Swimming Upstream (2 page)

“So,” said the lifeguard. “What are you doing now?
I finish my shift in a minute. Do you fancy a coffee somewhere?”

I shook my head. “Sorry. I need to get home. I’ve
got work in the morning.”

“Come off it,” he said. “It’s only four o’clock!”

“Yes, but I’ve got an early start.
Really
early.”

“Why, what do you do?”

“Radio. I’m a presenter.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I’m impressed. Which
station?”

“Oh God, only local. You know. GCFM. I’m normally
on the lunchtime programme, but it’s my first shot at Breakfast tomorrow. I
need to be up bright and early.”

“So you are…Lizzie…Lizzie…” he clicked his fingers
again, making a good show of searching for my not-so-very famous name.

“… Taylor,” I finished for him.

“That’s it. I know the name. Though I can’t say
I’ve ever listened. But I will now. Definitely will now. Ah, I’ve just
realised. You’re Elizabeth Taylor. Ha ha. That’s funny.”

“No. It’s not.”

“You’ve heard that before, I suppose?”

“Just a few times,” I sighed.

Sean came back with the keys to the machine. I
watched uncomfortably as he fiddled around putting different keys in the lock,
trying to find the right one to open it. I could tell that the lifeguard was
getting impatient.

“Hurry up Sean, the lady’s waiting,” he said. And
then, “Oh, for God’s sake, give them here!” He snatched the bunch of keys from
Sean, opened the glass door and released my cereal bar. He handed the keys back
to Sean and steered him back in the direction he’d just come from, giving him a
little push as he walked away.

“You just can’t get the staff,” he commented
tragically. He handed me my snack. “So. I suppose I am just going to have to
settle for hearing your voice, then. On the radio. For now, at least.”

“Yes,” I said. “I think
you are.”

Outside the rain had stopped. I walked up Coldham’s Lane,
my hair still wet and tangled, the late afternoon sun barely warming my numb
ears. I’d buy tuna and pasta and salad for dinner, I decided, and a bottle of
sparkling water. No wine tonight. And no fags. And only one more night without
Larsen. He was away on tour with his band, due back tomorrow. One more night to
try and figure out what it was that I actually wanted from him. Or, more to the
point, from myself.

I stood at the edge of the road waiting for a gap
in the traffic. The dual carriageway was busy; it was the beginning of the rush
hour. I shouldn’t really cross there, I knew. There was a pedestrian crossing
further up the road near the traffic lights, but that would mean an extra couple
of hundred yards’ walk up the road and the same back down again on the other
side if I wanted to get off the road and cut through the park. I watched for
several moments until the traffic slowed for the lights up ahead and then
stepped out, putting a hand up and smiling at the driver of the car in front of
me who nodded and slowed to let me cross. But then, as I ran across the next
lane towards the crash barrier, I saw a car heading straight towards me.

I heard a voice scream from a distance, amid a
squealing of brakes. I tried to pull myself back but it was too late. My ankle
twisted painfully and I stumbled in the road. The car in front of me screeched
to a halt. I felt the bumper hit my leg and then I found myself sprawled, face
down, my hands and chin bouncing against the hot metal of the bonnet. For a
brief moment I lay prostrate, almost nose to nose with the startled driver who
was staring into my face through the windscreen. And then I was thrown into the
air.

I hit the ground with a thud. It felt as though my
heart had stopped.

A young woman rushed over and kneeled down beside
me. “Are you okay?”

I nodded. I could hear car doors slamming and people
talking nearby. The woman leaned forward and put her arms around me. She was
wearing a black fake fur duffle coat. I tasted fake fur and everything went
black. The woman sat back up and the sky reappeared above me.

“I think we’d better get out of the road,” I
mumbled. My heart was beating like crazy. I felt really scared for some reason
I couldn’t fathom. I could sense that a small crowd was gathering round, but
all I could see was a pale yellow sky, and the clouds moving eerily above me,
as if I were somewhere else, stuck in a parallel universe, or in some horror
movie.

“No! You mustn’t move!” The woman’s voice sounded
familiar. She leaned forward again and I squinted up at her pale face and her
long dark hair, which was hanging over me, tickling my chin.

