Читать книгу Original Skin - Maryrose Cuskelly - Страница 7
ОглавлениеTouch Me
‘She reminded him of the pleasure of being scratched, her fingernails in circles raking his back.’
—The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
THE SKIN has a memory all of its own.
‘I remember that touch,’ a lover once said to me, recalling the first time I laid my hand on his arm. That small contact, weeks after we had first met, was enough to prompt him to ask me out. Some 18 years later, I still remember it, too, and can see the scene played out in the dingy foyer of the community theatre where I was performing in a play: the liverish red of the foyer walls, steam rising from the tea urn, a cluster of audience members and my cast mates chatting after the show.
‘You were good,’ he says to me, ‘which was a relief, because I didn’t know what I’d say to you if you weren’t.’ I laugh at his honesty and, made brave by the compliment, reach out, the fingertips of my right hand brushing his left elbow It is enough to confirm the flick of sexual attraction between us. It’s what I intended to convey when I extended my hand in that first crucial touch that seared itself into both our skins.
APART FROM ITS MOST obvious purpose—keeping the body whole and integrated—the skin’s primary function is that of a sense organ. It is here, in the pliable, vulnerable, elastic skin, that our sense of touch is located. Known as the mother of all our senses, touch is the first to develop and the last to leave us. While our other senses—sight, smell, taste, and hearing—are located in discrete organs, touch is dispersed throughout the surface of our body in the skin.
When we distrust what our other senses are telling us, it is touch that we ultimately rely on to verify our experiences. That lingerie may look beautiful, but only when it is against your skin will you be able to verify whether it is silk. You may hear your beloved’s professions of love over the telephone, but until he is in your arms you will be not be completely reassured that it is to you he is still devoted. Despite clearly remembering that I put my passport in my bag, as I approach the immigration counter at the airport I repeatedly search it out with my fingertips to reassure myself that I have not forgotten it.
RIDING INTO THE CITY on my bicycle, a light, feathery sensation alerts me to something brushing against the back of my right hand. I glance down in response to where my grip encircles the handlebar. Before I even fully register what has caused the nerve endings in my skin to alert my brain to something foreign touching me, I flick off a large huntsman spider skittering across the back of my hand. I gasp, and an expletive rushes out as my sharp intake of breath reverses. The spider must have crawled into the hollow inside the handlebar, confident the small, dark place would be an ideal den. The vibrations travelling through the tyres and up through the metal frame of the bike had disturbed it.
My neck stiffens, the skin across my shoulders and down my back quivering as if the spider had run down my spine. Twenty minutes later, a vague itch in the exact spot where the spider had been keeps me glancing nervously at my hand.
TOUCH CAN BRING us back into our bodies in a way that our other senses do not. While breathing in the heady scent of an old-fashioned rose or taking in a panoramic view of the landscape tend to transport us, swelling the boundaries of our bodies to take in that which is beyond us, our sense of touch shrinks us back into ourselves. Stressing our inescapably corporeal existence, touch reminds us of our body’s borders more rapidly and completely than any of our other senses. Touch is impossible to escape: we can close our eyes, stuff silicon plugs into our ears, hold our nose, and refuse to eat, but our skin is always receiving signals, impossible to turn off.
So central to our lives is our sense of touch, so intrinsic is it to the way in which we experience the world, that we can barely conceive of a life without it. Loss of the other senses is easier to imagine. Most children play variations of Blind Man’s Bluff; earplugs can offer us some insight into a world without sound; and anyone who has endured a heavy cold knows what it’s like not to be able to smell—but a life without tactility? How would we know where we ended and where everything else began, if not for touch? Would it be possible to learn to navigate our body’s way in the physical environment without the information we glean through our skin?
Monitoring our bodies and our surroundings would be exponentially more difficult without our sense of touch. Thrown back on to our other senses to bridge the gap in our sensory arsenal, sight would become crucial in gauging the position of our bodies in any particular space. Grasping objects, judging the weather, navigating around potentially injurious surfaces—those with the capacity to cut, to burn, to bruise—would become exercises requiring immense concentration. If the lights suddenly went out when we were standing up, we would simply fall over, not being able to feel the ground beneath our feet.
