9

Skin hunger

‘Then stay with me a little longer,’ Madame Olenska said in a low tone, just touching his knee with her plumed fan. It was the lightest touch, but it thrilled him like a caress.

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence¹

One afternoon while walking, I looked into a street-facing primary-school playground and saw a run-of-the-mill episode that left my eyes prickling with tears. A group of children, wearing their uniforms of blue shirts, shorts and hats, were kicking a ball around. One boy lost his balance and, in a moment that seemed to stop time, toppled over. I flinched as his knee scraped the asphalt. Close enough to see him try and fail not to cry, but not close enough to see if his knee was bleeding, I watched as his little friends helped him up. They shepherded him slowly across the accursed bitumen towards a teacher. One friend held his hand. The other rested a palm on the wounded boy’s shoulder as if to say, ‘I’m with you. I feel your pain.’ A tiny tableau of bravery and compassion. We can only hope that the impression of that kindness lasts longer than the graze on his skin.

Skin as pain. Skin as comfort. Skin as friendship. The introduction to Nina Jablonski’s Skin, at once prosaic and momentous, reads: ‘The pores and nerve endings of our skin unite us with our surroundings. Skin is the interface through which we touch one another and sense much of our environment.’² University of Cambridge literary scholar Steven Connor writes that skin was thought of first as a screen, until it became a membrane (around the time of our friend Tobias Smollett), and then a milieu: ‘The skin becomes a place of mingling, a mingling of places.’³ Touch is fundamental to our survival, but we take its physiological remarkableness for granted, just as we can be oblivious to all the ways it tells us that we are alive and connected to other people. A Sphinxian riddle might ask, ‘What is inside and out, pleasure and pain, superficial and deep, sense and sensibility?’ The answer is touch.

Touch is when we embrace and are embraced; we align our own hardness and edges, sense our softness and give as we feel another body along the length of our own. Touch is being in a body on a humid day, as sticky as the bubbles in bubble tea – who could say where skin ends and saturated air starts? Touch is swimming laps in a pool, pulling our arms through cool water that resists and yields to their motion. Touch is clasping hands with another to twirl and shimmy, bump and grind on the dance floor. Touch is running hands over a dog’s pelt, a cat’s fur, a bird’s feathers. High-fiving when the ball goes through the hoop. Clapping and stomping to call musicians back on stage for an encore. Two people removing clothing in a frenzied rush of desire. As the band Hunters & Collectors expressed it, ‘So shed your skin and let’s get started.’

When we pat a baby’s back, in time with our beating hearts, we recall that touch is our first language, and our most primal. Babies’ skin is wondrous. If I could travel back in time to relive a moment of my choosing, I would seek one sense-memory, so associative, over all others: to hold my children when they were babies. A newborn has no world beyond skin on skin. The whirling thoughts and pressing obligations that form a mother’s world settle and distil to the essential, her skin on her baby’s. The former certainty of inhabiting an autonomous self evaporates. Surface to surface, she finds depths of feeling within that she never knew of before. Claudia Benthien, who is admittedly a literary scholar rather than an anatomist, writes, ‘In the embryo, the skin and the brain are formed from the same membrane, the ectoderm; both are, in essence, surfaces.’⁴ Our tactile selves speak a silent but sometimes charged language: erotic, companionable, healing, ecstatic, maternal.

At life’s beginning and end, and everything in between, touch is how we protect ourselves and how we connect. Touch is how we express love, security, care. Of the five senses, touch arrives first and leaves last. Cradling a newborn baby skin-to-skin is an exquisite elixir of relief, love and exhaustion; a magic sensation that releases oxytocin and dopamine, pain-extinguishing endorphins. ‘Kangaroo care’ for premature babies, skin-to-skin, has transformed neonatal care.⁵ Touch is our final language, too, comprehended without words. We hold our beloved in our arms, with our hands or lips to forehead, as life slips away.

Deathbed touch reaches for the unsayable, the unknowable. It can be formalised, as in the Catholic sacrament Extreme Unction, known today as the Last Rites. A sick or dying person is anointed and blessed by a priest with chrism, a mix of olive oil and balsam. I can remember sitting in Mass when I was about ten and being much taken with the word ‘chrism’; a delightful mix of prism and Christmas, I thought, although learning about its ritualised role in relation to the dying made me want to jump out of my own skin. Now I see the Last Rites as an act of comfort and salvation for believers, the spiritual meaning of which is carried through touch.