She gasped. “Lizzie? Lizzie Taylor! I don’t believe
it!”

“Catherine?” I breathed, recognising her as an old
school friend I hadn’t seen for years.

She bent down and kissed me. “Oh Lizzie, it’s so
good to see you. You’re going to be alright, darling. Don’t worry. But you mustn’t
move.”

I couldn’t move at all, in fact. It felt like
Catherine and her big black coat were still pinning me down, but at the same
time I could see her standing up and talking to the driver of the car that had
hit me. I heard her say, “Never mind whose fault it was! Has anyone called an
ambulance?”

An irrational ice-cold knot of terror tightened in
my gut. “I don’t need an ambulance,” I protested, but my words were lost in the
stream of traffic, which was now moving again in the next lane. I could feel
the back of my head becoming heavier, and then everything really did go black. From
somewhere nearby a voice bellowed out, “She just walked out in front of me!”
but I was zipping through the air by then. When I glanced down I could see the
road below me but instead of a busy dual carriageway it had turned into an
empty tree-lined avenue, a quiet street with a lone little girl with auburn hair
and a pink dress dancing on the pavement in front of a gate, crying. The
silence was suddenly shattered by an ambulance, turning into the street, its
siren blaring.

I zoomed back down into the blackness and into the
road again. Catherine was leaning over me and calling my name. Her voice became
a man’s voice and she was wearing a green uniform.

“Lizzie?” said the voice again. “Can you hear me?”

I realised that this was not Catherine but a
paramedic. “Oh God,” I groaned. “I’m not going to be doing Breakfast tomorrow,
am I?”

“That’s the last thing
you want to be worrying about right now, my love,” said the paramedic. “Anyway,
let them get their own. Do them good.”

Catherine was sitting on my bed. I lifted back the curtain
that surrounded us and looked out of my cubicle. Casualty was full, wall to
wall with broken legs and noses.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “You don’t have to wait
with me.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Catherine gently. She gave
my hand a squeeze. “I don’t mind. I wouldn’t leave you like this. Anyway it’ll
give us a chance to catch up.” She lifted her hand to display a diamond-encrusted
fourth finger.

“You’re getting married?”

Catherine nodded, smiling and arching her eyebrows
expectantly.

“Congratulations,” I added.

“So,” said Catherine, “How did you end up here? In
Cambridge, I mean, not here!” She laughed and waved her arm round expansively.

“I came here to study. And then I met someone. So
I stayed.” I told Catherine about Larsen, from the beginning, but leaving out
the end, because I didn’t know what the end was.

“So. You’re shacked up with a popstar. How cool is
that? And he sounds gorgeous,” said Catherine when I’d finished.

“He is. Gorgeous,” I repeated.

“But?” said Catherine perceptively, and I realised
how much I needed to talk to someone. I realised suddenly that I didn’t have
any friends, after all. Not
real
friends, friends that I could talk to
about how I was feeling. All I had was Larsen’s friends, the friends I had
inherited the day that I met him. The friends that had always been Larsen’s
friends before mine.

A nurse came in with my X-rays. “Well, nothing
broken,” she said.

“Really?”

The nurse started to bandage up my foot. “It’s
badly sprained. You’ve torn a few ligaments. Don’t expect to be running a
marathon any time soon.” Or swimming, I was guessing. She disappeared again.

“So what about you?” I asked Catherine, not
wanting to bring her down with my problems. “What have you been doing since I
saw you last? And who’s the lucky man?”

“I went to drama school, luvvie. Four years at the
Central School of Speech and Drama. London. Swiss Cottage. Then I met Martin
when I was performing at the Arts Centre here in Cambridge. A fringe thing. Some
play one of my classmates had written. It was awful actually,” she laughed. “Martin
knew her, so he came along… and the rest is history, as they say. I moved to
Cambridge to be with him.”

“What are we like?” I smiled.

“What do you mean?” asked Catherine.

“Following men around.”

Catherine looked puzzled. She smiled faintly and
pulled back the curtain. An elderly registrar arrived. He handed me my
prescription and a pair of crutches.

“Watch where you’re going in future, young lady,”
he told me. “How are you getting home?”

“Home? I can go home?”

