11

Reservoir Dog

On the first Sunday of every month there’s an informal swim on Camps Bay beach. You can turn up with no more qualification than a cap and goggles and a little Speedo and join the big-bellied polar bears and swim a mile up and down the shore.

It’s a good deal because they’ll look after you if you’re new to it, and you’re not too far off the beach so you can just doggy-paddle in if it gets too much. Plus, there’s the hairy camaraderie of the pack.

Still, they do recommend you get acclimatised to the cold. The water in Camps Bay can get down to ten degrees, and I would be unwise to just turn up on the day and splash myself and plunge on in. I’ll cramp or my heart will stop or something still more terrible might happen. It’s even worse than not waiting an hour after eating.

The principles of acclimatising are heartbreakingly simple. You start on the beach, where the sun and the warm sand and your lovely dry towel are, and then you walk slowly into the sea. When you feel the cold on your feet, which is the point at which sensible individuals give a little squeal and back away while kicking water on their girlfriends, you don’t stop but instead, insanely, you carry on walking. This is like being given the instruction: “When you feel the Lego piece on the sole of your foot do not lift your foot but continue stepping down.”

Keep walking till the water comes over your knees and then over the tricky demilitarised zone to your waist. Stand there a minute or so, casually if you can, hands on hips to look heroic and also so you aren’t holding them out like awkward wings to avoid your arms getting wet. Then walk deeper in to your shoulders. Bend your knees to dip your head. It’s only when your head is wet that your body works out how cold or not it actually is. Then walk slowly out. Do this all again. Keep doing this for twenty minutes, then half an hour, then forty-five minutes.

I tried. I can understand why some people find swimming boring. In a way I’m grateful for the physical pain and mental struggle, because without them I might look around at that empty blue water and think, “God, this is a bit tedious.” But compared with walking in and out of the icy ocean for forty-five minutes, swimming lengths of a pool is mental stimulation similar to debating Jon Stewart while smuggling heroin sticky-taped to your body through a Turkish airport. What I’m saying is, it’s very boring. Also, it’s cold.

This is something I often don’t consider when I read the word “cold”: how very cold it is that cold can get. The water in Camps Bay isn’t always as cold as you think – sometimes it only feels cold – but when it is really cold it’s like sliding into a sleeping bag made of frozen razorblades. And if you happen to be doing some kind of weird acclimatising exercise and can’t jump around and yell and thrash your arms and legs to get the circulation going, it becomes fiendishly, excruciatingly, orientally colder.

But it’s the boredom more than the cold. I focused on the coldness just to give myself something to do. Walking in and out of the cold Atlantic is a cure for that time-speeding-up thing. The time did not rush by. If I could spend the next decade doing nothing but acclimatising to cold water, my forties would last forever.

After half an hour I stopped. People were looking at me as though I was a cult member or a serial killer punishing himself for what he’s planning to do tonight. Besides, I’d spent the last half-hour thinking it over, and a combination of time on my hands and strong motivation usually means I can come up with a justification for not doing something.

Surely, I reasoned, if I have big hurdles to overcome, I should tackle them one at a time. I have four obstacles ahead of me: (1) cold water; (2) distance to swim; (3) fear of the deep; (4) mental self-sabotage.

Surely only a shivering fool would try to get over all four at the same time? If I’m scared of small spaces, snakes, darkness and heights, I wouldn’t lock myself in an unlit filing cabinet with a cobra while falling out of an aeroplane, would I? One at a time, son.

So I walked out of the sea and kept walking back to my car and drove home and signed up for the Ebenezer Mile.

*

The Ebenezer is a fine blue dam on the Great Letaba River in Limpopo province, winding through high hills and thick green pine forests in the Land of Silver Mists between Polokwane and Tzaneen. Every year the good people of the area host a mile-long open-water swim. I’ve never swum that far in one direction before, and I’ve never swum in open water.

I could have signed up for the Midmar Mile, I suppose, but the thought appals me. Too many people swim Midmar – it’s the biggest open-water race in the world – and too many of them are too serious and too many are too good. Besides, I don’t like large gatherings of people. It would be like going to some immense sports day or school gala, and surely one of the benefits of being childless and forty is you can choose never to attend a sports day or school gala ever again in your life.

The Ebenezer doesn’t have many people, and it’s more beautiful than Midmar and the water is warm and clear and lovely, and there’s another thing: it was almost time for the Midmar Mile but still a month till Ebenezer, and a month is just far enough away that you don’t have to do anything right now.