Those imponderable ‘Would you rather . . .’ questions that children defiantly ask each other combine the chauvinism of the able-bodied with a commitment to freaking each other out. A playful, ‘Would you rather roast to death in the desert or freeze to death in the snow?’ is followed by other questions that internalise themselves in a cocoon of dread as we age. ‘Would you rather lose your sense of taste, or the feeling down your right arm?’ Children can barely contemplate a stroke, paraplegia or quadriplegia that removes sensation from tracts of skin, leaves them disconnected from the brain stem.

I read a book called Still Lives: Narratives of spinal cord injury because I wondered what it must be like to not feel your legs. The story of a British paraplegic woman called Julie intrigued me; she can feel, but not in the ‘normal’ way. She tells the interviewer, ‘If you can touch your hair, you know, but you cannot feel the touch. If I touch my legs I know.’ Indeed, if you touch your hair, you feel it on your hands, but the hair itself has no sensation. If a hairdresser is poised to snip off a lock they’re holding between their fingers, you don’t really feel it, although even with your eyes closed you know they are touching your hair. If they yank the strand and stimulate the nerves on your scalp, then you will certainly know. If Julie looks at someone else touching her leg, she says, ‘then I know they are . . . And I can feel a presence.’⁶

I wondered if it is similar to having a baby by caesarean section. The epidural means you don’t feel the scalpel, thankfully, but I sensed a strange and unsettling pressure that felt like someone rummaging about inside my pelvis. Needing to be sure that the block to my nerves was working, the anaesthetist asked me the same question while sliding an ice cube upwards from my pubic bone. ‘Can you feel this? Can you feel this? Can you feel this?’

Skin is the site of physical contact, which can be neutral, affirming or rupturing. Literary scholars and philosophers, I discovered, animate skin in fascinating ways beyond the biological. Steven Connor writes that skin is bilateral; it is material and image, stuff and sign. ‘If you touch your skin – and think how hard it is to think without touching your skin, forefinger to lip, say – then you feel yourself and you feel yourself feeling.’⁷ And if someone else touches their finger to your lip? Vast is the emotional and sensory distance between touch that is wanted – let’s call it a caress – and an unwanted grope. Heading further along a rough tactile path brings us to outright violence. A desired kiss will leave no mark, if it’s done right, but a violent strike will leave a bruise, or worse, visible to the world and felt deep within. ‘Don’t touch me,’ a person thinks, or screams, their brain and skin receptor cells reacting in protest to repellent or painful touch. Touch that makes your skin crawl. Brain and skin fire signals back and forth to each other so that we can interpret whether touch is pleasurable, or discomforting and malicious enough to make us squirm.⁸ Or run. A pinch can be playful or cruel. An out-of-the-blue slap can make us feel as if the world has stopped spinning, in a bad way. A finger traced down a spine can make the world stop spinning, in a good way.

Context and consent are everything.

Our soles, palms and fingertips are ‘glabrous’; our armpits are not. To me this is an adjective that somehow doesn’t sound like what it describes, some of the sexiest parts of the body: glabrous skin is hairless skin. Glabrous skin is populated by four groups of ‘mechanoreceptors’, the first two named after German anatomists, the last two named after Italians. These receptors, Monty Lyman writes, ‘essentially respond to changes in pressure and distortion of the skin’.⁹ Imagine you have just dropped a coin into a sack of lentils. Your wedding ring has slipped into an ice bucket. Your credit card is wedged into a crevice in your couch. In each case, you can first locate, and next fish, pincer or prise out the lost object, more than likely with your index finger and thumb. Such dexterity is thanks to a delicate, adaptive interplay of disc-shaped Merkel cells, which are packed in the fingertips, the Meissner corpuscles that lie deeper, and electrical impulses to the brain. Merkel cells are ‘slowly adapting’ but Meissner corpuscles are ‘rapidly adapting’, recording only the onset and offset of skin indentation and making tiny adjustments, rapid reflexes of a thousandth of a millimetre, many times a second. The final mechanisms of touch are the Pacini corpuscles, which structurally resemble microscopic onions and can pick up vibrations, and the Ruffini endings, which let the brain know the position of your hand as you search by touch.

As we saw in Chapter 1, ‘What is skin?’, Merkel cells are in the basal layer of the epidermis, close to the surface. They detect pressure and minute vibrations. If you brush against a spider web, you feel the gossamer threads thanks to Merkel cells. How do we pull a grape off its stalk without squishing it, before popping the fruit into our mouth? This intricate series of actions, done without thinking, are all thanks to the work of Meissner corpuscles. You don’t need sight for these delicate, dextrous feats, only touch. Why on earth should a clunky arcade game that requires its player to pick up a crappy toy with a metal claw provoke any sense of achievement at all? The set-up we are born with is magic.

