Story for performance #300
webcast from near Dungog at 05:31PM, 16 Apr 06

I hold your foot now as you once held that photo. I am rocking. I am rocking you. I have never massaged your feet. I have barely known your life. I shouldn’t have to touch you this way. Your dirty, shitty, limp, clammy body, lifeless under my washcloth. Away, I am sluicing away the evidence.

Hands slipping and sliding up legs and across mounds. The soft cloth between your toes, between each hair, parting, untangling, unravelling, between each ridge of callouses, between each pore, each cell. Across the pale pink expanse. Across the yellowish skin. The cloth is dirty, already cold. I am soaking and I am squeezing. Soaking and squeezing. Slurp and splash in the blue light. The room stretching out and out, a blue sky.

‘The water is cold. I’ll change the water for you.

‘There now. Is that too hot for you?’

I see her toes splayed in the sand down near the home where I grew up. She is disappearing from me into the sand bit by bit, yet I don’t, I can’t, I don’t reach out. How thin she looks, uncomfortable, irritated, always was, but worse now. Her, just lying there in the hospital bed. There is something wrong with her legs. They are swollen. She is not comfortable. They can’t find a place of stillness. I massage her. She offers me her feet. I take that swollen leg into my hands. I gently press the spongey flesh of the feet and ankles. My fingers leave their mark there—in her flesh. The skin not springy as once it was in health.

I see again the sensuality of the daughter’s body. I see the daughter’s body in the mother’s. I am excited. I am confused. I am sad. I continue. At last, the work of my hands, at last, the springiness of the skin returns. The swelling dissipates through the leg. The stillness returns.

Like this your baby skin gaping, stretched, I know you. I’ve known you from that time, I saw the photo, those body parts I showed you, remember? Your body parts. I’ve seen you, I know you. I rocked you. I had to breathe, I was frightened.

So where I am now is where? Where? Is something gone? She is disappearing from me in the sand, bit by bit.

I arrived. I bent over her face. I felt her breath. I said ‘Hello, hello?’. Not expecting anything and she said ‘hello’ back. And she must have recognised my voice. And she said hello back. It was the last thing she said.

Your feet, though, your feet, I have never massaged. Your life I have never known.

I imagine your toes splayed in the sand down near where I grew up. You are disappearing from me in the sand, bit by bit, yet I don’t, I can’t, I don’t reach out. What am I giving? Do you know what I am taking? That I am taking? The branches, breast, pelvic area in the crook of the tree, the dried, rotten tree. You giving and taking. Ashamed, am I? Guilty, am I? Your dirty breasts and labia. I clean your breasts and labia.

Martyrdom? Fuck martyrdom. I do what I do, there is no code. I am who I am. I give succour but I have my own story. I have no shame.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Deb McBride, Michelle Outram and Stephen Rodgers.