Surely comfort would be much more difficult to give and to receive without touch? Not even sex would make sense. Yes, our lover’s beauty would still exist, as would the smell of their hair and the taste of their lips, but without touch I imagine sex reduced to a mechanical task undertaken purely to ensure the continuation of the species. It would be akin to having a shower in order to stay clean, but without the simple, sensual pleasure of warm water on skin.
The gratification we draw from eating would be radically diminished, too, with the texture of food a mystery to our lips, tongues, and fingers. Perhaps our sense of taste would become much more acute to compensate, and we would find that the fresh acidity of limes, the bite of a salt crystal on our tongues, or the sweetness contained in a teaspoon of honey would become even more piquant.
I don’t want to underestimate the power and the importance of our other senses, or to wish them away, yet I can only imagine what strange, constricted creatures we humans would have evolved to be without the ability to physically feel our environment. The trade-off for the release from physical pain would be a harsh price to pay for foregoing the kiss of wind on our skin, the subtle pleasure of clean sheets, or the shock of cold water on a hot summer’s day, not to mention the more obvious delights of the caress of a lover’s touch. It would be impossible to compile a complete catalogue of the sensual delights that would be denied us without our sense of touch, so varied, subtle, and enmeshed it is in our experience of being alive.
We only have to see an infant mouthing every object it can get its hands on to recognise the importance of touch in gaining information about the world. How would babies learn, when still too young to have language or to understand or interpret what they see? Without a sense of touch to immediately signal that they had injured themselves, for example, few would make it to adulthood with all their limbs intact. Surely, too, the moment when an infant becomes aware of its own skin—the boundary that they first become aware of through their sense of touch—sets the child on the road to the realisation that it is a separate entity: what is inside my skin is me, what is outside is not me.
As I wrote earlier, it was through my children’s skin that I first came to know them and, I imagine, how they came to know me.
I’m not sure why this was such a revelation to me. I assumed, I think, that I would look into their eyes and immediately know them as my own. In fact, my attachment to them began with the loveliness of their small bodies, rather than with a recognition of their spiritual selves or their emerging personalities. My impulse was to touch, stroke, and explore them to discover who these brand-new creatures were. In many ways, it was a similar impulse to that felt when we take a new lover.
By knowing their bodies, I came to know them. My sons’ enveloping skin was the initial interface between us. This running of my hands over their bodies, over their skin, was the beginning of a deep and abiding connection. I can’t help but think of the struggle I would have had to bond with my children if I had had no sense of touch.
I was reminded of the intensity of this connection when I asked a friend how things were going with her new baby. ‘We have a secret,’ she said of herself and the child, ‘we’re in love.’ I knew instantly what she meant, and could almost feel the rush of milk to my breasts that a baby’s searching mouth brings. Other physical sensations, the echoes of which will never completely evaporate, rippled through me: the regular tug-tug as a baby’s mouth locks onto the nipple and begins to suck; the flutter of little starfish hands either side of the breast; the feel of tiny fingers hooking into my mouth and, with the first urgency of hunger relieved, small hands wandering, patting my face.
This love affair with my children, and my delight in the perfection of their physical selves, their corporeality, has continued. They have reached an age where they are beginning to struggle against the close physical connection that I still long to have with them. But I remember well when they were young enough to allow me to hold them, to stroke them, to tell them how beautiful I found them, and their enveloping skin continues to enthral me.
Despite this intense bond, I remember being overwhelmed by the constant physical demands of having a new baby. For the first six weeks of his life, my first child had barely been out of my arms: I had bathed him, breastfed him, stroked him, slept with him; I had spent hours and hours touching him.
Once, after a marathon breastfeeding session when my baby would cry if he wasn’t attached to the nipple, I recall feeling as if I had this enormous parasite sucking the life out of me. My husband, sensing this—or rather, having it shrilly and tearfully conveyed to him—suggested I go out to a movie with a friend, leaving the baby with him. Not long after I left the house, I was aware of a vague, physical sense of loss. I wasn’t missing my child in my head or even in my heart—it was a relief to be away from him—but my skin had come to know his intimately, and that’s where this loss resided: in my very pores. My selfish heart had pushed my son aside momentarily but my skin remained faithful and would not forget him.
OUR LIPS, OUR TONGUES, and our fingertips are areas of skin densely crowded with nerve endings; as a result, they are especially sensitive. We use these parts of our bodies to explore and identify objects in our world.
