Cockfosters by Helen Simpson

Author:Helen Simpson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473523487
Publisher: Random House

Arizona

18:07 NEEDLES

‘Can you feel that?’

‘Ouch. Yes.’

‘Good.’

‘A sort of pulling sensation. Is that right?’

‘“The therapeutic ache.” Yes.’

She felt like a violin being tuned, she thought, as she stared up at the ceiling. The twisting of the hair-fine needles along with the checking of various pulse points made it feel like some sort of fine-tuning was going on.

‘And that?’ asked Mae again, turning another needle.

‘Yes, but not as strongly,’ Liz replied.

It seemed to work by administering little shocks to get things moving again. Stalled fluids. All the chronic stuff doctors hated, that’s what it was supposed to be good for; autoimmune conditions, IBS, asthma, backache. From what she’d understood.

‘Was the migraine less severe this time, would you say?’ asked Mae. ‘In terms of intensity?’

‘No,’ said Liz. ‘Unfortunately not. Worse if anything. Flashing lights, nausea; flat on my back in a darkened room. But it may all simply disappear when I hit the menopause! You said so last time.’

‘That does happen sometimes,’ said Mae, raising her eyebrows slightly and smiling. ‘I’m not offering empty hope.’

They lapsed back into silence while Mae stood and held Liz’s wrist, testing her pulse. Quite a lot of any acupuncture session seemed to be filled with this careful pulse-taking. As far as she had understood, there were twelve different pulse points, six along each wrist, all useful for reading the selfsame central pulse in subtly different diagnostic ways. And the changes in pulse quality that happened when Mae slid a new needle into one of the body’s eight hundred or so acupuncture points provided her with clues as to what should be done next. Or something like that. At any rate it was a quiet, painstaking business as well as a leap of faith, and Liz was finding it surprisingly restful.

The room was bare and clean and bright, though without the strip-lit glare of the hospital space where she had last week seen the specialist. ‘Be happy,’ he had said, patronisingly, at the end of an inconclusive appointment. Her GP had snorted when she told her this: ‘Another consultant telling a middle-aged woman she’s hysterical.’ Certainly his advice had not been noticeably more scientific than anything Mae had said so far.

‘So, what are you working on now?’ asked Mae, returning her arm carefully to the table.

‘I’m finishing a paper on the Risorgimento for a conference at Senate House next week. Mazzini’s identification of liberty with blood sacrifice, all that.’

‘The Risorgimento?’

‘It was the big freedom movement of the nineteenth century.’

‘Yes, yes,’ murmured Mae mock-seriously, then: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about but it all sounds very impressive.’

Mae had been recommended to Liz by an insomniac colleague in the History Faculty. He had earnestly assured her that he felt better than he had done for months and that a needle between the brows was the sovereign remedy against sleeplessness; Liz had decided to go along with an open mind.

‘He was quite impressive, Mazzini. In exile all those years. He never gave up. Though Marx did call him “that everlasting old ass”.

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