‘It really is quite marvellous,’ Lizzy assures me.
I flip the leaflet over to find a picture of one of the tanks (or ‘pods’ as the leaflet describes them). It looks like something out of a science fiction movie. Not an exciting one, though, like Aliens. This is more like a prop from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I have tried and failed to watch three times, falling asleep before the end on every occasion.
The pod is white, enormous and has a flip-up door, allowing you to see into the cool blue water inside. It looks like Pac-Man after extreme weight gain, and a bath in strong bleach.
‘And this is supposed to be good for your mind as well, is it?’ I ask Lizzy, none too sure.
‘Absolutely! If you’ve enjoyed what we’ve been doing here, you should love that. It’s the next step. It should get you even further down the path of healing. It certainly did for me. The sense of self-discovery I gained inside that tank was mind-blowing.’
‘Sounds bleedin’ fabulous!’ Wimsy replies, sealing my fate. I can’t very well disappoint the poor bugger now, can I?
Nope. Sensory deprivation with my new friend it shall be. And fingers crossed it does what Lizzy says it will.
Fingers also crossed that the salty water doesn’t pickle my skin too much. I have no love for eating gherkins, so I don’t particularly want to look like one.
Floaters takes up the entire ground floor of a rather grand old Georgian house. There’s a chiropractic clinic on the floor above it, with a holistic therapy business on the third and final floor above that. It’s like a one-stop shop for physical and mental self-improvement.
. . . or, given the prices of some of the treatments on offer across all three floors, it’s a gigantic Georgian-shaped money vacuum that’ll leave you penniless in seconds, and not quite convinced any of it was actually worth it.
Now Lizzy isn’t around to fire his curiosity and his loins, Wimsy isn’t too sure about our impending visit to a sensory deprivation tank.
‘I don’t like baths,’ he says, looking at a large poster of one of the pods as we wait at reception to be taken through.
‘It’s not a bath, Wims. Unless you pour a whole box of salt in with you every time you have one.’
‘It looks like a bath. A bath with a lid.’ He looks at me disapprovingly. ‘Baths should not have lids, Ollie.’
‘Well, I can’t argue with you on that one.’
I have to confess to a certain amount of apprehension myself. I’m not someone who suffers from claustrophobia, but I can’t say the idea of being enclosed in a dark space sounds all that relaxing, or life affirming, to me.
But Lizzy was absolutely right about mindfulness, so I guess I’ll have to trust her on this as well.
A young man in a Floaters T-shirt appears at reception and asks us whether we have a booking or not. I tell him we have, and he proceeds to empty my wallet and eat all of my money, before moving on to my clothes and my car.
That’s what it feels like, at least. This sensory deprivation doesn’t come cheap. I’m not sure how much I’ll enjoy being deprived of my senses, but I hope it’s a lot more than being deprived of one hundred and eighty pounds to lie in salt for half an hour.
The reception guy tells us where we should go to get changed into our swimming trunks, and where we should meet him down the hallway, where the pods are kept.
I had to lend Wimsy a pair of my old swimming trunks, obviously. This is how these things work. The Chinese have a proverb that states if you save someone’s life, you are responsible for that life. I certainly appear to be responsible for Wimsy’s wardrobe.
We both jump into our respective swimmers (mine from M&S, his sadly from Primark) in cubicles in the changing rooms and meet Mr Floaters outside the room that houses the pods.
‘All ready to go, then?’ he asks us as we self-consciously approach him.
‘Yes?’ I say, hesitantly.
Wimsy mumbles something about baths and lids.
‘Great! Then let’s get you set up and going.’
Mr Floaters holds the door open, and we enter the room, to be presented with the opening scene from every slow-paced science fiction movie you’ve ever seen – when the crew of the ship awake from hypersleep.
The sensory pods are arranged in a circle around a central bit of decking. Two of the enormous white blobs have their mouth-like lids open invitingly – in much the same way that a shark does.
