Dr Jive Goes to Ilfracombe

Doctor Jive Goes to Ilfracombe by Chris Green

A break up can be devastating. Since Lucy left, I become confused in familiar situations. I get lost close to home and struggle to find my way back, even with Google Maps on my phone. I am taken in by conspiracy theories, and they are definitely after me, whoever they are. I get night terrors and wake up in a sweat. One night I get up and in a flurry of activity, I spray the fridge purple and paint the kitchen in a zebra pattern. Another night, I discover the neighbours aren’t keen on my psychedelic synth folk music. Come to think of it, neither am I. What is happening to me?

My friend Frankie thinks I should see Dr Jive. She explains how kind Dr Jive has been to her. I suggest I ought to expect a period of adjustment to being on my own. My confusion is down to Lucy leaving, and I should give it a little longer before seeking help. But Frankie is insistent. I should go to see Dr Jive now, she says. He’s your man. Some doctors shy away from mental health issues or dole out a course of fluoxetine to get the patient out of their hair, but Dr Jive takes the time to listen, as if he really wants to help.

I manage to get an appointment with Dr Jive straight away, which is a surprise, as usually it is impossible now to get an appointment with a GP within a week. He seems pleased to see me as if he doesn’t get to see many patients in a day. The surgery is nicely kitted out. Soft colours giving it a homely feel. A display of beach scenes on the wall. Ilfracombe, a small seaside town in North Devon, he explains, when he catches me looking at them. I fidget as I try to tell him what I have come about. He tells me to relax. He seems very laid back. I wonder briefly if he is going to put on some ambient music and offer me a spliff, but he doesn’t.

After I have gone over my history, we agree that the progress of my obfuscation will have been helped along by my bountiful use of drugs when I was younger. I explain that when I was growing up, it was almost compulsory for young adult males to indulge in substance abuse. All social interaction revolved around the shared experience of being out of it. Dr Jive suggests that I may have continued to indulge this timeframe longer than I should have, blurring my sense of reality.

He’s right. Nail on the head. And for years, there were many others like me who I could relate to, so my detachment from reality didn’t matter. But one way or another, this number became smaller, and I began to stand out more, which in turn made my condition more acute and more noticeable. This is why Lucy left. After I had accidentally taken her Kate Spade slingbacks to CLIC Sargent, she screamed she had had enough. She could no longer put up with my unpredictable behaviour and mood swings.

‘Do you have a flotation tank?’ Dr Jive asks.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t even know what it is.’

‘No bother,’ he says. ‘There is a flotation therapy centre close by. I recommend you book yourself in there for a session or two.’

I have never heard of flotation therapy, so I ask him to explain.

‘Flotation therapy involves relaxing in a supersaturated solution of salts,’ he says. ‘You lie back and float effortlessly on the surface of the water. By being free from the forces of gravity, your muscles relax, and you slip into a meditative state. The good news is they are offering free sixty-minute taster sessions this month. Ask for Selena Dream. she will sort you out. Say Dr Jive sent you. You might get longer than an hour.’

Sensory deprivation is not for everyone. If it does not suit you, you cannot imagine how hellish being trapped inside a tank in the dark feels. All your demons have been waiting for a moment like this. I get out alive, just I think. But already the nightmare haunts me.

I phone the practice to book a follow-up appointment with Dr Jive to see if he has anything more conducive to staying alive to offer.

‘Can you come in right away, Mr Elliott?’ the receptionist says. ‘He seems to have a free appointment at eleven o’clock. ….. Or there’s another at eleven thirty.’

‘Eleven’s fine,’ I say.

‘Perhaps you should have done a few things in preparation for flotation,’ Dr Jive says. ‘It can be a shock initially because the sensation is so unfamiliar. You need to be acquainted with the mechanics of meditation. But I expect you have regular Omming sessions, don’t you.?’

‘Not as such,’ I say.

‘Didn’t Lucy used to om?’

‘No. Lucy never ommed. She was more rock and roll.’

‘Never ommed? Extraordinary! What about gong baths?’

‘No.’

‘Anyway, I recommend you make a start with the omming, right away, Mr Elliott. Two or three hours a day should do it to begin with. And listen to some Shakuhachi music. Buddha’s flute. It’s very healing. I’ll send some over. What’s your email address?’

‘troyelliott137@gmail.com’

‘Right, now let’s see. What else do you think might help?’

‘Well, you’re the doctor, Doctor. I was hoping you might tell me.’

‘Fair point. OK. You have a car, I presume.’

‘I did have, but Lucy took it.’

‘That’s a pity,’ he says. ‘But I expect you will get another one, and when you do, you should take a break somewhere. A holiday to recharge the batteries. Now, as you’ve probably gathered, I’m rather fond of Ilfracombe. I could give you the address of an Airbnb that is very comfortable, and the landlady Trisha Shirt lives on the premises, but she tolerates omming. In fact, she positively encourages it, and she holds meditation classes in nearby Mortehoe on Thursdays. My brother Jimmy prefers Mundesley in North Norfolk and likes to send his nervous patients there. But I’ve been and I don’t think much of it. Trust me, Ilfracombe’s the place to get your mental faculties back on track.’

Frankie is keen to know how I got on.

I tell her about the flotation tank and the omming.

‘It probably was a little soon to start you on flotation therapy,’ she says. ‘But all the other stuff is sound. All part of the healing process.’

