Excitements

I was eating an apple when I got self-conscious. The student on work experience sitting at the table nearby would be able to hear my crunching and was probably bothered by it. But I also thought how freeing it would be to just continue to eat the apple with abandon. The idea excited me. So I did.

In my first office job, I got into the habit of eating a carrot most afternoons. One afternoon I was sitting at my desk eating my carrot, and another editor who sat in same pod as me cleared his throat and said ‘Ah –’, the way he always did when he wanted to say something. I looked up and he placed his hands on the top of the dividing wall and leaned over and hissed, ‘You’re enjoying that goddamn carrot, are you?’

A poet came into the office. There was a problem with the illustration on the cover of his new book. The dog in the poem was male, but the dog on the cover was decidedly female.

‘I was hesitant to mention this,’ the poet said, sliding the drawing out of his bag to show us.

‘You want me to draw a penis on the dog?’ the illustrator asked him.

‘Well –’ the poet said. ‘It doesn’t have to be … an enormous production, but if you could tweak it somewhat, it would put my mind at rest.’

Most days, we get in at least one expression of disbelief about the passing of time. ‘I can’t believe it’s only Tuesday.’ ‘How dare it be August.’ ‘How is it ten o’clock already?’ We’re almost indignant as we say it, as if time is an old-fashioned family values party that refuses to adapt to the realities of people’s lives now. I say it even though the passing of time is one of the few things I believe in unwaveringly. How would time really have to behave for us truly not to believe it? I think it would have to start glitching pretty seriously before we paid attention. Maybe we would see slivers of twenty years ago in it, like noticing a run in a stocking and seeing your skin through it: you’d be walking along and a bit of the street would peel back and show you what used to be there. Maybe your cat would just never die. Twenty, thirty, forty – still snoring, making a sound exactly like that ancient mummy with the vocal tract that scientists reconstructed with a 3D printer. ‘I don’t believe it,’ the vet keeps saying. ‘I just don’t believe it.’

The man in the running shoe shop put me on the treadmill, had me run for a bit, then called me over to show me the video. He got lost and we had to scroll through a whole bunch of other legs until we got to mine. We watched them for a while. ‘They’re moving well!’ he said. I couldn’t really tell what I was looking at. He rewound the video and we watched the legs again and he slowed them down then sped them up again. The legs looked like they were excited about something, and were trying to explain it to us – either that, or tell us some kind of elaborate lie about what they were actually doing. ‘I’m excited,’ I said when I paid for my new shoes. I’d told him I was coming back to running after two years of getting injured all the time. ‘I’m excited for you,’ he said. ‘One time I couldn’t run for eight months, and I would’ve stopped doing anything at all if it wasn’t for my dog dragging me outside at the same time each day.’

I was up late because I had this idea for a poem about going rafting with my aunties. All of them, living and dead. Just all of us on a raft, going along the Waitaki River. I tried writing it and realised I didn’t know any of my aunties well enough. I didn’t have good details. Uncles would be easier. The poem became about going rafting with my uncles. The first bit went like this:

I’ve gone rafting with my uncles.
Earlier, Uncle Neil lost our only paddle.
The river tore it out of his hand like corn from a husk.
‘Aw, no,’ he said, as the wind came up
and my other uncles and I looked down into the water
and back to Uncle Neil’s hands. His carpenter’s hands
from the 70s. How good he once was at everything,
how hungry we were for salad bowls and cabinets.

The poem ended with my mother appearing in a bush on the side of the river, with a small dog in her arms, and she called for help and everybody was saved. As a poem it didn’t work. The problem was Uncle Neil’s losing the paddle at the start. Also it wasn’t a poem. More and more I think I will have to give up poetry. Every time I start a poem these days I immediately lose it. It feels like looking at a playback of my legs and trying to figure out what the hell they’re saying. But also, more and more, the idea of giving things up excites me.

I had a dream that I was eating. I ate seven jam sandwiches and kept going, casting around the shelves for the next thing – old biscuits, half a bag of chips. I was like a massive tunnel borer. I had to keep the eating going, because it was hard to throw up bread and I needed to delay that process, even if delaying it was only making it worse. I knew that once I couldn’t eat any more I’d have no choice but to make myself throw up, and that whole thing would go on for at least an hour. Then there would be the recovering, and who knows how long that would take. I woke up feeling a heavy dread, then relief when I realised that I hadn’t even eaten any sandwiches. I felt excited too: there were all of these things I could do, now that I didn’t have to recover. It was like the end of that Raymond Carver story: ‘It is August. My life is going to change. I feel it.’