Mr Floaters explains that all we have to do is lie in the pod, in the temperature-controlled salty water, and he’ll do the rest. The pod lids are shut automatically, and will re-open once our allocated time has passed. After we’ve dried ourselves off with the towels he’s going to provide for us, we can then don fluffy dressing gowns and partake in the fresh chocolate or lemon sorbet that Floaters offers in its small, but ever so lovely, relaxation room.
I am a mere thirty minutes away from chocolate sorbet. Even if this floating in a dark tank thing doesn’t do it for me, then surely something cold, sweet and chocolate-flavoured will.
Somebody really needs to invent chocolate that doesn’t have any calories in it. They’d destroy the entire therapy business of the United Kingdom in one fell swoop.
Wimsy looks decidedly nervous about all of this, so I step forward and climb into my tank to show him that everything will (probably) be alright.
The water is neither hot nor cold, but quite tepid. I lie down in it, and it doesn’t make me feel hot or cold, either. I’m assuming this is the point.
The level of buoyancy my body achieves is quite amazing, though. I had to give my weight along with Wimsy’s when I made the booking, and now I can see why. They have to get the salt levels just right, so you can bob about with no fear of going under.
‘See, Wims? It’s fine,’ I call over to him.
I can feel myself relaxing already. The feeling of floating around like this is quite lovely in and of itself.
Wims peers into my tank and gives me a look of suspicion, but then he does indeed climb into his own tank and lie down.
‘I feel like I’m being pickled!’ he cries over the lid of his pod.
‘Please relax, sir,’ Mr Floaters says. ‘Enjoy the experience.’
Wimsy doesn’t reply, but neither does he leap back out of the pod, so I’ll assume he’s still willing to go along with this. If there wasn’t a promised date with Lizzy to discuss the experience, though, I’m not sure he would.
Mr Floaters leaves us, and a few moments later, the lid begins to close. This forces my heart rate to climb a little, as daylight disappears gradually, until it’s just a thin line, before being extinguished completely as the lid closes with a deep thunk . . . and an ominous click. I also hear a hydraulic hiss that makes me feel even more nervous.
‘Bloody hell,’ I say out loud. My voice is flat, dull and without echo.
I strain my ears to hear something . . . anything. But there’s nothing other than the gentle lapping of the water beneath me, and my own breathing.
Oh my. How strange.
‘Oh my. How strange,’ I say out loud, marvelling at how odd my voice sounds in this environment. We’re used to the acoustics of our voices being an almost living thing – bouncing off other objects and reverberating around in the air. Having all the energy and three-dimensionality of your voice sucked away is quite, quite bizarre.
I elect to keep quiet, and just try to relax and enjoy this experience, like Mr Floaters suggested.
This starts with realising I have tinnitus.
Not much. Not enough to impact my life in any real way, but in this closed-off environment I can definitely hear a small amount of whining coming from both ears. Too much indie rock when I was a youngster, possibly.
I try to ignore this and concentrate on some nice, even deep breathing, the way I learned in Lizzy’s mindfulness class.
This calms me considerably, and I do start to feel myself loosening up a little.
Five minutes later and I’m pretty much fully relaxed. The
sensory deprivation has gone from alarming to quite soothing in a remarkably short space of time. There’s something about the feel of the water against your skin, the sensation of floating comfort and the lack of any external stimulus that slows your brain to a satisfying near-halt.
I can actually feel myself starting to fall asleep.
. . . and that’s when the hallucinations begin.
Look, I’m not sure if they actually are hallucinations, or just that I’ve dropped off, but trust me, none of what is about to transpire feels like a dream to me. Not at all. Something profoundly different from dreaming happens to me in this tank, and it’s going to stay with me for many years to come.
At first, the hallucinations are auditory only. My brain, obviously starved of outside stimuli, has decided to make some of its own. This begins with the sound of cheerful birdsong, for some reason.
Then I realise that I’m recalling the pleasant evening I spent in the New Forest in the tent, before BambiWanks happened.
This birdsong lasts just a few seconds before being replaced by a sweet-sounding Latin guitar.
