Whale Therapy

photo Stuart Walker

There comes a point when you will try anything. Harriet described herself as a whale therapist and said she would use techniques associated with these giant sea mammals to ease my anxieties. It seemed like a reasonable idea – I'd heard of equine therapy – so I turned up at a large detached house on the Loop Road in Whitehaven and waited for my instructions.

Harriet made me lie on the sofa, saying I could keep my boots on if I wanted. It looked like an expensive sofa so I was surprised at this because I was wearing very large Redwing boots which would have to rest on the arm. She had already told me that the house wasn't hers, that her practice partner Zena owned it. So maybe she didn't care what happened to Zena's sofa.

I lay back and rested my big brown boots on the sofa's arm.

'Close your eyes, David, and relax. A whale lives its life almost in slow motion. Its heart beats only ten times a minute, as compared to a shrew's which beats sixteen times a second.  So, David, concentrate on your heartbeat and try and slow it down to the beat of a whale's. Imagine you are sleeping upright, floating like a bat, and the water around you feels warm and gentle, and your heartbeat is becoming slower and slower and slower… and slower… and slower.' But I was distracted by my boots resting heavily on the arm of the sofa. The arm of Zena's sofa. I began to wonder whether Harriet disliked Zena and was using my boots as a way of getting back at her. Maybe Zena thought that this whole whale therapy fad was a hollow gimmick that Harriet had invented after the whale had appeared on the beach.

'Now, David,' Harriet said, 'take deep breaths and concentrate on each breath as it comes in and out. A whale has colossal lungs. Enormous sacs of air. Imagine you are a whale with colossal lungs. Those lungs draw in the planet's deepest breaths. Draw in a breath and imagine that it is the deepest breath that any animal on the planet can ever take. Then take another. And another, each time filling those colossal whale lungs to capacity.'

But I couldn’t stop worrying about my boots. I didn’t like the option of taking them off as there is something very intimate about feet in socks. And I worried that there might be some sort of emergency – a man running amok with a gun, for example – and I wouldn't have time to put on my boots. I might not even be able to find them if Harriet had put them in some so-called safe place.

'When a whale dies,' Harriet was saying now, 'it doesn't sink to the bottom of the ocean right away. It floats for a long while, slowly rotting, and as it does so, it gradually drops its debris on the ocean floor, a nourishing rain for creatures on the seabed to thrive on. This is called whale fall and it is a bountiful feast for all the plants and animals that live in the darkest deepest parts of the ocean, strange alien creatures that look like inside-out medical instruments. Imagine you are a floating dead whale and that parts of you are dropping off slowly to feed the creatures on the ocean bed.'

I wondered why I had to be the one who was dead and rotting and why I couldn't be one of the inside-out creatures on the sea-bed enjoying these tasty treats. Maybe she had made me into the dead whale because she had taken a dislike to me. The offer to keep my boots might have been a test – most ordinary, wholesome citizens would of course take their boots off if offered the option.

I pictured myself as one of the inside-out fish, a slinking, jawless thing with long protuberances that glowed at the end and see-through skin with syrupy organs floating inside. It calmed me down and stopped me thinking about my boots. Maybe changing my shape entirely was the way ahead and I began to wonder about getting radical plastic surgery to make me look like the undersea oddity I had created.

It would be a better route than all this endless talking.