The Swimming Pool (9 page)

‘I'm not a child,' she protested.

‘People of all ages can get run over.'

Just like people of all ages can drown
.

And the way she reacted, with a scowl of near revulsion, made me wonder if I'd said it out loud.

Not quite the early birds we'd aimed to be, Gayle and I met at eleven thirty on the first Saturday morning of the state-school holidays, some three hours after aqua-aerobics had finished. A veteran of four previous dips, I was not as melodramatic as she was in my assessment of the temperature.

‘Did you put a couple of tons of ice cubes in here before we arrived?' she called to the lifeguard, as she inched along the edge, arms and shoulders still exposed, a method that I'd kindly pointed out only prolonged the agony.

‘It'll warm up by August,' he told us. He was the same good-looking one who'd approached me before, thinking
me in difficulties, though I saw no reason to relate that humiliation to Gayle.

‘That's no use to us now, is it?' Her manner was flirtatious, and seeing the boy's polite lack of understanding made me feel pity for her, for both of us.

I was not the only one who'd put on weight over the long months of winter and spring, and we made heavy weather of the ten lengths we asked of ourselves. As we broke the surface and clambered out, I tried not to make associations with large, possibly injured, marine mammals. Sitting on our towels with coffee from the snack bar, both virtuous and miserable because we'd denied ourselves a flapjack to go with it, we had our backs to an excitable gaggle of teenagers on the edge of the sundeck. Into a sudden lull came the voice of the lifeguard we'd spoken to and, turning, I saw that he was issuing stern advice of some sort to the group. ‘No more, all right? I don't want to see that kind of thing here again.'

One of the boys, about sixteen and with the narrow waist and muscular development of a trained swimmer, glanced about to see who might have heard and caught my eye briefly before returning to his cohorts. The way he disregarded me was familiar to me from other encounters with young people who did not know me as a teacher or as the mother of a friend: just a forty-something woman of limited or no relevance.

The lifeguard retreated, his face flushing, a reaction to the confrontation, I assumed, until I saw Georgia Channing hurrying towards him. She moved with a
silent and arresting grace, rather like a sprite, and he couldn't take his eyes off her.

‘Hi, Matt!' she sang, then, glancing over her shoulder, ‘Oh, hi, Natalie!' Reaching the noisy group, she came to a halt, smiling hello. Without discussion, the kids gathered her into their heart and rearranged themselves, as if her presence had been required before they could properly settle.

‘Isn't that the Channing girl?' Gayle said.

‘It is. I met her the other day.'

‘She's quite the queen bee, isn't she?'

Though this echoed precisely my own prejudices before I'd met her, I protested, ‘She's actually very sweet. Not what you'd think at all.'

‘Really? I don't believe that for a moment. She'll be a member of the Noblesse in the making.' Gayle made no attempt to disguise her dislike. It appeared that, on the matter of the Channings, she had made up her mind in advance.

‘Oh, Gayle.'

‘You said that exactly like you say “Oh, Ed”,' she said, laughing.

‘How do I say “Oh, Ed”?'

‘You know, fond but dismissive. As if he's a lost cause.'

‘That's not true,' I said.

‘It is! Not that I'm one to talk. It's a miracle I haven't murdered Craig – he's always so
negative
.'

Not knowing quite where to start with those remarks, I took the path of least resistance and said nothing.

On
our way out, we happened to catch the eye of the young lifeguard, back in his chair, and I asked, curious, ‘What were they up to, that group over there?'

He followed my gaze to the sundeck. ‘They play these stupid breath-holding games. I've had to tell them about it before.'

‘What – you mean swimming under water?'

‘Or just ducking under for as long as they can. Some of it's swim-team stuff. We used to do it at my club – the coaches encouraged it to build lung capacity. But now we know it can cause shallow-water blackout.'

‘Sounds dangerous,' I said.

‘It is. That's why I'm here.'

In spite of his elevated position, he spoke to us with the deference of a young man trained to respect his elders, and whereas in the past I would have appreciated the courtesy for the rarity it was, this time it was somehow dismaying, coming as it did so soon after the younger boy's indifference.