Beneath the fingertips of someone who is blind, the raised dots of Braille characters transform themselves into words, instructions, stories. With touch, we can test if a cake is baked or the washing dry, and recognise the difference between leather and vinyl, silk and nylon.
A surgeon may rely partly on touch to tell healthy from diseased tissue, use her fingertips to find a wiry vein, or discern where one organ begins and another ends by the difference in texture.
Lips pressed to a child’s forehead will sense if he has a temperature. Even with our eyes closed, those same lips puckered in a kiss can recognise the difference between a nipple, a fingertip, or the end of a nose.
We explore objects with touch in a variety of ways that we may not even be aware of. Pick up an unfamiliar object now with your hand. Your fingers will immediately begin a series of actions to help you gain information about it. They will rub across the surface of the object to determine its texture—tracing its edges, finding where the surface dips and swoops, where it protrudes and recedes, its patterns and features. Pressing down upon the surface will allow you to gauge its hardness: is it malleable to the touch or does it remain unyielding to the pressure of your hand? How will you assess its temperature? Most likely, you will simply let your fingertips rest on its surface for a moment to gain this information. You might extend your hand, holding the object away from your body to gauge its weight, and then wrap your hand around it to discover more about its form and volume. To garner more precise knowledge of its shape, your fingers will trace the outline of the object.
THE SENSORY RECEPTORS in our skin are highly specific. Nerve endings only respond to particular stimuli: heat, cold, air movement, pain, pressure, vibration. When a specific sensory receptor is excited, a particular sensation is felt: a burn feels distinct from a scratch, a change in air pressure unlike a change in air temperature.
Chains of neurons connect nerve endings in our skin to the spinal cord or at the brain stem, and onto the cerebral cortex. Information derived from these sensory receptors in our skin travel along these chains. We can then respond accordingly and appropriately: scratching an itch, pulling away our hand from a sharp or hot object, slapping an insect.
Given the sensitivity of our skin, why aren’t we in a constant state of irritation at the persistent brush of fibres from our clothes, driven mad by the pressure of our feet on the ground as we walk around, or bowed under of the weight of the atmosphere bearing down on our shoulders? Mercifully, we are kept from the insanity of such unceasing stimulation by the fact that our touch sensors respond to changes in stimuli, and not to those that are ever-present.
Our sense of touch is able to alert us to information that extends beyond the mere physical banalities of temperature, texture, and atmospheric pressure. It offers us clues that hint at relatively intangible things, such as how others are feeling about us, their intentions, desires, attitudes—all can be discerned in a touch. Is the person grasping our hand trying to assert their dominance or communicate their submission? Are they demonstrating affection, support, solace, approval, or disgust? Our skin will tell us.
The pressure and duration of touch, in addition to where we are touched, can alarm, excite, irritate, warn, comfort, disgust, or seduce us. City dwellers regularly tolerate the press of flesh from unknown fellow commuters. Unfamiliar backs rest against hips, buttocks brush against the back of a stranger’s hand. But in the crowded space of at train a peak hour, it takes merely a slight increase of pressure, a subtle change in intensity where skin meets gaberdine or linen, to alert a woman that someone is taking advantage of the enforced proximity to experience a moment of unshared titillation. Even such a relatively minor example of unwelcome touch can make us feel violated.
Touch connects us all, literally. When we empathise with another’s pain or grief, share the excitement of our team winning the grand final, or the triumph of a successful business deal, we are moved to touch each other—a shake of hands, a pat on the shoulder, a quick hug. A friend’s eyes fill with tears as they recount a failed relationship, a moment of humiliation, or the death of a parent and, instinctively, we reach out to them. A child comes crying with a skinned knee, and we encircle them in our arms. Dejected team mates pat each other on the back after a loss, or wrestle each other on the ground in an orgy of self-congratulatory delight. These sometimes casual, fleeting, or impulsive connections affirm our place in the world, that we belong.
Psychologists and other observers of human interaction have long been aware that our touching behaviour is influenced by culture, gender, age, and the relationships between them. How we come to connect physically with others, skin to skin, even in the most perfunctory manner, is determined by a host of different factors that at a conscious level we may only be dimly aware of. Your boss might touch you briefly on the arm to gain your attention, but would you take the same liberty with her? A young man in Indonesia might walk along the street with his friend, their hands touching, but would young heterosexual men in Sydney do the same? A close female friend may drape her arm around your waist, but if she assumed the same liberty with your husband or partner how would you react?
