Skin

After her divorce my mother flew to Tanzania. The particular kind of evangelical Christianity that she embraced used foot washing as a form of baptism and she criss-crossed the country, washing the feet of men and women and children, many surprised but most eventually willing to be taken up by the ministrations of this tall, devoted woman.

Six months later she returned to Toronto and left the church that she’d so recently joined. Yet her impulse to wash others’ feet didn’t waver. She approached an organization that assisted newly arriving refugees and asked if she could offer her services to those who came through its doors. Of course not all those seeking the organization’s help wanted to have their feet washed. Yet there were some who allowed themselves to be led to the plastic chair that my mother set up in the corner of an office. She spread a towel on the floor in front of Ibrahim from Idlib. Gently she peeled off his socks, which were as new as the winter boots sitting beside him, and invited him to lower his feet into a basin of steamy water. Lifting his right foot into her lap, she began to soap the cracked skin, working her fingers into the webbing between big toe and second toe, second toe and third, tugging on each toe as she went.

He faced her with a look of frozen uncertainty. Each day of the last week had been a besiegement of the unknown. The woman holding his foot took out a file and began to rub at the hard callouses of his heels. She pressed a finger to a place on the ball of his foot that sent a jet of feeling through him, so powerful it made him cry out. Then some part of him, braced for years through the bombings, shellings, since the first time he’d huddled as a child in terror under the kitchen table, experienced a small release. My mother massaged each of his feet in turn with almond oil until his skin was silky, drew his socks over them and sent him back to the world, wiping tears from his eyes, his gait at least briefly different.

When friends asked us how our mother was doing, we tended to be vague, embarrassed by her strange preoccupation. Yet my mother insisted that everyone who arrives in a new country deserves to be touched and where better than the feet, that vulnerable, overlooked, nerve-rich part of the body.

When we were children, she never kissed us as she put us to bed, she unkinked our toes. If something happened during the day to upset us, some unhappy schoolyard incident, she had the ability to find the place on the sole of the foot that called up the moment, a pain that with the pressure of her fingers seeped away. She deduced our moods from the pattern of our wet footprints across a tiled floor after a shower.

Later, when I was about to become a mother myself, she told me that her own feet were the most sensitive part of her body. With every step she took, a sensorium burst to life, shooting up through her soles. The grass that she crushed underfoot thrust itself against her. The experience was so overwhelming that she did everything she could to dull it: wore shoes with the thickest tread she could find; scrubbed the soles of her feet with sandpaper; never went barefoot. To my surprise she confided that her feet were the most eroticized part of her body; she couldn’t come to orgasm without a gentle, continuous brushing of her left metatarsal arch. My father, it seemed, had grown tired of her peculiarities.

On his deathbed, my father called for my mother. Barely conscious, he kept repeating her name. When at last she appeared, she pulled a chair up to the end of his bed. She unfolded the sheet at the bottom of the mattress and laid a hand atop each of his ankles. He made small cries like a wounded creature as her wet sponge touched him and she pressed her fingers slowly and methodically to his wasted flesh.

*Skin* by Catherine Bush, published by GooseLane.

About Skin:

In Skin, Catherine Bush plunges into the vortex of all that shapes us. Summoning relationships between the human and more-than-human, she explores a world where touch and intimacy are both desirable and fraught.

Ranging from the realistic to the speculative, Bush’s stories tackle the condition of our restless, unruly world amidst the tumult of viruses, climate change, and ecological crises. Here, she brings to life unusual and perplexing intimacies: a man falls in love with the wind; a substitute teacher’s behaviour with a student brings unforeseen risks; a woman becomes fixated on offering foot washes to strangers.

Bold, vital, and unmistakably of the moment, Skin gives a charged and animating voice to the question of how we face the world and how, in the process, we discover tenderness and allow ourselves to be transformed.

About Catherine Bush:

Catherine Bush is the author of five novels. Her work has been critically acclaimed, published internationally, and shortlisted for numerous awards. Her most recent novel, Blaze Island, was a Globe and Mail and Writers’ Trust of Canada Best Book of the Year, and the Hamilton Reads 2021 Selection. Her other novels include the Canada Reads longlisted Accusation; the Trillium Award shortlisted Claire's Head; the national bestselling The Rules of Engagement, which was also named a New York Times Notable Book and a L.A. Times Best Book of the Year; and Minus Time, shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award. The recipient of numerous fellowships, Bush has been Writer-in-Residence/Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich and a Fiction Meets Science Fellow at the HWK in Delmenhorst, Germany. An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, she lives in Toronto and in an old schoolhouse in Eastern Ontario.