Touch is often seen as the poor cousin of other senses. I read a slightly resentful comment that ‘For every research paper on touch there are 100 on sight.’¹⁰ Monty Lyman worked through the latest scientific literature on touch as research for his book, and his engrossing descriptions of its mechanics made me consider something commonplace but miraculous: we feel our clothes when we put them on, but don’t notice their presence for the rest of the day, unless they prickle or pinch our skin. Lyman’s stupendous list of fun facts about touch asks: Why do our fingers and toes, but nowhere else, wrinkle like prunes in the bath? It is because they turn into something resembling the tread of tyres so we can grip wet objects. Why can’t we tickle ourselves? It is most likely the power of our subconscious – our brain knows it’s us. (Auto-eroticism works because it involves different receptors.) Do women or men have a better sense of touch? Women, because our smaller fingers have a more concentrated distribution of receptors. Why can eating a hot chilli, or getting raw chilli on our fingers, make our skin feel as if it is burning? It is thanks to nociceptors, the pain receptors on nerve endings in our skin that detect extreme heat and cold, and many types of pain.

There are those ‘incredibly sensitive free nerve endings’ to study – on the lips, nipples, clitoris, penis, tongue, palms, fingertips, soles. But everyone’s ‘sexual skin’ is individual: whatever it is that gets you going can be a turn-off for someone else. The skin-to-brain conversation about sensory or sexual response is like a fingerprint, in the sense that it’s unique to every person, but it is far harder to measure, quantify or explain. Lyman writes about the ‘bizarre phenomenon’ of ‘sound–touch synaesthesia’, describing neural connections in a stroke patient who found that the voice of a certain radio presenter gave her tingling sensations down the side of her body where she retained feeling.¹¹ This, to me, sounded like ASMR.

ASMR is not so bizarre if you experience it. Not everyone does. Autonomous sensory meridian responses can spontaneously provoke pleasant shivers and tingles of a non-sexual kind. I have seen the sensation described as being ‘like a rush of champagne bubbles at the top of your head’. I agree, but would include the back of the neck and down the spine too. I would also add sight to Lyman’s sound–touch equation, as well as an ambience of stillness and calm, and a careful – ideally mundane – activity.

As someone who can experience this feeling, I was interested to discover not only that it has a name, but that it has become a fashionable area of study. Not surprisingly, it has also been coopted to sell products. The person who is said to have coined the term ASMR had searched the internet using terms such as ‘brain orgasm’ or ‘tingling head and spine’ to see if others shared these feelings. She discovered a post called ‘Weird Sensation Feels Good’ on a message board from the early internet. (ASMR is the kind of thing the internet seems made for.) You can journey down many YouTube rabbit holes watching videos that promise to trigger ASMR. These videos have been described in The Guardian as ‘kooky and baffling’: the gentle sounds of soap being carved, soft whispering into dual high-tech microphones, eating crunchy pickles, hair cutting, towel folding, wood turning. Even when they fail to trigger the physical sensation, these videos can be relaxing.¹² And are hugely popular.

For perhaps the first time in history, the comments under the article in The Guardian about ASMR were better than the article itself. A few correspondents had never heard of it or experienced it, and thought the whole thing creepy. But, while commenters are admittedly a self-selecting group, most of them recognised it. Many insisted that ASMR was not about sexual arousal. Quite a few argued that the effect couldn’t be manufactured. Some of the touchy-feely-soundy triggers these respondents reported were literal sense-memories: someone’s grandfather humming to himself as he filled in Pools coupons with a pencil; another grandad straightening the curtains as he closed them, running his fingers down the fabric. The most unexpected had nothing to do with touch: one person got the feeling from answering inconsequential market research questions over the phone.

I remember my first and most recent experiences of ASMR. Both happen to involve touch and paper. In a school music class, our teacher, a nun, would slowly run her fingers along the stapled folds of sheet music, down the length of the page, as she walked around the silent classroom handing each student their score. I suspect she probably whispered as she did it. Most recently, I waited at a counter, watching a shop assistant wrap the gift I had just bought. Methodical and practised, she was probably used to dazed customers staring at her hands.

This is what sent me into an ASMR coma. She slowly runs her scissors down the gift wrap, smooths out the sheet of paper on the counter and places the box in its centre. She wraps one edge of the paper around the box, then the other, then the other, smoothing and folding each side, in no rush. She peels the sticky tape from its dispenser and tears a piece off. She tapes the edges of the paper together in the middle, running her finger over the adhesive. She does the same for one end, and again for the other. She unrolls a strand of decorative ribbon, which makes a lovely sound. She cuts it, ties it around the gift and knots it. She moves the box to a different angle. She rolls out more ribbon of a different colour, cuts it, places her scissors carefully on the counter and ties the ribbon around the gift from the other side. She curls the ribbon by running her scissors along each strand with a little flourish, gently bunching and fluffing it up. This makes a lovely soft sound, like leaves in the breeze. She then runs her hands over the whole box to make sure the paper is unwrinkled and snug. Finally, she reaches for a paper bag, shakes it open and carefully slides the wrapped gift inside.

