Poisonous, profiteering physiotherapist Sue Mindberry is making a packet by charging seven gullible, fifty plus women $1000 per head for thirteen three-hour sessions of hydrotherapy. They are variously brain-damaged, hugely obese, psychically astray and arthritic. Sue Gough believes with Germaine that even such as these do not deserve the invisibility that age is supposed to confer. She gives them each a story – or rather, stories – invented by Beverley, a stroke victim, who hates her post-traumatic paralysis so much that she tries to disappear into the imagined lives of her fellow sufferers in the pool (its roof rolled back so that as they lie in the water supported by floaties each can identify with her own personal star or goddess).
The Nether Regions by Sue Gough
Picador, $21 pb, 321 pp
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