The Swimming Pool (7 page)

Somehow I
was not as surprised as I might have been when, on the penultimate day of term, just as I had five minutes to myself, my mobile rang and it was her.

‘Listen,' she said, ‘I've found you a therapist.'

‘Hello? Who is this?'

‘It's Lara.' Of course,
silly
. ‘So I've asked around and she's supposed to be the best.'

‘The best?'

‘You know, for the aquaphobia. I spoke to the therapist and she says she's treated it before and had great success.'

I struggled to find a clear response. It appeared that this near stranger had taken it upon herself to make medical investigations on behalf of my daughter, a girl she'd met for about five minutes. On the one hand it was intrusive, not to mention naïve that she should think Ed and I lacked the wherewithal to ‘ask around' on our own; on the other, I was touched. Most people's good intentions began and ended with kindly incomprehension.

‘That's
very thoughtful of you, Lara, and I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but we really have tried everything already.'

‘You haven't tried
her
.'

Indeed, when she gave the name of the therapist, I didn't recognize it. ‘You're right, we haven't, but I'm guessing that's because she doesn't do NHS referrals and is too expensive, in which case we're not going to be able to see her now.'

‘It's not as expensive as you'd think,' Lara said, though vaguely, and I remembered Ed's report of her having offered him a higher rate to meet her tutoring requirements. ‘Just promise you'll phone her. I'm determined to get Molly in the water,' she added.

Again, the audacity of it – and the generosity. I didn't ask how she'd got my mobile-phone number. Perhaps from the school office. They weren't supposed to release staff contact details but I had a feeling Lara would know how to get people to do things they weren't supposed to do.

I relayed the exchange to Ed.

‘You mean she's the same one who's just signed up for tutoring? The woman I met at the summer fair?'

‘Yes, she seems to be our new fairy godmother. Maybe she feels bad for having helped open a pool in our neighbourhood and making Molly's life a misery.' I remembered Molly at the lido that time, hunched against the wall, emotion locked behind her eyes, released from her torture only when Lara entertained her with her chatter.
‘But she can't feel personally responsible for the opening of a public swimming pool, can she? Only a complete megalomaniac could take that position.'

Ed smirked. ‘Megalomaniac, fairy godmother: same thing.'

‘Cynic,' I said, chuckling.

Molly may have been fine physically after that shocking afternoon in July, but she was not otherwise. Water, from that day onwards, was the enemy. Bath time, which had previously delighted her, became so fraught I would dread it all day, prepare at length my strategy, my calm, only to abort the task the moment she felt liquid creep over her skin and began yelling to get out. Ed fitted a new, lower showerhead and we washed her in the lightest of sprinkles, careful not to allow water to fall on her face.

Subsequent expeditions to any swimming pool, large or small, indoor or out, raised hysteria as awful as the original. A paddling pool, even a bucket, provoked the same distress. She began to refuse to go near the duck pond in the park near our flat, screaming herself into a frenzy each time we tried to coax her towards it, digging her fingers into our flesh, both desperate for our protection and terrified we would not give it. I tried not to notice that she always reached for Ed first, tried not to think that she had
good reason to trust her father over her mother. During these episodes she suffered nausea, palpitations, diarrhoea and, worst of all, hideous choking convulsions, though there was never any obstruction in her throat.

As her speech developed, so did her ability to describe her fear.

‘What do you think the water will do?' I asked her once.

‘It will swallow me,' she said, and a grotesque image spilled into my consciousness, an image of hands tearing at blonde hair, of desperate eyes still open under water. I purged it at once, like bile in the gullet.

Seeking advice online, we came upon the glass of water test, which involved turning a glass upside down and plunging it into a basin full of water. ‘See, the air is still inside the glass,' I told Molly, though she could hardly bear to look, doing so only through splayed fingers. ‘The same thing happens when you put your head under water. You see, it can't go inside you! The air prevents the water flowing into your nose.'

‘So long as you don't tilt your head back,' Ed said.

‘Ed!'

Molly tilted back her head and cried.

Swimming lessons, conducted by instructors experienced with nervous pupils, were, without exception, disastrous. However thoroughly we briefed the teacher, however specialized he or she claimed to be, it made no difference to the strength of Molly's aversion, the depth of her anguish. It was heartbreaking, over and over.

On
good authority, we tried a lake instead of a pool: no sudden drop, no queuing or climbing required on exit. We tried to tempt her to the water's edge with a chocolate finger for each step taken. There would be a toy, we promised, if she just put her toes into the water. She became hysterical, straining against our grip to escape us and calling out that we were hurting her, which drew concerned approaches from bystanders. We concluded that we – like the swimming teachers – did not have the necessary expertise to tackle what must surely be a form of post-traumatic stress disorder: a psychologist would succeed where we were failing, an expert in childhood phobias.

That was when the word ‘aquaphobia' entered our vocabulary, as did the necessary definition for explaining to others how it differed from hydrophobia. (Very occasionally, word leaked that poor Molly had rabies.)

And so to the years of therapists, so many I lost count. The process never varied: waiting for the referral to reach the top of the waiting list, waiting for the next appointment, waiting for advice about subconscious learning and empowerment through knowledge. The Archimedes Principle was discussed, the buoyancy laws we'd demonstrated so unsuccessfully in the bathroom basin explained over and over. Hippocrates came up (so, once, did
Jaws
). We were told that instead of following our teacher's instinct patiently to detail time and again the technical reasons why a situation was safe, we were simply to say to her, ‘You know the facts.' And yet the
facts included statistics that made Molly's fear so understandable in the first place – and stirred our own, frankly. People
did
drown, thousands a year worldwide, about four hundred annually in the UK; and for those who could not swim, the risk was considerably greater, making our daughter's condition a catch-22.

