The Frankston Massage Jennifer Compton

The Frankston Massage

I ring at random and find a clinic opposite the Frankston Cemetery

and book an hour of someone touching me and letting my mind go.

He is a cheerful Aussie larrikin, he may have had a long liquid lunch.

He offers me a used towel, moist to the touch. I say I like to take my

underwear off. I’m taller than him but not by much. We are of an age.

Where is the whale music, the feng-shui bamboo, and the scented oil?

I lay myself down, naked under a clammy towel, prepared to give him

the benefit of the doubt. He won’t shut up. His holiday in Norfolk Island

exercises him very much. Yap yap yap. As he storms my body, and yet

he finds the place in my shoulders from which all my unshed grief hangs.

Kudos for that. But he won’t shut his trap. As he flips me back to front,

making eye contact. This is a bloody shambles, one of us has to get a grip.

I ask in a small voice, staring at the grimy ceiling, picking up the scent of

socks, if he does maybe many footballers? Yeah, in February—he replies.

When they begin training and start to feel it but not as much as I would

have hoped. He has hoped, as I have hoped, and we have come to this.

Neither of us getting what we want. He wants to split my mind off from

my body’s machine and pounce like a predator on all my hurts, I want

to be taken apart and tenderly caressed and then put back together again.

And now he wants his score, he gives himself a modest seven out of ten.

Out of the goodness of my heart I give him eight and a half, for trying,

for misunderstanding me so well. Tenderness for these peers of mine is

my downfall. His brothers have, with that same blithe, myopic stare,

used me as clumsily and depended on my charity so many times before.

I walk back to Frankston all swinging shoulders like a front row forward

but my mind is graunching away and grinding out of kilter, out of whack.

Jennifer Compton