Anne, when assessing injury in her client, touch is way to ‘see’ into the muscles and joints. The knowledge she gains through palpating the tissue beneath the skin allows her to gauge where there’s inflammation or a build up of fluid, or where the muscle is in spasm.
At one point, Anne leans across the table to take my hand, ‘Can I touch you?’ she asks, and I give permission. She holds my hand lightly in hers, her fingers moving in small circles over the place where the skin lies close to the bones, uncushioned by a layer of fat. The contact is sure, deft, and professional, as she demonstrates the light pressure that is required to encourage lymphatic drainage. At her assured touch, I find myself responding. It is immediate; Anne’s touch is at once reassuring and pleasant. I feel like a cat that finds itself unexpectedly, yet pleasantly, scratched behind the ears.
Despite her clinical approach, Anne concedes that there is often an exchange of energy between a masseur and the person being massaged. This exchange can go either way and sometimes, she says, there are clients who emanate a negative or malevolent charge, and ‘you have to protect yourself against that’. Other times, she says, before she begins a massage, she will feel tired and depleted, but by the end of the hour she’ll be energised. Something has happened in the time she has had her hands on the skin that has revitalised both her and her client.
No matter who it is on the table before her, there is always an undercurrent of a sexual or cultural nature, she says. Teenage boys, prickly and full of juice, are an interesting challenge as clients. Anne tries to overcome any awkwardness brought on by their partial disrobing and her hands on their skin by talking to them like an aunt’. If they have an iPod, she asks them about the music they’re listening to; if it’s a sports injury that they’ve come to see her about, then she’ll talk to them about the sport they play.
For some, she says, she feels like a hairdresser, in that they talk to her about their families, their work, and the other matters that have filled their day. For other clients, with injuries requiring painful manipulation, she imagines they view coming to see her like a visit to the dentist. She does concede, though, that the release of adrenaline and endorphins that a massage can give, even though there may be a degree of pain, can be pleasurable. And at the memory of her fleeting touch on my skin, I don’t imagine a massage from Anne would be all bad.
Towards the end of our chat, Anne mentions a ‘skin hunger’ that she has noticed, mainly in her older clients. Perhaps they have found themselves single after a divorce or the death of a partner, or it maybe they simply don’t touch their partner much any more. Often, she finds, they will spontaneously tell her that it feels good to be touched, but more frequently she is simply aware that the feel of hands on their skin is something that they have been craving. An image of Carol sitting beside her elderly father in his bed in the nursing home comes to mind. I see her with her weight comfortably pressed against his body and her hands stroking his arm.
What are the rules for professional touch? In the massage suite, there are the discretions of the averted gaze and the carefully placed towel that shields areas of the unclothed body that are not being massaged.
In a conversation with Jenny Webb, whose career as a masseuse, myotherapist, and a teacher of both, spans almost 20 years, she tells me that she advises her students that any time they touch a client it must be for a professional purpose. For instance, she warns them against leaving one hand ‘resting’ on the client’s body while the other is reaching for a bottle of oil. She, too, finds that the enforced intimacy between masseuse and their client often triggers a confessional atmosphere that sees the one on the table revealing more than perhaps she wants to hear: ‘Some people feel really strange lying on a table, getting touched by someone they don’t know and not talking to them.’
This situation, two people together in a room, one of them at least partially naked and the other with their hands on their skin, can create an atmosphere of familiarity that is partially misplaced. Jenny maintains a professional distance by not discouraging her client to speak, but by limiting her own responses and engagement with her clients’ conversation. Of course, there are other clients, and I am one of these, who feel no compunction to speak, but submit to the professional touch in silence.
Silence or not, Jenny, like Anne, acknowledges that a transference of energy can happen when skin meets skin: ‘I know sometimes when I’ve had a bad day, I’ve got to stop myself mentally before I go in, not to take that with me. Who knows whether it comes out through the hands or not.’
Another thing Jenny does, in a small ritual of self-protection, is shake out her hands at the end of a massage, so that, metaphorically at least, she is shedding any stress that has jumped from their body to hers through the sensitive, permeable membrane of the skin.
I ask Jenny how she chose massage as her career, and she recalls, as a child, rubbing her mother’s shoulders or brushing her hair. Her father was a sportsman, and the healing and therapeutic aspects of touch were embraced by her family. She remembers her grandmother’s hands, the skin of her palms and fingers roughened by gardening, drawing circles on her back to put her to sleep. It was a ritual of her childhood, and the contract was 100 strokes of her grandmother’s hand as Jenny lay in her bed.
Her eyes close for a moment and her head falls to the side as she remembers the sensation. ‘I can still feel it,’ she says, ‘I want my 100 back rubs every night, please.’
Touch, of course, is not always a positive experience. Violence and sexual assault leave their own reverberations in the victim, and perhaps in the perpetrator.
Over the last few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the extent of sexual abuse of children. Children who have been sexually abused may become confused about the difference between abusive and caring touch, and who would be surprised at this? When touch can be about what someone wants from you, a transaction where you end up with less than nothing; where the feel of someone’s skin against your own can rob you of something intangible and make you suspicious of anyone who puts their hand upon your arm, the world must seem a treacherous and uncertain place.
How easy must it be for such a child to come to regard touch as tool to coerce and control, or as a means to achieve closeness, irrespective of the nature of the relationship? If the skin has its own memory, can the experience of such a betrayal of trust ever be sloughed from their skin as time passes, rubbed away by the love of their family and their own resilience, or does it remain embedded in their skin forever?
Melting Pot: the colour of skin
‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’
—Martin Luther King, 1963
WHEN THE 2000 SYDNEY OLYMPIC GAMES were on, our family watched a lot of the swimming competition on TV My eldest son, who was about three years old at the time, was fascinated with the obvious physical differences between the swimmers, and would often ask of any swimmer who wasn’t white, ‘Where are they from?’
By the time the finals of the various swimming events were reached, almost all the non-Caucasian swimmers were Japanese, and we answered accordingly. Somehow, over the weeks that we watched the Olympics, my son came to assume that anyone who looked racially different from himself was, by default, Japanese.
‘Is he Japanese?’ he’d ask in his clear, chiming voice, pointing at the tall, young man with ebony skin and black curly hair busily packing supermarket shelves as we wheeled our trolley past. ‘Is she Japanese?’ again with extended index finger and bell-like tone as a sari-clad woman with honey-coloured skin climbed aboard the tram.
I
