French Revolutions

going to hurt, but
actually the pain was no worse than the last time I tore off a pair of
gaffer-tape trousers after they caught fire. After the first Velcro-parting rip
my eyes clamped shut while my mouth did the opposite.
    Filling her second bucket with strip
after waxed strip of flayed follicles, Martine confessed that she had once
depilated her father. He was ‘almost’ a professional cyclist, a man who covered
500k a week for years, but after one shin’s worth of her follicular yanking he
yelped off the trolley and hobbled away in search of his razor. Christophe
Moreau, now there was a super-hard man. He wouldn’t have made a squeak, not
even at this bit — ow ow ow STOP now — where
I frenziedly pluck out any remaining individual hairs with these tweezers.
    A razor, I thought. Why hadn’t I just
shaved my stupid legs with a razor? And why had I bothered anyway? Martine had
assured me it was nothing to do with aerodynamics: part of the reason was to
facilitate the massage process, but from what her father had told her the main
intention was to reduce the risk of infecting the regular and serious leg
abrasions that are the cyclist’s lot. How awful, I’d thought; what a ghasdy
rationale. Shaving my face every morning was dull enough, but imagine if I did
it not for presentation purposes, but because at some stage during the journey
into work I would inevitably headbutt a postbox.
    Walking out of the salon it felt
strange to have thanked and paid someone for such an experience, though not as
strange as my bald leg flesh felt as my trousers swished freely over it. I’d
ordered a cab to take me from beauty salon to massage parlour and, gratified
that even such an itinerary did not apparently mark me out in his eyes as a
‘john’, felt brave enough to ask the driver to wait. Thanking God and — behold
the sound of crawling flesh — last night’s predatory pensioners that I wasn’t
going into a massage parlour stinking of stale booze, I walked through an
unassuming door and into an unassuming surgery.
    Later I was told that in France, massage has none of the stigma attached to it by the British, and is indeed widely
available on the health service. How I would have appreciated this knowledge as
I took my place in the vet-smelly waiting room next to a scabrous old tramp
reading a well-thumbed Marie-Claire. His turn was called by a pale-eyed
young man of ominous appearance and he slowly rose into an arthritic hunch. In
moments the sound of heavy skin being roundly belaboured thundered out of a
halfclosed door. When the old man began to protest wearily it was slammed shut.
    ‘Monsieur?’
    I’d been in two minds about staying,
and they’d both decided to make a run for it when a cheerful man in his forties
popped a curly-haired head round the corner. In moments I was, for the second
time in less than an hour, lying face-down on a trolley with my trousers on a
chair and my pants wedged up my crack, waiting for a hired stranger to get
cracking on me.
    ‘Alors,’ he said, offloading a wristy
squirt of cold white cream on to my hairless, goosebumped thighs. I’d noticed
since returning to France that my ability to sustain conversation with the
natives had improved exponentially, and also that I kept wishing it hadn’t.
Even two weeks ago I could have just bitten the headrest in agonised
semi-silence; now I felt obliged to formulate considered replies as he
systematically worked me over. The backs of my calves weren’t too bad,
permitting me to explain my quest in an almost normal voice, and to return the
genuine excitement this seemed to cause him with appropriate modesty-conveying
noises. For a brief moment we were two middle-aged men exchanging sporting
anecdotes in a wholly humdrum fashion; then, as we moved on to discuss the
region’s cycling stars, he pressed his thumb into the nearside tendon beneath
my right knee and with a stridency normally used to invoke the name of Mr
Gordon Bennett I shrieked, ‘christophe
moreau!’
    Thus ended my meaningful contribution
to the debate, along with any residual fears that I might inadvertently develop
an erection. My vital signs were still some way from normality when, working
his way up, my cheerful tormentor manually encountered a contorted ganglion of
muscle tissue in the underside of my left thigh. ‘Aaah,’ he said, and so did I,
only with a generous helping of silent ‘G’s and many additional punctuation
marks. After ten minutes he