Because I have lost the notes I made that day, I am collecting detail up from my memory-beach where things are ground down and worn away by the days coming in over one another like waves.
How can I see detail and have as my illness that I cannot see? It is one of the peculiar things about blepharospasm that sometimes the twitch and tremor leave you in peace and you can see. But if you badly need them to do so, they take a tighter grip and blind you. I remain observant although, as I am now, I need guiding around this house that I have known for over forty years. It’s hard to explain to those you know, and impossible to explain to strangers without boring them.
Claudia the shaman appeared. I knew it must be Claudia because she practically made the car’s bumper curve upwards, she was so smiley and dainty. She parked her Mini and hopped out, a small Latin woman of perhaps twenty and pretty as a picture, long black hair, gold skin, smile to make a morning, lots of jerseys and a poncho. She had a soft raffia basket, which she put over her elbow.
She asked, ‘Are you Candia? I am Claudia’, which always strikes me as an almost palindromic and certainly confusing thing to have to say, and unlocked her premises just like any shopkeeper. There was no alarm system. That was a good sign. Spirits worth their salt can protect their premises.
She had the glow and pace that make normal gestures feel like bestowed privileges. We settled with our mugs of fruit tea. After many years I have not worked out which blend is the least nasty.
She was undoubtedly a hibiscus flower along this cold shore. She took off her sensible boots and some of her thicker woollens. It was, after all, August. Settled at her desk, she took a look at me over it. She was tiny, and perhaps not even twenty. I was sure that I was growing.
Soon I would fill the shop.
She started to ask the questions and I began to bore myself, retelling my much-handled story. Often, when I am telling medical people or other putative therapists about it, I start to think, ‘Oh it’s not that bad really. Why don’t I stop troubling you this minute?’
Shaman-Claudia sat on her chair like a sprite, not in it like a weighted person. I noticed a tall thing in the corner that looked as if it might be a rainmaker, one of those hollow stalks full of seeds that fall with a sound like sudden rain on big leaves. I was sure there were maracas somewhere about.
There is no point doing these things with half a heart.
We went down to the basement; it was clean and fresh. It might have been in a modest East Coast B & B, before the Scottish Tourist Board fell to the torrid charms of air freshener and full-strength potpourri.
I lay down as I was told, Shaman-Claudia dimmed the lights and lit a candle, passed a number of large feathers, could they have been from a condor? over me, rattled her various instruments, and settled, with a gravity that made her small form intensify, to calling down the relevant spirits.
At no point did I even feel like laughing. I am not unusual I’m sure in testing myself in these circumstances. As a rule I can get through with manners and going deep within not to retrieve past selves but to avoid being hurtful. At no point at all did I not take literally all Shaman-Claudia said. That was her achievement. The bogus couldn’t get a grip on her anywhere, possibly on account of her wholesome physical person. We entered the spirit world.
That, in a basement in Portobello on the East Coast of Scotland, takes some strength of being, when a complete stranger is rattling and chanting over an old Scots body, calling up its animal familiars. Mine arrived at once, punctual as their keeper, or whatever one is to one’s animal familiar. One was a small tiger not through the kitten stage and with very large feet and the other was a whippy and talkative snake.
There is no surprise for the reader there at all. They come straight from my library of predictable attachments and concerns, my usual wardrobe of metaphors. Maybe the tiger was related to Ormiston, maybe the snake to our first mother, Eve.
The tiger told me to walk towards Fram and Claudia and to say to them what was in my heart. My normally rather distanced way of speech, at least with strangers, became direct.
I spoke the plain words of affection.
The headache that I carry which combines the strain of my condition with the puzzle of my situation became acute.
When any physical sensation occurred, Shaman-Claudia identified it well before I had expressed it to myself. She told the headache to be off. It did as it was told.
I explained to Fram and Claudia all that I wanted for them and their happiness. It came out without the administering of blows to myself.
The snake was a subtle customer, as tradition dictates. In a gesture of elegant animistic diplomacy from beyond both rationality and the grave, it turned out that the snake was my late mother-in-law who had in life feared snakes terribly. It was a nice snake and full of excellent advice, all of which I was anxious to remember in that way you are in dreams, because you know that this is it, the last, the only chance, before…
You wake up.
There is, when you come round after these things have gone well, or reached something important, a sense, I know now after several brushes with these other angles to healing, that you are on the edge of flu. You have come down with something.
We had been over an hour in the basement with the small tiger and the snake. I checked all the graphic works on the walls to see if I had glimpsed a picture of either creature before going under. Irreproachably nebulous images or nice Scots scenes hung on the walls. My eyes were fairly open, and did not insist on closing.
I was rather competitive about my familiars and asked, ‘I s’pose everyone has tigers and snakes?’
Shaman-Claudia was wise to all levels of the question and avoided it. Like all convincing practitioners of creeds, she had no exotic manner to her although her flowerlike head and tininess made her exotic. She was tired after her exertion, like a dancer or a hod carrier.
We had more tea, and chatted about the usual ice-breakers. You get used to this upside-down intimacy, drawing people out about themselves after they have seen you weeping in the foetal position. I am unable to say how this rhythm lies in relation to paid sex though the thought of the parallel has crossed my mind.
I have sometimes wondered how many women like me pay to be touched, completely innocently, by strangers, just for the specific it may offer against loneliness? I have even resorted to manicurists during a bad three weeks this January, but I couldn’t keep it up. They spotted me for a first-timer at the salon in the Gloucester Road and I was shy to go back after I realised that I was too guilty and not rude enough and don’t like coloured fingernails. But I did love the tender Polish touch of the girls with their cream and patting and the little bath of wax for your fingers’ tips.
Shaman-Claudia told me a bit about herself now. She was, despite appearances, rather more than twenty. She had two children with her Brazilian ex-husband, one nearly grown up, and she had recently remarried, a Scotsman, an ex-minister of the Kirk. Her personal tone was calm, amused, taken at a magnificently easy pace. It is unusual for the very small to be magnificent. Her own magnificence lay in this: that, like a creature, she was at once serious and weightless. She was one of those rare people from whom you get the strong sense of what the world is to them and how it would be to be loved by them. She was both unstrained and entertaining. It was hard to be defended or harsh near her. She had shown me at the very least that it would be by ceasing to struggle and writhe and try to exorcise my grief about it all that I would take the hook out of my heart and stop re-impaling myself on it as I had been doing for months to no one’s benefit.