The Anti-Verruca Immersion Footbath

The Anti-Verruca Immersion Footbath

21 July, 2008
by: John Ellingsworth

I am busy ramming and screwing the base of my hand into my reopened eye, which is tender and itching. I'm not supposed to scratch, so instead I bludgeon and abrade. It seems to be putting her off.
"- are you all right?"
"Fine."
"It's just your eye's like-"
"It's fine. You were saying about moods."
"Yes." She pauses to look up at a small girl who is screaming quite loudly as she plummets hundreds of feet. "You get different ones, like weekends are families and it's basically a playground and an indoor park. Weekdays, it's weird - you get these suits who come in and look all shifty and its like they're visiting a brothel. They never seem to look at each other. It's just weird".
"Hmm."
"Are you going down?"
"Presently."
"The corkscrew one is my favourite - you should start there."
"That slide is for the weak and the pregnant. Direct me to your biggest."

I have never in my life ever waited this long for anything. I am considering (a) pushing down the youthful and infirm people in the queue ahead of me; (b) hurling myself from the balcony and catching the outside of the superstructure and sliding down on the top of it with great style and élan (this option generated by WWJCD: What Would Jackie Chan Do?); and (c) turning to the person behind me and announcing that I have syphilis, just for something to do. The worst and most torturous thing is that I can look down and see people shooting out of the three outlets far below, looking exhilarated or terrified or carefully blank, having the fun that I am not having.

I'm in the Tate Modern. The five slides in the Turbine Hall curl like tough rope from low, middle and high balconies. Their undersurfaces are shiny metal, looking whole from a distance but seen to be made from many overlapping pieces when close-to. The tops are transparent. There are about thirty people clustered around the outlets below, and about three or four million people in the queue ahead of me. The queue stretches to vanishing point and, if harnessed, could probably be used to prove or disprove all sorts of far out physical laws. Obviously the need to slide lies dormant in us all.

A truly fat person achieves terrible velocity and scares a gallery assistant as she comes belting out of the longest slide. I am almost shaking with impatience. The queue seems to be stretching longer and longer in front of me as I watch. I would do (a), (b) or (c) right now, but I can't decide which. And then, just as I'm turning round to the person behind, (d) occurs to me.

Through the anti-Verruca immersion footbath, round a corner, and there it is. "Now, that's a fucking slide." I am not talking to myself, not today — my friend Richard is here also, decked for swimming in trunks identical to mine but looking, Richard, markedly less handsome and well endowed. He has been complaining for approximately an hour that immersing himself in poisonous public water will turn his piercings septic, and as we approach the agitated lip of the pool I am heartily looking forward to pushing him in.

We walk forward, staring up at the immense twist of bright plastic that runs from ceiling to ground level and looks structurally amazingly unsound. The pool is pretty much your average pool. Mothers are smiling to toddlers in armbands. Bored lifeguards are willing one or two of the prettier girls to get into difficulty. The noise is echoing and overlapping.

Not far away, a fat kid is making a spirited attempt to murder a thinner one by drowning him. This boy is an ugly seal on land, reviled by his clan, but here in the water he finds his body powerful and mobile. When he first dived in, he stayed below the surface and opened up his big hands and swam forward in huge sweeps, twisting through the slow legs of strangers, pushing on under the shadowy keel of the giant foam raft, bumps appearing and disappearing above where children stepped and jumped and fell, the whole thing sort of benignly volcanic, the boy now feeling calm and disconnected from the world, sounds muffled and delayed, movements slow and predictable, and he skulled, the boy, this swimmer, he skulled and from the corner of his eye in the murky water saw the red swimming trunks and scarred left knee of someone he knew from the world above, except that here, now this was his world, and he remembered his past life, the life he must soon return to, and his blood sang with the thousand indignities he had suffered, and he gathered himself for one last surge, and at last, at last - redress.

The chlorine in my eye isn't exactly balm. I resist urges and voices that are trying to make me claw the fucker out, and hang over the railings to look down at the main pool. The foam raft is moving like a sea thing that chases and chases and never catches swimmers. A boy is acting as captain, shouting left and pointing left, but the raft is nonetheless pulling to the right, its turn looking sick and drunken. Passengers are having a bad time dealing with the spongy surface, finding that stepping down with one foot pushes up the other, this probably the closest feeling there is to a magic carpet, and not all that close. As I watch, another raft comes into view and it evolves that the two are conducting some kind of miniature sea battle. Without cannons the objective seems to be to steer your raft close enough to the enemy to make the jump, piling onto the rival vessel until it exceeds its maximum capacity and can no longer float. It looks like some of the young brigands aren't above punching, either. I watch them until the flume guard tells me I can go.

The slide is a tube which becomes a half-pipe toward the bottom, and here at the entrance I can see the inside of the tunnel is bright, indicating that the plastic is thin enough to admit light. I grip the bar above, the launch bar, pull my weight back and then fling it forward.

The designers make an effort to simulate a journey. As you shoot through different environs, the walls are sometimes dark and othertimes studded with LEDs, the plastic is in different colours; but all of this is eye candy and pointless, because visual stimuli take a backseat to the special, sensuous feeling that comes from sliding downward on a thin membrane of water - a sensation of being carried, and of lightlessness. I do want terribly to be able to fly. There are a few things I have experienced which approximate it - diving (too much like falling), trapeze (too much like work), being hit by a car (only good for about half a second) - but sliding is closest. What ruins it for me and breaks the experience is the disappointment of hitting the water, going from extreme speed to that heavy slowness.

As usual, my enthusiasm passes on a conduit to Richard, so while I'm sitting cross-legged in the extreme shallows, imagining a dystopic underground waterpark which is also a city, and rotten, its flumes shifting sewage and effluent, Richard is running up the stairs that lead to the biggest slide with I guess you would have to call it Napoleonic vigour. He is approximately five times as tall as every other person on the stairs and twice as excited. He waves, but I'm distracted by the members of the smaller of the two warring rafts, who have lured the bigger raft into the shadows and are executing a new manoeuvre. The attack starts as normal, but then, at the last moment, all of them dive under the big raft, locking into Atlas postures and heaving up in a line along the centre of the foam, bringing it up like a tent and leaving its crew without purchase or favourable gravity. They go tumbling off on either side. The usurpers pick up the empty raft, throw it toward the deep end and then swim after, leaving the others dead in the water, with a vessel too small to accommodate them.

Fatso is up on the highest dive board high over the dive pool. The rectangle of water past his toes in his mind's eye shudders and slides, becomes something different. He looks up and there is no ceiling and no sky. The lifeguards are there, on dive boards all around him, but indifferent, like gulls; two of them are fucking. He looks down and sees mists, occasional birds; sees flumes criss-crossing below him he will steer and roll through as he skydives down.

Our time runs out. We hit the anti-Verruca immersion footbath. Hit the showers. Rip the plasticky paper tags - like hospital admissions tags - off our wrists. Richard won't shut up. "That was amazing. That was so amazing," Richard says.

---

Aquasplash, in Hemel Hempstead. The website dares readers to throw themselves into the fearsome Space Bowl, which is transparent green, and the wreck of men. Are you going to fucking stand for that? Get in there.

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John Ellingsworth