Turtle Diary

25 William G

Somebody’d told Harriet about a free demonstration of something called Original Therapy and she asked me if I’d like to go with her. Neither of us had any idea of what it might be and I couldn’t care less but I went. Anything to keep my mind off the turtles.

The place was in Maida Vale, the people had long hair and wore sandals which they mostly took off. There were a lot of good-looking feet in the crowd. The bearded men looked like Great Men of History from the neck up: Darwin, Pasteur, Mendeleyev, Faraday. From the neck down they looked like layabouts. The girls looked better to me but then girls usually do, there seems to me to be more human solidity in women than in men. Odd how one says girls and men. More than half the men were boys and more than half the girls were women who looked as if they’d seen a good deal of a certain kind of life and had cooked many hundredweights of brown rice. Oriental pillows on the floor, Buddhist and Zen books on the shelves, the I Ching, Laing, Castaneda, Hermann Hesse, The Whole Earth Catalog. Smell of old incense in the air.

The Original Therapy lady was a rampant-looking woman of about forty. Shiny red hair in the style of old musical films, tight white trousers, gold sandals, silver toenails, bursting purple silk blouse. Swarthy boyfriend with a St Christopher medal and a racing-driver watch strap.

Her name was Ruby and she sounded as if she lived in a caravan, her voice and her way of talking. She began to tell us about her therapy while some of the people in the room sat in the lotus position with very straight backs and others held their heads. One girl wailed a little now and then, another muttered the whole time.

She was American, this Ruby. Told us how she’d knocked about, been a rodeo rider, done roller derbies, wrestled, had three husbands and all kinds of troubles. Discovered her Original Therapy whilst wrestling one night. Another lady had a scissors grip on her and was squeezing very hard, got a bit over enthusiastic and wouldn’t let go. Under the pressure Ruby experienced a strange alteration of consciousness.

‘I was seeing all kinds of coloured lights and shooting sparks,’ she said, ‘and the sound of the crowd was beginning to come and go like the roar of surf far away. Something began to happen to me. I could feel myself going way way down and way way back, like thousands of years, millions of years, glaciers coming and going and the dinosaurs sinking into the swamps and the primitive trees being crushed into coal. Farther back than that even, crawling out of a warm ocean and gasping on the beach and beyond that back to the sea and smaller and smaller, all the way back to a single cell. And back beyond that to nothing, just the warm sea, what they call the primordial soup.’

Ruby went farther than the soup even, she got to a point where there was nothing, no time, no her, no anything. Then there came something like the idea of a question, a kind of original YES or NO? It put itself together as YES. There was a mystical green pattern with no sound, then a red explosion in Ruby’s mind and the people in the ringside seats were picking the other lady wrestler out of their laps. That was the turning point in Ruby’s life, going back to the origin of life and finding the big YES, and she was going to show us slides and then demonstrate her therapy.

A lot of the people in the room were shifting about and trying to find space on the floor to lie down. Some were smoking hash. There was one chap who looked as if he’d been thrown together by dustmen from odd bits of upholstery and discarded clothing, he asked Ruby whether when the spirit goes out of the body another spirit could come into it. He had a high choked voice, fat unshaven face.

Ruby said that nothing like that had ever happened in her experience. There were no other questions, it was quiet in the room, one or two people were asleep. The last light of the day came through the windows, smoke drifted. Then the window curtains were drawn and Ruby showed us slides.

We saw many slides of Ruby in a bikini scissors-gripping people who also wore swimsuits or shorts. ‘The skin contact makes a difference,’ she said. ‘Smells are important too.’ We saw people bursting free as they reached YES, saw their happy faces afterwards. Ruby told us that people were revitalized in a variety of ways by returning to the origins of life via her scissors-grip. Illnesses disappeared and one man who’d been losing his hair stopped losing it.

The curtains were pulled back. It was evening now, the dim light of the street lamps came a little way into the room, ended in darkness. Candles were lit. Ruby withdrew briefly, bounced back in her bikini. A powerful presence. I felt depressed and anxious, Harriet seemed nervous, hugged herself forlornly. The wailing girl said, ‘Oh Jesus.’ The dustbin chap went red in the face. Several of the thinner people got up and left.