‘And he feels I need a holiday ‘

‘Good idea.’

‘When he feels at a lob ebb,’ I say. ‘Dr Jive goes to Ilfracombe,’

‘Then that’s what you should do, Dan,’ she says. ‘You should go to Ilfracombe.’

She seems to have forgotten that I no longer have a car.

‘You could always steal a car,’ Les Rubio, the bar manager in the Frog and Trumpet, says. ‘Ford Fiestas are the easiest, and there are plenty of them. I know a location where there are no cameras and I could give you the name of someone who would do the documentation and change the plates and someone who would do a paint job.’

This is not something I would normally entertain, but desperation somehow justifies the idea. I need to get to Ilfracombe and there are no trains. How else am I going to get there? Les shows me a YouTube video which talks you through how to get into a Fiesta and get it started without keys. It is surprisingly easy. With Les’s help, I liberate a 2014 model from the recreation ground car park. I scrape together enough funds to pay Bogdan for keys and documentation and Dmitri for the paint job. As luck should have it, Trisha Shirt’s Airbnb has a vacancy for the following week.

The long drive cross country to North Devon is a bit of a fag. I am used to bigger cars. And satnav. The route would be clearer with my TomTom, for sure. All the roads lead the wrong way. But apart from a close call when Dohma Yeshi’s Shakuhachi rendition of The Long and Winding Road on my player gets the better of my concentration and I drive the wrong way around a roundabout on the outskirts of Bridgwater, the journey passes without incident. And the last stretch seems interminable and they call these A roads.

The accommodation is in a large Edwardian house with a fair bit of land. There is no answer when I knock, I find Trisha Shirt, burying something out the back. Perhaps it is a dead pet. A large pet by the size of the hole. She puts down the spade, pours the last bucket of soil over the space, and comes across. She welcomes me with a North Devon greeting the content of which I don’t understand. The dialect around here is almost like a foreign language. She doesn’t elaborate on what the digging was all about and I don’t pursue it. She asks if it is my first time in Ilfracombe and I tell her I had never heard of the place until Dr Jive suggested it for a holiday and recommended her accommodation.

‘Oh, you must mean Johnny,’ Trisha says. ‘Johnny and Janey Jive often come to stay. I didn’t realise he was a doctor, though. You mean a medical doctor?’

‘Yes. He’s a General Practitioner. Perhaps not a typical one. Anyway, he waxed lyrical about Ilfracombe. He says he loves it here. He even has pictures of Ilfracombe beaches on the wall in his surgery. He said I had to visit to see what a paradise it was, and you came highly recommended.’

‘Johnny’s a nice man. He drives a nice shiny car, and he’s always well-dressed and very polite. Not like some of the riff-raff we get thinking this is going to be like Weston Super Mare or Burnham on Sea. One thing I have noticed though is that Janey doesn’t ever seem to look the same. Last time they came, she looked like a new woman.’

‘I expect she likes to keep up with the trends.’

‘I expect that’s it, yes,’ she says.

I’m thinking that Janey never looking the same suggests she isn’t always the same person, but I don’t want to contradict Trisha so I don’t mention it. After all, it’s up to Dr Jive what he gets up to in his private life. But the mystery surrounding him seems to be deepening. Who is he? Why was he so keen to get me here? What is it about this out-of-the-way seaside place?

After a few days of power-omming with Tricia and a couple of sessions of Get a Grip therapy with C. O. Jones in Barnstaple, I can feel my vitality coming back. I even manage to get a date. I am not ready for commitment and neither is Sharon, but it is very nice to feel the sap rising again.

Watching the boats come and go from Ilfracombe Harbour every day, I feel it might help my recovery to get out onto the open seas and experience some nautical thrills. However, I discover that the services from Ilfracombe are limited to short sea cruises or supervised fishing trips around the North Devon coast. You can’t even get a boat over to Wales, which you can practically see across the bay, so I decide to steal a boat. There are plenty of cabin cruisers there just waiting for me, and, of course, I have the experience of stealing the Fiesta under my belt. While I can no longer use desperation as an excuse for theft, as C. O. Jones taught me, sometimes in life, you have to be bold and do things you otherwise wouldn’t. You don’t get anywhere, he says, by being a shrinking violet. Besides, the owner will probably be well-heeled and won’t even miss the boat for a few days. And guess what, there is even a YouTube video offering instructions.

…………………………

Sitting here in my prison cell at the beginning of my five-year sentence, I can’t help but feel a little regretful. It needn’t have turned out this way. The Get a Grip therapy comes in handy, but for whatever reason here at Leyhill, there is a zero tolerance for omming. But at least I avoided the high security units of Broadmoor and Rampton. Dudley Bills KC did a sterling job in court. Leyhill is an open prison, and I am allowed in the garden where I can help Keith Doobie grow medicinal herbs and spices. Governor Presley says that under the early release scheme brought in to tackle overcrowding, I should be out within the year. Dr Jive has asked for a visit, but I am not sure if I should approve it. I’ve been thinking there’s something uncomfortably dodgy about Dr Jive. Nothing has felt remotely normal since I first went to see him about my emotional turbulence. Things were straightforward before his intervention. My crisis diagnosis was premature. Broken hearts and wounded pride sort themselves out. There’s no need for histrionics or outside interference. All that is needed is time. Judge Block seemed to agree.

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