On Saturday I spent a couple of hours watching a series of YouTube videos called ‘The Worst Pain’. I was supposed to be reading manuscripts or maybe writing something. The video series was devoted to a physiotherapist giving men sports massages. The physio had the nickname ‘Thumbs’. After he’d been introduced at the start, the camera always zoomed in on one of his thumbs, and you could see that the thumb looked unusually strong, almost like a horn or a talon. The physio wasted minimal time warming up the muscles: it was just a few brief strokes over the skin with his palms before he went deep into the trigger points.

Like with this guy I was watching now, the feet were often a problem. Typically, the feet were the root of hip and knee and calf injuries. But they were painful to treat. The physio was kneeling at the end of the table with one of the man’s feet in his hands. He had wedged the ankle underneath his armpit, which allowed him to cradle the foot and also stop it from escaping. In his tattooed arms the foot looked tiny, like a face in the window of an airplane. The physio worked mostly in silence, though sometimes he murmured gently when the man on the table was in a special kind of pain.

In every video, the physio had a solid, serene presence as he carried out his work. He was like a rock on a cliff while, below, the man on the table was a sea, thrashing about in both predictable and unpredictable ways. I should have been disgusted with myself, but I didn’t feel like I was. But whenever I was watching I did get pretty tense – my face pushed back into my neck – and maybe my body was trying to tell me how I really felt, reminding me of a time back before the internet was showing us things like this. Still, there would be a before and after shot of this guy’s feet soon – twisted and sore-looking in the before, relaxed and pain-free in the after – and I can’t lie, I was looking forward to seeing those feet.

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Feet of clay

Feet of dirt.

Feet of tree that will not fruit.

Feet of elephant that died and was buried at the school.

Feet of someone walking down the driveway with torch.

Feet of pay day.

Feet of landlord at the door with a spanner.

Feet of neighbour turning to me with horror.

Feet of air.

Feet of stars. Feet of sun again.

Feet of England.

Feet of clay.

I run and I run but never quicken my pace.

 

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Eleven

I was cleaning up my desktop while avoiding writing my column, and I came across this old photo of Jerry. It’s him at the vet’s in July 2014 after he’d been hit by a car. Not pictured is his big shaved bottom, which took the impact. He came to the Waikanae SPCA as a flea-ridden stray when he was about five (though, his age is a guess). I often wonder what his life was like before. I feel jealous of this other life he must have had. Sometimes I imagine his old family turning up and he runs towards them, overjoyed – like in that video with Christian the lion in Kenya, in the 1970s – then they pick him up and bundle him into their car and speed away, brakes screeching. Jerry turns eleven soon. He’s just a really good cat.

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The haircut

My childhood sweetheart rang. We hadn’t spoken in twenty-five years. He said, ‘Also, I am seeing somebody else now.’ It was as if we’d been in the middle of a conversation, as children, and he’d only just remembered to mention it now.

My whole body started to tremble. I said, ‘Can I speak to her?’ but he told me she couldn’t come to the phone because she was out getting a haircut.

A wave of grief rose up in me. It was the thought that this person had hair, hair that needed cutting, and presumably also then a whole head with a brain inside it, and a body that was alive. She was a whole person, and I was not.

After the phone call, I sat in a chair, sobbing, and tried to eat a long raspberry bun. I had read that when you’re feeling down you should eat, and this was all I had. The bun was delicious, but eating it was a miserable experience. It grew larger and larger in my hands, and my mouth seemed to keep changing its location, until eventually I was just smashing the raspberry bun into my face, hoping some of it would get in. I had the sense that my childhood sweetheart was watching me trying to eat and feeling relieved at his decision.

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DREAM

I was riding my bike to the train station, because I was going to catch the train to New York City. I had a dog with me. The dog was very big but was old and very sick. I was carrying it in a large white sling around my front, like a baby. I was also towing in a trailer all the things we would need for the trip, such as dog food and medicine. The dog was well-behaved, and I could sense from the dog which streets I should take for the fastest route to the station. The streets were empty as we rode along together, and I kept thinking how relieved I would be when we finally got to New York and could unpack and sit down. When we finally arrived at the station, the attendant looked at me with the dog in the sling and said, ‘The train that goes to New York City rides through this station too fast for anyone to actually get on. I just thought you should know that.’

I didn’t know what to do, and wondered if we should just continue the trip by bike. I looked into the dog’s eyes. I could tell that it wanted to go home, and suddenly I felt angry. ‘I care about you,’ I mouthed, with no sound coming out, ‘but why didn’t you tell me before that you didn’t even want to go!’ We started riding back home, and once again the dog showed me the best streets to take for the fastest route.

