Healing hands

I turned up at Trixabell’s massage studio in a lather. It was a hot morning and I’d been rushing. Sweat was trickling down the sides of my face and soaking through my shirt in the usual places. I’d better have a shower, I said. There wasn’t one, she said. Nor was she worried about a bit of sweat. Trixabell was as friendly and talkative as she had been when she gave me her card in the gym. I should take off everything except my underpants, she said. As I stripped, she told me about how embarrassed she’d been at the garage earlier, not having enough money to pay for the repairs to her car. New alternator, £230, she said, when I pressed her for details. About the design on my underpants, a series of crossed shipbuilders’ riveting hammers over a Tudor castle, in claret and blue, she made no comment.

Scented candles flickered among Hindu deities on a long shelf. The atmosphere of quiet contemplation and oneness with the universe was intruded on, fatally, by the sound of delirious studio audience laughter on the television set in the room next door. The wall between us and it must have been very thin. ‘What about some music?’ I said.

I’m no stranger to the paid-for massage. To be honest, the paid-for Swedish massage is now the chief point of physical contact between myself and the rest of humanity. And I am often asked whether I would like to choose some music. I usually request the Pointer Sisters. But Trixabell’s studio wasn’t equipped with a music system. So even Pan-pipes were out of the question. The wobbly massage table, the old carpet, the unmitigated daylight, the brush marks in the matt emulsion on the walls: everywhere you looked spoke of haste, improvisation and a shoestring budget.