‘What's the longest someone can go?' Gayle asked. ‘I don't think I could hold my breath for longer than thirty seconds.'

‘My record was almost three minutes.' If he was proud, it was only in a dubious, self-knowing way. ‘That's about the limit without hyperventilating first. You have to bring your pulse down to do it for any real length of time. You know some German free-diver just did twenty-two minutes?'

‘Twenty-two minutes under water without breathing? I don't believe that for a moment,' Gayle said briskly.

‘It's
true,' he said. And he almost added ‘Miss', I could tell. Though I didn't recognize him as a former pupil of mine or Ed's, somehow he seemed to know we were teachers without needing to ask.

‘We're old,' I said to Gayle, as we were propelled through the turnstile. I had never seen the park so bucolic: the trees' foliage was full, thick as wigs, the nettles temptingly velvet-soft, lethally chest-high. A suburban jungle. ‘I don't know why I'm suddenly so aware of it, but I am.'

‘Baring all in public will do that to you,' Gayle said. ‘But if it means remembering to breathe in and out at the correct intervals then I'm very happy to be old.'

A sudden outburst of excitement followed us through the turnstile and I knew without looking back that it was Georgia's group.

Unsurprisingly,
Molly had made no request to return to the lido since our brief excursion together in June. When we walked past the main gates of the park together at the start of the holidays, I marvelled aloud at the trail heading towards it, its pilgrims' shoulders heavy with swimming kit, supermarket carrier bags full of picnic lunch: ‘It's like the path to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.'

‘Huh?'

‘You know, in Spain. It's a really famous pilgrimage.'

‘It's just a pool,' Molly said and her words, emotionless and hollow, made me shiver slightly. There not yet having been a second session with Bryony Foster, it was far too early to discuss progress and I was certainly not going to tempt Fate by voicing expectations. In any case, there were plenty of places for Molly to be besides the lido. As the daughter of teachers, she had no assumptions of her school holiday being idle. The first part would include a week of tennis, a stack of French worksheets (a holiday staple after it had been discovered that my year fours at Elm Hill Prep
were as advanced as her year-eight class) and, naturally, extra maths. Later, in August, there would be a holiday with us in the New Forest and a week on her own in Stoneborough with my mother and grandmother.

Needless to say, she objected to every last bit of it. ‘Can't you just leave me alone to do what I like? Can't I just go wild, like you used to in the olden days?'

‘I never went wild,' Ed said, and then, when we accepted this without argument. ‘No need to protest
quite
so passionately, girls!'

‘We know
you
were a model citizen from birth,' Molly drawled. Sometimes the adult-sounding intonation caught me unawares and I would startle, scrutinize her features, check she was still our child. ‘But Mum was naughty, wasn't she?'

‘Oh, yes, your summer of sin,' Ed said, smirking at me. ‘You were about Molly's age, weren't you?'

‘I think I was a bit younger,' I said vaguely, though I knew very well I'd been exactly the age she was now. My ancient unease, usually suppressed, had prickled close to the surface lately. I didn't like where this conversation was headed.

‘You were so lucky to be
free
,' Molly proclaimed.

‘I was unsupervised,' I corrected her, ‘and that's not a good thing. I didn't see my mum and dad for a month. I felt insecure, like no one would care if I got into trouble. Once I was back home again, I was fine.' Was it only me who heard the rampant self-justification in this summary?

Molly
was watching me. She knew even less than Ed did about that ‘summer of sin' and it was as easy for her to dismiss it as it was to profess a desire to emulate it. ‘You hung out with Mean Mel, didn't you?'

‘That's right.' I couldn't remember whether Mel had been awarded the sobriquet at the time or merely acquired it in the retelling, but she'd earned it all right, just as I had Nasty Nat.

‘What kind of trouble did you get into?' she pressed.

‘I told you before: shoplifting, smoking …'

‘Note that it put her off both activities for life,' Ed interjected.

‘What else?'