Now I appear to be flashing back to the music played in Manucode – and I am instantly transported to a vision of Vanity’s lingerie.
Great. I do not need an erection right now. I already resemble some kind of adrift sailboat in this water, I don’t need to add a bloody mast.
Then the guitar music recedes, and different music begins to play . . . the sound of a sitar, gently picking out a few exotic chords.
Then, in accompaniment to the sitar, the rest of the hallucinations begin. The first is a smell – a kind of faint waft of warm vegetation. This is what I always imagined India would smell like.
Ah . . . of course.
This was my dream.
This was what I wanted to do with Samantha once we were married – take a trip to India, listen to some sitar music and ride an eleph—
‘Alright there? How you going?’
Right in front of my eyes, the head of an elephant has appeared. It has a huge trunk, enormous eyes, set wide on its wrinkly grey head, and gigantic flapping ears on either side.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I exclaim out loud.
The elephant recoils a little bit. ‘Not quite, buddy. Be bloody weird if Jesus was an elephant, right?’
‘I suppose so,’ I reply, in the full and absolute knowledge that I have completely lost my mind.
‘You haven’t lost your mind,’ the elephant reassures me. ‘And you don’t have to speak out loud, it bangs around in this tin can like a right bugger. Just think your words, that’ll do ya.’
Okay, I say, in the vaults of my brain.
‘Yeah, there you go. Much better!’
Who are you? I ask the elephant.
‘I’m an elephant, mate,’ the elephant replies.
Yes, I’m aware of that, but who exactly are you?
‘Ah, gotcha. I’m you, mate. I’m your mind. The underneath bit. The bit you keep suppressed, so you can go about your business up on top, so to speak.’
My mind?
‘Yep. I’m your subconscious – set free from its bonds by the deprivation of the senses, to wander in the vaults of your brain, unmolested and unfettered.’ The elephant nods at this. ‘Here, you’re quite bloody lyrical when you want to be, aren’t you? Good vocabulary, and no mistake.’
Right, okay. Thank you . . . I suppose.
‘No worries.’
So, why are you an elephant?
‘Ah, now that’s the interesting part, mate. It would appear that you’ve decided to let your subconscious manifest itself as both an object of your dreams and a reminder of the love you’ve lost.’ The elephant looks at me meaningfully. ‘Probably says a lot about your state of mind that, mate.’
Probably. So you’re my subconscious mind, manifested as the elephant I dreamed of riding with my ex-girlfriend?
‘Yep.’
Well, that makes about as much sense as the rest of my life, I guess.
‘Probably.’
Can I ask just one more question at this juncture, though? I feel it’s an important one.
‘Go right ahead, mate.’
Why are you talking in an Australian accent?
The elephant shrugs. This should be impossible, given that it’s just a floating head, but it manages it all the same. ‘Search me, mate. I’m just your subconscious given metaphorical flesh, I only know what you know.’
You should be talking in an Indian accent, surely?
‘I guess so. But here I am, talking like I just stepped out of an episode of Neighbours, for some bloody reason.’
You are. I wonder why?
‘Dunno, mate.’ The elephant leans in a little. ‘Maybe it’s because you’re a bloody idiot, and your grasp of how an Indian person should sound isn’t very good. You’re therefore trying to avoid descending into stereotype, by replacing that accent with one more familiar to you, from years of watching low-grade, imported soap operas.’
Sounds quite likely, I have to agree. But calling me an idiot is a bit steep.
‘Is it? Because I appear to have huge flappy ears, mate . . . and the only elephants that have huge flappy ears are African ones. You’re a good four thousand miles too far to the west – in terms of your visual representation of the largest member of the pachyderm family.’
Oh, right. Fair point. I pause in reflection for a second. But would an idiot know what a pachyderm is? Or have a vocabulary large enough to use words like unfettered and manifested?
The elephant ponders this salient point for a moment. ‘Ah, you’re right, mate. Fair go, fair go. Let’s just agree your grasp on the accuracies of the Indian subcontinent and its varieties of fauna aren’t great, and move on, shall we?’