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New Year’s Eve Paragraphs

A couple of years ago a friend asked me, ‘Are you someone who is easily contented?’ I don’t know why I’ve always remembered that question. We were sitting in a bar next to a window and the sun was shining in my eyes. I can’t remember what I said. I think I was conflicted, because the question seemed to be about whether I wanted things to change or stay the same. Afterwards I cycled home, ate a big dinner and got into bed with a book and felt completely happy then fell asleep.

I walked into the lounge and immediately forgot what I was there for, so I said what I always say when I forget, which is, accusingly, ‘What the fuck was it?’ A song by Guillaume Teyssier called ‘Shadow Dancer’ had just come on the stereo. In the video for the song, two French guys (one of whom is Teyssier) wearing shiny bomber jackets saunter into a classroom and give disco lessons to the students. I don’t understand why Guillaume Teyssier isn’t more famous. Every so often I google him and see if there have been any developments in his career, but there never have. In the lounge, I thought of the bomber jackets and suddenly I started dancing. It was the usual dance which I have been doing for twenty years. A series of rippling, bubbling movements, sometimes a geyser, sometimes a jug coming to the boil. The last time I’d done this dance was perhaps a year ago, and it took more effort than I remembered. Then, as I was dancing, I thought of a line in a James Brown poem about dancing, from his most recent book. The line is, ‘Her body made a kind of qwerty motion.’ Thinking of the poem took me out of the moment and I was suddenly incredibly embarrassed. I stopped moving around. I remembered what I was in the living room for. Nail clippers.

I tried to write an essay about ‘New Zealand’s terrible year’. I was not happy about it – the year, obviously, or the essay. I kept telling myself, you will figure out how to describe it. Halfway through writing it I realised I wasn’t figuring it out and wasn’t going to, because it was impossible and because I should not have agreed to write the essay. A feeling of dread came over me, then panic, and I thought, I shouldn’t be a writer anymore. Then I said out loud, ‘Don’t be so dramatic. God.’ Then I thought, Still, though. You think about that.

A big blackbird was sitting in a relaxed, almost spreadeagled way on the fence outside my bedroom. I wanted to take a photo of it. When I moved, I saw the bird’s eye swivel towards me and seem to widen as it saw me sitting on my bed in my dressing gown while the sun outside was shining, and the bird straightened up and flew away.

When I think about happiness, which I am doing because it is New Year’s Eve and unavoidable, I think of it in kind of a mocking way, telling myself off for wanting it. You can’t just wish for happiness, because happiness isn’t a place at which you arrive and then can stay. And the more you strive for it, the more elusive it gets. As far as happiness is concerned, the best you can hope for is to catch it for a moment, like a tail wind. It’s just logic. When I’m saying all this, my inner voice is both jolly and defensive, like a sunburned man on holiday about to lose his temper in the car. But I’m no longer satisfied with the knowledge that happiness isn’t something to be achieved and that I have to embrace my unhappiness first. I worry that it means that it will always be like dancing to ‘Shadow Dancer’ – for a few seconds my moves are impressive, until I remember that they’re not.

For Christmas my mother gave me a book called Words on Words: Quotations About Language and Languages. When I was struggling with the essay I turned to the chapter ‘Writing: The nature and functions of writing; techniques of successful writing’. I read: ‘Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.’ (Walter Bagehot.) I put down the book and googled types of teeth. Walter Bagehot had left out the canines, premolars, wisdoms. Regardless, how was the statement meant to be helpful? I read, ‘No iron can stab the heart with such force as a full stop put just at the right place.’ (Isaac Babel.) I didn’t think it was right to equate punctuation with murder. I knew the statement was hyperbolic, and I was being disingenuous. But I couldn’t get past it and I still can’t. A full stop will never have the force of someone stabbing someone in the heart, not even close. Then I read a French proverb: ‘Where paper speaks, beards are silent.’ What the fuck.

I have never been less sure of anything.

At high school I remember a friend said that a good title for a novel would be ‘And She Went’. I agreed, it would be a good title, because it indicated that the character was decisive. The last line of the novel, we agreed, would be ‘And she went’.

