Free Painkiller by N.J. Fountain

‘If you can’t take this seriously…’
    I dropped the dressing gown to the floor and stood there, defiantly, in my not-bad-for-a-forty-three-year-old nakedness. ‘This seriously enough?’
    He choked and cast his eyes to the ceiling. ‘You are supposed to keep your underwear on.’
    ‘Oh.’
    I jumped back into the changing room and struggled with my knickers and bra. ‘That wasn’t embarrassing in the slightest,’ I shouted.
    ‘I did say. Just now. Five minutes ago.’
    ‘I’m sure you did.’
    ‘It wasn’t a… I did say.’
    ‘I’m sure you did. I’m sorry. I find it difficult to concentrate on what people say. The pain gets in the way.’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘So what did you think?’
    ‘Fantastic. Just fantastic.’
    ‘I meant about my posture.’
    ‘Ah. Of course. Well, before my brain shut down from overheating, I noticed that my initial diagnosis was correct. Your shoulders are a mess, and the muscles in your left side have contracted.’
    I re-emerged, and at his gesture I positioned myself face down and exposed my back and bum to the elements. He positioned the flat of his hands either side of my spine.
    ‘Hands not too cold?’
    ‘No, it’s fine.’
    He’s not going to rape me. He’s gone to far too much trouble
, I thought.
    He can’t rape me, anyway, there’s people walking in and out of that steam room every other minute
, I thought.
    Please, God, don’t let me get moist while I’m lying here
, I thought.
    It wasn’t erotic in the slightest
. Hellfire!
Even to a hardened pain-junkie like me, it was fucking agony. He buried his elbow in my shoulder, making me want to scream. He worked his way up my back, stretching the spine, pushing at my hip.
    ‘As I thought,’ he said grimly, ‘the muscles have really pulled you out of shape.’
    As he pummelled my body I stared fixedly through the hole in the table, eyes wandering over the shapes in the marble floor. There was a very round whorl in the pattern, and I imagined it was a huge clock, and imagined the second hand of the huge clock lurching its way around the dial slowly, slowly.
Don’t think ‘agonising slowness’, don’t think ‘painfully slow’, just think
…
Just don’t think. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. There goes the second hand, away from the four
…
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Over the five Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Towards the six
…
Just twenty more times around the dial
…
    And then he said, ‘I’m done.’
    I got up off the table and stood, and walked around the room, afraid I might break into little bits. I caught my reflection in a shiny wall, and saw I had grown bright red goggles, where the hole in the table had left a mark around my face.
    My hip was sore, but felt wonderful. Every limb felt lighter. My Angry Friend was still with me, of course, but the other pains, the muscular ones I had taken for granted as part of the general shitness of the way I felt, had eased considerably. The dull headache, the one I’d had since March, had gone.
    ‘That’s amazing,’ I said, balancing myself on the balls of my feet. ‘I feel like I’ve grown another three inches.’
    ‘You’re standing taller, I can see it from here. And your shoulders have dropped.’
    I moved my head, and the action was glorious and uneventful. No cracks, no twinges, no stabbing feeling between the eyes.
    ‘My God. My doctor told me not to expect any miracles. This comes close to a miracle in my book.’
    Niall was getting embarrassed again. He coughed. ‘It’s nothing really. You just need to release the muscles, keep them from seizing up. They will start to bunch up again with the pain, almost straight away, so it’s a never-ending process, I’m afraid.’
    I nipped back into the dressing room and grabbed my jeans. ‘Don’t worry about that. My life is filled with never-ending processes. I take my drugs three times a day. I attach electrodes to my body to try and hold back the pain. I put my mouth guard in every night to stop myself