Vigilant now, my mind sifted the minor crimes. ‘We played chicken with the traffic –
that
was stupid. There was one kid who very nearly got run over and the driver threatened to call the police, which gave us all a scare. And once we broke into a building site, climbed the scaffolding and dared each other to jump down on to a big mound of sand. It must have been twenty or thirty feet. We were very lucky we didn't break our ankles.'

‘That was trespassing, by the way,' Ed said. He liked the learning to be quite clear. ‘They could have got into trouble with the authorities even if they didn't kill themselves through sheer idiocy.'

‘Yeah, right,' said Molly. Talk of death did not put her off. For someone afraid of the bathtub, she was ghoulish in her love of other brands of misadventure. ‘So what were you
meant
to be doing?'

I
paused before admitting, ‘The adults thought we'd gone to the pond in the woods to swim. That's where we went most days.'

There was a catch in my voice – to speak of the pond was to have the empty spaces in me fill with anxiety sharp as hunger – and judging by Ed's quick look, he had heard it. Of course he would think I was being careful not to insist on how much fun it was to go swimming with your friends and blurt out my wish that Molly could enjoy it too, though I was not. (In any case, the pond had had dark water, water you couldn't see through, with a soft, muddy bed that your toes couldn't rely on, and the expert in me knew that dark water was a whole other potential fear, more closely related to agoraphobia than aquaphobia.)

‘That was when you hid all the boys' clothes, right?' Molly said. ‘Even their trunks.'

I forgot now why I'd once shared that particular detail – in warning, presumably, or in one of my talks about the developing body and respecting others' privacy. ‘Only one boy at a time,' I said, smiling both for her benefit and in the hope that it might trick my mind into subduing the agitation. ‘I'd hold him down and Mel would pull the trunks off. He'd have to beg, borrow or steal to get them back.'

As a half-repellent nostalgia settled on me, I surprised myself by chuckling. For all the insecurities I'd experienced that summer, for all my shame and dread about the way it had ended, I retained a clear memory
of laughing, and especially when torturing boys, of laughing so hard my whole chest ached. I could hear Mel's voice, deepening with giggles as she swore at me to sit harder on our victims. I don't think I had sworn before that summer.

‘Did the boys cry?' Molly asked.

‘Once or twice, if they couldn't find their clothes.'

‘This is starting to sound like my stag night,' Ed said.

‘More like
Lord of the Flies
,' Molly said, earning an approving look from Ed for having begun the reading list for year nine. ‘I think that was really horrible, Mum. Why did you do it?'

‘Because they teased us,' I said truthfully. Somehow she was extracting more information than I normally gave, but this was not the dangerous part, I reminded myself. This was not so different from climbing scaffolding and stealing cigarettes. ‘They teased Mel about her turned-up nose and me about my birthmark. They called us names.'

‘What names?'

‘Snout-nose and Pock-face. Also the Ugly Sisters. One boy called me Two-face, that's a character in
Batman
who has acid thrown in his face. I remember I'd never heard that one before.' I'd learned that you never forgot hurtful nicknames, from however long ago; I hoped Molly had none to remember.

‘Maybe what you did was fair, then.' She had an air of respectful impartiality, like a coroner. Perhaps it had developed to balance the irrational energy of her phobia or perhaps it was simply her father in her.

Ed
and I often discussed whether or not our parents would even have noticed if we'd had a phobia like Molly's, whether we would simply have hidden it. After all, it wasn't so many generations ago that to have learned to swim was the exception to the rule, not the other way around. We always ended up drawing the same conclusion: even if we hadn't concealed it, they wouldn't have noticed. Because, back then, stuff got overlooked, which had done our generation a great disservice.

On the other hand, well … it had done us a bit of a favour, too.

In my case, certainly.

It was only when Georgia Channing was next in our flat that I thought again of the lifeguard's talk of shallow-water blackout – I'd developed a memory for the names of disorders and had no trouble recalling it – and I discreetly read up on it while she and Ed worked. In short, it was when a swimmer passed out under water as a result of a lack of oxygen to the brain, sometimes, as the lifeguard had warned, after having purposely engaged in breath-holding exercises. There being no warning signs and a very limited time frame for possible resuscitation, it frequently proved fatal. SWB victims were often strong swimmers in competitive squads, exactly the sort to
push themselves too far, to challenge one another. It occurred more often in males than in females.