That will either be the most boring paragraph of all time, or meditative and relaxing, depending on your sensibilities. Maybe both. The real thing gave me a delicious feeling. It does seem miraculous that skin can respond in this way to something decidedly non-sexual without being touched.

Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry devoted three episodes of their BBC science podcast Curious Cases to ASMR and brought my attention to various ASMR ads.¹³ Promoting the beer Michelob, actor Zoë Kravitz sits in a forest and whispers into microphones over the bubbly sound of pouring beer. John Goodman whispering about how a Big Mac is made was, for me, the least ASMR-ish thing ever. I was onside with the ‘definitely not porn’ stance until I saw an ASMR interview with the rapper Cardi B. You don’t need to launch a scientific study to conclude that listening to Cardi whispering and watching her run long nails up and down a phallic foam-covered microphone will produce a buzz of excitement more than calm.

Literature, song, movies and art are devoted to touching, not touching, the desire to touch, illicit touch and thwarted touch. If this assertion overreaches, consider that even in the bleak and existential play Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett has characters Vladimir and Estragon stop speaking and embrace each other. The abstract-expressionism and landscape-painting wings of the world’s art galleries, without a nude portrait in sight, are full of ‘DO NOT TOUCH’ signs. Never have I so struggled to heed this instruction as when I saw British Indian artist Anish Kapoor’s sculpture My Red Homeland. In this work, tonnes of red, waxy paint are piled on a twelve-metre turning wheel and smoothed into something else by a giant steel arm. Everyone who sees its grandeur must surely wonder what all that viscous redness feels like. Seeing can be believing but, like doubting Thomases, sometimes we want to touch to be sure.

The most famous piece of religious art, frescoed on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, shows God’s and Adam’s outstretched fingers pointing towards each other. Michelangelo’s genius is that the digits don’t quite touch; he wills us to feel creation and life sparking within that tiny gap. The film E.T. the Extra Terrestrial contains perhaps the most famous image of fingers actually touching; E.T.’s glowing finger rests against ten-year-old Elliot’s bleeding finger and miraculously heals it. The theatrical poster for the film plays on this moment, showing earthling and extraterrestrial fingers making contact, in a nod to Michelangelo.

Religious imagery aside, E.T. is a fairytale about home, charged with pathos. It is an interesting metaphor that, when something shifts our emotional state in a positive way, we say it is ‘touching’; we feel it from the inside. Literary scholar Pamela K. Gilbert puts it beautifully: ‘Like so many aspects of skin, touch is directed both inside and out: we encounter the outer world through touch, but we also find our place within it through constant proprioreceptive signals of our bodies’ relation to themselves and other objects in space.’¹⁴ These ‘objects’ are often other humans.

An infinite number of the stories we watch, read, sing, tell ourselves and each other, start with furtive glances, move to hand-holding (hands may be gloved) and have ‘Reader, I married him’ endings, accompanied by fireworks. Such a conclusion, or beginning, can be gratifying, even when the reader knows in their heart that the union is ridiculous or doomed. There are just as many stories of the ‘I will strike you down and kill you with my bare hands’ variety. A universe of artistic expression is devoted to slaying, burning, scarring, cutting, stabbing, flaying, piercing, mutilating and smiting. Every possible method to torture the border of our corporeal selves has been immortalised in art, schlock and everywhere in between. Much creative output fetishises this violence and its consumers learn to read its language. From Nosferatu to Kylo Ren, films have taught us that baddies are the ones with scars. Harry Potter is a notable exception, although the facial disfigurement of his enemy Voldemort is far worse. The British Film Institute’s refusal to fund films using scarring, burns or physical difference as shorthand for villainy is welcome, but up against centuries of acculturation.¹⁵

Diane Ackerman writes, ‘Touch teaches us that life has depth and contour; it makes our sense of the world and oneself three-dimensional. Without that intricate feel for life there would be no artists, whose cunning is to make sensory and emotional maps, and no surgeons, who dive through the body with their fingers.’¹⁶ Her assessment is my cue to move away from pain and violence and feel my way towards the warm and fuzzy part of the touch spectrum, the therapeutic and healing, the pleasurable and sensual. But before we swipe right, so to speak, we are compelled to detour through the world of touch deprivation that COVID-19 delivered. Where we lost touch with each other. Where circumstances made us touchy about touching.

