I get it right in the second tumble-turn. I approach the wall with speed, push my nose to my knees, heels to my hips, big kick off the wall.
I have been practicing the dolphin kick.
You take in the perfection of my glide. There’s warm pride in your eyes, soft eyes that look at someone in a personal way. You don’t wear glasses with big metal rims these days. Eyes couldn’t see better, you say when I ask.
Little flutter kicks lead to the hand stroke and away, away I go. I like it when the weather is good like today, when sundown rays through the natural light ceiling put golden shimmers in the pale blue chlorinated water. The floor is tiled, tiny insets the size and shape of sticky notes. I imagine each tile has a message I listen for when you are silent. I track ebony lines at the bottom to keep my swim straight.
“Learn the feel of water,” you say.
You never swam a day in your life, yet you have wisdom to know. You speak clearly, concisely, with ease—easy words, easy eyes of a friend. Your voice is different than before, perhaps then it was alive. Not that now it’s dead, just calming. You calm me.
I smile.
You’re my daddy tortoise, my Moses, my Mandela—his spirit lives, my Brer Terrapin like in Uncle Remus stories.
“Remember how Terrapin deceived Brer Buzzard?” I say.
“I told you that story.”
“Same way you told me those why and how stories. Why the crocodile lives in the water. How the zebra got his stripes. When the hyena found his laugh.”
You weave your hands together. Big hands. Strong handshake. Best way to know a person’s self is by how they shake your hands, you like to say.
You are well traveled. It is no wonder you have come to visit. Melbourne.
I bought CDs of music you adore: the soulful sound of Mama Africa. I used to call you the black Irishman, perhaps for your love of the Irish: their humor, their coffee—stirred and topped with cream. The whiff of whiskey on your breath after breakfast was never disagreeable growing up. It was for me simply a daddy smell, a happy daddy smell.
One couldn’t tell how well traveled you were, how well educated, when you visited Grandma in the village. You wore tire soles and a sheet around your waist. Handwoven batik in colors of the rainbow. You didn’t like a shirt or trousers in tropical heat that dizzied mosquitos. You drank toggo, pure banana brew cool from a calabash, washed it down with the soup of goat entrails slowly simmered over a three-stone-hearth fire.
I liked how you did the voices, tawkin’ Suthern like when you did Uncle Remus. You first told his stories straight after your conference in Atlanta, Georgia, USA—your work paid for it. I sat on your lap, rested my head on your solid chest and you told me the Terrapin story.
You said:
Dey social, shake hands, ax each udder what happen ovah in de fambily. Den Brer Terrrapin he say to Brer Buzzard dat he tired o’ eating grits, and dat’s a fact. Dat he want to go into biddiness wid ’im, gittin’ honey from de good ol’ bumbly-bee. But Brer Terrapin crept alone into de hole, gobbled de last o’ bumbly-bee honey, licked it off his footses, so ol’ Brer Buzzard couldn’t tell what he’d done.
You laughed telling that story, told me the moral was not about stealing or deception, like what Terrapin did, but about stupidity. You told me not to be stupid like Brer Buzzard else “de bumbly-bees gone come a-stinging you.”
“Remember the story of the monkey’s heart?” I say.
“You always loved water stories.”
“Tell me the story.”
“You’re too old for it now.”
“Tell me.”
“What do you want to hear? How the little monkey who lived with his clan on the bank of the lake fell from the overhung branch of a baobab tree and the big croc lunged from the murky depths of the water and snatched him in his jaws? How the monkey didn’t plead or cry, simply said he didn’t have his heart, and the heart was the best part of a monkey for a croc to eat? How Croc believed the little monkey had left his heart on the topmost branch that fanned out leaves to the stars, so gods of land and water could spice it? How Croc opened his jaws and let Little Monkey leap across his back and tail, scramble to his tree to fetch the heart? And Little Monkey bellowed from the top for Croc to open wide for the god-loved heart, and instead hurled a big mango that cracked Croc’s tooth?”
“How hard is your heart, Little Monkey, roared Croc,” I say.
“Stupid does that to you.”
You don’t tolerate fools. Too much yam in the head, you call it. Sometimes you say too much onion, or cassava.
“You didn’t tawk Suthern telling the monkey story,” I say.
“It wasn’t from the South.”
“It wouldn’t have made me forget our roots, the tongue of our forefathers, like how we prayed.”
Injina lyo tata / In the name of the father
No lyo mwana / And of the son
No lyo roho mtakatifu / And of the holy spirit
Amina / Amen
Silent, you watch my backstroke.
“It isn’t efficient,” I say. “Feels like I’m moving blind. No eyes on the crown to see where I’m going.”
“Follow the ceiling.”
“It has no lines.”
“Picture them.”
“How?”
“A challenge then?”
You knew about raising the optimistic child without reading those books proliferating in the parenting section of bookstores. Labels on the shelves of the one around the corner on Flint Street near Twenty-Four Seven Pharmacy tell you where to go so you can grow a resilient child, one who is active and success prone. You taught me to stay hungry, to go the step when I was training for sprint team. You shook your head when my lips puckered because I’d lost a race. It’s not about winning, you said.