One of my problems is I often have just a small scene that feels kind of meaningful, but it’s not a story. It’s barely an idea. I’ve thought I’d like to write about learning to ride a horse. More specifically, about being carried away by horses. Being carried away by a horse feels like something that should mean something and that I could write about. My mum and brothers and I all learned to ride horses together in Te Kūiti, and at different points each of our horses panicked and carried us away. I have a memory of being carried away by my horse, Alicia, which went galloping along a ridgeline far above the teacher’s, Mrs Bakewell’s, house. Alicia cleared a couple of fences and then went sort of clambering, monkey-like, up a steep hill – her legs seemingly unstoppable, like one of those military robot dogs – while I clung on to her back, instinctively lying myself down on her neck, screaming. I saw the small riding paddock in the distance, with its brightly coloured jumps made of barrels and logs. My brothers, my mother and Mrs Bakewell were standing down there. I remember rolling down the cold wet grass, so I must have unhooked myself from the stirrups and thrown myself from Alicia.

And I remember watching my mother being carried away when we were on a trek near Piopio. It was one of the most terrifying moments of my life to see her disappearing into the distance on the back of the horse. Then she, too, threw herself from the horse and rolled neatly, like Indiana Jones, along the ground.

I wrote to my brother JP to ask about his experiences falling off horses, and he wrote about an event at a gymkhana. His horse – rotund, black with a white star on his nose – was named Sparky. ‘I remember falling off Sparky repeatedly as we attempted to canter over a series of small wooden logs set in the ground. The crowd were keen to see me succeed, and it seemed to become an important test of character (though I can’t remember to who) that I perform this event satisfactorily.’

I remember thinking this was a great anecdote, but then I didn’t know where else to go with it.

I don’t mean this to sound like a joke, because it’s true – I’ve had a lot of sex dreams these past few nights. They are not normal sex dreams. In one, I was wrapped in wet muslin because in the dream people had a sexual fetish for cheese and were trying to form me into a kind of cheese. I was trying to stay calm, and keep an open mind out of respect for others’ predilections, even though I was struggling to breathe through the muslin. When I woke up, I was grumpy with myself for having these things in my head. How did they get there? I didn’t care if there was a simple explanation.

On Christmas Day my oldest friend and her mum and I were swimming in the sea. There’s always a moment in the sea when the sky looks very huge, almost glamorous, like a beautiful face on a cinema screen. Then my friend shrieked, ‘What the fuck was that’ and immediately I felt it too – a thick bed of slime under my feet. Awful. The slime felt old, somehow. It had been there a long time. How far did it go for? Impossible to tell! The water was brownish, cloudy. There were just too many things you couldn’t see. We paddled back to the shore and walked up the beach in our togs. We all hobbled back to the car, dusted off our feet, and went.

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DREAM

I was reading the weekend newspaper when I came across a story about a prolific writer who had started a petition. Tens of thousands of people had already signed even though the petition had only started the day before. The petition was titled: ‘Petition to convince Ashleigh Young that she is not a peacock.’ The wording was something like: ‘We are sick and tired of Ashleigh Young pretending that she is a peacock. The fact is, she is not even a bird. She is a homo sapiens. We have evidence. She has been allowed to get away with this for too long.’ As I read the article, I felt a terrible, sickening feeling of guilt, and I knew that finally I had been found out, but I also felt a keen loss, somehow, knowing that I couldn’t behave like a peacock or any kind of bird anymore.

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Special time

It’s that special time of the year when people are asking themselves what to do about the social media accounts they’ve deactivated for the holidays.