Though Georgia had not been involved, I thought I might have a quiet word with her when she was finished, ideally out of earshot of Molly. She might be able to use her influence to caution her male friends against such stunts.

However, when the time came she declined my offer of refreshment and issued one of her own: ‘My mum said to say you should come for lunch on Sunday, if you're free.'

‘That's very kind of her. I'm sure we'd love to,' I told her. ‘Where do you live?'

‘On The Rise. Our house is called La Madrague.'

I restrained myself from crying out, I
knew
it would be The Rise. I
knew
it would be a house that had a name and not a number – let alone, like ours, a letter.

Behind me, Molly had emerged from her bedroom and I saw Georgia send her a look of ironic sympathy. She asked her if she wanted to walk to the high street together.

‘Go, darling,' I urged. ‘You said you needed a new protractor.'

Molly shot me a poisonous look.

‘That's hilarious,' Georgia said. ‘I would have thought you'd have, like, a ton of maths equipment in this house.'

‘These things get lost,' Ed said.

‘No way. It's so super-tidy here,' Georgia said, eyeing the immaculate piles of papers and mugs on coasters on
the coffee table before sending another sympathetic glance Molly's way. ‘You could win an award or something.'

‘I know, I'm not even kidding,' Molly said. ‘I don't need a protractor anyway. But I do need a lip balm.'

‘Hey, I'll show you the one I just bought from Elm Trader,' Georgia said. ‘It's guava and lychee.'

Lip balm was practically a currency in its own right for this generation. Accounts of olden-days-style scrimping and saving for a single roll-on gloss having been met in the past with condescension, I didn't offer one now.

Since Molly was there, I had no opportunity to raise the issue of breath-holding games, though I admit it's possible that, excited by the invitation – the two invitations – I might not have remembered even if she'd been absent. Instead, I shared my findings with Ed when the girls had left.

‘Shallow-water blackout? I don't think we need worry about that,' he said, and here came the expression I'd grown used to seeing in such discussions: exaggeratedly co-operative, not a million miles from patronizing. ‘She's not going to drown on dry land, is she?'

‘Not Molly,' I said, ‘the other kids. People Georgia knows. You know what the pack mentality's like. They urge each other on.'

‘Don't get neurotic about it, Nat. They've all got parents of their own.' He wasn't normally so explicit, but he'd had more than his fill of pack mentalities in term
time, perhaps. Remembering Gayle's comment about my dismissiveness, I made a point of agreeing.

As we lapsed into silence, I found myself recalling Molly's comment about
Lord of the Flies
, and for the second time in recent days I thought with a shudder of my old friend Mel.

Of the sound of our laughter over still, dark water.

My grandparents' village of Stoneborough had a population of 490. It had woods, a recreation ground, and a newsagent's with stale chocolate and and uncertain opening hours. The bus service to Southampton operated twice a day except on Sundays, when it didn't operate at all.

It was a backwater if ever there was one: my father's words, not mine. The first time we visited after I'd heard the term, I'd actually expected to find streets of rivers, like in the flooded villages I'd glimpsed on the television news and later understood to be in Bangladesh. Then I realized he meant it was boring, which made it the perfect place to send a girl who'd received a warning from her school about disruptive behaviour and whose parents had finally twigged that discussing a child as if she were hard of hearing might be a contributing factor to those behavioural troubles. Warring parents who wanted her out of the way so they could war more freely. Sort out a few things on their own, as they put it.

‘It's
only for a month,' Mum told me. ‘You'll make friends.'

‘I don't want friends,' I said.

‘Everyone wants friends, Nat.'

And I remember the hug she gave me – close and long and a little desperate, as if I were an evacuee whose destination was a question of pot luck and who might never return. She didn't ever hug me like that again – I wouldn't allow her to because when I came back I was shadowy and uncommunicative, a person with secrets to guard.