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?
Melting Pot: the colour of skin
‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’
—Martin Luther King, 1963
WHEN THE 2000 SYDNEY OLYMPIC GAMES were on, our family watched a lot of the swimming competition on TV My eldest son, who was about three years old at the time, was fascinated with the obvious physical differences between the swimmers, and would often ask of any swimmer who wasn’t white, ‘Where are they from?’
By the time the finals of the various swimming events were reached, almost all the non-Caucasian swimmers were Japanese, and we answered accordingly. Somehow, over the weeks that we watched the Olympics, my son came to assume that anyone who looked racially different from himself was, by default, Japanese.
‘Is he Japanese?’ he’d ask in his clear, chiming voice, pointing at the tall, young man with ebony skin and black curly hair busily packing supermarket shelves as we wheeled our trolley past. ‘Is she Japanese?’ again with extended index finger and bell-like tone as a sari-clad woman with honey-coloured skin climbed aboard the tram.
I tried to explain to him that these people, in all likelihood, were Australian. That just because someone had dark skin didn’t mean they were foreign; that the original inhabitants of this continent were all black or brown.
‘Remember how we watched Cathy Freeman light the flame at the opening of the Olympic Games?’ I asked him. ‘She’s brown and she’s Australian.’ I explained that our family looked the way we did because our ancestors came from Ireland. ‘Australians come in all colours,’ I said, appalled that somehow this wasn’t obvious to him. After all, we Melburnians pride ourselves on living in one of the most multicultural cities in the world. There were black kids and Asian kids at his childcare centre. How was it that being white had, for him, even at his tender age, become intrinsic to being Australian?
I counted it as a small victory when one day, not long after this conversation, as we were walking around our neighbourhood, we came across a man delivering advertising brochures.
‘Look, Mum,’ my son said loudly, pointing at him as we passed, ‘He’s brown and he’s Australian.’
WHEN WE REFER to ourselves and others as being ‘black’ or ‘white’, we are rarely talking about just the colour of our skin. Blackness and whiteness each have their own set of inherent meanings to do with history, culture, and politics that go beyond the amount of melanin in a particular individual’s skin.
Despite the fact that the majority of the world’s population come in varying degrees of brown, it is the binary alternatives of black and white, and their attached symbolism, that is forced upon us. Traditionally, black has been associated with sin and defilement, white with goodness and purity.
As a child brought up within the Roman Catholic faith, I knew that the innermost part of my being, my soul, was, of course, white. Visible only to God, it hovered inside the borders of my body, a perfect simulacrum, albeit a pale, insubstantial one. Sins, I was told, would appear like black stains on that pristine whiteness if I strayed from the path defined as right and good by the Church. Limbo was still a tenet of the Catholic faith then, and for my peers and me it was filled with little black babies—the progeny of the pagan hordes who lived in the dark continent of Africa. Having died before they could be baptised, these babies could never be admitted to heaven but were to linger forever in the in-between place of Limbo.
In my heart of hearts, I envied them. We were told by the nuns who gave us religious instruction that Limbo was exactly like heaven, except that those in Limbo were denied seeing the face of God. That would have been a blessed relief as far as I was concerned. The idea of God’s huge, bearded head looming perpetually out of the clouds was alarming to my five-year-old self to say the least.
Even recalling that image now, planted so vividly in my imagination as I sat in the cold room beneath the nave receiving religious instruction, makes me nervous about the idea of heaven. Oh, to be a little black baby, babbling happily in the benign environment of Limbo, blissfully ignorant of the existence of God.
AS I BOARD a bus in Strasbourg, France, my eyes are drawn to an extraordinary looking woman who has already taken her seat. Her skin is exceptionally pale, and her thick, wiry hair, arrayed in an intricate pattern of plaited rows, is a yellowy-cream. When she removes her sunglasses, for a moment, I see that long, milky eyelashes frame her whey-coloured eyes in a remarkable frill. Despite the translucence of her skin and corn-silk coloured hair, her features are unmistakeably African.
The disjunction of her complexion and her features draws my gaze. I fight the urge to stare, but my eyes are drawn again and again to that impossibly white skin and improbably coloured hair. The woman has an otherworldly beauty that sets her apart whether I look at her or not. The effect of her appearance is so dramatic that I immediately associate it with the images once so popular with Benetton, the clothing manufacturer, and its iridescent advertising campaigns featuring