Page 78 of To Hell With It
A man appeared at the front door – which had ‘Bathe House’ painted on it in blue – with a beard so big it was actually hard to see his face. He wasn’t old, probably in his late thirties, but he looked like someone who wanted to be older than his years. Like someone who wanted to escape his own reality, because when I looked into his eyes they were as anxiety ridden as mine. He had no shoes on and his fingernails looked like they had been digging in mud all day.
‘Hi, Pip.’ Eve smiled.
‘Namaste,’ Pip said with a slow blink, like he was controlling an emotion I couldn’t work out.
A few moments later (actually after quite an awkward silence), Eve explained to Pip that I was there for a sound bath then left me to it and waited in the van. Pip told me to get comfortable, which meant removing my shoes and socks, lying on the floor and allowing myself tojust be, as he put it.
The problem is I couldn’t just be. I couldn’t lie on his floor. All I could see were his feet (the skin on his heels was hard and crusty and tinged yellow). My gaze trailed up his bare legs (he was wearing shorts) to his penis (I couldn’t actually see his penis, but imagined it dangling down above me on the floor like some weird porn film), and then I imagined giving him a blow job and his dead toes curling in delight.
I felt sick. There was nothing relaxing about it at all, nothing soothing – the butterflies were going crazy; had he walked on phlegm with his bare feet? Had he cleaned his floor after his last client?Who was his last client?Did he even clean his floor? (I already knew the answer to that one). I knew I had to say something but I didn’t want to offend him.
‘Can I sit instead?’ I asked. ‘I have a bad back and it’s not good on hard floors.’
‘Whatever is more comfortable,’ Pip said gently, and I let out a loud breath.
There was a huge gong next to Pip, which momentarily took my mind away from the floor. He picked up a club and banged it but it wasn’t as loud as I had imagined it might have been, the sound was gentle and soft and floated around my head like a cloud. Then he sat down in front of me, with his legs crossed and his hands clutching his dead feet, and before I had a chance to even think about my exit, he placed both his hands on my temples.
‘Close your eyes,’ he said in a breathy, humming kind of way but all I could think about was his crusty feet transferred to his hands onto my face. ‘Close your eyes and take a deep breath in, allow yourself to let go of anything weighing you down.’ He breathed out loudly. ‘Take yourself to a place of peace, a place of stillness.’ He hummed. ‘A place you can call home.’
I thought of Drangan, of Una in her salon waiting for me to meet her for lunch, of Niall and I stacking shelves and eating Rich Tea biscuits in the store room while talking about woodlice. I thought of my mum with her birds and my dad with his moles and then I started to cry. But not about any of that, I was crying about Pip’s dead feet on my face.
‘That’s right, let it all out.’ Pip sighed.
Dong, dong, doooong.
‘Let yourself be free.’ I felt him sway from side to side to the rhythm of the gong and I imagined his penis swaying too.
The sound of a spluttering engine startled me and it took me a moment to realise that it was getting fainter. And then a moment longer to recognise what it was – it was Eve’s van.
I opened my eyes and looked out of the window, grateful for an excuse to escape. And you know when you know something bad has happened, and it doesn’t hit you straight away even though it should because you’re watching it happen? It was like that.
I watched as Eve drove off, away from Pip’s house, away from me, away from my bag, which was on the pavement where she had been parked only moments before.
I ran outside but I already knew what she’d done. I dug my hand inside the side pocket but it wasn’t there, my wallet. It wasn’t there because Eve had taken it and left me in the middle of bloody nowhere with a man called Pip and his crusty feet.
When I turned around, Pip was behind me shaking his head.
‘Not again,’ he muttered and I turned to face him.
‘What do you mean,not again? She’s stolen my wallet.’
‘Sounds about right.’
‘I need my wallet,’ I said in disbelief. ‘She might have taken something else.’ I frantically rummaged in my bag.
‘No, it’ll just be your wallet.’
‘How do you know?’ I faced Pip, frustrated.
‘Were you staying at The Sky Hostel?’
‘Yes, but I was in a café just down the road from there when I met Eve,’ I said. ‘Why? How do you know I was staying at the hostel?’
Pip pondered for a moment.
‘She waits for travellers staying at the hostel, offers them a lift, and then takes their wallets and leaves them as soon as she can.’
I thought back to Eve turning her van around when I was having a poo. She was going to drive away and leave me there. I felt hurt and angry at the same time. What about everything she told me? Everything I’d told her? OK, we weren’t best friends, but we’d shared stuff, she couldn’t be a bad person, could she? I was desperate for there to be some kind of mistake.