Agreed . . . and what are we moving on to?
‘Well, bloody hell, mate. We’re in here for some self-discovery, ain’t we? Let’s discover some shit!’
Okay, elephant, what exactly should we be discovering?
‘Troy.’
What?
‘My name’s Troy, mate.’
Wasn’t that a horse, not an elephant?
Troy the elephant gives me a disparaging look. ‘Don’t try to be clever, sport. We haven’t got all day.’
Sorry. But I have to ask again . . . What should we be discovering?
This earns me another meaningful look. ‘Reasons, mate. Reasons.’
For what?
‘For why you keep making the decisions you do! For why you keep making the same mistakes with your life! Answers to the questions that plague you, so to speak.’
But I don’t know the answers, Troy! I spit in frustration. That’s the problem!
‘Ah . . . yeah, you do. Deep down you do, mate. It’s just hard to engage with them. Difficult. That’s why I’m here, to help you confront things that otherwise you probably wouldn’t.’
Such as?
‘Well, now . . . how about your pathological need for love?’
I do not have a pathological need for love!
‘Oh yes, you bloody do! You’ve spent your entire life searching for the one, haven’t you? Gretchen, Yukio, Lisa, Sam . . .’
And what’s wrong with that??
‘Well, mate. It’s made you kind of . . . desperate, don’t you think?’
Desperate?
‘Yep. And desperate is just another word for needy, isn’t it?’
Is it?
‘Yeah! A man with your extensive vocabulary knows that! And that desperation is why you went so overboard with Sam, so early. Why you scared her away.’ Troy looks upward thoughtfully. ‘Come to think of it, you’re not just needy with women, are you?’
What do you mean?
‘Look at “Dumped Actually”.’
What about it?
‘Well . . . you get dumped by Samantha, and what do you do? You start writing a feature all about it!’
So what? Erica wanted me to do it!
‘Ah, bollocks, mate. You didn’t have to do
it! You wanted to do it! And it wasn’t just to help you get over Samantha!’
Why, then? Why am I writing it??
‘Like I say, mate. Love. In this case, the love you get from other people. You couldn’t get that from Samantha any more, so you substituted her with about a million other folk.’
Oh God.
‘That’s why you’ve been putting yourself through all of these ridiculous bloody pursuits, sport. To keep your readers happy. To keep them loving you. You can’t find the love you want with a woman, so your readers will just have to do in the meantime.’
That’s awful – and a little weird.
‘Eh, could be worse, to be honest. None of us are fuckin’ perfect.’
Do you have to swear like that?
‘Yes, I do have to fuckin’ swear! Because it feels good!’ The elephant narrows its eyes. ‘And that’s another fuckin’ thing, while we’re on it. You never swear. Not fuckin’ properly, anyways!’
Stop it!
‘No! You fuckin’ drongo! Why don’t you swear more?’
Because it’s rude!
‘Bollocks! You don’t fuckin’ swear more, because you don’t want to fuckin’ offend people! You don’t want their fuckin’ disapproval!’
That’s not true!
But it is, isn’t it? The elephant knows it – so I know it . . . deep down, anyway.
‘And that’s the root of your problems, mate. That pathological need for love makes you a bit . . . soft. Skews your perspective, so to speak. You’re constantly searching for the love of your life, and it’s not doing you any good, is it? Look at what happened with Sam. And it didn’t just ruin your relationship with her, either. It dribbles over into every aspect of your life.’
He’s right. He’s bloody well right.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
‘There you go!’ Troy the elephant shouts triumphantly. ‘Now you’re swearin’!’
Fuckity fuck.
Hmmm. Maybe the elephant is on to something. The swearing does feel good.
‘Fucking fucking fuck!’ I say out loud into the confines of the tank.
‘Yeah! Go for it, mate! Swear it up a storm!’ the elephant cries, rocking its head back and forth.
‘YEAH! YEAH! FUCK!’ I shout. Then I take a deep breath. ‘FUCK YOU, YOU CUNTS!’
Dumped, Actually Page 21