A month later I flew to Johannesburg to hire a car and drive up the Great North Road towards Zimbabwe.

My preparation hadn’t gone precisely according to plan. Ten days earlier I came down with a flu that went like the alien in Alien straight to my chest. I was still coughing up impressive articles of phlegm shaped like Mayan artefacts carved from amber and jade. When I breathed out I could make a very gratifying death rattle, as though my lungs were two empty spray-paint cans being gently shaken.

“I don’t think you should swim,” said my partner.

I didn’t think I should swim either, but I knew myself. After the debacle at the sea pool it took a long time to get back and I still didn’t do it wholeheartedly. I had pulled out of the cold-water acclimatising, pulled out of the Camps Bay swim. The Dardanelles was coming closer and it wasn’t getting narrower. My friend Heather had booked me a chalet above the dam and she’d be swimming it too with her whole family. If I pulled out of this now I’d have so much shame and self-loathing I’d never get to Turkey.

I just wanted to drive up the N1 on my own and think my own thoughts with the space and leisure to hawk up sputum into my hand and admire it before throwing it out the window – these are the small luxuries an athlete should enjoy in the hours before a big match – so I was secretly relieved that my partner was working and couldn’t go. I was less relieved when I arrived at the airport and her father was there in the arrivals hall with an overnight bag.

“I’m coming with you,” he said.

This is one of the unconsidered drawbacks of the Gautrain scheme. It encourages chaps to make unaccompanied trips to the airport to meet you, thus forcing you to take them to the far north.

Mind you, I’ve nothing against Tom. He’s eighty-three years old and a good man with a thick Dublin accent. He came to South Africa in 1958 and spent his best years underground in mines around the Highveld but he’s strong and can walk for days and his memory’s better than mine. I’ve always liked him but I’ve never been alone with him before. In fact I’ve never spent time with the fathers of any girlfriends or done that smiling second-son routine that many guys do with their in-laws. It makes me uncomfortable. I once had a prospective father-in-law who wanted to take me fishing. I begged my girlfriend at the time to get me out of it.

“Why don’t you want to go?” she said.

“I don’t like fishing.”

“It’s not about the fishing,” she said. “It’s about bonding.”

“I’m not looking for a new father.”

“Wow,” she said. “You have a lot of problems.”

And it’s true, I do, and I’m usually stubborn about it, but what can you do with an octogenarian at the airport with an overnight bag? I told Tom he could come along.

Four hours up the N1 is a long time to make conversation, but we did okay. I heard stories about the mines and about my partner as a baby and about the time when Tom raised money by booking Petula Clark to sing at his social club in Ireland in the sixties. But having him there made my driving stiff and self-conscious. I became hesitant to change lanes; I kept turning on the windscreen wipers instead of the indicator. Every so often he’d casually mention my speed and I’d grit my teeth and slow down for thirty seconds. Then I was stopped for speeding.

Tom politely stared through the windscreen and said nothing while the cop wrote me the ticket. In my dark heart, I blamed him for it.

We turned off the highway and went past the Zion Church at Moria in the dusk and then up into the misty mountains and down a dirt road and we came to a fork. Tom said we should go right but I went left and Tom sat in polite silence while I tried to do a three-point turn on a steep gravel slope in the middle of a lightless forest.

Finally we reached the chalets and a strange barefoot woman opened up for us while telling us about her first marriage to a man who worked on a tugboat in Durban.

I wasn’t listening to her.

I stared at the double bed in the single bedroom.

“We’ll be fine,” said Tom, putting his bag down on my side of the bed. “Just watch your hands. I don’t sleep in pyjamas.”

“Why are you so freaked out by this?” said my partner on the phone. “Think of him as your dad.”

And it occurred to me that that was the problem.

My father died when I was very young. When the call came from the hospital to say he was dead I was ten years old. It was 3 a.m., when nothing good happens by telephone. I know people say they want to know as soon as it happens, but I don’t see it would have killed them to wait for daylight. That way my mom and I would have lived four more hours with unbroken hearts.

I listened as my mom cried on the telephone and I felt a numbness spread through me. My father was dead and I was alive, and I didn’t know what that meant yet, but I didn’t want anything to change. I didn’t want to feel whatever my mother was feeling. I wanted to go on as though nothing had happened.

I didn’t cry that night or that morning, and I didn’t go to the funeral. He had asked to be buried but we cremated him because it’s cheaper, and I was playing Atari with the Renyard twins up the road.