‘Should I go back,’ they’re asking, ‘and if so when? Should it be soon or later or never?’ And they’re asking, late at night, ‘Should I announce that I’m back, and if so should I announce it sort of swaggeringly, or self-deprecatingly, or matter-of-factly? How irritating is each of these modes or do they all fall under the same banner of quite irritating?’ People don’t know the answers yet but they keep asking more questions, and they’ve got up from bed and they’re stomping around the room, maybe they’re dragging some furniture around, heedless of their downstairs neighbours who are actually trying to have a peaceful time sometimes. ‘Should I just slip back in without ceremony, like a smelly seal rolling back into the water before going to eat some molluscs? Would I prefer no one to remark on my re-entry, so that I can go about my business of complaining about buses and describing the times I lock myself out of places and retweeting certain posts that I think will reflect well on me, or will I secretly be hurt that no one has noticed my return and take out that hurt on people who post things about gratitude and home renovation or whose achievements I am jealous of? How long until I break into someone’s shed and steal their ride-on mower and drive through a fence? Will I apologise and say, “This was an important learning experience for me” or at 4a.m. will I find myself staring into my ravaged open palms while whispering, “I don’t know who I am anymore, or who I even was before all this”?’ And now people are walking around the neighbourhood at night, out there with the timid January fireworks, asking, ‘Will I be able to hold on to this new feeling of space, perhaps something close to peacefulness, or maybe it’s a vague empty confusion, inside my head, in a part that I wasn’t aware could feel space, or even anything, anymore – or will I watch the feeling steadily departing from me like the number 23 bus that the schedule board said was cancelled but apparently wasn’t? Does it matter if I no longer have that peacefulness, since in exchange I’ll have the gift of a platform where I’ll be exposed to many voices, as if standing naked while a chill wind blasts through the tunnel? What is peace to a person? Is it something about learning what to hold on to, and what to let go of? What if I can’t hold on? What if I can’t let go? What if my hands are on backwards, and they have tiny sieves where the fingers should be, and I’m letting go of all the things I should be holding on to, and there are strips of velcro in other places and they’re holding on to things I should let go? What other parts of me are on backwards –my brain? What is the exact nature of my wrongness and how visible is it to others? Am I having a flare of visible wrongness, like eczema, or am I managing it okay right now?’ It’s that time of year when people have finished their night walk and they’re back home now, and they’re searching for their door key in their pocket, but they can’t find it; it must have fallen through their sieve fingers and they’re locked out again, and it’s the time of year where they’re pulling a towel off the washing line and wrapping themselves up in it and curling up on the grass, with the bugs and the mosquitoes, and they’re being eaten alive, and a hedgehog is at the dark periphery of the garden, just waiting to visit them and shriek at their face before running away on its freakish long legs. And it’s that time of year when people are curling up a bit tighter outside on the lawn and asking, ‘What if the planet is an immense round cat, and I’m buried in its fur, like the princess carried on the white bear’s back in that fairytale “East of the Sun and West of the Moon”, and what if right now I’m being carried to an enchanted castle, and this roaring wind is actually the cat purring, or eating some wet food, and this is how I’ll be lulled to sleep.’ And they’re finally falling asleep, and they’re waking up stiffly at five in the morning, when the night is just newly deactivated, and they’re slowly standing and brushing the grassy bits off themselves, and they are feeling a surge of fresh and righteous anger because they are not in an enchanted castle, they’re on the lawn, and today is the day they are going to steal a ride-on mower, yes, it’s that time of the year where people are bracing themselves against a tide of unanswerable questions and also against the irresistible pull of mistakes, and today is the day they are going to drive through a fence.

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THE RADIO

I’m at my parents’ house for a few days. The radio is almost always on. It’s talkback radio. I think it’s Newstalk ZB. New Zealand’s #1 Talk Station. During the day, the talkback radio is overlaid with the tennis commentary from the TV. This, in turn, is overlaid with my parents’ commentary on the tennis, especially if there are female players and there is any suggestion of a tantrum. All of this is occasionally overlaid with the phone ringing. Three different phones ring at different pitches and intensities whenever someone calls the landline. But at night it’s just talkback radio – a tinny, dyspeptic gurgle.

I’d just started writing this when my mum drove up outside, after running errands around town. She opened the door and the car radio blared out. Two men were talking on the radio. ‘What you’ve gotta do when you’re buying new shoes is make sure they fit you and they look good. If you start there then you’ll be fine, but no point in buying shoes that don’t fit and that don’t look good.’ ‘Well, when you put it that way –’

Last night I was trying to read my book and I heard what sounded like a high-pitched, repetitive conversation outside. An argument at the neighbour’s. Then I tuned in properly. It was ‘Roxanne’ by Sting. The neighbour had the radio on outside, at night. Maybe the radio was hanging in a tree. It sounded like it was, because the sound was spilling all through the garden. After ‘Roxanne’, which is close to #1 in terms of all of the worst songs to overhear when you’re trying to concentrate, it was ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’ by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. I kind of like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, for nostalgic reasons and because Tom Petty was in the Wilburys, but when it’s coming from a radio that’s hanging from a tree in a neighbour’s garden when you’re trying to read, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are nearly the worst thing of all, worse than mosquitoes, worse than getting sunburned or covered in burrs or all three. After that, it was Blondie’s ‘One Way or Another’. I stood up and stared out the window with a venomous and helpless feeling.

Earlier today I was cleaning the pantry. I try to make myself useful sometimes when at my parents’. I put on a podcast (the Adam Buxton podcast) to listen to while I was cleaning – on my cellphone, which I propped up on the bench. My dad came in, from the garage, and he looked sort of uneasy. ‘There’s a radio somewhere. What’s that radio noise?’