Generally, we spend little time analysing the appropriate way to touch others. It is something that most of us know deep within our bones, and is based on learning that began the moment that we emerged from our mother’s body and—depending on the year and the circumstances of our birth—were either placed in her arms, held upside down and smacked on the bottom, or whisked away in the latexed hands of a professional for medical tests or intervention. Based on experience and observation built up over our formative years, we know without thinking how the layers of culture, age, intimacy, status, and gender dictate the appropriate way to touch another person.
Occasionally, though, the way we use touch may be more calculated: at the beginning of a business negotiation, how long will you clasp your colleague’s hand when you greet them? Will you grasp their elbow at the same time? To garner a friend’s allegiance in a fall-out with another crony, will you use touch to subtly underline the bond between you? As a lone woman in a roomful of men, will you decide to initiate a handshake in order to signal your determination to be taken seriously in the discussion about to take place?
‘I’M TOUCHED.’ We hear the phrase often when someone is trying to describe how a gesture or a word has moved them, directly connecting the realms of emotion and physical sensation. As a matter of course, we regularly use words with tactile overtones to describe our sentiments and moods: the prickle of irritation, the warmth of a smile, the sting of rejection, the weight of loneliness, the buzz of excitement. Anger is ‘hot’, kindness is ‘warm’, and to be ignored is to be ‘given the cold shoulder’. Given this linguistic link, would emotions still have the same power if we could not feel the physical world?
Without the ability to name and describe feelings in this tactile way, would emotion wash over us in a deluge of feeling devoid of the nuances that we can categorise so precisely: would anger feel the same as frustration, would sorrow be indistinguishable from ennui, passionate love similar to confusion? Perhaps we would wade through a porridge of feeling rather than dart among the sharply defined mosaic of emotions that we are accustomed to. Such puddles of ill-defined perception would make for much murkier interactions with our fellow humans, and negotiating even the closest of relationships would be a formidable challenge.
THE SKIN, it has been said, is the surface of the brain. Certainly, as anyone who endures an attack of hives or a sudden flare-up of eczema as a result of stress could tell you, the skin and the processes of the mind are not entirely separate.
In fact, there exists at a very fundamental level a link between our skin and our psyche. As the foetus develops in the womb, the skin and the central nervous system, which includes the brain, develop from the same ectodermal origins. The ectoderm is the outermost layer of the three primary layers of the embryo. From our very beginning, then, our mind and our skin are intertwined.
Given this connection on such a basic physiological level, it follows a certain logic that researchers in the field of touch have noted the benefits that massage can have on a variety of psychological disorders. Studies have found that regular massages improve the behaviour of children diagnosed with attentiondeficit /hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and make them feel happier. Massage can help girls with eating disorders develop less distorted body images and improve their eating habits. Other studies have suggested that the aggressive behaviour associated with boys may be due to them being touched less than girls.
American researcher Tiffany Field, director of the Touch Research Institutes at the University of Miami School of Medicine, has proposed that teenage sexual promiscuity and pregnancy are on the increase partly because young people rarely receive appropriate, positive touch from their teachers, sporting coaches, and other adults who shape and influence their lives.
We live within a climate that regards adults touching children with suspicion. Fear of being charged with sexual assault has resulted in teachers being instructed not to touch students, or only to do so within tightly prescribed guidelines. Maintaining concern about sexual abuse is entirely appropriate given the shameful revelation over recent years of systematic abuse of children within various institutions, including within religious and welfare organisations. But at what cost do we starve our young people of positive experiences of being touched?
We know that our bodies and our minds both suffer when we are denied touch. In 1990, after the fall of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, distressing images from Romanian orphanages flashed around the world. Stricken children, wizened and undersized, with empty, sunken eyes lay motionless in their cribs. Under-resourced and understaffed, these institutions struggled to care for the children living there. The children languished in their cribs, rarely touched. Their emaciated forms and lustreless eyes demonstrated, in the most graphic and heartbreaking way, the detrimental effects on growth and development of not being touched.
The images prompted a flood of offers to adopt the children abandoned in these orphanages, and many of them found their way to Western countries and new homes. Years later, most of these children were still physically smaller and developmentally delayed compared with other children their age.
