A ribbon of air bubbles trickles upwards, vanishing to nothing as the tiny orbs pop and break the surface of the pale-blue water. She stares at them, eyes wide and stinging. Is the water really blue? Or is the reflection from the tiles causing an optical illusion? Sometimes it’s hard to accept what’s real, what’s fantasy. She closes her eyes. Lets her thoughts drift off. Tries to clear the clutter from her mind.
Forty-seven, forty-six, forty-five . . .
It’s been years since she’s done it. Wonders if she still can. Thirty-three, thirty-two . . . There’s fluttering in her chest. She’s only halfway there. She blows out through her nose, flaps her palms upwards, gently. Just enough to keep herself anchored to the tiled floor of the swimming pool. Nineteen, eighteen . . . She’s going to do it. She has to do it. Her chest tightens. Pips of pain patter inside her head. Ten, nine, eight . . . She lets herself drift up. Four, three, two . . . She fixes her feet onto the bottom and thrusts hard.
One.
She bursts out like a champagne cork. Her face burns, her lungs squeal. She grabs for the side of the pool, hugging onto the edge of the drainage channel while sucking in great lumps of air that stick hard in her throat as she tries to gulp them down. Eventually, her breathing slows. Her face begins to cool. She opens her eyes, stares into the drain, watching as the water slips over the lip and gets sucked inside.
A rubber squeaking sound from the poolside stops abruptly just above her line of vision, and she glances up to see a pair of white trainers. ‘Hey, you OK down there? I was about to grab a net and fish you out.’
She tips her head back and looks up. The lifeguard looks about half her age. He must be new, because she comes here every day and she’s never seen him before. He smiles down at her, half smirking, probably thinking we’ve got a right one here, and she wonders what he knows about saving anyone’s life.
In fact, she’s surprised he’s even got up out of his chair to come and find out what she’s doing. He’s definitely new. Give him a week and he’ll be nowhere to be seen, like most of the others.
‘Sorry, didn’t mean to freak you out. Just something we . . . I used to do when I was a kid. I wanted to see if I could still do it.’
‘Right. Good on ya,’ he says. His Australian accent seems to turn the statement into a question. He nods, gives her another small smile. Continues his ambling circuit of the pool. She swivels herself round, watching him go. Tanned, toned legs in a pair of white shorts. He probably has quite an effect on some. But not her.
A family appears from the changing rooms. A cute blonde girl with pink armbands jammed onto twig-like arms and a father and son in matching blue Bermuda shorts. The mother has her hair tied in a topknot, her expression pulled tight. ‘Come on,’ the young girl screeches. Her voice echoes around the walls. ‘Come on!’
Marie turns away, a different pain stabbing at her now.
She slides down the wall, under the surface again, presses her feet against the side, arms straight out in front. Pushes away into a glide, followed by a neat dolphin kick for half a length, before slicing her left arm down, cutting gracefully through the water as she begins a slow front crawl. She tips her head to the left after four strokes, sucks in a breath. When she’s about a metre from the end, she flips forwards into a perfect tumble turn, and continues her stroke.
She tries to clear her mind. Tries not to think about the letter.
It’s her daily ritual. Sixty lengths – an equal, ordered mixture of front crawl, breaststroke, backstroke and butterfly. She always cools down by taking off her goggles and cap and sculling gently on her back for another four lengths, hands paddling by her sides. She loves the feel of the cool water caressing her scalp, filling her ears. A stir of echoes muffled by water. It makes her feel alive.
She’s done.
Sixty-four lengths: sixteen hundred metres. She walks the width of the pool to climb the steps, and that covers the nine-metre shortfall that makes it exactly one mile. She doesn’t even know why, but there is something important about it being a mile. Everyone’s got their obsessions. She checks the clock. Forty-eight minutes. Three minutes more than usual, but she puts that down to sitting on the bottom of the pool and the recovery afterwards. She hasn’t done that since she was twelve. Hearing from him has triggered something.
Memories.
Curiosity.
Fear.
She watches the cute blonde girl in the baby pool nearby as she climbs the steps out of the training pool. The girl is kicking her legs hard, her small pointed chin poking high out of the water. Her mother walks slowly along beside her, trying in vain to avoid being splashed in the face. Marie longs to go into the baby pool. Sit in the warm, shallow water, watching the little ones splash and kick and squeal with delight. Graeme always said it was warm because so many kids pissed in it. That rumour about the council putting some special dye in there to make it turn bright blue. It never happened.
Graeme.
Marie smiles at the mother as she walks past her towards the changing rooms. The mother smiles back. A ‘what can you do?’ smile. Marie wouldn’t care if she got splashed in the face, if it meant she had a little girl to do the splashing.
She steps into the communal showers and slams the heel of her hand against the ‘on’ button. One of those ones you have to lean on permanently or it goes off after ten seconds. She tilts her head and lets warm water skitter down over her face. Leans back onto the button, stopping it from popping back out. It digs hard into her back and the pain jolts, wakes her up. She runs a hand down her side, imagines the faint alien feel of the scar tissue through the thin fabric of her swimming costume. Even after all these years, it marks her. It has grown with her. Tortures her. Burns her through her clothes. She wishes she was in a private shower cubicle, so she could peel off the tight, wet Lycra and scrub hard at the scar with cheap pink soap. But all she can do is let the lukewarm trickle rinse her gently, barely removing the scent of chlorine.
Swimming is her quiet time. When you’re on your feet all day, it’s nice to be weightless for a while. Away from the chatter, the repetitive banality of TV sport, the bells and clatter of the fruit machine, the sounds of the till drawer being slammed shut, of cutlery being scraped on plates and pint glasses being dumped on the bar; the stink of sweat, fish and chips, bleach on lino, old men’s farts. The coolness of the water on her skin takes her away. The slow, rhythmic breathing and the gentle movement of gliding through the water is therapy. It’s her medication, her meditation, her head-time.
But now he has invaded it.
Graeme.