Mum said, ‘It’s Ashleigh’s podcast.’ On the podcast Adam Buxton was talking to the comedian Roisin Conaty and they were talking about restaurant reviews. Adam Buxton was reading out a Trip Advisor review in a silly voice.

No more was said about this but it was clear that the podcast was an uncomfortable deviation.

Sometimes when my mum has come to stay, she has slept with a portable radio next to her head. The talkback is going into her brain all night. I don’t like the idea of sentences such as ‘People who are anti rodeos are insane’ and ‘I think people should be charged to use public toilets, like they do in Europe’ and ‘New Zealand gets nothing in return for housing all these immigrants, we have to house and feed them and we get nothing back’ going into anyone’s head when they’re awake, let alone when they’re sleeping and their defences are down. We know what happened to Homer when he listened to all those vocabulary-building tapes by Dr Marvin Monroe while sleeping.

When we lived in Te Kūiti, it was Radio Waitomo that was on all the time. The main DJ was named Chulu (a name I haven’t heard since; I also can’t find any information online about Chulu to see what became of him). I remember my Dad doing an impression of Chulu once, when we had friends round for dinner. ‘He’s quite incredible. One moment he’ll be reading the weather forecast –’ he did a muttering, horse-racing-like impression of this – ‘then the next minute he’ll be –’ and here Dad leaned over and shouted at his dinner plate – ‘”BIKES BIKES BIKES!” Doing an ad about bikes, you know.’ Everyone nodded.

We were talking about Chulu because my mum was the scriptwriter for a weekly five-minute radio show about the local high school, where she taught. Sometimes I’d help with the scripts, typing out the words on the computer as Mum came up with lines. The show was meant to be an irreverent but informative conversation about high school life and news. A group of high school students would go into the studio each week to record the show, reading from Mum’s script. Mum had also written an ad for the show, which would come on the radio every so often, and we’d all stop what we were doing to listen. ‘Hey everyone,’ the ad went. ‘Get a lifestyle!’ My mum found this phrase hilarious – this was around the time that the word ‘lifestyle’ was everywhere, usually in the context of ‘lifestyle block’ – because she felt that the word ‘lifestyle’ was essentially meaningless. The phrase ‘Get a lifestyle!’ was therefore the perfect slogan for the show. One of my brothers had come up with a little electric guitar riff which played before the show aired – a punky thing, with some edgy drums. It was lo-fi and – in my memory – meant to be ironic. All of this must have been quite subversive at Radio Waitomo, which didn’t do irony. It was a family station with loud sexist ads.

Chulu sounded like a nice guy on the radio, but apparently he had a temper, and would sometimes get annoyed with the students if they had to do multiple takes. There was a story that once, he’d exploded in a fury at everyone and they all had to leave without recording the show properly. I don’t know if that’s true. I never went to the studio, so even though I was proud that Mum was a cool scriptwriter, both Chulu and the station itself remained distant and annoying to me, an ever-present burble, insisting on commenting on everything and talking over everyone.

The tennis commentary has changed to the trivia show that my parents watch every night. Every so often there is a sparkly ‘BREE!’ noise when a contestant gets something right, followed by my parents exclaiming.

In some ways all of this commentary at home is sort of comforting. The talkback burble is an ancient burble. No matter how technology progresses, it is a burble that will go on forever. People lost at sea or falling down cliffs, still queuing up to have their say on plastic bags; phones ringing from freshly buried coffins because there are still things to say about immigrants and climate change. Commentary settling in a thick haze over the planet, with the formic acid smell of a billion ants. But in another way I’ve always found talkback dispiriting. Like being cursed to hear other people’s inner monologues forever, no room left to ask a question, no room for uncertainty, no room to try out your story, no room to let a fact settle and take root before someone’s trying to pull it up and figure out if it can be eaten.

I know this conclusion wasn’t unexpected. Happy new year anyway. On New Year’s Eve I was the person shoving earplugs in my ears at 11pm to block out the fireworks.

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Just clearing the energy here

This morning I hurt my hand from punching a wall. My upstairs neighbours have been noisy – stomping and crashing – and I feel like I’m coming a bit unstuck. I could have punched a pillow, but no – it was a wall or nothing! My neighbours must think I’m insane. So I am finally starting to look for somewhere else to live.

I wish I could make something better out of the fact that I hurt my hand punching a wall. I wish I could call it art. But no. It was very ordinary and idiotic.

To try to calm myself down, I decided to go and get a massage. But I didn’t enjoy it because the whole time I was seething about my flat situation and my fool hand.

