Prologue

I’m about to make an enormous mistake.

This isn’t a thought I’ve had very often. More usually I’m thinking, “Have I just made an enormous mistake?” or especially, “I have just made an enormous mistake!”

This stopping ankle-deep in the cold, salty water of a mistake is a new feeling, but it’s just as well, because this might be a real mistake, one of the ones that count.

I’ve made many mistakes in my time. I’ve ended up with bad knees and a sore heart and shoes that cost too much and make me look like a Sicilian art dealer. I’ve made mistakes that have cost me time and love and more dignity than I have to spare. I’ve made mistakes in conversation with people I’ve wanted to impress that still cause me to hug my knees in the night and hum till I can’t hear my memories any more. It sometimes feels that everything I’ve ever said or done or worn has been a mistake of one kind or another and even the good things are just mistakes that turned out well.

But this doesn’t feel like one of those. This feels like the kind of mistake that can’t be made right, that will end with me inhaling cold green lungfuls of water and in three days’ time my body will be found in the reeds of some downstream village, sparking legends that last for decades about the pale sea creature that came floating in one day all doughy and limp like a person-shaped piece of pie pastry not yet cooked.

This must be how Jacob Zuma or Tony Abbott sometimes feel: one minute everything’s sunny and fine, and then the next a terrible clarity strikes and you’re looking around, wondering: What am I doing here in front of all these people? And where are my trousers?

Because actually that ankle-deep cold salty water isn’t a metaphor – my feet are cold and wet and above them are my horrible bare hairy legs.

I used to quite like my legs. Forty years ago on TV there was a pantyhose advert featuring a pair of legs walking down a street in high heels while someone sang “Ain’t she sweet?” My father told me, “You know, they always use men’s legs in pantyhose adverts.” I’m not sure he intended it to be aspirational, but ever since then I’ve had in the back of my mind that if things don’t work out I could take a job as a pantyhose leg model. Hemlines may come and go but sheer hosiery will always be with us, and with gams like these I’ll never starve.

But now I realise I’ve been kidding myself. In fact they’re less like legs, more like a pair of weird pale carrots, the knobbly, skinny kind whose parents are ashamed of them so they’re kept in a dark cupboard and beaten if they make a noise when the neighbours come to visit. How can they be so scrawny when the rest of me is so not scrawny? Is … is that daylight I see? My god, is that a thigh gap?

But the legs aren’t even the worst part.

Above the legs … above the legs I’m wearing a Speedo.

A Speedo.

What kind of man wears a Speedo? Unmarried uncles, that’s who, and Europeans, and scoutmasters on holiday. David Hasselhoff. And now me.

I dislike everything about a Speedo. I recoil from its look the way I’d recoil from a sweaty stranger emerging from the woods holding something wrapped in a handkerchief, saying, “Do you want to see what I have in here?” But even more I dislike what they say. Look at me, they say, I am so small yet see how easily I hold all your manhood.

And yet here I am, in public, all Speedoed up. On my head is a rubber cap like my Aunty Rose wears in the shower, and goggles that make me look like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, or Jeff Goldblum even when he isn’t in The Fly, and I’m standing on the edge of Europe and a long way away is Asia.

And the idea is that I’ll dive into this water, where it’s cold and there are probably eels that feel like seaweed so when they brush against my ankles I won’t kick them off until it’s too late, and I’m supposed to swim and swim and try not be pulled downstream by a current moving as fast as the traffic in a Cape Town slow lane, or twice as fast as the traffic in a Cape Town fast lane, and swim and swim till I get to the other side.

And this is the truth: I can’t do it.

For twenty years my swimming technique was like my sexual technique: three or four frenzied strokes then a lot of gasping and sleeping. One year ago I couldn’t swim more than three laps without stopping and crying and clinging to the wall like a Humpty Dumpty who has just skipped ahead and read the second line of the poem.

And it’s not as though I’ve discovered some late-flowering gift in my middle years. I know that Toni Morrison and George Eliot only started writing novels when they were each over forty and Grandma Moses picked up a paintbrush for the first time in her seventies and Colonel Sanders was already sixty-five when he found his way to the crispy chicken-fryer. I cheered when George Foreman won the world heavyweight boxing title at forty-six. But I also know that the only thing all those people have in common is that not one of them has a single thing in common with me.

I’m not athletic. I’m so perfectly designed by nature to spread out on the couch, I should be made of crochet. I’m scared of water and I’m scared of the deep and I’m convinced that deep water will be the death of me. I can’t swim for the two hours it will take me to cross to Asia; I don’t even stay in the bath that long. People drown on long swims. Their hearts stop or they cramp or they panic and swallow water. I don’t want to put negative thoughts in my head (people have been trying to fill my head with positive thoughts lately, as though they’re somehow more buoyant), but experience suggests I might be a panicker. I’ll be all alone out there with an ocean on each side, and if the wind picks up and brings the waves I won’t even be able to see the land.

These are my darkest fears and I’m in the middle of them and I’ve done it to myself, because here I am in Turkey with a Speedo that started off too small but is rapidly becoming too big, standing on the lapping shore of the biggest mistake of my life and the Dardanelles in front of me. How did this happen? I must be old enough to know better.

But I’m here precisely because I am old enough to know better.

I’m here because I recently hit middle age.