Massage parlour and hair salon

In the period between 1980 and ’85, there were days, even weeks, when business at ‘Bruno’s Bookshop’, Foster, was slow. Then friends – such as Barbara, my music loving fan from up the road, or Trevor, the warm-hearted gnome whose pottery worshop was close to my bookshop – would worry about me. There were, indeed, many who expressed concern. All would wonder what I could turn to, if things got worse. Later, from 1986, my book business at the ‘Octagon’ in Omeo also had its slow patches, and friends there would worry.

I used to smile and shrug my shoulders, and I would In point towards the rear of the premises and say: “Open a massage parlour, I suppose. See, I’ve got a bit of spare room here at the back.” And we would all laugh. It was a response I gave quite often, probably because it was so implausible as to be funny. Or was it, more seriously, because I had received massages and enjoyed them? or because I knew massage parlours could be fronts for prostitution, and I was trying to stir? In both cases I enjoyed teasing my audience, some of whom knew me well, some not – so their own reactions were interesting.

A few years later, about 1988, on visiting my former bookshop in Foster, which I had sold as a going concern, I found it closed down. On a subsequent visit it was open again, but no longer as a bookshop. It had been converted into a posh, and efficient, little hairdressing salon. At the back, they gave a good massage also, as I experienced.

In 1997, when my partner and I sold up in Omeo so as to watch over my Mother in Oxford, the ‘Octagon’ bookshop name and stock went to Patricia. She was a gay, eccentric, informed and livewire nurse from Perth who had just moved in from the West. She used name and stock to open a bookshop at her nearby home. Our premises – which included home, accommodation facility, health centre, and bookshop – were bought by a couple who kept the residence and accommodation facility, discarded the health service, and turned the bookshop into a hairdressing salon.

These coincidences – they hardly deserve to be called ‘remarkable’ – had their origins almost twenty years earlier, in Madrid.

In part, they dated back to sabbatical from La Trobe in 1979. I was, again, on my own, a recipe I thought appropriate for obtaining the maximum amount of ex- posure to the Spanish language, and the least to English. In the building next to my apartment in Calle Vallehermoso, was a bookshop, the ‘Albacora’. I often dropped in and browsed, and distinctly remember yearning for an environment such as it offered. How I wished I could have my own little bookshop somewhere! Though I was in love with my research, I was not in love with my university department, and did not look forward to returning. Within a year, or year and a half, I had left University, and had my own bookshop – in Foster. Clearly, my visits to the Albacora stimulated my decision making faculties, and planted a potent idea. There is nothing particularly strange about that, you might say. Correct. But that was the beginning.

Now, I don’t remember if it was then, or while staying in Madrid during a visit to my parents in Oxford round 1983 or 4, that the following occurred. In a building in that same district, after using a phone number from the newspaper, I found a masseuse, whose touch was most acceptable. Her advice on other matters was also welcome, and at the end of one visit I made a date for a drink together. We met in a bar in the Calle del Príncipe, near the Plaza Santa Ana. I don’t recall our conversation, but I’m certain there were no requests, for that would have made what happened next unlikely. I don’t react well, and certainly not immediately, to requests. I gave her several hundred pounds, which I could ill afford. Why? For a series of massages in advance? For other ‘services’? No. In return for a letter from time to time – which she duly sent –in which she would tell me how she was getting on. The money would free her from her present job and its attendant perils, by paying for her to train and qualify as a hairdresser.