“You’ve been lucky. No real damage done. Your
observations are all good. Blood pressure’s on the low side, but I understand
that’s normal for you.”

“Yes.”

“That will account for the temporary loss of
consciousness. Nothing to worry about. And the sprain will heal in its own
time. So, is there anyone who can take you home?”

“My fiancé,” said Catherine. “He’s coming to
collect me. Us. We’ll take her.”

The registrar nodded and disappeared.

“You don’t have to do this!” I protested. “I can
get a cab.”

“Don’t be silly. He won’t mind.”

“Are you sure?”

By way of reply, Catherine took me by the arm and
hoisted me off the bed. We hobbled together down the corridor towards the
reception area. Outside, I pulled a pack of cigarettes out of my bag and
hastily lit one. Catherine took one crutch for me and I leaned on the other one
and breathed in deeply while Catherine glanced round the car park.

“There he is!” Catherine pointed towards a black
BMW Three Series, which was parked up just outside the entrance. “He’s here
already.”

“Nice car,” I said. I stubbed out my cigarette.

“It’s old,” said Catherine, modestly. “Not as
flash as it looks.”

“So what does he do?” I asked her, trying to show
some enthusiasm for her good fortune in the wake of my own despair.

“Do?”

“Martin. For a living.”

“Oh!” she laughed. “He works at the pools complex.
That’s where I was heading when I saw you doing your kamikaze act in the road. I
was on my way to meet him from work. To surprise him.”

“He works at the pool?”

“He’s a lifeguard,” she explained.

At that moment the door of the black BMW opened and
out stepped Martin, still in his shorts and flip flops. I recognised him
instantly and could see that he recognised me.

What was it like, the beginning, with Larsen? Magical,
heady, scary. A chance to forget anything bad that had ever happened to me. And
to discover that love really does conquer all. Well, for a time, at least.

Cambridge was beautiful but I didn’t belong. My
first term at the College of Arts was like being part of a big, new,
interesting jigsaw puzzle, only I was the piece that didn’t seem to fit. I was
studying French, and trying to make friends was harder than I’d thought. I’d
sit in the canteen and try to join in the chat with my classmates but somehow
there was never a connection and that just made me feel insecure. Their
background, their frame of reference, was so different from my own, their
conversation, their experiences did not fit with my own thoughts, my own
reality. Not only that, but everyone spoke better French than I did and
although we’d all started the course at exactly the same time, it felt as
though they had all been here, studied, and met and forged their friendships
long before I came on the scene. I wandered by myself from tutorial group to
lecture hall, feeling more and more isolated as the weeks went by. I discovered
that being alone in a crowd is the worst kind of lonely.

Then, in early December, I got chatting in the
launderette to a girl called Karen who told me they were advertising for bar
staff at the club where she worked. Before long I was working there too, in the
evenings and at weekends. It was just over the Romsey bridge, off Mill Road,
but far enough from both the red brick of the Tech and the gothic splendour and
tended lawns of the University to feel as if it could have been the street that
I grew up in. Immediately my mood lifted and I began to feel as if I belonged
in Cambridge. Everything made more sense at the club. Everyone seemed more real
to me. And it wasn’t long before I spotted Larsen, up on the small stage with
his band.

“Who’s that?” I asked Karen, the first time I saw
him.

“Larsen Tyler,” she said. “He’s
the
local
talent.”

Larsen was a natural performer. I watched him,
constantly, every chance I got, every time he played. I watched him longingly,
but quickly averted my gaze whenever he seemed to be looking my way. He seemed
at home in his body in a way that I never had been with mine. He stood on
stage, his legs splayed, his head bent over his guitar, his shoulder-length
blond hair flopping forward and covering his face as he strummed. He would
throw his head back and smile as he sang, his eyes working their way round the
room and locking briefly with everyone in his field of vision. When the song
ended he would whip his guitar strap off his shoulder and leap onto the piano
seat, his fingers moving gently over the keys to a slower melody, while the
rest of the band fell into time. After the set finished, he would disappear
into the back room with the manager of the club and the rest of the band, where
I knew they were drinking till late. Occasionally I would see him chatting to
some girls at the back of the bar and would feel an irrational knot of jealousy
tighten in my stomach. But he never looked my way.