Rubbing it in

Various friends of mine swear by massages. One of them likes his feet done after a long walk; another swears that the hand massage during a manicure is the best thing since chocolate was invented; a gal-pal tells me that if it wasn’t for the head massage she gets at the beauty salon, she would be a limp rag worth less than an old sock after it has been chewed on by the neighbour’s four Rottweiler puppies. And someone I know, mercifully long-distance, tells me with that particularly lascivious wink-wink-nudge-nudge (yes, it works well over email, trust me) how the full body massage at the place down the road from where he lives is just to die for – that he still lives is a matter of great wonder to almost all of us who know him, even vaguely.

I have never been able to deal with even the concept of a massage. After many months over years of physiotherapy to repair a bum knee and ankle, the idea of hands other than my own – and that of a very select few who have passed the requisite tests to get to that stage – touching me is truly shudder-inducing. I didn’t even like my mother oiling my hair, though I would take it because it was my mother and she seemed to like it more than I did. Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy the hug-stuff as much as anyone else; I would just rather avoid the kneading, rubbing, no-pain-no-gain feeling-up that a massage, especially a therapeutic one (and why else would people do it?) involves.

I have watched massages being done with a certain repulsed fascination. At the salon, where I am having strange things done to my hair, turning it from wild to controlled or streaky faded brown back to an even darkness, I have seen women having their arms and calves expertly manipulated. There is that well-greased slap and tackle-the-cellulite knead, the skin softening, exfoliating rub-down and the smoothing-soothing moisturing steps that make sounds akin to glutin-rich pizza dough being punched or linoleum being cleaned with a very soapy mop. And then there has always been the sight of usually-flaccid calf muscle or, worse, flabby upper arms wobbling under the onslaught of hands that are not doing it with any passion or perversion, just doing a job.

The yuck-factor apart, a massage is supposed to be all about relaxation, about de-stressing, about rejuvenation. My scant experience is massage as pain, perhaps worse than what had caused the massage to be done at all. At the physiotherapy centre at the local speciality hospital, there were wails of woe and gasps of great agony renting the curtains between treatment cubicles. That, in itself, was all more painful than the torture that they – and I – went through at the hands of the doctors and therapists. To me, it is the sound effects that start the repugnance flowing; I never really got past that stage to go through the actual process itself.

But after many years of persuasion and even more reassurance from friends, doctors and beauticians, I allowed myself to undergo a foot massage during a pedicure. It was not the ‘full treatment’, as the girl at the salon put it, but just a sample of what I could do to help myself and my feet (as if they were separate entities) look and feel better than the rather ragged state I was in at the time. I went through the entire procedure, but in attenuated form, and found myself actually enjoying it – the warm soapy foot-bath, the soft soapy lotion, the tingling bubbles of the spa jets…and then the beautician picked up my foot to rub it down with an oily unguent. That was the end of any state of relaxation I could have achieved. Every nerve on end, I just wanted it to end.

I am now in complete and utter disgrace from almost the whole tribe of women and many men that know this sorry tale. They tell me I am a lost case, one that should be cast out of humankind, one who cannot have the rudimentary brain to realise that I can have a good thing when I feel it. I bow my unmassaged head in shame even as I slink away on unmassaged feet with my unmassaged hands in my pockets and the unmassaged rest of me gleeful at the prospect of escaping the massage and all those who press it upon my uninterested person.