The Feel of Steel (14 page)

A Spy in the House of Excrement

I
recall the precise moment at which I resolved to go to the Spa Resort on Koh Samui, in the Gulf of Thailand, and to subject myself to its famous Cleanse and Fast regime. A friend who had survived it told me that the cleansers and fasters sit about for hours at bare tables, comparing notes in shameless detail on the substances which the gruelling regime causes to issue from their bowels. I was ready to pack my bags, even before she added that one young woman had passed
a small plastic doll
, which her mother told her she'd swallowed in early childhood. This was the detail that decided me to become a spy in the house of excrement.

If you are squeamish, bail out now. Read a cook book instead. No hard feelings. But before you go, consider this piece of graffiti, written above the toilet in a Paris restaurant:

C'est ici que tombent en ruines
Les grands ched'oeuvre de la cuisine.

It's raining when my scientific friend J. and I take a clapped-out taxi from Koh Samui airport to the Spa Resort. On the way everything looks desperate and squalid. Mangy curs scrounge in roadside bins. This is not what we had in mind. We heave our wheeled suitcases out of the boot, and drag them through puddles and wet sand to reception. A scattering of vagued-out New Agers are loafing about in an open-sided, cement-floored restaurant. Beyond it a beach, angled palms, a flat sea.

My bungalow with its tiny porch and louvres at first glance seems dark, even primitive. Wonky little fluoro lights are set here and there but only the bedlamp works. In the bathroom, tiles are chipped, window frames softly rotting. The bed, however, with crisp white sheets drawn tight and knotted at the corners, is firm as a board. I drag out my feather pillow from home and plump it up. Next door J. is washing her hands: the water from her basin pours straight out of an open pipe on to the bare dirt under her window. I lie down feebly under the ceiling fan.

At four o'clock all new fasters are invited into a dark library, clogged with large items of furniture and a shelf of execrable paperbacks. By means of a video (and later a more graphic personal demonstration) Buzz, the
Australian mentor of the program, tries his best to explain how one self-administers the two daily enemas or ‘colemas' which are an essential part of the cleanse and fast regime.

Everything he says bewilders and appalls me. That huge
bucket
? I have to pump its entire contents into my
colon
? But what is this colema board on which you lie in your bathroom? Where do you put your bum? Which way does your head point?

‘Be creative!' says Buzz, earnestly friendly with his big bony nose, dazzling eye-whites and toned bare shoulders. ‘If you want to put your legs up in the air, go for it! You might like to meditate, or call on your guardian angel, if you've got one.'

If I had one, she would be airlifting me out of here right this minute.

Buzz leads us into a cement enclosure where a Thai woman is preparing the afternoon's colemas for a small, dreamily milling crowd of fasters in sarongs. With a composed, mysterious smile she ladles boiling water out of a gas-heated vat into numbered clear plastic buckets, and mixes into it a dark fluid – coffee – then adds a spoon or two of cider vinegar.
Youch
. What if I perforate my bowel, poison myself, introduce a bug I'll never get rid of? Ruin completely what remains of my battered old body?

‘Let's go out later,' hisses J., ‘and buy some Dettol.'

We spend the eve of our fast at a table overlooking the smooth water (the rain has stopped) and perusing
Cleanse and Purify Thyself
, a brick-sized, often incoherent, and
bizarrely Christian harangue by a Dr Richard Anderson N.D., N.M.D., from whose theories the spa regime draws its inspiration and its authority. According to him, the traditional North American meat-eater's acidic diet causes the body to secrete a substance called
mucoid plaque
. This lines the intestine, combines with other elements and hardens into toxin-holding layers. For good health, he argues, this plaque must be periodically scoured off.

Dr Anderson's book features hair-raising photos of the mucoid plaque passed by his acolytes. He himself has spent time hiking in the High Sierras with a friend, eating only salads of the raw herbs they find growing there, and carefully measuring the long strings of mucoid plaque they pass. I keep cracking up as I read, he's so fixated and grandiose, with his claims to be in possession of a revolutionary new truth; but while his theories make me glaze over, I am gripped by the photos, his anecdotes, and letters sent to him by his grateful followers: ‘I could not believe the filth and slime that came out! And so much of it! Where does it all come from?
Amazing!
'

Day One:
Surprisingly, I sleep deep and still. Early next morning we are given a tiny strip of blotter to lick – a pH test. Mine goes green. This qualifies me to do the fast but no one seems particularly interested. A questionnaire handed out on our arrival is never mentioned again or
checked by anyone. (How annoying. I love filling out forms. One of the questions is ‘When was the last time you had an orgasm?') We are repeatedly told that our health is our own responsibility, that the Spa management ‘do not profess to be medical authorities or advisors'. I note the furrowed brow of a Frenchwoman, who whispers to me that she has done a cleanse several times in her country where, however, things are more . . .
supervised
.

J. and I have signed on for seven days. The regime goes like this. Five times a day, you gulp down a thick ‘detox drink' of fruit juice, psyllium and bentonite clay. (All I know about bentonite is that Australian farmers throw it into leaking or algae-infested dams. But I have read T. Coraghessan Boyle's satirical novel
The Road to Wellville
, in which a doctor explains that ‘psyllium . . . is hydroscopic; . . . it absorbs water and will expand in your stomach, scouring you out as it passes through you just as surely as if a tiny army of janitors were down there equipped with tiny scrub brushes . . . Like eating a broom – but that broom will sweep you clean.')

The gluggy doses are staggered with three-hourly handfuls of six capsules: three herbal supplements, and three ‘chompers' or ‘intestinal cleansers'. Each evening you take a Flora Grow capsule, to re-equip the scoured intestine with friendly bacteria. You are so sodden with fluids that you are never hungry.

And twice a day you collect your numbered bucket of fluid and retire to your private bathroom. You hang the bucket from a rusty wire hook in the ceiling over the toilet. You take off all your clothes (this can get messy).
You lay your four-foot-long colema board down flat, resting the holed end of it over the toilet and balancing the other end on a low plastic stool.

You give a quick suck – as if stealing petrol – to the long plastic tube that drops from the high bucket, and when the fluid starts to flow, you block it off with a large rusty bulldog clip provided, while you get settled on the board. You lie on your back with your knees bent and your bottom over the hole. Your ‘personal colema tip', like a tiny sprinkler that fits on to the end of the long tube, you anoint with KY jelly; then you slide it a little way into your rectum, lie back on the board, release the bulldog clip, and let warm water from the bucket flow into your lower intestine.

You hold your anal sphincter closed for as long as you can tolerate the steadily growing sensation of fullness, then clamp off the tube again and gently massage your abdomen with your fingertips. Then you relax your sphincter. And into the toilet slithers a luke-warm gush of . . . we'll get to that in a minute.

Many westerners have bad memories of enemas. As children we were given them for threadworms. Women of my generation going into labour, thirty years ago in a public hospital, were first shaved, then given a rough and hasty enema: an experience sorely humiliating. Yet in alternative healing circles, colonic irrigation has always
been popular. Indeed, the practice has a long and chequered history, probably in every culture. Not the least of this is erotic. Upper-class British boys of earlier times, whose colons were briskly washed out by beloved nannies, felt the thrill of it; and Victorian prostitutes would number enemas among their professional services.

Dr ‘Rich' Anderson, whether he's aware of it or not, stands in a long tradition of almost Manichean loathing of the putrefying inner caverns of the human body. His diatribe echoes inarticulately the angst of the great eighteenth-century Irish satirist and cleric Jonathan Swift:
‘But Celia, Celia, Celia shits.'