What Becomes (7 page)

Racing and running away.

Louping.

Breenjing.

Going a game with itself.

Which may well be a sign of weakness. Before I turned up I did need to consider my weaknesses and strengths, how best they'd be accommodated. In here I will have to be able to second-guess myself, but that won't be a problem – I've been doing it for years, because it is the key to any comfort.

Given that I want a happy time.

This is the general rule – people seek their happiness. Even if they're masochistic, when they find their perfect pain, it should make them happy.

And who doesn't like being happy? Happy's why I'm here. I am trying something new that should increase my happiness. This time it's
flotation and relaxation
. I've walked in and bought an hour of both.

At least, I suppose the
flotation
part is the one that's guaranteed and whatever
relaxation
I get will be down to me.

Quite possibly less than an hour of that.

And thereafter I'd expect an amount of happiness will ensue.

Anyway, I am predicting this is something I'll enjoy: floating, relaxing, unwinding, enjoying the benefits of salted water.

Whatever they are.

I'm not quite clear.

It feels slippery, somehow, the surface – slippery and thick. Not truly unpleasant and not exactly nice. Mainly neutral.

I did foresee the absence of distraction will leave me alone with me, which isn't always wise, but I've done what seemed necessary, sensible – I didn't bolt and clamber into this at once, there was no rush. I waited, pulled the door wide to let in the light and checked very thoroughly everywhere: each shadow, every corner, not forgetting above.

I am all that's here.

Leastways, there is me and there is here – which is a
Flotation Tank
– and, to be perfectly accurate, this isn't really a tank. Not anything like one.

I'd expected a tank.

Flotation Tank
.

As advertised.

This is more of a room, a cupboard, in fact – a Flotation Damp Cupboard with Light-proof Door. A cupboard right down in the basement, as if they suffer persistent floods and have taken advantage.

No attempt at something futuristic, not a capsule and not a fancy casket affair, heavy lid on a watery grave.

Claustrophobia probably an issue with those options.

I'm just lying in some brine in a warm, wet cupboard.

Who'd have thought.

But a warm, wet,
safe
cupboard – I've made myself entirely sure of that – just me and the four peaceful walls and the innocent ceiling, some water. Not even too much of that. Inches. Barely shin-deep.

And that's good, because now the door's shut it's as dark as nasty thinking and I'd rather not end up imagining any possible cause for alarm. I'm naked and lying with something I don't know – with the dark – and this must seem only snug and homely, buoyant: no overtones of drowning, suggestions of creatures that rise from unlikely depths, hints of noise underneath the silence, eager.

Which is more than enough of that.

Plus, it's thirty quid a session – stupid to waste it. Embarrassing as well: running upstairs to the hippy at the till after eight or nine minutes and saying you've had to chuck it because of the monsters you brought in with you, as if you're a kid.

Well, I can be definitive when I state there are no monsters.

Not here.

I checked.

There's only myself in a peaceful setting, peaceful cupboard, with an hour to reflect on the knowledge that I must have more money than sense.

More money than sense –
there are so many meaningless sayings we pass between ourselves.

Don't trust him as far as you can throw him.

There are always two sides to the argument.

He's not slow in coming forward.

She's no better than she should be.

This is the way to the flotation tank.

Sometimes, when you hear people talk, you'd imagine that we are in some way obliged to take part in each other's dreams, just plunge into lie after lie and wallow about. You could think that on the inside we are mainly fantasy.

Word dreams.

No internal organs, just a mass of unlikely excuses for their absence.

And no way to stop the words.

No, there is, though.

There is.

I am in charge here.

That's right.

And nodding my agreement rocks the heart of everything.

Which is myself. For an hour.

They said doing this would make my head race.

A side effect of the floating.

Sensory deficit: not enough left of feeling to slow me down. Sleepy heart rate, skin quiet, almost disappeared, reality loosened and tepid, at body heat. I'm increasingly unclear about my edges, may have misplaced, or forgotten where I stop. I could, in fact, be seeping out into the water, could be washing away.