I started thinking about all the times I’ve laid on massage tables. I wondered why it was that I’d started going to see massage therapists in the first place. There is something inherently silly about massage. (I wish there was a different word for it, too. ‘Massage’ is now too loaded with Weinsteinian tones. ‘Rub-down’ is worse, and ‘manipulation’ or ‘palpation’ sound too medical.) The silliness seems to come from the way that someone is touching your near-naked body with warmth and tenderness but in an essentially therapeutic, totally non-erotic way, often in silence or while asking about your weekend plans. It takes a while to get past the silliness. At the same time massage is deadly serious, because of the intense focus on the body and the ways in which it’s disintegrating, and the knowledge that this practice has been going on for millennia. Your animal body, one in an infinitely long line of animal bodies. Alongside the physical specificity of it, there’s something abstract about the process – maybe the hope that you’ll just ‘feel better’, that being touched will relieve you of whatever dread or worry you have, for a few moments. It’s a hope of being comforted, which must be the oldest hope we have when receiving physical touch.

The first massage I ever had was after the Christmas rush one year when I was working in retail. I was strung out and over-peopled and my legs hurt. I decided to book in, for a treat, to a cheap place. The massage seemed okay, but then every so often the therapist, a soft-voiced spiritual man in shorts, would raise his hands and start sweeping them back and forth through the air above me. ‘Just clearing the energy here,’ he’d say apologetically. It didn’t feel like anything, though it seemed like the air was getting a nice massage. Over the next few years I’d go back every so often and have my air massaged. I don’t know why it took me so long to realise that it was bogus – or something that helped only if you truly believed in it – and there was something soothing and lovely about the experience anyway, lying in a darkish cocoon with a bit of oil on, like some veg under a grill. So even though I didn’t believe in the energy-clearing stuff, and it was even a bit tedious, I really liked the feeling of being outside of time. It was a feeling that – a bit like after a daytime movie – when I emerged back into daylight, something would have changed. Not just something, but everything. I could’ve taken a nap instead of paying the thirty-five dollars. But there was also something about offering all your issues up and then leaving someone else to it. Like those people who pay storage experts to come into their homes and throw everything into bin bags. Then the people come back in and start accumulating crap again. Massage is a bit like that.

I loved having my arms and head stroked when I was little, by my mum as she watched Coronation Street; I would become stupid with pleasure. Maybe a massage rekindled that same feeling of safety, and of gleaning little bits of comfort from someone, like a tree that ends up covered in bits of wool after an itchy sheep has visited.

‘We see our skins as hides hung around our inner life, when, in so many ways, they are the inner life, pushed outside,’ Adam Gopnik wrote in a piece about the science of touch, and I’ve always felt that to be true – being stroked in a loving way made me feel much calmer and happier. Gopnik says the skin is basically like living inside a really tall eye or a big ear. But touch is the first sense you develop as a human. And maybe it is more immediately central to our emotional lives. The neuroscientist David Linden writes in his book Touch that there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ touch sensation: ‘by the time we have perceived a touch, it has been blended with other sensory input’ that tells us what it means: whether the touch is soothing, distressing, playful, reassuring. I hadn’t thought about that before but of course it’s true.

I started trying to get massages whenever I could. These early massages showed me where all my bad spots were – you could tell they were bad if the therapist kept going back to them – and the more conscious I became of my bad spots, the more massages I wanted to get. Rather than just going around ignoring my body, like in airplane mode, the whole thing was starting to reveal itself as a more complex operation. I got my glutes elbowed in brightly lit studios with Easy Listening up loud and the therapist telling me all about his triathlon training; reflexology massages where a young woman pointed to a wall chart and said the reason the arch of my foot was sore was because of my sluggish digestion; massages where my face was stroked intently with a piece of stone; massages where I had fingers shoved in my armpits; massages where I was asked to visualise my feet being bathed in a healing yellow light; a stomach massage in which I thought I could *feel the shape* of my intestines; massages that were so painful I saw stars and heard bells ring; massages where I hated the background music so much that I came out more bunched up than when I went in; massages that were so pleasurable that each of my cells seemed to wake up and I felt like a beautiful glowing exotic snail. Context is everything with massage (and all touch): if anyone but a massage therapist touched me in these specific, problem-solving ways, it would be weird(er).

Most of the therapists I met had worked in different jobs – physio, yoga, nutrition, teaching, even law – before getting into massage therapy. One woman played in a death metal band. One guy had all of his marathon times printed out and stickered to the wall so as you climbed the stairwell into his studio you passed all of his progressively shorter times, and motivational slogans, then at the top was his goal – a sub-2.5-hour time. He was the only massage therapist I’ve met who had no sense of humour. My favourite therapist was a young sporty woman who also struggled with anxiety so we talked about things that helped. We both rode bikes and hated a strong northerly wind and were both always trying to give up coffee. She also gave incredibly painful massages. Have you ever had your adductors massaged? It’s like stingrays; do not approach and you’ll be okay.