CAROL NEWNHAM is a neuropsychologist who works in the Parent—Infant Research Institute at the Austin Hospital in Melbourne. Her work assists parents of preterm babies learn how to interact with their children to overcome the many barriers to their development that often exist. These barriers may result directly from the fact of their premature birth, or from the demands of the care to keep these tiny babies alive.
‘The medical intervention that is required for babies born at or below 30 weeks often means that babies are denied contact with their mothers, something we know is essential for their growth and development,’ Carol says, obviously engaged by her topic and moved by the plight of the families she deals with. ‘In addition to this deprivation are the many, and often painful, procedures the babies must undergo.’
Preterm babies must be kept in isolettes, the heated, plastic boxes that maintain the babies’ temperature. They are also routinely subjected to painful medical interventions that may include having their heels pricked and blood squeezed out sometimes several times a day, suction may have to be applied to clear their lungs, IVs inserted into their veins, lumbar punctures performed, and tubes inserted to aid ventilation. All this, according to Carol, can have the unintended, but hardly surprising, result that the babies become frightened of being touched, even by their mothers.
Skin and skin contact has a lot to do with the first months of a healthy baby’s life: ‘The baby’s been in a body, and with a full-term baby they then do a lot on that mother’s body,’ Carol explains. For babies born prematurely, this contact, which includes touching and massaging, smelling and tasting, and vestibular (whole body) movement, is severely disrupted. For the parents, too, the need to caress and hold their child is almost overwhelming, but the result of a baby associating touch with pain and stress can turn even the simple task of changing a nappy, or giving the baby a bath, into a heartbreaking clash of conflicting needs, high anxiety, unread signals, and tears.
Many of us assume when we become parents that we will intuitively know how to touch our babies, to give them comfort, to soothe them when they cry. The mother—infant dance is what Carol and her team call that ‘happy state’, when everything falls into place and mother and child react and respond to each other in concert. Her description of this phenomenon reminds me of a documentary that I saw about the separation of a pair of conjoined twins. The babies were joined along the front of their torsos and, prior to their separation, their mother was the only person who was able to lift and hold them in a way that the babies found comfortable.
However, the mother—infant dance, where the partners in that most vital of relationships can read each other, is not always easy. In fact, Carol says she’s often stunned by how often it simply doesn’t happen. Much of her role revolves around teaching a mother how to read her baby’s signals of distress. This is more difficult than it sounds, given that preterm babies cry much less than babies born at full-term. However, with a little patience and care, parents can be taught to recognise when their baby is stressed and unhappy—dysregulated, as Carol calls it.
These signals may include a screwed-up facial expression, clenched fists, stiff arms, and even the colour of the baby’s skin changing so that it becomes mottled, red, or sometimes blue. In the face of these changes in their baby’s behaviour and appearance, the mother is encouraged to slow her movements down, pacing her actions and the way she touches the baby to a tempo that it can cope with.
Carol’s observations of babies and their mothers are helpful to her now, as a grandmother, and they have informed the way she went about bonding with her grandchildren when they were born. Of course, she says, she was just dying to immediately touch and hold them but, because of her work with prem babies and their mothers, she was able to pace her approach to her grandchildren, reading the subtle signals they gave that let her know she was proceeding at the rate they were comfortable with.
Often, the way she advises parents to interact with their prematurely born baby may actually result in them touching their babies less. She tells me a story about a father she observed who was visiting his little daughter in the hospital while she was still confined to an isolette. ‘He was rubbing his thumb up and down the sole of her foot and every time he did it, she moved her foot away. So he’d follow her and he’d do it again, very lovingly, lovingly,’ she emphasises, ‘touching this little girl.’
‘Does she like that?’ Carol asked the father, hoping to prompt him to really observe his daughter and read the signals she was sending.
‘Oh, yeah,’ he told her, ‘you can tell she likes it, because every time I do it she moves.’
Carol pauses and for a moment we both contemplate the scene she has just described. ‘Can you see how,’ she asks me, ‘with the best will in the world, parents can actually make their babies move away from them rather then towards them?’
Preliminary research that Carol and her team have conducted into the brain development of the preterm babies whose mothers they have been working with has indicated some interesting results. They were hoping to see increased brain volume in the babies but, while this did not appear to be occurring, what they did observe was that the molecules of the myelinated nerve cells in the brain, through which electrical impulses travel, showed an improvement in the way that they lined up, allowing for enhanced transmission of impulses.
