It’s five p.m. and I’ve just ventured downstairs to the pool for a swim. After breakfast, I tried to write, but it was no good. I couldn’t focus, my head spinning with a myriad of thoughts – my conversation with Stella, my upcoming meeting with Trevor Carrington, but most of all the email I received and the potential danger I’m placing myself in by remaining in this house. Unable to sit staring at the screen a moment longer, I decided to go food shopping. Something banal to take my mind off things. There’s a Waitrose in West Hampstead but it’s a bit pricey for me, so I ended up walking to the Finchley Road which has a large Sainsbury’s halfway down. I spent a good forty-five minutes in there, aimlessly wandering the aisles, my mind not really focused on the groceries, shoving items I didn’t really need into my trolley which meant I had to get an Uber back to the house because I couldn’t carry it all.
Having unloaded everything in the kitchen, I found Adriana in her study just getting off the phone and asked if she was OK with me using the pool. I hadn’t forgotten she’d already said I should feel free to use it whenever I wanted, but it’s early days with me living here and I suppose I still feel more like her guest than a lodger. She seemed a little preoccupied, but said it was fine, that I shouldn’t need to ask, and so, having gained her approval, I found myself padding back upstairs to change.
The rectangular twenty-five-metre pool is on the lower ground floor, and although I know I am safely tucked away inside where it’s warm and secure and protected from the wintry elements, one side of the wall is glass and beyond that is the outdoor terrace where Max said Adriana sometimes entertains in the summer. Right now, it feels a little eerie, a little exposed, with it being pitch-black outside, although I suspect it’s my imagination running wild because of all that’s happened since I received the email.
The room is kept at a constant twenty degrees, and so I don’t feel cold as I remove the white towelled bathrobe I found in the small interconnecting changing room and lay it across one of two cream cushioned loungers at the far end of the pool. It’s almost like being at a spa – even though I’ve only been once to one of those when I treated Mum one Mother’s Day – save for the absence of calming background music. Just now, I could do with some of that.
I slide my feet out of my flip-flops, tucking them neatly under the lounger, before standing at the edge of the pool, absorbing the serenity of my surroundings, the stillness of the water which is calling out to me. I’m itching to know what Trevor Carrington has to say about the last time he saw my dad, whether he had any inkling that he was depressed and planned to commit suicide. I still find it strange that he left us that week so full of life, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Granted, it seems he’d mastered the art of deception to a tee, but even so, could he really have been hiding that dark a depression so convincingly? Would he really have left Mum and me in such high spirits knowing he’d never set eyes on us again?
I swam a lot when Mum and I moved to Nigeria. In the warm freshwater lakes with my cousins. I found it helped with the anxiety attacks I started suffering from after the trauma I went through, the secure family life I’d taken for granted having been obliterated. Before that, I’d been a content sort. Not super confident, but not the nervous type either. My childhood had until then been a happy one, and so I guess when the shit hit the fan out of nowhere, it was a shock to my system, my ordered life thrown into disarray.
Back then, before we learned of Dad’s suicide, and everything that ensued afterwards, I couldn’t ever have imagined feeling like the air was being crushed out of me, the slightest thing setting me off and triggering periods of extreme light-headedness, my hands stone cold one moment, clammy and hot the next, my pulse rapid and erratic. It was just panic, the doctor would reassure Mum, after she got upset picking me up from school when the attacks started coming over me without warning, causing repeated disruption in class. My teachers were sympathetic but warned that something had to be done as I clearly couldn’t go on like this. It didn’t help that my friends abandoned me, probably at their parents’ behest, and it was another reason why Mum decided to flee the UK.
I sit down and sink my feet and calves into the warm water, wait for a few seconds then slide the rest of my body in, the water caressing my skin like a comfort blanket. Then I start swimming back and forth, gently at first before picking up the pace. Faster and faster, I propel myself through the water. Breaststroke, front crawl, backstroke, I flip from stroke to stroke, a sense of calm filtering through me, despite all that’s occurred these past twenty-four hours.
Having swum forty lengths straight, I rest against the wall of the pool, place my arms either side and pull my head back so that I am looking straight up at the glass ceiling, and again can’t help wondering if there’s a camera installed somewhere watching me. Catching my breath, I feel my heart rate slowly return to normal. After a few seconds I turn my head to one side. And that’s when I see movement through the glass. Not an animal, I’m sure of it. But a human figure. I shut my eyes, tell myself I’m imagining things, my mind playing tricks on me. But when I open them again, I’m certain I see the outline of a person pressed up against the glass. From where I am it’s impossible to decipher a face or if they’re male or female.
But someone’s out there. And before I have time to yell, they’re gone.