Anew thing Shadi and I have just discovered – there are other places to go at night besides McDonald’s, like the swimming pool where we go during the day but at night-time it’s completely different. It’s too cold at night to be there really but I don’t think anyone cares. It’s ours.
This night, Shadi and I take Sal and Mo through the hole in the back of the chain-link fence. I pull back the fence at the corner where I cut it straight with a pair of pliers from my dad’s shop last time we were here. You can’t even see the cut. With a bit of effort I can pull it back and forth just like that, like opening a tin can and no one even notices.
Mo goes in first with no effort at all and then stands there on the other side watching the three of us scratching ourselves against the fence and falling over our feet. At night-time the place is quiet, even with all the noise of the streets around it. It’s like arriving in another universe. Sal and Mo sit on the edge of the pool with their feet in, talking quietly. Shadi too, unlike Shadi, is quiet. He takes off his shirt, slips into the water at the deep end of the pool and swims towards the shallow end where the girls are. I stand underneath one of the trees and watch Shadi’s neon green swim trunks dip in and out of the pool water. When he reaches Sal she pulls her dress off her head so that she’s sitting there at the edge of the pool in her swimmers. She puts her arms on his shoulders and he puts his hands on her hips and pulls her slowly into the pool where they swim off together to the other side. It’s a different kind of Shadi when he’s with Sal.
I’m trying to get myself together before I go over to Mo. She’s so beautiful it makes me feel like I’m exploding with wanting her. She’s looking off into the distance of the street, away from me. The moon has broken all over her head and she looks like she’s glowing there in the yellow dress she’s wearing.
I take my shirt off and sit beside her in my swim shorts. She kicks her legs slowly around in the water and so do I. Sometimes our legs are touching. Sometimes not. This place makes everyone quiet. I kiss the freckles on her shoulder and ask, ‘So what are you thinking?’
Mo puts her hand on my knee and laughs into the water. ‘That’s my question. That’s what I ask you. But you always change the subject.’
‘Well I thought maybe if I ask you first you’ll stop asking me.’ In the water, our legs and our feet look bent backward and out of shape. In the bits of light from the street and the moon it looks like our feet are disappearing and regrowing again.
‘I’m thinking, I forgot to put my swimmers on.’
‘Doesn’t matter. We can just sit here anyway.’ And we do until the moment Mo pushes herself into the water in that yellow dress and swims across to the other side of the pool. She’s amazing. She looks like a stream of yellow paint just floating there. I jump in and swim towards her until I meet her in the corner of the pool. Her dress floats up around me and the fabric gets all caught around my legs like it’s pulling me in and I am, I’m totally pulled in, leaning against her in the corner, her lips are like warm rubber and I’ve got a bunch of her wet hair in my right hand and suddenly she says ‘fuck’ and it takes me a while to realise what she’s talking about as she pushes me away from her and I realise that it’s not her yellow dress glowing. All the lights around the pool have been turned on and then from somewhere, an alarm.