Touch deprivation has been studied, so you can read horrific scientific accounts about what happens when monkeys subjected to separation experiments are deprived of maternal touch. You might recall the nightmare of children in Romanian orphanages who were never cuddled or touched, and the damage it did to them. Consider too the phenomenon of ‘boarding school syndrome’, where young children sent to British boarding schools became traumatised when home was swapped for an institution and the possibility of caring touch disappears or turns abusive. We have a discrete bodily system devoted to emotional touch beyond the cells named after German and Italians. It is mediated by sensors called C tactile fibres. During the COVID pandemic, many people’s C tactile fibres did not get much of a workout.

‘Skin hunger’, ‘contactless’ and ‘social distancing’ might all have vied for 2020’s word or phrase of the year. (The Oxford English Dictionary, for the record, anointed ‘unprecedented’ the winner.) We were already living much of our life through our screens, but everyday incidental touch with strangers, friends and family not in our household was banished almost overnight. So was handshaking, whether firm or weak, prolonged or fleeting. Brushing against someone on the bus, at the gym or while making your way to your seat in the cinema. Tapping someone’s arm for emphasis in conversation. All gone. For many, especially people who live alone or needed to quarantine, their stress about contracting the virus or holding on to employment could not be ameliorated through cortisol-reducing touch. Suddenly, there was no touch at all. Millions of people found themselves resident in the disconnected loneliness of an Edward Hopper painting. It’s perhaps no surprise that sales of weighted blankets, said to ease anxiety, went through the roof.

Footage of thousands of people at music festivals, or films with crowd scenes felt like remnants of a lost world. Affectionate, familial hugs and kisses – single or repeated, alternating between cheeks – became exercises in risk, hugging someone not in your ‘bubble’ unthinkable. I read about one young woman in London, called Alice, not her real name, who engaged in covert hugging at the end of her garden with her best friend, Lucy, also not her real name, during lockdown. Their encounter was described in language more often used to depict an illicit affair than a hug between friends: ‘There, with the furtiveness of a street drug deal, Lucy hugs her tightly. Alice struggles to let her go. “You just get that rush of feeling better,” Alice says. “Like it’s all okay.”’¹⁷

Friends told me a story about something that happened after lockdown rules were relaxed for the first time in Sydney. A friend visited their house for dinner. At the end of the night, one of the hosts hugged their guest out of pure instinct. This hug was described by onlookers as one with ‘great, loving force and of impressive duration’. When the hug-ee, who had been living in another city, away from friends and family, was finally released, he was crying. He said, ‘I have not been touched for three months. I hadn’t realised how much I missed it.’ My friend Catherine Max, in London, touch-deprived for almost a year, is proud to have invented what she calls ‘the Baloo greeting’, after the bear who sings ‘The Bare Necessities’ in Disney’s The Jungle Book. ‘It involves rubbing backs like Baloo does against trees. There is quite a lot of contact facing in the opposite direction, and you always end up laughing, which is the best tonic of all.’

Pity the poor Brazilian etiquette coach who wrote a COVID-inspired guide for her fellow citizens, among the planet’s most demonstrative people, on how to replace the kisses and hugs of standard salutations with elbow bumps. She gave up on her efforts, understandably, which were not helped by that country’s reckless superspreader president.¹⁸ The terrible trauma of people who craved one last touch with a loved one who was dying alone will linger forever. Farewells that should have happened through skin-to-skin touch were mediated by medical staff in PPE, or by Zoom or FaceTime. How can the bereaved ever recover? One devastating image from a pandemic full of them emerged in 2021. In a hospital isolation ward in São Carlos, Brazil, which had been ravaged by multiple waves of the virus, nurses filled latex gloves with warm water and tied them together, like clasping hands, around the hand of dying patients. They called the set-up mão de deus. The hand of god.¹⁹

Tiffany Field runs the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami. I imagined a place with flocked wallpaper, shagpile carpet and bowls of marbles everywhere, but no, the institute sits within the paediatric department of a medical school. Its research and practice emphasise the benefits of baby massage, especially for preterm babies. Dr Field calls touch ‘the mother of all senses’ and as long ago as 2001, well before smartphones, she was writing about generalised touch deprivation. In a pre-COVID joint survey by Goldsmiths’ College in London and the BBC, almost half of respondents felt that society didn’t allow them to touch enough, except for South Americans, who were happy with the quota of interpersonal contact they enjoyed. Nearly everyone, 88 per cent, enjoyed public displays of affection from their partners; the other 12 per cent did not, and are perhaps more private, or no longer together.²⁰

Among the infelicities of growing older is less incidental touch. I chatted over coffee with Dr Shahrzad Jahromi, a Sydney geriatrician, near the major hospital where she works. She told me she struggled with the way that COVID removed the possibility of touching her frail, often confused patients, who would normally be reassured by gentle physical contact. She said, ‘Even before COVID I didn’t like standing at the end of the bed. We would sit at eye level, holding their hand. Now you can’t do that. It makes such a difference.’ She tells me some of her patients, craving touch, get their fingernails done partly because of the hand and arm massage component of the manicure. Upmarket nursing homes often provide massage services for their residents, but sadly the budgets of most hospitals don’t extend that far.