‘What do we do?' I asked Ed.

‘We get on with it,' he said. ‘With the rest of life.'

Not all of it, however: for one thing, there would be no second child until we'd fixed the first, until I'd stopped blaming myself, stopped declaring myself unfit. But how could I stop when I knew that Ed had not? Even the least educated or experienced of parents knew you didn't take your eye off a toddler in water, however shallow; a teacher of young children and possessor of an up-to-date first-aid qualification had no excuse. There were times when I allowed myself to be overwhelmed by the fear that he might believe complacency had caused me to reach too sluggishly for that towel or even – on ghastly nights when I couldn't sleep – that he thought I'd toyed with risk for the perverse thrill of it.

‘Poor thinking', the therapists called this sort of thing: feelings of helplessness on the parents' part that served no one, least of all the child.

Finally, there came a new approach. ‘This is a childhood fear that has not been outgrown – yet,' said the last therapist. ‘I suggest you let nature take its course. Pools can be avoided easily enough, can't they?'

Well,
yes, we'd managed by then to avoid them for years. Moving to Elm Hill when Molly was three or so, we'd been relieved, if not attracted, by the absence of a duck pond or lake in our new park. That crumbling old lido was
never
going to reopen.

We agreed to take a year off from therapy and revisit on Molly's thirteenth birthday. (‘Not literally on her birthday,' Ed said. ‘That'd be no treat.')

‘So long as we crack this before she reaches the age of independence, we'll be fine,' the therapist said. ‘After that, she's less likely to want to communicate with you about it.'

Which brought us to the present day. We hadn't cracked it, we'd reached the age of independence, and as to whether she still wanted to communicate with us, well, she was a teenager now and the odds were not exactly in our favour.

‘A
hypnotherapist
?' Gayle said, looking up from her salmon in watercress sauce with a short-tempered frown. She said it exactly as you might
exorcist
or
warlock
.

‘A hypnotherapist,' I confirmed. The sight of a rogue flake of fish inside her open mouth reminded me that the light was much too bright and I rose to dim the spots. I should have lit candles, created an ambience, but our dinners with Craig and Gayle were so easy and frequent
that we often didn't shop specially for them or make any particular preparations. At least we could speak freely, Molly being at Izzy's for a sleepover and Gayle and Craig's two girls having long since established social lives of their own.

‘She's called Bryony Foster. I checked her out online.' It was only right, I had felt, that I should pay Lara the respect of taking her recommendation seriously, if for no other reason than that when our paths next crossed I wanted to be able to give an informed reason for my failure to make the appointment.

It had come as no surprise that the therapist was based in Harley Street. That she was a hypnotherapist, well, maybe that hadn't come so left of field either: what I'd seen so far of Lara Channing did not suggest a rigid adherence to convention. But there were stranger therapies in the world and it was certainly worth sounding out the notion on parenting forums. There, I discovered that Bryony Foster was considered the best in her field.

– I heard she's a total genius. We tried for Lucie's bedwetting but there was a six-month waitlist!

– Keep trying! We got a cancellation, so lucky! Charlie's anger issues have been completely cured.

What Molly had, however, was nothing like bedwetting or anger issues. It was a chronic and debilitating phobia. When I'd phoned the previous morning, Ms Foster's receptionist had made no mention of a waiting list. ‘Oh, yes, Mrs Channing contacted us about Molly a few days
ago. We'd be pleased to help. We have a cancellation next Tuesday at five? Does that give you enough time to get here after school?'

It would be a scramble, but only that first week: we'd be more flexible once Molly broke up for the summer on the Friday. I was surprised to find myself already thinking in terms of multiple visits. ‘How much does it cost?'

‘The standard fee for a private session is a hundred and ninety pounds.'

‘And how many sessions do you think she'll need?'

‘It's impossible to say without meeting Molly, but the average is five or six.'

Quick mental arithmetic told me that even at the full price the sessions would be more or less the same as the fees paid by the Channings for Georgia's twice-weekly tutoring.

‘I'll take it,' I said.

Now, salmon finished or abandoned (it wasn't my finest culinary hour), Gayle and Craig looked to Ed for a rational explanation of so lunatic a leap of faith.

‘We've tried everything else.' He shrugged. ‘There's only alternative therapies left.'

‘So you have to pay for it?' Gayle asked. ‘Hypnotherapy's not available on the NHS?'

‘No, but it's acknowledged by them as a treatment for phobias, addictions, a lot of stuff.'

But Gayle was not convinced. ‘What would
she
know about phobias, anyway?'

Craig
exploded with laughter. ‘Listen to that
she
. Always a sign that you've got it in for someone.'

Gayle shot him the kind of fiercely contemptuous look that was more common than you'd think between spouses of two decades' standing. ‘Seriously, Nat, you have no personal connection with this family, how can you trust their recommendation?'

This was getting unduly obstructive, almost as if Gayle were hoping Lara's therapist would fail like all the others. That Molly would never be cured. ‘We have no personal connection with anyone we go to for help,' I said mildly, ‘and referrals by medical professionals have so far been one hundred per cent unsuccessful. As Ed says, we exhausted mainstream options long ago, and time's running out. This could be our last real chance.' Just saying this caused a twinge of anxiety, and I knew instinctively that it had been right to take the appointment. ‘Besides, we do have a connection now. Starting from tomorrow, Ed is the Channings' daughter's new maths tutor.'