Now you watch my swim, right there by the edge like a coach, even though I am the one who tells you about technique, about how I haven’t refined mine because I taught myself.
“The stroke length isn’t right. I don’t get enough distance out of the stroke,” I say.
“Lower your head.” You surprise me with this observation. “Level your bottom with your back and head near the surface. Now increase your foot tempo.”
Eddies of water cling to my skin.
I tell you I read about movement coming from hips down, body tipping on a seesaw for streamline, cheeks resting on water so I breathe cleanly every fourth stroke.
“Black folk’s bottom is not made for streamline,” you laugh. “But you’re doing just fine.”
I practice off the wall torpedoes.
“Head down,” you say.
Suddenly you’re there, in the water with me. You press my arms against the back of my ears. I dive, eyes downward. Kick, kick, kick. I finish with a breaststroke, head tucked between outstretched hands, back and head aligned. I pitch and pull my body forward in the water.
You sit on the wooden bench along the wall as I rub down with a large beach towel.
“Too much cloth,” you say. “Why not robe it?”
You like efficiency, neatness. You smacked me once with a stick when I let my nails grow. Long time, I was a child . . . I cried, not for pain. You weren’t much for discipline. Mum was the flash temper. She gave it to you anywhere—church, school, playground—if you deserved it. Like when I ate fish, headfirst—slap! “You eat tail up!” Like when I spoke with a mouthful—slap! “Nothing wise comes from clog!”
My Melbourne apartment is not flash; it’s not in Beach Boulevard. But it wears well a careless order: stacked paper neat on the table, arranged clothes on the four-poster bed rail, pressed sheets inside a blue doona . . .
I soak, listen to the soft sizzle of mango and coconut bodywash foam.
I remember how you took interest in the mouthwash when first you saw it. “Need all 945 milligrams of whitening? Can’t chew sugar cane?”
“From where?”
We laughed.
You fingered my pore wash (200 milligrams), the soap free antibacterial hand wash (600 milligrams), the body scrub flannel shaped like a mitten, the black stone for my heels—you said it looked like the one your grandmother pressed on skin to take away poison from a snake bite. You liked the snow-white porcelain bowl for the toilet brush, its tiny blue flowers around the words “Eau de Cologne”; the spin toothbrush with its soft bristles; the squeegee window cleaning stick with its rubber lip to remove scrum off the glass . . .
The house is under my rule, but subconsciously I follow yours—the order, the cleanliness.
I ponder this in my immersion, knees up in the water.
Something in the air today, it’s like someone has opened the cap off a bottle of nice booze . . . I feel heady. You’re in the living room.
You used to massage my shoulders, best big hands ever. Far gone are those days, not since I peaked, arrived at an age when a father gets cautious with his woman-child.
The tub is wide as a coffin, more height from the bathroom’s high ceiling, else I’d suffocate. I remember panic when I first learned to swim, face down in the water, it felt like a shroud over my head.
Clothed, I open the fridge, consider egg pasta veal tortellini.
You peer across my shoulder. There’s something magnetic about you now, your physicality. You’re a head and a half taller than me. Robust—not stocky, big bones. Look good in those wide shoulders.
What new thing have I brought from the supermarket off Queen Market?
I move aside so your eyes, those personal eyes that look at a soul, can take in the sparkling ice tea—four mini cans 250 milligrams each, the dairy-free yogurt—deliciously creamy, the tub says (1 liter), the horse radish cream (190 grams), the savory smoked tomato jam—made in Australia (300 milligrams), the apple cider vinegar in a bottle shaped like the neck of a giraffe (300 milligrams) . . .
“All this. How much?”
I estimate.
How so with ease we fall into our conversations!
“Don’t throw your name,” you say.
“What d’you mean?”
“The West is infectious.”
“How?”
“Just saying. There’s protein in rain termites, in green locusts . . . free and organic.”
“Snatched from the air.”
You prop yourself on the kitchen counter as I fill a saucepan with water to boil the tortellini. You smile at the splash of water into metal. You love sounds, like the distant clap of thunder when it rains, a symbol of transformation you say. After dinner you listen with a cocked head to the sound of the dishwasher on a cycle, swirr, swirr, swirr, then it gurgles.
Gurgle. Gurgle. Like how you did when you were sick.
Bitter, bitter cold in my marrow now. I remember Mother’s ash-streaked face. She sat on red-brown earth surrounded by mourners. She looked ancient. Her going wasn’t long after.
I cry sometimes, a little each year. Tendrils of grief, they bud and burrow.
“People die to continue the cycle of living,” you say.
“No they don’t.”
“You’re stronger than you think.”
“I’m not. I keep myself busy. Haven’t had time to scratch my bum since you . . . you—”
“I’m here now.”
“Yes.”
“Stop existing. Live.”
“Does grief take a holiday?”
“Your grief is the swim-on-it kind. It heals with water. Your animal spirit is the river shark. You have soul memory. In your swim you roam free.”
“Will you? Swim with me?”
“Tomorrow I will,” you say.