‘What’s the lady going to do?’ a little girl asked her mother.

‘Therapy,’ said her mother.

‘Like Daddy?’ said the little girl.

‘A different kind,’ said her mother. ‘Watch.’

Ruby put on a record. For atmosphere, she said. ‘There was this wonderful Disney film, Fantasia, years ago,’ she said. ‘There was a part with the beginning of the world, the red sky and the steaming oceans, and then later came the dinosaurs and all. I’ve always loved the music’

It was Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps. In all the photographs I’ve seen of him Stravinsky looks to me like a man who was potty-trained too early and that music proves it as far as I’m concerned.

A mat was brought in and one of the bearded fellows took his shirt off and lay down on it. Ruby lay down at right angles to him and wrapped her legs round his waist. ‘Let your mind go completely blank if you can,’ she said. ‘Breathe out when I squeeze, breathe in when I ease up. Keep looking at me.’

The muscles leaped up in Ruby’s thighs, the bearded fellow gasped as the air went out of him and they were away. In about five minutes he reached YES, burst free, was happy like the people in the slides and Ruby went on to the next applicant. Nobody’d been told to bring a swimsuit, most of the men took their shirts off, some of the girls had a go in bras and knickers, other kept everything on. Ruby made a real effort with everyone, squeezing hard until they reached YES or said they had. One chap cried ‘Pax!’ but he was the only one. After a time I stopped paying close attention. We were all crowded round very close, Harriet’s bottom was partly resting on my right hand and a bare foot belonging to one of the better-looking girls was touching my left. I felt cosy and relaxed with the candlelight, the smell of hash and sweat, the breathing and the grunting as one person after another returned to the origins of life between Ruby’s muscular thighs. Even the Stravinsky became soothing with repetition.

It went on and on. I must say I rather fancied being squeezed by Ruby but I wasn’t sure I felt like doing it in front of everybody. Harriet was not tempted but we were both beginning to enjoy the evening in a quiet way.

Ruby was scissors-gripping a very good-looking young man named David when he began to groan but not in the ordinary way. His eyes were closed and he seemed to be in a sort of trance. He braced his hands on Ruby’s thighs and pushed as if trying to squeeze out from between her legs, worked a few inches of himself out of her grip. ‘Can’t breathe,’ he murmured as if talking in his sleep. ‘Round my neck, strangling me.’

‘It’s the cord,’ said a blonde woman with frizzy hair and a wrinkled face. She was American too.

‘What cord?’ said Ruby.

‘The umbilical cord,’ said the blonde woman. ‘I’m a therapist too. He’s doing a natal, he’s re-experiencing his birth. Quick, turn him, get him untangled. Loosen your grip so I can turn him.’

Ruby loosened her grip, the blonde woman rolled David round between Ruby’s legs. ‘There,’ she said. ‘That’s all right now. Let him squeeze himself out the way he was doing.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Ruby. ‘This never happens back in Los Angeles. They just go back to that big YES and Zonk! They’re out again.’

Murmurs and crowd noises. This wasn’t Los Angeles, said several other Americans. Small stirrings of solidarity between the expatriates and those of us who were English, feelings of pride that things in London might perhaps be not quite so simple as in Los Angeles. There was renewed interest all round. David was wiggling and shimmying, parting Ruby’s legs with his hands and uttering rending groans.

‘Whatever it is it feels good,’ said Ruby. ‘It feels like something big happening. You have to stay open to whatever comes up in this kind of work.’

‘He needs help,’ said the blonde woman. ‘I’ll push from behind. Somebody else take his head and shoulders and ease him along when he tries to get himself out.’

‘What are they doing now?’ said the little girl to her mother.

‘David’s being born,’ said her mother.

Willing hands were laid on at both ends of David, Ruby, and the blonde lady. More and more people joined in the delivery. By this time David, still with his eyes closed, was halfway out of his trousers with all the wiggling. He was wearing black knickers. There was more pushing and pulling, much encouragement and advice, and finally with one big hoarse cry David was all the way out. Of Ruby’s legs and his trousers both.

