The Feel of Steel (16 page)

At dawn I meet J. in the sandy courtyard. She says, ‘I'm absolutely desolate. I hardly slept. In the night I thought, “I could just stand up and put my head among those fan blades”.'

We exchange haggard looks.

I whisper, ‘Wanna throw in the towel?'

A pause. She sets her jaw. ‘No.'

We trudge to the detox counter.

‘Gee, I feel cranky,' I mutter to Henri (pronounced Ahn
ree
), a cheery American know-it-all in his sixties with grey curly hair and faded tattoos, who has famously
been on the road for the last seventeen years, carrying only a light rucksack and managing his investments from internet cafes.

‘Ah,' he says, twinkling his eyes wisely, ‘if you'd done a cleanse as many times as I have, you'd know to expect this. It's just the toxins coming out.'

Toxins, shmoxins. What
is
a bloody toxin, anyhow? I stump away to the restaurant and sneak a big carrot juice. Jackie, an investment banker from London, tells me the horrid huck-haaaah creature of the night is ‘probably some sort of lizard'. Yeah, right.

Henri joins the table of fasters. In three minutes flat he has skilfully derailed our bowel-centred conversation and is presenting his credentials as a sage. These stem from his glory days as a hippy, which must be as remote to his audience of young American backpackers as is the Civil War: ‘Back in the sixties, my former wife and I, we bought a Winnebago! We drove right across the United States – visiting communes!'

When he leaves the table for his massage I expect us all to dive back into coarse boasting about our heroic feats of self-purification; but a deferential silence falls, then one of the Americans – the one I have until this moment liked best, a cute version of George Costanza – sighs and says, ‘Isn't Henri great? I really respect his
nomadship
.'

J. reports having seen Madame Mysterioso out in the courtyard the night before, ‘doing a sort of
dance
. With bells on her feet. If I'd had a gun I would have blown her away. She's to me what the narcissist in the loin-cloth is to you.' Grimly we fantasise a sten gun swivel-mounted
on the verandah rail, and begin
sotto voce
to draw up a list. Sorry, Henri, but you're on it.

After what would have been lunch, J. and I nick across the road and through a coconut grove to a flasher, newer resort. Oh, an oasis of luxury. It has lawns. It has glass tables. It has alternating blue and green tiles. But even as we relax, guiltily, in the perfumed elegance of its sofa cushions, we experience a pang of loyalty to our battling old outfit down below, with its chipped bathrooms, its hard-labouring Thais – most of whom could afford these treatments only by winning the lottery – its spacy rationale, its credulous spirituality, its crackpot theories – and its dim little cabins full of westerners pumping filtered water into their bowels and then studying, theorising about, marvelling at and saying a jubilant farewell to the muck that comes out. We slip our thongs on and scurry home.

Day Seven:
How slowly, slowly, in a blur of detox, capsules and colemas, each day passes! The thick drinks and distasteful capsules I force down with a shudder, but I must admit that I like the colemas. I like them quite a lot. J. entertains herself during hers by listening to talking books on a Walkman, but I love just lying there in the cool, staring up at the criss-cross weave of the ceiling and listening to sounds drifting in from the world: cars and scooters on the road, someone scrubbing, water trickling,
a breeze rattling in palm fronds, a Thai voice raised in sharp chatter. Birds chirp in their business-like way.

This dreamy pleasure can only be infantile – the body's memory of lying swaddled in the cot, long, long before toilet-training, and being languorously aware of one's bowels, sensing their fullness without guilt or anxiety, and being allowed to let go.

After each colema I take a shower, curl up on my bed for a while, then dress and stroll out to the beach. It's a plain, beautiful curve, shaded by palms and visited by high-prowed fishing boats. A steady, pleasant breeze blows across it, always from the same direction. In the distance comes and goes a line of mountains, faint as a mirage.

And yet the regime is a strain, an assault. Nothing here is imposed. There is no big stick. You have to find the discipline within yourself. Fasters greet each other with nods, and sit in a stunned row on palm-shaded deck-chairs outside the restaurant. The non-fasting Spa guests, of whom there are plenty, look up from their plates of exquisite tropical food and stare at us with awe – or is it merely pity? My emotional state lurches between rapture and dejection. Fresh revelations of the obvious (‘Time passes! Youth does not last! Life is short!') strike me the crushing blows familiar from long-ago acid trips. Somehow, though, one emerges from sloughs of despond, and slogs on.

There are three sets of rusty scales at the Spa. Even the management jokes about their unreliability. A charming young Bostonian couple
on their honeymoon
, who have
been fasting and cleansing for ten days, are collectively two stone lighter. J. is crestfallen that she has lost only one kilo. She gets on her mobile to a gym bunny in Sydney, who reassures her: ‘It's all fluid, darling! It'll drop off when you come home!' I, catastrophically, seem to have lost weight only from where I most need to keep it: my face.

But you can see a change in people's eyes and skin: clarity, freshness, brightness. To look at the face of the Gallstone Legend from San Diego, on day thirteen of his cleanse and still counting, is to behold the pure, sensitive lineaments of boyhood.

Day Eight:
Today we are to break our fast. We are advised to eat, that first incredulous afternoon, ‘only' a plate of sliced papaya. How gluttonous it seems, to approach that pile of glistening orangey-pink slivers! When the moment comes, we pick up our spoons with a strange dreaminess, reluctant to break the spell. And yes, it does taste good, and feels even better – but there's a kind of disappointment in it, too. Now everything will become ordinary again. The days will be divided by those weird social events called meals. We could have salads this evening, or soups. But, still in love with our self-discipline, we pick at the delicious food without appetite.

