returned, the whoosh of the billowing curtain.

  ‘Okay, so I’m going to begin with seeing how the vestibule is doing.’

  Alice put her head back on the pillow, closed her eyes and waited for the first sensation: the cotton bud like a pin.

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘A three.’ Not too bad. ‘Five … Four … Five …’ Alice tried to place each discrete sensation on the map in her mind. ‘Seven – is that nearer the urethra?’

  ‘Yes, one of the glands close to the urethral opening. What about this?’

  ‘Seven again, I think.’

  The needling slipped down the pain scale again.

  ‘So, a little better overall,’ Sasha commented.

  ‘Still worse at the front than the back.’

  ‘Yes, the pain’s always been more focused there for you, hasn’t it?’ Alice heard the sound of the bin closing, and water running down the drain. ‘Non-latex gloves, Alice. And warm water to help.’ Sasha always remembered this too: how reactive her skin had proven, even though it was just latex, just gel. With a stab of grief, she recalled sex with Duncan in the early days: ribbed condoms – for her pleasure, announced the box – and raiding the fridge, foods outside and in. The laughing, sweaty joy. The utter abandonment to pleasure.

  Sasha’s hand brought her back, lodging her in her body with stretching and pulling, then pressure.

  ‘Okay, so I’m inside the vagina now and I’m palpating the muscles around the vaginal wall. Can you feel that?’

  ‘It’s sore, but it feels okay. It’s like it needs to be stretched.’

  ‘Good. Yes, there’s some tightness, but not as much as you had, perhaps.’

  The pressure was reaching into her body now, and swivelling.

  ‘Is that the obturator internus?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Sasha.

  In her mind’s eye, Alice recreated the tracings she’d made from the anatomy atlas. Muscles and ligaments and tendons; busily interweaving nerves; and blood vessels, blues and reds tidy and contained. The journeys taken by all these unfathomable structures around and between jutting bones, this intricate web that somehow held the pelvis together in a beauty of form and function. And the rhythm of the words she’d copied from the atlas, whispering them to herself like poetry: ischiococcygeus, puborectalis, ischial tuberosity …

  Was Sasha visualising all this as she pressed and massaged? Making sense of threads, knots and bumps by placing them in the anatomical bowl she carried in her mind? Alice tried to hold it, too, that picture of her pelvis, rotate it into depth and life; strained to marry what she could now feel with what she’d seen: neat, discrete anatomical parts. But it was as if the two things were entirely different. Completely unconnected. Two bodies, she reminded herself. And two senses: sight and an unfamiliar kind of … It was hard to know what to call the other. Inner sensation? Kinaesthesia? In any case, less precise than the kind of touch she was used to and almost as if she were underwater, or immersed in some kind of viscous flux where she was the feeler and the felt, the prober and the probed, and inside, the spongy muscular warm wet around her – gooey, mucousy, ropey, gluggy and straining aching needling and everything muddled and messy in a passageway, a cone, a cylinder, a vortex … nerves wetly sparking a body a mind a brain? Something is wrong, and swimming t
hrough it, the wrongness, dissolving in it or dissolved by it, boundaries gone and just the feeling there. Right there.

  ‘Could you try a contraction now?’

  ‘What?’ She swam back to the room. To Sasha. Opened her eyes to the light above and the charts of body parts on the walls.

  ‘A contraction. Just like you’ve been doing at home.’

  ‘Oh. Okay.’

  Alice returned her mind to the imprint of Sasha’s hand, breathed in and out, then pulled that part of herself up and into her body.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sasha, ‘and … let go.’

  She tried to relax, felt the sore judder as her muscles loosened, then jammed.

  ‘So, the contraction looks good, but we’re still going to have to work a little on the release.’

  It had been measured, the contraction and release, in earlier sessions. A small probe slipped inside by Sasha had told them the muscles were always slightly tense, her body perpetually on alert, stuck in some kind of faulty loop.

  ‘I still don’t get why there’s pain in my vulva if it’s the muscles inside that are the problem.’

  ‘Well, we don’t really know yet if it is just the muscles. It’s probably nerves and muscles feeding into the problem together.’ Sasha pressed and stretched, a little frown between her eyebrows. ‘It’s like a tension headache. The pain is referred to the head from the muscles in the neck and shoulders in just the same way.’ Her hand shifted inside. ‘Try it again, if you can, focusing on the release.’

  This time Alice breathed out as she let go, imagining everything dropping away from her.

  ‘That’s better!’

  ‘I love that feeling of release when I can get it properly – like a flower opening.’

  ‘Exactly. Well done, you.’

  Her dark core throbbed and she knew she would suffer even more by the evening, but for that brief, solitary moment Alice was warmed by the praise – by getting one single thing right.