Wanting to talk to someone who does touch as therapy, I contacted one of the best massage therapists I’ve ever had. Tineke Rietveld suggested that we do our interview before the massage I booked with her. I agreed, knowing that afterwards I would be too relaxed to be coherent. We chatted in her studio in the late afternoon through a storm that meant that any pan-flute instrumental music inside was drowned out by the sound of torrential rain. Rietveld, who trained first in kinesiology and later in remedial, oncology and lymphatic drainage massage, told me that massage is becoming more integrated into mainstream medicine thanks to evidence-based research that massage contributes to better outcomes for cancer patients. She is based in a dedicated cancer and lymphoedema rehabilitation clinic, where cancer patients are referred by major Sydney hospitals.

Rietveld talked about the work she does with cancer patients during their nervous wait for results, managing their anxiety through touch, and then after surgery. Therapeutic touch can be like breaking through armour, a second skin we construct around ourselves. ‘It’s enormously intimate to be working with someone in that space. People are already vulnerable because of where they are in their journey in life. On top of that they’re naked, which is another level of being vulnerable. It’s a privilege, from a therapist’s point of view, to have permission to touch the part of the body that has lived through so much. Very often people cry through long-held anxiety, not having had the sense that it’s okay to let go and open up. Especially after mastectomies; women often haven’t touched themselves there, so when they receive massage and you get permission to touch those areas, it can be a massive release. I think every person’s body is beautiful, although some patients disagree and say they’re awful. They can’t look at themselves. So, if we can overcome that first hurdle, even if someone else’s hand touches them, it’s empowering to continue their journey. Because that part of the body is with them 24/7. If you deny it, you’re denying a big part of yourself.’

Tineke Rietveld noticed a yearning for touch during COVID. ‘I think massage, whole-body massage, can make up for loss of incidental contact and touch. COVID highlighted there are lots of people living alone who miss out on incidental touch. If you live in a family setting, there is some contact somewhere, maybe it has even increased. For people who live alone, COVID highlighted an aspect of their life that is perhaps absent.’ I lay face-down on her massage table, neck and shoulders tight from spending my days in front of a computer. Even though I was never touch-deprived myself – a loving partner, an affectionate teenage son, a daughter who returned home during lockdown, a mother I could not not hug – I closed my eyes and felt lucky in every sense.

As mass vaccination against COVID-19 started rolling out, world-famous psychotherapist Esther Perel said, ‘I think people will want to reconnect with what I call a healthy relationship to eros.’ Perel does not use ‘eros’ in a strictly sexual sense, but refers to ‘a feeling of curiosity, aliveness, exploration – the happenstance, the chance encounter’.²¹ The end of a pandemic doesn’t mark victory in a war; no one expects a mass eruption of exuberance, people throwing themselves at strangers with abandon. Perel would be the first to acknowledge that restricted touch, while frustrating, can also be sexy. But she means an openness to simple everyday connections. Touching without fear gives us the riches of King Midas, the things and people we touch turning us golden within.

As the world began to open up, my mind wandered to the sunny hedonism of the beach, and the touch of sun on bare skin, sand underfoot and, of course, sex. Demobilised soldiers and their families congregated on beaches along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts after the end of World War II. From the mid-twentieth century, write beach historians Lena Lenček and Gideon Bosker, beachscapes everywhere began ‘evolving as the locus for erotic pursuits’.²² In real life and film: From Here to Eternity, set just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, has the most famous of all beach-kissing scenes, perhaps the best-known movie kissing scene full stop: Deborah Kerr and Bert Lancaster embrace passionately on the sand, waves washing over them. Same locale but more camp than high drama, and as frothy as sea foam, in Blue Hawaii Elvis Presley plays a character straight out of the army surrounded by Waikiki women.