Carol is familiar with the work of Tiffany Field. She tells me about a study research that Field did in the area of newborns and massage where babies were massaged by researchers for 15 minutes three times a day for ten days. The treatment also included gently moving the babies’ limbs. At the end of the ten-day period, the massaged babies had put on 47 per cent more weight than the control babies who were not massaged. Kangaroo care can achieve similar results, Carol believes. ‘I think human beings need close bodies. Whether you’re a baby or an old person, you need people who love you to be physically close to you.’
‘There’s such a lot of similarity between little bodies that are at the edge of viability and old bodies that are at the edge of viability,’ Carol tells me, and this belief influenced the way that she interacted with her father when he was old and dying. Towards the end of his life, he was in a nursing home where she would visit him three or four times a week. But, she says, she would never just sit beside the bed. Ignoring the sometimes-puzzled looks of the staff and other visitors, she would climb up on the bed and sit beside her father so that her body was touching his. She would also stroke his arms and head with her hands.
‘There’s almost some sort of taboo about touching your dad the way you would touch a baby, she says, ‘but I would do that all that time.’ It was something they both found comforting.
On one visit, she found him bruised and battered in his bed after a bad fall. As usual, she had arrived in time to help him with his evening meal, but he refused to eat.
‘I just leant over and gave him a big hug,’ she says, ‘and his old arms went around me.’ They stayed like that for a long time and then, finally, when they broke the embrace, she was able to get her father to eat. ‘He absolutely needed the close contact more than he needed food. He needed someone to hug him and to understand how he was hurting.’
TOUCH HAS ALWAYS been associated with the healing professions. Doctors, physiotherapists, nurses, myotherapists and masseurs, occupational therapists, and practitioners of alternative medicines use touch diagnostically, to comfort, and in the course of treatment.
In many traditional blessings, the hand of the holy person is placed on the head of the one to be blessed, the touch conferring authority, absolution, or a benediction. The Bible contains numerous references to both Jesus and his apostles ‘laying on hands’ in order to heal or to bestow the Holy Spirit.
Royalty were once thought to have the power to heal through touch. When the king or queen claimed the source of their right to rule as coming directly from God, their power was exemplified through the notion of the Royal Touch. Exercised by monarchs in England and France up to the 18th and 19th centuries respectively, the ritual was deemed particularly beneficial for sufferers of scrofula, a nasty tubercular condition that afflicted the lymph nodes of the neck area. Ugly, weeping sores resulted, and the condition was known in France as ‘mal le roi’—the King’s Evil. As well as being able to bestow healing with the touch of their hands, true kings are apparently never attacked by lions.
Massage, whether therapeutic, remedial, or for relaxation, is a popular way that we can get permission to be touched. As our society has become more affluent, there has been a rise in businesses that enable us to be ‘professionally’ touched in an impersonal and yet intimate way. From the hairdresser and the beauty therapist to masseurs and physiotherapists, we lower the usual boundary of personal space to allow these strangers and acquaintances to put their hands on our bodies.
Recently, when I had a massage as a treat for my birthday, as the therapist, a young woman who I had never met before, tucked the soft, thick towel into the band of my underpants and edged them down, I was reminded of the intimacies of touch that happen between a child and its mother. The physical environs of the modern massage suite serve to further evoke the nursery: the darkened room, the soothing music, soft cloths placed against the skin, and the sweet smells of citrus and lavender.
It was like being a toddler again, being fussed over and coddled a little. I was positively tucked in. As I lay there happily submitting to the firm, professional stroke and kneading of the masseuse’s hands, I reflected on the pleasant selfishness of submitting to this touch that did not require reciprocation. Apart from the fee that I would pay at the end of my session, I had no obligation to respond to the firm strokes and the occasional deep bite of pressure on a particularly knotted muscle. My experience of it was as a one-way transaction, but I did wonder if my masseuse felt the same way.
Anne Davies is a myotherapist. Myotherapists use many traditional massage techniques, along with a detailed knowledge of anatomy and the working of joints and muscles, to treat pain, injury, and dysfunction of movement. Anne’s client base comes mainly from those with sports injuries or postural issues and ranges from elite athletes to weekend joggers. Small and compact, she strikes me as someone who focuses on the biomechanics of massage and its therapeutic benefits to the muscles beneath her hands. I imagine her treatment room as light and spare, totally devoid of candlelight and whale song.
For 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?