Best to take an inventory of what I am not.

Blinded heat. Scent of wet wood. Oddly substantial presence beneath the limbs – it now feels like a sofa, a mattress, a nothing that lets you hover, tip, spin. Gliding through your own little piece of outer space. No stars, though. Blanket blackness. Numb.

Not that I'm actually moving. At least I don't think so, I can no longer tell.

Need to be cautious about that.

Oh, and now I'm remembering that kid at the party last week.

Why not? I can let that happen.

He was scared of me at the start – I was, after all, an unknown visitor – but then we chatted and made faces and then he wasn't worried any more, was forgetting himself, giggling. He brought his hamster down to show me – Benny, Benji, Billy, doesn't matter.

He wants to go up your shirt.

Precocious idea. I mean, not sexual, but experimental. And I wasn't going to fight the child off – because that's how the hamster gets murdered and then there's hell to pay – and the rest of the room was both crushingly middle-aged and viciously tedious so I'd no prospects of anything better to do and under the shirt goes the hamster.

The boy's seven, six, has purely innocent motivations, a generous impulse, and he sets the thing down on my stomach, gives me a sensation that he has already relished – the tiny paws and whiskers, scampers of fur across skin.

Lovely.

Weird and lovely.

That frantic ticking of breath – I'd known it before, years ago, and here it was back again: repeating, rattling along above its echo – because of course, I had a hamster when I was his age and of course I'd fed it into my own sleeves, my jumpers. It was something like sliding a panic inside my clothes: that scrabbling and vulnerability. I couldn't have said if I was reading its fear, or it was reading mine. The whole procedure was an adult kind of pleasure, complicated: anxiety and fun and loss of control and maybe the chance that I'd hurt it without meaning, or that it would hurt me.

I remember watching the boy's face and thinking that I ought to forget more, clean things out.

And then I picked up his hamster, held it firmly in my hand – that whole body reckless with life, the wild and tiny heart, everything about it too fragile.

The boy's eyes were happy and then less so.

I could feel his will between me and shutting my fist, the way he might be brave.

He looked, a loud look, and he was right to. He was a small, good-hearted man.

And then I gave the hamster back.

No harm done.

Not anywhere.

And none intended, not a breath.

But, let's be frank, a lousy choice of pet. Hamsters are almost impossible to love. They have the brains of a wind-up toy, or possibly a potato. They are bonsai rats and smell much worse than all that should imply. They're unconscious when you want to play with them, then berserk through every night, and they live for about a week. Flush the body down the toilet and buy another, I presume – it's not as if they cost a lot.

The kid's father was the sort who'd find that appealing. I was stuck in a corner with him for some truly geological slab of time while he maundered on about this probably mythical trip he made to Italy when he was younger and single and he took great pains to pronounce each Italian word as if he were a waiter in a sitcom and he leaned in tight and kept constructing these laborious smiles which I think were designed to imply that he was a dandy youngster and blade about town and could be that way again with no more than a cheap motel room and a free afternoon to spur him on.

He'd be the cheap motel breed of adulterer. Not for interesting and perverse reasons – just to save cash.

Fair enough, his wife is a dead-eyed, organic hummus-producing marionette with a whispery, creepy laugh – but he'll have made her that way. And she'll have made him a sticky-handed fraud reliant on alcohol, golf and non-threatening porn. They are every excuse they could ever need to abscond and yet they'll stay and, having ruined themselves and each other, they will grind on and on and their son will be worn down and hollowed at seventeen – a self-harmer, criminal, crackhead.

Hope not.

I'd like to think he'll muddle through.

Honest.

I wish him well.

And I was nice to him that evening.

Thank you very much. What a lovely hamster. Best I've seen. Is it time for you and him to go to bed? Oh, no, you're quite right. You go to bed, but he wakes up. That's how it works. Night-night, anyway. Sleep tight. Well done, Barney, Buster, Bobby.

