The needles

I am late, just as I’m always late for everything. I forgot to get any money out the night before, and I left the house at the last minute, so I run to the cashpoint in the searing heat. I’ve long suspected that ATMs just know when you are running late; that’s when they take eons to recognise your PIN, or wait an age before moving from one screen to another. Those are the times where they whir for what feels like hours before spitting out your money, seemingly from a vault many miles below the surface of the earth. In extreme cases they have been known to swallow my card and refuse to give it back until the bus has long gone.

A bona fide eternity later, notes in my wallet, I scurry across the busy road with scant regard for my personal safety. Being hit by a car I could deal with, being late for this appointment would be deeply embarrassing. Even on foot, even minutes away from my destination, the motorists I dodge look in even more of a hurry than me. Windows are open and an array of radio stations pump mindless sounds into the shimmering haze. Inside the cars, couples who have run out of things to say are hitting town, and they’ll stay there until they’ve run out of things to buy.

I on the other hand have nearly run out of time. I get to the steps of the building two minutes late according to my phone (which on past experience is quite a charitable judge of punctuality) and April greets me at the door. She looks younger than I expected, though on reflection I would be hard pressed to say how old I thought she was. She’s smartly dressed in a crisp white shirt. I notice her glasses are by Gucci; I don’t expect an acupuncturist to wear Gucci, though I have absolutely no reason to think that.

“Would you like some water?” she says. I nod. I’m just about the right side of out of breath but from my damp forehead I’m very much the wrong side of dry as a bone. Considering this is supposed to be relaxing it has got off to a terrible start, and it’s all my fault.

We go up to the top floor, to a big airy white walled room with high ceilings. I know this place well, I used to have weekly sessions of a very different nature here and was pierced in an altogether different way. Seeing that big oatmeal sofa again is like running into somebody in the street who you used to know, I don’t know whether to acknowledge its presence or blank it. Out of the window I can make out a tall office block further into the centre of town, and I feel like I ought to know where it is.

We talk about my symptoms and April asks me a lot of questions. I don’t understand what they all have to do with anything. When do I go to sleep? Am I a hot person or a cold person? Are my hands hot or cold? My feet? Do I sleep on my side? Sometimes I don’t understand April’s accent and I need to ask her to repeat herself. I feel embarrassed for asking, as if I should know. April doesn’t give a lot away. Sometimes, I will answer a question and she nods and says “Yes! Very good.” It’s like she is giving me an oral exam on behalf of the cosmos, and I don’t know which are the right answers.

She beams when I tell her that I quit smoking seven years ago. If smokers could feel the sheer joy she radiates at that point they might all give up at the drop of a hat.

I graduate to the couch after taking my top off. I have the sort of complicated relationship with my body which can only end in tears; some days it feels like I was transplanted into it thirty-six years ago and it’s finally getting round to rejecting me. And yet in some ways at least I am quite comfortable in my own skin, and I have no problem with sitting there shirtless while April tries to get me to relax. My spine is out of alignment, she says, and one of my shoulders is far higher up than the other. Small adjustments can make big differences, she tells me. I feel like, as someone who tries to write, I ought to understand that concept.

She rubs an oily white cream into my arms and feet. The tube has Chinese symbols on it which I cannot make out and could not possibly understand.

“Is the smell all right?”

I lift my arm to my nose, sniff it and can’t help but grin.

“It’s lovely! It smells of root beer. Root beer is one of my favourite things.”

April gives the huge surprised smile of someone who doesn’t hear that very often, and we have something in common. It almost makes things comfortable as I sit on the couch, anxiously waiting for the jarring, frightening moment when the first needle goes in. I’m conscious of April standing behind me, no doubt looking at my neck through those Gucci glasses, deciding where to strike first. I brace myself.

“Was that uncomfortable?” she says.

I nearly fall off the couch. I had no idea she had started yet.

Slowly, steadily, the needles go in. It’s the weirdest feeling - or rather, lack of feeling, because I am barely conscious of any of them. Initially I refuse to look - whenever I have my blood taken for tests I can cope as long as I never have to look down at the syringe sticking into my arm. I just stare at the educational poster on the wall (showing some grisly educational pictures relating to smear tests) and keep my gaze fixed there until the whole thing is over and the plastic, ruby-red tubes are stickered up and safely finished, sitting there on the table like gigantic fountain pen cartridges.

But it feels so innocuous that I find I’m unable not to peek. The needles are tiny, dotted in grids all along my arms and feet. What would they look like if I joined them up with a biro? Would it be a map of two years’ pain, or some new constellation I have never seen? I wonder where I have been while all of them have been going in because it can’t have been here, I don’t remember any of these. Not just that, but my breathing has slowed, my shoulders have dropped and I feel completely at rest for the first time in some time. I half expected the whole thing to have a soundtrack of whale music, strings or pan pipes, I didn’t know what to expect, but in this high-ceilinged room the whole process has taken place in a companionable silence with a woman I have known for less than an hour.

I am transformed. When I got on the couch I was a soggy lump of clay waiting to be pierced by lances, now I am a thin and gauzy tissue, fixed to a board by thumb tacks. They are the only thing that stops me from fluttering away. And then it is over as quickly as it has begun. I feel rueful watching April walk round me taking the needles out, one by one.

“You have done really well. You are very good at relaxing.”

I don’t think anybody has ever said that to me before.

I hand over the money I went through such torment to get, we agree a time for the following weekend and I take my leave of her. I go out through the grand red door and blink in the sunshine, back on the gorgeous Georgian square, ringed with stunning houses I regularly fantasise about living in. I call Kelly. She is shopping in the centre, and we agree to meet up for lunch. “I want you to tell me everything about it.” she says.

On the walk into town I examine my arms and hands. Even in the strong afternoon light, I can only just make out the tiniest of marks here and there. If you didn’t know better, you wouldn’t think there was anything there at all.