Two years later I played my first rugby match. I played flyhalf and my scrumhalf was a kid called Garth. We walked off the field at fulltime and Garth’s dad was there and patted him once on the shoulder. Garth had played about as well as me, which wasn’t very well, but the pat had nothing to do with how he played. It was just a pat that said, “You’re my son and I was here and you’ve just played a game of rugby.” Garth drove away with his dad and I walked home and that’s the first time I cried. I didn’t know why I was crying and it didn’t last long and afterwards I didn’t think about it again.

I never looked for father figures, the way some boys do who lose their dads. There have been men who might have been mentors that I’ve pushed away. I felt more comfortable doing it on my own, even when that meant doing it hard, or more usually not doing it at all. I thought that meant I was a man, but really it meant I was always ten years old.

A few years ago I found myself in trouble over that quote that I hadn’t attributed. It was a difficult time: strangers wanted me fired; acquaintances became enemies; some friends stayed friends and others disappeared. The editor of a national newspaper, a man I hardly knew, tried to call me, and when he couldn’t reach me sent me an email. He said, “You’re in trouble here, and it’s all getting bigger than it needs to be but we can get you through this. If you want my help, I’d like to help you.”

I never replied. In my head I was a kid lying in bed at 3 a.m., knowing that bad times are here but wanting nothing to have changed. I needed help but I never replied and I lost my job and it took ten years to come back again.

I sat out on the lawn of the chalet above Ebenezer Dam that night, talking to my partner on the phone and listening to the warm wind moving through the pines like a shaggy dog, and I thought about what all that meant and how it was still happening. I thought about how I didn’t take a coach when I should obviously take a coach, and how I keep myself to myself and never ask for advice or help although a part of me is always crying out for advice and help.

That night I lay awake listening to Tom snore, my head on a rolled-up T-shirt because I’d used my pillows to build a feathery Berlin Wall between us. I don’t care how uptight that makes me; at least I’ve never woken on the morning of a big swim spooning a naked eighty-three-year-old man.

Next morning is the morning of the swim.

We meet up with Heather and her family who are warm and welcoming and concerned about my chest, then we drive down to the dam and Tom sits on a folding chair in the shade while I register. I do a lot of staring nervously at the water. A mile is a long way when you see it all in front of you. The route is around two tall inflatable cones and back to the starting point, and it seems to me you could lose a Boeing in that triangle of water and search for years without finding it. I pace nervously, past the stand selling beers and boerewors rolls and the kids swimming off the wooden pier. I come back and sit coughing thoughtfully and calculating just how embarrassing it would be not to finish. Tom lets me pace and knows not to make conversation. He opens a cowboy novel and when it’s time for my swim he says good luck and waves goodbye.

It’s hard in the water. I swim as slow as I can but all the kids and old men are beating me and no one wants to be stone last so I swim faster than I should. The water is cool and I can’t see the bottom. I reach the first inflatable cone and hold on a moment before I round it. The second leg runs close to the far bank. I could crawl out here and hide in the reeds and be safe. But Tom and Heather and her family will be back there waiting for me and what excuse can I give? Can I feign amnesia? Was I kidnapped by banjo-playing hillbillies?

Instead I turn over onto my back and float and look at the sky. People come past me like a migration of walruses. The water is kind, it’s holding me up. Maybe I can just float here all day.

But there are other people floating too, and some treading water. They don’t seem too bothered about it; they’re just taking a break. One guy smiles and waves. “Beautiful day,” he says, and I think, yes, actually it is a beautiful day.

When I make it across the finish line they give me a medal for finishing. I stand in the yellow sunshine and look at my medal and it doesn’t bother me that I’m wearing a Speedo in public. I don’t worry what I look like. I feel proud.

I call my partner to tell her I finished.

“I know,” she says. “My dad’s been phoning every five minutes to tell me how you’re doing.”

I look across at Tom with some surprise. He’s pretending to read his cowboy novel.

“Really?”

“He watched you the whole way through his binoculars. He was worried when you started floating belly-up.”

I don’t know what to say.

“He’s very proud of you,” she says.

And then I have to stop talking to her, because something is catching in my throat.

We go back to the chalet and Tom opens a bottle of wine he’s been saving for a big occasion. We have supper with Heather and her family in their chalet and watch Ireland play France in the Six Nations. There are small kids running around and Tom beams to look at them. We drink wine and cheer for Ireland and Ireland wins and then Tom says he’s turning in. He stands and says what a good day it has been, and as he walks past me he pats me once on the shoulder.

A boy doesn’t become a man because he turns a man’s age, and he doesn’t become a man when his father dies. He becomes a man when he starts to get over it.