Afloat

Jason, 40 years old today, surrounded by friends, sat back and ordered himself a coffee ice cream float. He did so with pride and luxurious anticipation. Gone was that hollow hankering feeling, the absence of a good time if the time didn’t include copious amounts of alcohol. Gone was the anxiety, the hang up that maybe he wasn’t good enough, that maybe the people around him were secretly whispering about him, his looks, his weight, his taste in shirts, his taste in shorts, the colour of his face, his pseudo aggressive laugh. Gone. 

Yes, Jason had carried out an amount of work on himself. He’d entered midlife in a crisis he didn't recognise until two years’ ago when, in the morning light of the day after this one, he’d found himself suddenly awake, face down on the verge of a soaking lay-by somewhere north of the London North Circular dual carriageway.

Birthdays had never been good. Even when he was a boy there was something awful, boring, churningly traumatic about them. They were always compromised or ruined or just not fun. 

From the games of hide-and-seek and the disastrous inflatable pool parties to the ‘let’s just go see a movie’ when half his entourage walked out due to his apparent bad taste. Then there was his 30th when he hired a hotel for everyone stay overnight and had to pay to drain and clean the pool the next day. None of them hit the spot. Birthdays didn’t work for him. He just didn’t enjoy them. The anticipation was awful, the nerves unstoppable, the event a let down. And when he surrounded himself with friends from work he discovered he that because he didn’t like the work he didn’t like his friends either.

And so, two years ago, to the day after this one, he resigned from his six figure job.

“You gotta be kidding me!” exclaimed his boss, more astonished by this exit than that Jason was stood before him in his plush office, bare foot, soaked to the skin – partly with dew, partly with the residue of the beers, shorts and cocktails of the night before. 

“This isn’t me,” said Jason, more sober with each small word. “This is not me.”

“I know it isn’t,” said his boss, palming a bottle of Jamesons from his cabinet drawer. “Whaddya say we have a slosh and forget about all it? Take the day off and see how you feel tomorrow?”

And Jason did and he felt the same tomorrow. He felt the same all year as he took himself apart piece by piece, replacing what he didn’t like with organic food, soft drinks with no artificial sweetener and pilates.

“Happy Birthday,” smiled Tanya, the life coach he’d bumped into at his first yurt-based Nature Guru retreat. “You deserve all this, remember that.”

“I have already expressed my gratitude today,” nodded Jason. “And it was fantastic.”

Sharon and Karen raised their smoothies to Jason and laughed their shared laugh. Having been thrown out of his own flat by his ex-fiancee – shortly followed by the tens of thousands of pounds worth of engagement ring he’d bought her – he’d been fortunate enough to meet these two in a cafe in Hoxton. They recognised his soul they said, and took him in and he couldn’t believe his luck.

They were deeply spiritual, deeply platonic, looking past his weight and clammy hands, addressing the low self esteem that hung around his neck and realigning his spirit through warm rock massages and wild swimming.

“I’m not much of a water person,” he warned them.

They’d giggled as he followed their directions, reassuring him that he didn’t need to be able to swim to enjoy where they were heading. Just relax and go with it. So he drove them all to the Lake District where, among the rugged hills, assaulted by the most fantastic views, they bathed naked in nature’s infinity pools.

“Have you ever been to the pool on top of that hotel in Singapore?” He asked. “Marina Bay Sands, it’s called.” They just giggled.

Then there was the hard slog. The sweat and muscle strain of shedding the extra tyre – tyres – from around his waist and shoulders. He could have traded his Mercedes for a couple of years of premium gym membership, but instead he gave the proceeds to a third sector outfit, enrolling himself at a spit-and-sawdust boxing training basement where the mats were decaying with other people’s sweat and dust and addiction hung permanently in the air. Powered by an ex-weightlifter’s bullying sarcasm he reshaped his body, taking himself from pear to inverted triangle in six months. 

A hairdresser who he spotted weights with once or twice blew-dried his hair into new angles and 18 months after his final blow-out he was a new man.

And now the waitress returned, smiling, with a silent fanfare, impressive looking drink on her tray, sliding slightly as she curved in, letting her free arm scoop up the glass and glide it to his table.

“Coffee ice cream float,” she informed him, placing the paper bill on the saucer and securing it with the long silver spoon.

She smiled. He smiled. Sharon and Karen giggled. The waitress left and he studied the drink, satisfied that he would shortly enjoy this luxury and his fast-flowing metabolism would convert it to highly positive energy.

A coffee ice cream float, he mused. A float.

He leant forwards and lifted the spoon to dip into the cream on top. Why not, he thought, start with the most perfect part? The cool smooth cream with chocolate infused. But, spoon in hand, he hesitated and for a full minute sat there, staring at the drink.

He didn’t know it was happening until he started coughing. It was only then that he realised his breathing for the past sixty seconds had become progressively worse. Just a tickle, the slightest of contractions to begin with, but then gradually building. A clear restriction materialised, triggering a wheeze in the space between his mouth and lungs.

He wasn’t panicking. He couldn’t be panicking. There was nothing to panic about. But maybe he was panicking. Maybe there was something to panic about. Bloody birthdays.

And yet still the path to his lungs seemed to be getting narrower. Jason began to wonder what he could use to open himself up again. To open up. He was laughing now – unable to laugh any more – and realising it was all gasping.

And now with the gasping, the arms. The flailing, the reaching for something but not reaching it as he slid off his chair, watching the drink move up and out of his viewing frame and with it the name. The world slopping over his head.

“A float,” he gasped as the people and surroundings around him to blur and the reassuring sound of the siren began to fade. “A float…”