He told me the hamster's name and not his own.

Well done, you.

Once he'd gone I was by myself.

The solitary solitary, there on the lookout for fun.

More likely to find a sea lion in the hummus.

So by myself and bored.

But it's either that or I turn up on the doorstep with someone who isn't a date and then we spend our time explaining to couple after couple that we're just in the same room at the same time – no special bond, no special anything – just pals – to be frank, we're not even that – acquaintances – two people at loose ends simultaneously – although there was that kind of tension between us for a while – some years ago. And then it occurs to me, realisation seeping in, this might be the start of its resurrection – that particular discomfort might be resurrected – and I'm anxious because I don't want it, but will also be disappointed when he doesn't try anything. I will begin to feel ugly, unsuccessful. Meanwhile, all those inquisitions and explanations have become a burden and it's full night outside and I have decided I hate the man I came with. I will never see him again. He is a bastard. I won't even share a cab home with him because we are practically strangers and I don't really live in the same part of town and why should I, if I don't want to – I am a free agent and can control what I do.

At least, those parts of my life which are my own – those I can control. Those parts concerning other people, they are more problematic.

For example, I would rather not have been the solitary at that party.

If I'd had my own person there, someone I could have talked to, then we'd have hidden ourselves from the bowls of horrific salad and the nasty flans and we'd have chatted, maybe mentioned the hamster.

Yes, we'd have discussed the sensuality of hamsters and those rumours you always hear about film stars and gerbils. I don't see how that would be entertaining, trying to put a rodent in your anus, and surely the animal wouldn't cooperate. Or would you have it anaesthetised? Hypnotised? Trained? And you'd need a delivery system, some variety of piston, or at least a lubricated pipe. By the time you'd overcome the many challenges of insertion, would you still be aroused? Or are there people you can call who'll perform gerbil installations – professional and quick?

Thank you for phoning. Saturday night is a busy time for us, but please do leave your number and we'll reach you as soon as we can.

Candles and music. By yourself, or with a loved one, and this man there in overalls, smoking a Woodbine for effect and fitting your gerbil. Shaking his head and removing his flat cap when he doesn't quite like what he sees.

You've had some right cowboys in here . . . Any chance of a cuppa once I'm done?

We'd have talked, my companion and I, about that – about the way people find curious joys, will let themselves be borne along in hopes of them.

My joys would not encompass an evening hemmed in by magnolia woodchip and the reek of discontent while watching a mouth that I haven't the energy to loathe as it puckers and slackens and moistens and grins and no doubt tells me unseductive things about
Fi-ren-ze
and
Tor-in-o
and I have to picture plague rats cantering round inside snow globes up his arse so that I don't hit him.

That's what happens when I've no one to talk to.

I get annoyed.

Which is not relaxing.

But this is relaxing.

Should be relaxing.

I am here to relax.

Thread my hands in under the water and fold them smooth at the back of my neck, interlace the fingers. And this is like resting, if not relaxing. There's a flutter of instability as I reposition, the surface takes a while to settle, but I don't seem – for example – to be falling or anything like that, there's no unease, only a liquid shift against my spine that might be air, or time, intention, happiness.

The idea of falling, it's the only one I really wouldn't want to summon up.

The drop.

My theory about the drop.

We're born into it, slithering over its edges and into life and at the start it's exhilarating, it's a rush. We're flying. Almost. We're flying
down
. But we assume that if we were built to fly, if that's what we're for, then that's what we'll do. Forever. We imagine we'll plummet endlessly, perhaps in a broad, unnoticeable loop, a corkscrewing motion through infinity. We are not sure, we give it less than our full attention, because other bodies divert us, the ones who are falling at our pace. Our course screams onwards, downwards, and there they are, at our sides, near our faces, with us until the currents change, or else there's a torsion of breezes, or other processes we cannot quite explain, and they are gone and we are left to our descent.