The Feel of Steel by Helen Garner

Author:Helen Garner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2001-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Day Five: My revulsion at the detox drinks and capsules intensifies by the hour. Gagging, I venture into the steam room, grope to the tiled bench, and sit meekly in my sarong, hands clasped on my knees. The air is white with fog. Am I even alone? A tall dark mass enters. I squeak, ‘Who’s there?’ It’s a man from San Diego, who tells me the tale of his gallstones. As it happens I have already heard it around the traps, for he is the legend of our intake: people point to him and whisper, ‘See that guy? He’s been fasting for, like, ever.’

‘We all have gallstones,’ he says, in the nonchalant but faint voice characteristic of someone more than seven days into the program. ‘I did the epsom salt treatment. I passed a thousand stones at first, then two and maybe even three thousand more. I lost a lot of them through the weave of the plastic sieve.’

Gallstones? Do gallstones come out your bum? My croissant suddenly doesn’t seem worth mentioning. I sit in silence, outclassed, adrift in a world obsessed with filth. Everybody seems so sure. The printed instructions for the fast warn us against ‘negative people’ who may bring us down at vulnerable moments. Fancying myself an intellectual as I do, I consider it a matter of honour, in this credulous environment, to be one of those ‘negative people’ – but what do I actually know about the inner workings of the body? What is the basis for my scepticism? I’m still functioning on Miss Featherstone’s biology lessons at school, her simple diagram of a mouse: cheese went in at the top, moved down the tubes, and issued from the bottom in what she called ‘little – black – pellets’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.