Inspired by my love of all things chiropractic.
“You’re…David. Yeah, you’re going to be my tough client of the day. You’re going to be the client who’s gone and completely thrown out his spine. I can see it from here. It’s bad.
Don’t worry about answering me. I find that I always just natter away. Tune me out if you want. I’ll probably talk on anyway. I hope that’s ok? It’s just…it gets so repetitive if there isn’t a running commentary. You find you’re stuck in this ongoing cycle of kneading flesh and smoothing bumps and pushing and pushing at this thick wheel of knotted muscle that never quite unknots. So you’re pushing away, wrenching at this solid human wall of tension and you’re causing pain even if you think you’re helping them, and to tell you the truth – it gets old. It gets really old, David.
So I find that talking it away makes it much better. I get to talk about my day and ex-boyfriends and how much I hate my job. And then whenever my boss walks in, the head chiropractor here, I immediately clam up, I furrow my fingertips into your muscles with an urgency and finesse you haven’t yet felt in our session, you sort of wish that our whole massage session could have had that same dedication and expertise but of course, I don’t do the really good massages for just anyone. Otherwise I would have burnt my fingertips off by now. I would be massaging you with little blooded stumps. Which you wouldn’t like, would you?
But some customers, well, they get this magic treatment. I’ll dole it out to one, maybe two, a day. The ones who deserve it, like you. You’re the hero, Dave. Can I call you Dave?
You were in the news and everything!
You were that everyday saviour, going for your daily mid-morning stroll around the park, a walk you take every weekday at 11.30am in lieu of a coffee or cigarette break. While your colleagues are sucking down the stimulants, you’re trotting merrily around a lake, you’re breathing in fresh, gorgeous air while they sully their lungs or dirty their throats. You find this mid-morning walk gives you the boost you need to “get on with it” that day, whatever “it” might entail. It’s a short walk, fifteen minutes at most, but enough time to ensure you become a highlight of the coffee-mothers’ day. They gape after you, this confident, strutting suited man, shiny and confident and self-assured. Their hands clutch at their coffee cups in a burst of misused passion. They want to fling their skim lattes away and grip you with the same urgency. They want to lap up your youth and your confidence, your swagger and your self-sufficiency. You are a sort of currency to coffee mothers.
But you don’t notice any of this, of course. For you this walk is a profoundly personal odyssey, a passage from one part of the day into another. It is your way of making sense of this life you lead, the meetings and the arse-kissing and the constant overwhelming TIREDNESS that is just part of the day. Your walk is the one break from it all, the few moments where your personality is allowed to escape from the pen, the moments where you may talk to dogs and smile at babies and snort gustily from spring flowers. So, you don’t notice the mothers. They don’t register. This moment is not about them.
But today, all that changes. Today is the day where some dog decides to go ape-shit in the park, running around, snarling and frothing at the mouth, butting prams and biting ankles and eating peoples’ picnics. This isn’t the sort of dog you would normally attempt a conversation with either, this isn’t a small fluffy white dog with orange food patches around its mouth. It’s not a Labrador puppy with wide swimming eyes, the sort that you’d find in a toilet paper ad. This is a big, snarling, stinking beast and it’s not the sort of dog who you think would be an equal conversationalist.
So, you ignore the dog, as much as possible. While you skip your laps around the not-really-so-very-big lake, the dog makes himself seen. The dog is ingratiating himself into your routine of liberation. He is assuming himself into this moment that was meant to be all about YOU, about YOUR peace and happiness, a peace and happiness only disturbed by dogs with names like Fluffy and Peaches, not ROVER and BARK.
So, this dog is annoying. He is annoying, the way he swaggers about YOUR lake, the way he glares at you expectantly through the quivering reeds and across the still grey water. He is annoying, but no big deal, until the dog starts making a big deal. The dog gets bored of trying to gain your attention, or decides to just amp up the way in which he will, HE WILL, wrench your attention away from the grass and the reeds and the still grey water.
The dog looks at you, and it looks at the coffee mothers and it makes a few major cerebral connections at once, before it decides on a course of action. The dog gears up and gloats, it gives you one last smug dog-grin from beneath its wrinkled brows, and starts STALKING towards a baby. The Mum is oblivious, she’s nattering away on her mobile phone and drinking a stupid skim latte, and this dog is just CHARGING towards the pram which she’s not even holding onto, the dog is frothing and snarling and it just has this long, low, horrible frequency to its bark. This is the sort of dog that means business. This is the sort of dog that would rip a body up in half before it realises what it just did.
And so the whole park is standing there in this frozen, cold horror, mouths agape, picnics forgotten. The swans are craning their necks out of the not-so-still grey water, the eels are holding their breath and poking their slimy heads out of the now-quite-disturbed lake, and there’s just this moment of awful, expectation-fuelled silence. And you can’t believe it. You can’t believe everyone is frozen while you, YOU, are just bubbling and seething with adrenaline, the adrenaline of your 11.30am ritual.
Before you know what you’re thinking, before you have a chance to slip out of the jacket you had made in Hong Kong, made for you by a tailor who you tipped generously, you BOLT towards this dog and this baby. You launch yourself at the dog, you roll and leap and soar in the dog’s direction, and somewhere in this rolling and leaping and soaring, you do it. You distract the dog from the baby. You awaken the mother from her inertia. She even drops her coffee. And you and the dog freeze in a moment of mutual solidarity. Mutual respect. Maybe a bit of mutual fear.
The dog calms down. Its breathing slows. Its foaming spittle trickles down its heaving mouth, its flapping tongue. The dog has been calmed. You get up to dust off your jacket, to chastise the mother, to point at her skim latte and lecture “WHAT’S MORE IMPORTANT, YOUR LATTE OR YOUR BABY” and then flounce away from the park and the lake and the gaping swans and breathless eels, out of the edge of the glimmering woods, out of the edge of this moment of tragically ill-populated heroism.
But you can’t get up. You are stuck. You are frozen. All those people around you, moments ago bogged down in stillness, their useless swollen feet lolling in what felt like setting mud, are now buzzing around a frozen you. Your energy has transferred to them and fled from you. Your heroic achievement has been pilfered, sucked out, collected and distilled into little bursts of unprecedented function amongst a sea of previously stationary people. They have sucked you dry of your energy. They have bled you. While they buzz and flap and sniff, you are stuck to the ground that moments ago held them down.
You are stuck to the ground not through some grand psychological impulse, an affinity with this dog soon to be in trouble, but because you have done something terrible to your back, and you are in ball-tearing, teeth-gritting, horrible pain. It feels like someone has coiled up your back muscles into some eternal tangling gyre, widening and disabling everything, worsening moment by moment.
And so you managed to scoop yourself up, you made a graceful exit on all fours, and you heaved your way here today. I’m so glad you came to us, David. To me. I feel like I know you now, from hearing your story. I feel like we have something very tangible and special in common. I might sound a bit crazy in saying that, but…I really do.
Do you feel the same?”