There was a general happy clamour and some of the girls had tears in their eyes. I looked at Harriet and saw that she did too. I squeezed her hand and she squeezed back. Ruby hugged David. ‘Give Mommy a big kiss,’ she said.

David still had his eyes closed, and as he moved into Ruby’s embrace he fumbled one big bouncy breast out of her bikini top and applied himself to it like a veteran infant.

‘Jesus!’ said Ruby and pressed his head to her bosom. There was a spontaneous ovation from everybody except Ruby’s boyfriend, who said something violent in Italian, rolled his eyes up and made a gesture. David opened his eyes and smiled a happy smile, Ruby put her breast back, somebody brought her a cup of tea. People lit cigarettes and joints, settled back cosily.

There were many earnest questions put to David by girls with glistening eyes and men in whose faces there now shone an awful lust for infancy. How had it felt, where had he been, how did he feel now? David said it had been a deep experience, it had taken him back to the darkness of the womb, his pre-natal anxieties, his ambivalence about his mother, his resentment of his father, his fears about coming out into the world. He told of his joy at the first light of emergence and Ruby’s boob. He felt good, renewed, serene. There was less tension in his neck. That was as much as he could say now, it was something he’d have to reflect on, it had been a very deep experience.

Now there was a rush to be next for Ruby’s Original Therapy but the primordial soup wasn’t in it any more, being born was what everybody wanted to have a go at. Harriet put her name down on the list, I didn’t. Not my time for rebirth just yet. Ruby promised to take on all comers, to go right through the night if necessary, and after a short break the therapy resumed.

Some wept as they were reborn, others raged. Some both raged and wept. The wailing girl went dead silent when she did it, the one who’d muttered to herself shouted the whole time. Stravinsky was abandoned, no one needed music any more. Additional mats were brought in to afford as it were a longer birth canal. Some thrashed about in Ruby’s grip while being pulled and pushed the length of the room and others shimmied smoothly through her legs like fish. Ruby was red and blotched and chafed all over from being scraped along and struggled with up and down the room but she said that she was so energized by the atmosphere that she wasn’t tired at all.

Even though many of the girls did their writhing in bras and knickers the whole thing was not sexually stimulating, everyone was in such terrible need of something harder to find than sex. I particularly noticed one impressively handsome bearded young man who had sat in a lotus position with a very straight back and a very aloof face earlier in the evening. Now he actually grovelled and whimpered waiting for his turn.

I could never have imagined Harriet squirming on a mat in the grip of a lady wrestler’s legs but when her turn came there she was. She was fully clothed of course but her face was naked and I’d never seen her look like that before. I thought of films in which strange harsh voices spoke through women who were mediums. Harriet groaned and sobbed in her own voice but her body arched and twisted as if some terrible thing in her wanted to shed her like an old skin and get out. I couldn’t help noticing, what with the disarray of her clothing and her skirt sliding up, that she had much more of a figure than I’d given her credit for.

By then I wasn’t feeling cosy any more. One moment I was safe and a little detached and the next I looked at the candle flames and moving shadows and was sick with terror. It was as if the evening had reversed a giant devil-mirror with its picture of a world and I was silvered at the back of things, lost atoms speeding to infinity. Terror was all there was, nothing else. It might reflect the images of aeroplanes or cathedrals or Ruby in a bikini and the faces in the room but there was no reality but the terror, all that it reflected was illusion.

When Harriet had finished we left. The night outside was quiet and peaceful but the silver terror was all about us. We got a taxi and Harriet cuddled tiredly against me. Well, I thought, here we are, and took her in my arms and kissed her. When we got to her place I paid the driver, she opened the front door and we went up to her room without a word.

We took our clothes off with the terror in the room. The terror was the energy that moved us, our naked bodies moved together like the sound waves of a scream. Most animals don’t make love face to face, I thought as I fell asleep. Male and female face the same way, seeing what’s about them. Whales and humans show two backs to it.