At this time I asserted that a massage was only truly good if it was painful. ‘The good pain,’ I would say to friends, and announce proudly that I’d almost blacked out. These painful massages were always ‘sports massages’, where you were trying to loosen up whatever poor muscle you’d ravaged by lifting too-heavy weights or running too far or just sitting at your desk. It was always strictly unnecessary to have done this damage to yourself – but on a sports massage table, whatever you’d done to yourself was deemed necessary (it’s sports!) and the pain, therefore, was necessary. I went through several sports massage therapists who started out giving me the level of pain I needed; gradually they came to seem too soft, so I would move on to a tougher, sportier therapist until I outgrew them too. If you didn’t bruise – pointless! If afterwards you didn’t walk around feeling completely out of it, like you were made up of all of those little dots collected by a holepunch, and if you didn’t lurch around insisting ‘I needed that’, then you might as well have just poured a bag of autumn leaves over yourself.

Pain meant progress was being made. On the other side of pain would be relief. Maybe pain meant that the heaviness and immobility that I felt in myself were also being worked out and would eventually resolve. Pain provided a compelling temporary focus. I also liked the idea of being a person who could bear a lot of pain. At my high school anyone who’d subjected themselves to pain – usually just by wearing shorts all through winter – was ‘hard’. I thought of myself as ‘hard’, like a plant that can grow in a salty environment.

I think through all of this massaging I was in pursuit of ‘the release’. Everyone has heard about someone who had a massage and ended up sobbing on the table, maybe even vomiting, after the touch ‘released’ something in them. Something had ‘come up’, and now needed to be ‘let go’. I was hoping the release would happen to me, but it never did. There’s a bit in Tao Lin’s story ‘Cull the Steel Heart …’ from his collection Bed where a character named Colin is described as having a metal rod inside him:

The rod went from his stomach to the middle of his head. It was made of steel and sugar, and had been dissolving inside of Colin for ten or fifteen years, slow and sweet, above and behind his tongue; and he could taste it in that way, like an aftertaste, removed and seeping and outside of the mouth. Sometimes he’d glimpse it with the black, numb backs of his eyes. But what he really wanted was to wrench it out. Cut it up and chew it. Or melt it. Bathe in the hard, sweet lava of it.

Maybe everyone has some kind of inner object, not necessarily a rod-like one. Maybe there is a great variety of objects. I feel something quite heavy and functionless in me, like a kettlebell or a cast-iron frying pan with the bottom burnt out of it. And I wanted it to be released. At the end of that Tao Lin story there’s a weird and beautiful moment that almost seems like a release, for Colin: ‘And every once in a while he would catch himself smiling and laughing a little, and it was those moments right after – as, having lapsed into a fantasy, there was a correction, a moment of nothing and then a loose and sudden rush, back into the real world in a trick of escape, as if to some new place of possibilities – that he felt at once, and with clarity, most exhilarated, appreciative, disappointed, and accepting.’

The closest I came to ‘the release’ was a few months ago, but it wasn’t the vomiting on the table sort, and I’m not sure if it had anything to do with the massage. One night, after getting my head and shoulders and arms rubbed, I fell asleep early and woke up at about two in the morning with a feeling that was on a knife edge between clarity and utter panic. It was a certainty that I needed to change something in my life, and the fear of what that certainty meant. It was just like the last line of that famous Raymond Carver story: ‘My life is going to change. I feel it.’ (I can’t help but read that line as comical even though it’s supposed to be momentous.) I lay awake for ages with my arms over the covers and my eyes wide open and I had a sense of myself as being like a bat, hanging into space, heart pounding, listening and listening for a sign of what to do.

And in the last few months, my pain threshold has gone right down. I’m no longer ‘hard’ but am soft and squishy. I wouldn’t even be able to wear shorts all through winter. In my massage this morning I realised halfway through with embarrassment that the head hole – the bit in the table where you put your head – was damp with tears and snot bubbles. And it wasn’t even a painful massage! It was a very average, swooshy one, like skywriting that disperses straight away. It’s just that my hand hurt and I was sick of myself. But bodies change. My hand will heal. I’ll harden up again and punch the wall again. Or not. If I don’t I’ll still be changing, still seeking new things to punch and new ways to be comforted.

 

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