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. I wondered whether she would run to massage oil, or whether she was just going to spit on her hands. And as I lowered myself down on the table and felt it lurch sideways under my weight, I calculated that one person maximum was all it would bear, so that was my idiotic juvenile fantasy nipped in the bud before we’d started.
Was there anything in particular that I would like her to work on today? she said. I mentioned an area of secondary concern — a pulled muscle in my left lower back. I think I must have strained it a few weeks ago, I said, and I’d been conscious of it ever since.
She began, however, on the backs of my calves. She had wonderfully strong thumbs. She must be the one in her family everyone turns to to get lids off. There was massage oil available, fortunately. It smelt of eucalyptus. But if I had ever imagined those thumbs would be applied to me in a manner that wasn’t strictly business, then I was badly mistaken.
She was really glad I’d booked a massage with her, she said, as she gouged mercilessly at my calf. The response to the business cards she’d been handing out in the gym had been fantastic. Every person she’d given a card to had come, she said. The 100 per cent response to her cards must have been karmic. It was the universe saying thank you. And, believe her, she needed every penny she could get at the moment, having recently left her husband.
And how is he, your husband? I said. He was missing her healing hands, she said. It was the only thing he missed about her, her healing hands. Healing hands? I said. Oh, she was well known for her healing powers, she said. In fact, she had an international reputation. When she went to California, the healers there all said they’d been watching and waiting for years for her to visit California. ‘What, as though you were the Christ or something?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Like that.’
For some time now I have been aware that as far as ladies are concerned I am no longer considered to be a player. Too old, too ugly, too skint. It’s come as a terrible shock but, like the bridesmaids in Matthew’s gospel, hope never dies and I keep my wick trimmed. Basically, this means I’ve kept in shape in case a late miracle should come to pass. And for an exhilarating moment, when the catastrophically gorgeous Trixabell invited me to her massage studio, then gave me her card, I believed she might have been kindly extending her lighted taper to this rusty old lamp. Now it seemed I was merely the innocent victim of a ferocious advertising campaign. As the saying goes, there’s no fool like an old fool. But in fairness to her, I ought to record that after the massage it was as though the pulled muscle in my back had only ever been just one more figment of my imagination.
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