Kneading Torture

 “he came in on a Sunday / every muscle aching

walking in slow motion / like he’d just been hit”

 

These are words of a very well-known and iconic Paul Kelly song. They described me perfectly.

   It was Sunday. I dragged myself off the beach, barely managing to hold on to my board. I’d paddled out, and even though the waves looked alluring and offered opportunities, there for the taking, I spectacularly failed to seize even one of those. It was all I could do to keep myself from drowning, hanging on to my board for dear life, and lying on it as exhausted as a cockroach in the last death throes of a decent dose of pesticide. In the end I’d given up and caught a bit of slop in. It wasn’t going to happen that day.

   There was a reason for that. I was comprehensively stuffed. Literally. I had a busted rib, a corked thigh muscle, a massive bump on the back of my head, and a thirst a full barrel of beer wasn’t going to be able to quench. I could barely lift up my arms, let alone drag them through the water with anything remotely approaching enough speed and power to be able to catch even the smallest wave.

   I had just finished a Black Belt grading in Australian kickboxing.

   I had spent more than two hours doing hard technical work on pads, and then sparred hard for seven rounds, against a bloke 14 cm taller than me, 25 kg heavier than me, and with arms 8 cm longer than mine. It’s not a match you’d be likely to find in any organised competition anywhere. I had survived, with most of my pieces still relatively intact, and I had achieved my Black Belt, the crowning glory of many years of bloody hard yakka. All up it had taken 2 hours and 50 minutes; the equivalent of a solid marathon, if, that is, you could run fast enough to complete a marathon in that time, which I for one most certainly couldn’t.

   I was utterly spent. Nothing left in the tank.

   It was therefore fortunate that I had had the great wisdom and foresight to book myself in for a massage, scheduled after what should have been my triumphant victory-lap surf, which instead had turned out to be more of an anaemic wet fart in the dark.

   So I struggled up the beach, across my home carpark, into my car and over to the massage place. I was looking forward to it with inordinate anticipation: massages are a rare and expensive luxury at the best of times, and at that moment it was going to be the single best possible thing I could think off: lie face down, close my eyes, listen to relaxing ploinky-ploinky music, and blissfully drift off into oblivion while a loving and tender pair of hands gently returned some life to my flogged-out body. Heaven on a stick.

   I was let in by a wizened old Thai woman, grey-haired and skinny and withered, who looked like she’d be hard put to weigh in at 30 kg, wringing wet. I told her I’d been doing Muay Thai for 3 hours, at which, being Thai, her eyes opened wide with understanding. I explained that I was sore everywhere, and pointed out my various body parts that were injured and that I’d like her to be careful with: my ribs, thigh, head, bung shoulder with years of accumulated damage in it.

   ‘No wollies, no wollies, you lie down, I fix you,’ and she motioned towards the table. I collapsed on it with a sigh and closed my eyes.

   I heard her busying herself around the room, felt the lights get dimmed, and the ploinky-ploinky music, predictable and reliable, filled the air. I smiled, stretched out and relaxed into the experience.

   For about five seconds.

   She laid her hands upon my back.

   Then, pain like I’ve never experienced before in my life stabbed between my shoulder blades.

   I shot bolt up right.

   ‘Aaaaaarrrrrgggghhhh!!!!!’

   I twisted my neck around in a 270 degree turn, dislocating three vertebrae and breaking another two, to see what was happening.

   There was the old Thai woman, leaning on me with all her might, one hand on top of her other hand, drilling her elbow into my back muscles like she was prospecting for oil and thought she’d find it at the level of the bone marrow, tongue hanging out of the corner of her mouth, a demented look on her face.

   ‘What are you doing?? Aaaarrrrggghh!’

   ‘No wollies, you be quiet,’ she said. She laid one hand on top of my head, pushed it down hard into the hole in the massage table and pulled a towel over my head, muffling my protests. ‘You lie down and lelax. You sole I make you bettel.’

   ‘Lelax?? How .... aaaarrrggghh!!’ Red hot pain travelled up and down my spine. Stars appeared in front of my eyes and started twinkling innocuously.

   She wiggled her elbow to and fro manically and started working her way around my back furiously. Every bit she bored into turned into a pool of agony.

   ‘Shush,’ she scolded. ‘Dis will implove youl cilculation. You will have bettel bloodflow ...’ She pushed a bit harder, dragged my underpants down and shoved her finger up my arse. ‘... I wolk youl plessule points, like dis,’ and she pressed down even harder. The top of my skull blew off and steam escaped from my ears.

   ‘Plessule? Plessule?? I’m not getting any plessule out of thi ... aaaaarrrggghhh!!’ She had found my busted rib, courtesy of a few too many body kicks that I had failed to block adequately, and pushed down hard on it with both her hands. I heard something go pop, and felt the two broken bits gently rub together, with an enjoyment factor of about -8 on the scale of Richter. If it wasn’t broken before it certainly would be now.

   ‘Be quiet,’ she admonished, ‘I wolk. I am specialist. I fix you up good.’

   ‘But that’s my sore spo ... hmmmllllffffff.’ She put a pillow over my head and smothered my complaints.

   ‘I do deep tissue. Vely deep. Filst time always hult. If no hult, no pain, no good.’ She grabbed my bung shoulder, the result of 20 years of surfing, kayaking and generally overdoing things, that I had specifically asked her to be careful with. She tucked my hand under her armpit, put her left foot against the top of the table, leaned back as far as she could, and pulled like she was doing tug of war against an elephant. I felt every fibre strain and stretch in protest, and red hot pain seared through my brain. ‘Youl shouldel no good, you no move, what you do?’

   I was beyond replying. I closed my eyes and gnashed my teeth in silent misery. I wished I could pass out and blank it all out, and, while grinding my molars down to their roots, one thought flashed through my mind: “I’m paying for this. How stupid am I?”

 

   She found my corked thigh muscle, the result of repeated and vicious roundhouse kicks to the leg, and pounded it into dust. With glee she discovered a half-busted toe, and twisted it around on itself five times, like a particularly recalcitrant cork refusing to come out of a champagne bottle. Tutting disapprovingly to herself she explored my strained Achilles tendon, and folded it sideways twenty times, ensuring it would never be functional again. Seizing hold of my head, she wrenched it in directions no living body part was ever meant to go.

   I lay back, squeezed my eyes shut, jammed my teeth together and clenched my sphincter for all I had, and waited for it to finish. An hour and a half. It was worse than the gruelling almost three hours of the martial arts grading had been.

   Eventually she stopped, turned off the music and turned on the lights.

   ‘So, finish,’ she said. She motioned for me to stand up. I obeyed dutifully. ‘You feel bettel now?’

   What could you possibly say? There’d be no point.

   ‘Yes thanks, tha ... that was great,’ I stammered. I stumbled out, shaking like a leaf in a cyclone, determined to never set foot anywhere within five miles from that place ever again.

 

   I hobbled back to my car, and managed to crawl behind the wheel. My entire body was in pain. It had been worse than the actual martial arts grading.

   I could feel a strong urge for a beer-anaesthetic come over me.

   Maybe about fifteen, that might do the job.

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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