We overcame our fear of the sun during the interwar period, stripping off the long skirts, trousers and sleeves that had covered nearly every inch of skin. Between this, but before we accepted the long-term damage of sun overexposure, were tens of thousands of sun-filled days. Australians devoted many of them to the pursuit of sensual freedoms, prostrating themselves and worshipping the sun as if it were the central deity of a national religion. As early as 1894, Ethel Turner wrote in the classic children’s book Seven Little Australians, ‘It may be that the miasmas of naughtiness develop best in the sunny brilliancy of our atmosphere.’²³ The blazing sun defined who we were, and tanning was part of that identity. The ideal Australian skin was, and perhaps still is, glazed and buttered with a ‘healthy tan’. But only if that colour was achieved from the default of Whiteness. In 1934, as part of a Western Australian Royal Commission into the ‘Condition and Treatment of Aborigines’, one pastoralist referred to some ‘half-caste’ Aboriginal women being ‘absolutely white’, while White women lying about on beaches with few clothes on were ‘doing their best to make themselves like half-castes’.²⁴

Coco Chanel is credited with popularising the suntan. The story goes that after a few summery weeks on the French Riviera in 1923, Madame Chanel stepped off a yacht and appeared ‘as brown as a sailor’. Everyone wanted what she had; the queen of fashion made the relaxed holiday tan, as opposed to the brown skin acquired by birth or through outdoor labour, fashionable. But Sydney beach historian Caroline Ford marks an earlier line in the hot, white sand with evidence that tanned skin was seen as healthy and vital, in men at least, in Australia before the Great War. She quotes a Sydney surf bather and writer who, in 1906, obsessed with the virile outdoor life embodied by tanning, wrote, ‘A good many of the men had skins of brown, and against these the white-skinned men looked weak and sickly . . . A man feels he’s a man when his skin is a real good brown.’ Others glorified brown backs, writing with a certain homoeroticism, intentional or not, about men rubbing oil into each other’s skin to achieve a ‘healthy tan’. Sydney beachgoers, Ford writes, invented the word ‘sunbaking’, replacing ‘sunbathing’ and effectively launching the cult of the tan.²⁵

On beaches around the world in the decades that followed, a battle of morality and modesty played out between flesh and fabric. As early as the 1930s, when bathing regulations mandated covered torsos for men and women, flesh won out. Margaret Finlay, an eighteen-year-old quoted in the Perth Mirror in 1953, said that while one-piece costumes might be more becoming to the feminine figure, she herself wore a two-piece because ‘I want to get as much of me brown as I possibly can.’ In an episode from the fourth season of Mad Men, set in the early 1960s, Don Draper pitches an advertising campaign to executives from Jantzen swimwear. ‘Our product is for modest people,’ they protest in response to the bared flesh on the design mock-ups. He kicks them out of his office, saying, ‘Your competitors are going to keep killing you because you’re too scared of the skin that your two-piece was designed to show off.’²⁶ In season six, in a brilliant scene of comic irony, Draper sits bare-chested on a beach chair in Waikiki with his gorgeous new wife. He is reading Dante’s Inferno.

Skimpier swimwear bared more and more skin, and private morality gave way to public exposure. The bikini ruled. Skin was something to be exhibited. People sought touch, whether from sun and fresh sea air or from the skin of another beachgoer. Summer lovin’, the endless summer, California girls. In Surfers Paradise, on Queensland’s Gold Coast, a state dubbed the Sunshine State no less, which as early as 1865 promoted itself to Britons as ‘warm like Madeira’, men and women stood, arms outstretched, to have all exposed skin on their bodies sprayed by ‘the suntan man’.²⁷ This full-body sunscreen spray-over happened at resorts in Europe and America too, including Waikiki: ‘Modeled on gasoline pumps, these were brightly colored, coin-activated dispensers, usually operated by an attendant wielding a trigger-action nozzle.’²⁸ The imagery is not subtle. Novelist and essayist Robert Drewe wrote, ‘Many, if not most, Australians have their first sexual experience on the coast and as a consequence see the beach in a sensual and nostalgic light.’²⁹

The cachet of tanned skin, tied to an affluent life of leisure, signifier of beauty, stimulant of desire. My friend Rodney Hanratty recalled clubbing at the legendary Berghain in Berlin and seeing a young man on a podium, his skin as white as alabaster, dancing above a sea of deeply tanned people, some naturally dark, others’ tans sprayed on. ‘He looked like a beautiful marble statue but it’s quite rare . . . It makes sense to aspire to that. That’s an aspiration that is healthy.’ But so often we want what we can’t have, physically or emotionally, either in ourselves or through touch transmitted to – or received from – someone else. Where do I start, where do you end?