I play Scrabble by candle-light with a new arrival, a green-eyed boy from Long Island. He is ambitious and
beats me hands down. In my vagueness I let the candle burn to a stump and set fire to the edge of his plastic board. He cannot conceal his annoyance, but this new, purified me smiles at him, maddeningly no doubt, out of the deep well of my tranquillity. Secretly I long to have become a fanatic like San Diego Man and fasted for, like,
ever
.

Day Nine:
Departure time approaches and we all become light-headed, hilarious. I find myself fooling and laughing with people I've wanted to gun down in the throes of our ordeal (though nothing can redeem Narcissus in his nappy). Jackie, the young London banker whose sly wit has reprieved several nincompoops from our firing squad, remarks happily, ‘I feel as if my personality's come back, since I started eating again.'

That's it exactly, and it's happening all around us. Have I lost it completely, or has the moustachio'd bore metamorphosed into a wit, the MASH addict revealed a passion for Henry James, the prune-lipped divorcee begun to weep for joy in a deckchair, the neurotic Jewish mother at last turned off her mobile? Nothing but euphoria, wherever I turn.

Late that day I sit under a palm tree and watch Madame Mysterioso, her fake plaits flopping on to her shoulders, emerge shining from a swim in the sea and walk slowly back to her towel. She lies on her back, rests
a moment, then raises both knees and rolls her back right over like a hedgehog's, till her knees are touching the sand behind her shoulders. The knobs of her curved spine gleam in the low sun. She is so slender, so relaxed, her muscles so delicately and firmly defined, her posture so beautiful, that I find myself contemplating her, for the first time, with something like respect.

Baby Coughs

F
irst, the baby was born. Then everybody became ecstatic.

When they brought her home two days later, the house overflowed with a new kind of air. People came in cars and on foot to adore her. Small crowds of visitors fell naturally into the configurations of religious paintings. The women pushed their faces in close, to smell skin. The men stood further back with their arms folded, smiling, talking quietly among themselves, but always with their bodies turned towards mother and child. The father's school friend struggled in carrying, in a pot, the Greek tree that she was named after. It was found that one bottle can supply enough champagne for nine people to toast a baby.

She took the breast. Milk flowed. The father cooked and served. The nanna washed dishes and clothes. The
granny got down on hands and knees and went at the kitchen lino. It was early in a Melbourne winter. The extended family hummed like a well-cranked top. The heart-broken old blue heeler slunk with impunity on to a forbidden rug, and rested her muzzle on her crossed front paws.

Two weeks passed in peaceable veneration. Everything about the baby was a perfect glory. Her hairline. Her orange poo. Her squashed right ear. Her long fingers. Her very small cough. ‘Like a bark!' said someone fondly. One cough at a time, maybe once a day. Bark! through stiffened pink lips. Then twice a day. Two at a time. Then three, then more.

And then one day when she coughed she didn't stop. Everyone rushed to the sofa. The mother held her folded forward like a tiny choking koala. Out, out, out went bark after bark after bark, and not a single breath came in. Her eyes screwed shut and disappeared. Her face went red, then royal purple, then greyish-blue. Before their eyes she shrank, intensified. At last she got to the bottom of it and a harsh thread of air sucked itself into her with a noise like a hammy actor dying. The man from along the street said, ‘You take that kid to hospital.'

Whatever she had was very infectious. They put her in an isolation unit on the fifth floor, with her mother beside her on a fold-out couch; and every hour or so, for five days, the baby coughed and went blue and fought for breath. They even clapped a weeny little oxygen mask on to her. After each paroxysm, nasty pale sticky foam coated her lips and she sank into an exhausted sleep.

They pushed a tube down through her nose and sucked muck out of her. They got some blood out of her tiny sausage of an arm. The tests were ‘inconclusive'. Whooping cough? Her parents weren't even sure how to pronounce it. Isn't it a disease of the olden days? Hasn't it been wiped out, like polio? It's coming back, said a nurse. I've seen this whole side of the thoracic ward – nothing but babies with whooping cough.

The baby coughed, the mother coughed, even the nanna coughed, but the father stayed healthy, which was just as well since attending mothers don't get fed: he was bringing in three meals a day. By the time the baby left hospital, she was three weeks old and a different, darker, more serious person. The nanna crept home and stayed in bed for a fortnight, choking and gasping, her tear ducts spouting water and the whole front of her torso in spasms.

And once they started telling people about it, they heard that whooping cough is indeed cropping up all over the place. The baby's uncle had it at fourteen. An academic in Newcastle at forty-two. Somebody's eighty-year-old mother up in Woy Woy (she swore by Bonnington's Irish Moss). The baby's great-grandfather, from the Mallee, thought he felt it coming on, but claimed to have kept it at bay by frequent garglings with Listerine. It got to the point where one of the nanna's friends told her that she'd heard you can immunise a baby against whooping cough
with garlic
. Gradually it all started to seem less terrible – more ordinary – almost as if they had overreacted.

But the fright was real. And the nanna had missed three weeks of the new life. She missed the baby and the baby's parents, and the work she'd been doing around their house, and the privilege of spending hours of each day holding her grand-daughter in her arms, watching the waves of expression sweep and falter and resolve over her pure face.