In Jeanette Winterson’s extraordinarily sensual, textured novel Written on the Body, skin almost becomes its own character. The narrator’s adulterous lover Louise says from her bed, ‘Don’t be long darling. I’ve tried to get you out of my head but I can’t seem to get you out of my flesh.’ Later, ‘I will explore you and mine you and you will redraw me according to your will. We shall cross one another’s boundaries and make ourselves one nation.’ The narrator says later, ‘Skin is waterproof, but my skin was not waterproof against Louise.’ Even if cancer didn’t enter into the novel, the section headed ‘The cells, tissues, systems and cavities of the human body’ would come as no surprise to readers.³⁰

Another novel I revisited, its extraordinary descriptions of cutaneous desire having got under my skin years ago, was Peter Carey’s Illywhacker. Its narrator, Herbert Badgery, may be a trickster but my memory, it turned out, was not duplicitous. More picaresque than I recalled – and longer – the novel is skin-packed: smooth skin, creamy skin, thick skin, beautiful skin, horny-skinned, ruined skin, soft skin, blue-white skin, untroubled skin, tingling skin, chalky skin, hot prickling skin, transparent skin, blood-filled skin, red scaly skin, lemon-peel skin, rice-paper skin and freckled skin that ‘hung on his arms, like the skin on a roast chicken wing’. But it is skin’s role in sexual attraction, or its opposite, repulsion, that stayed with me like a touchstone.

Leah Goldstein, a character in the book, writes in a letter to herself, gathering her thoughts, ‘What is wrong with me that I do not like his skin? Is my skin flawless? Have I been a liar to write to him as I have and then to wish to undo my words because of his skin? Is it skin I am rejecting or something else.’ This skin that repels and makes her shudder belongs to her husband, Izzie. To say things come to a head is understatement: the pages before the ultimatum where she must choose between husband and lover are preceded by a cockatoo nipping the top off the husband’s finger and the arrival of the police. Badgery, the lover, writes, ‘It was then that she told him [Izzie], in front of everyone, she could not bear his skin. I think of a suit of scar tissue, ripped and broken, beside which agony a lacerated finger is nothing but a young man’s prank.’³¹

Another novel’s vivid descriptions of skin agony sit within a Booker Prize–winning epic story of passion, lovers finding salvation, and damnation, through skin. In Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 book The English Patient, Almásy, now in a Tuscan villa, recalls the injury that made him the titular patient. ‘I fell burning into the desert . . . I flew down and the sand itself caught fire. They saw me stand up naked out of it. The leather helmet on my head in flames.’³² The novel and 1997 film based on it are infused with the colours of sand, reflecting the North African desert where much of the story takes place. The film’s palette includes the khakis and whites of expeditionary clothing, the desert explorers’ bronzed, sand-blasted limbs, the luminous skin of the lovers Ladislaus de Almásy (Ralph Fiennes in the film) and Katharine Clifton (Kristen Scott Thomas), the worn, yellowed pages of Herodotus they read, the grey felt the burnt man’s body is first wrapped in.

The patient thought to be English turns out to be Hungarian. Although, having always sought to transcend national borders, he could be from anywhere, especially now his body is so burnt as to make him unrecognisable. Floating in a morphine haze, he plunges again and again into the ‘well of memory’, recalling all that happened in Libya and Egypt before and after the plane crash that led to his injuries.

Almásy is being cared for by nurse Hana (Juliette Binoche), who ‘would lay belladonna over his eyes, give him saline baths for the keloided skin and extensive burns’.³³ In the desert, after his rescue by Bedouin tribesmen, a green-black paste was rubbed into his scorched skin by a travelling medicine man well known on the camel trails: ‘It was ground peacock bone, bartered for in a medina to the west or the south – the most potent healer of skin.’³⁴ Almásy’s ravaged skin is somewhat like the pages of his beloved Herodotus, his 1890 edition stuffed with maps, diary entries, drawings and snippets torn from other books. But its pages would have to have been damaged so badly by water or oil that they clumped and fused with the book’s leather binding, losing porosity and texture to be something like his own skin, a not-quite-human vellum. His breathing is ragged, and he can hardly bear to be touched. In one scene, Hana ‘pours calamine in stripes across his chest where he is less burned, where she can touch him. She loves the hollow below the lowest rib, its cliff of skin.’³⁵

Textural detail and a sense of tactility infuse book and film, which revel in sensuousness. Skin landscapes merge with landscapes of sand, the camera lingering on the hollow at the base of Katharine Clifton’s neck and on her breasts as if they were indentations and rises in a sand dune. Almásy asks a friend what this part of a woman’s anatomy, this dip at the bottom of the throat, is called. There are two different answers, but only the celluloid one is correct: in the film it is called a ‘suprasternal notch’; in the book it is a ‘vascular sizood’. Whatever this valley within planes of erotic geography is called, it is a place where empires of desire collided, the doomed lovers desperate to touch and be touched.